SQL Server Setup failed to obtain system account information for the ASPNET account. June 14, 2009
Posted by frater in Administration, All, Software Development.11 comments
On the topic of Sql Server 2005 installations, A seperate issue that may occur is the following error message:
SQL Server Setup failed to obtain system account information for the ASPNET account. To proceed, reinstall the .NET Framework, and then run SQL Server Setup again.
This is generally caused by installing IIS and not configuring asp .net, particularly if you install IIS after already having installed Visual Studio at an earlier date.
Fix this by registering asp .net with IIS. To do this open a command prompt and go to the following directory:
C:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.60727\
This is assuming you’re using .Net 2.0 or higher (3.0, 3.5). Even if you’re using the 3.x series and Visual Studio 2008, you still need to go to the v2.0 directory for this operation – this is because the 3.x series are not a replacement for the 2.x series, but rather extensions. (3.x is a superset of 2.x and there have been no breaking changes to 2.x functionality).
If you want to understand this further, there is an interesting post about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/vijaysk/archive/2008/03/20/running-asp-net-3-5-on-iis.aspx
For now though, run the following command: aspnet_regiis.exe -i
This will register asp.net with iis and hopefully solve this issue.
Edition Change Check Warning June 13, 2009
Posted by frater in Administration, All, Software Development.5 comments
Found an interesting little issue today when trying to install Sql Server development edition (though I’m led to believe it applies to all versions).
On the configuration check screen I noticed a warning next to “Edition Change Check”, the message of which read:
To change an existing instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 to a difference edition of SQL Server 2005, you must run SQL Server 2005 Setup from the command prompt and include the SKUUPGRADE=1 parameter.
I did a bit of investigating and it looks as though the cause here is that I already have sqlexpress installed. It looks like I installed it along with Visual Studio some time ago and forgot it was there, so the Sql installation files are assuming they’re going to be used to upgrade this installation – which it can’t do without specific instructions.
One of the potential issues here is that in order to do this, all service packs and hotfixes need to be uninstalled (something it obviously wont do without the proper permissions). What this means for us is that after we perform the upgrade, we need to reinstall all the service packs and hotfixes to ensure proper security.
The trick then is to open up a command prompt and navigate to the cd/dvd directory that contains the sql files and run this command:
setup ADDLOCAL=SQL_Engine INSTANCENAME=MSSQLSERVER UPGRADE=SQL_ENGINE SKUUPGRADE=1
If you’ve used a different instance name for your installation of the initial version you will need to use it here instead of MSSQLSERVER. MSSQLSERVER is the default name for a standard Sql Server installation, however the named instance for a standard sql express instance is SQLEXPRESS which I suspect is the most common case where the need to do this would catch us by surprise.
Note that the Edition Change Check will show as “Success” when this has been done properly. It took me a while of testing to ensure this as the property names are case sensitive and it’s easy to make a typo. Don’t continue past the configuration check until all the checks are green.
From there it should be a standard installation with no worries.
It might be useful to note that it is in fact possible to install an instance of sql server alongside sql server express if you do not wish to upgrade (or to keep the sqlexpress name). In this case it will just install as expected and you will be able to access either instance by name at leisure.
Hope this was helpful.
True Blood June 12, 2009
Posted by frater in All.add a comment
One season in and I’m still not sure how I feel about True Blood. I’m a fan of paranormal romances myself (though more Blake then Stackhouse) and so far the story has been interesting and reasonably compelling. On the other hand, it will be interesting to see if they can keep up the tension and interest levels over the long haul without getting.. well, stupid.
If nothing else, the success of the show and the current explosion in interest in paranormal romance has certainly started to spread now, with Twilight and Beyond Human both making waves and rumours constantly rising and falling of other shows.
This however is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while:
The True Blood MINI Convertible: Exclusively for Vampires | Up to Speed | Los Angeles Times
I also love MINI Cooper’s, so it’s a win:win.
The black and white fallacy June 11, 2009
Posted by frater in All, News, Rants/Opinions.add a comment
Slashdot | Dot-Communism Is Already Here
There is an interesting note (followed by an interesting discussion) on Slashdot about the trends toward communal behaviour on the internet and the way this is putting paid to many 50’s-era “myths” about communism and its evils.
Personally I think the first few responders have got it right. Just as in most cases, the absolutes on either side are as dangerous as the other. Absolute capitalism leads to economic collapse, serious gaps between the mega-rich and the starving-poor and a level of selfish viciousness that is astonishing to behold. Likewise, absolute communism breeds -exactly- the same problems as the system set up to empower the workers is itself perverted to serve the comfortable few.
Luckily, the world has very few absolutes. I have been watching the American media a bit lately and am constantly amazed by some of the things said, particularly on channels such as Fox News. I often am led to wonder whether the presenters on this channel actually believe the things they say, or are cynically manipulating a public more impressed with theatrics and personal attacks then actual reasoned debate and knowledge. To this day I’m unsure which I’d prefer to be the truth.
Watching the constant attacks on president Obama, constantly calling him and his policies and ideas “socialist” has been a complete laugh. There must be a segment of the population who obviously believe America to be a pure capitalist society. Truth me people, it isn’t – and you’ll be thankful for it.
The classic remark was from a Chrysler dealer not long after the company started shutting down franchises and giving them to other people, sticking the owners with stock they couldn’t sell and massive debts they couldn’t support. The story was horrifyingly sad, but it didn’t prevent us noticing the absurdity of what this man said: “How could this happen in America? I thought we were a capitalist society!”
The place where this sort of thing can most easily happens is a more “capitalist” society! In a purely capitalist society the market decides and there’s nothing stopping someone who is paying you from deciding to pay someone else instead to do your job. If they can do it cheaper, better, or hell, if they just like the look of their face more than yours. That’s what capitalism is all about, free market. (Emphasis on free.)
It’s a pretty horrible way to live for 90% of the people, so society decides to restrain the free market in various ways. We put regulation on the way companies dump waste (free market economics demand that companies dump waste as cheaply as possible, which prohibits environmentally safe options), the way they treat labour (minimum wage restrictions, unfair dismissal laws) and how they build their products (national safety standards).
We step further from the free market in our social services too – some countries more than others. Welfare, public school systems, public health-care (Australians, Canadians and plenty of other countries have it) are all “socialist” ideas that mix nicely with a capitalist economic system. Its the citizens paying for services available to everyone.
So every time you hear someone spit out “socialised medicine!” like its some sort of disease, realise that there is no “capitalism vs communism” anymore. Theres just the world, and individual societies who are each determining how much of their money they are willing to give to the government in order that everyone in the country should benefit from new services.
Personally, I find it a constant astonishment that a country who is so willing to spend billions of dollars for no other reason than killing the people of other countries is so allergic to spending some of that money to keep their own people alive. In the end, it’s health-care and education that will keep your country strong far longer than just guns and muscles.
And please don’t forget that communism and totalitarianism are not the same thing. It’s not only the communists who have to worry about governments controlling and oppressing their people. We -all- do.
Chaser’s Censorship (or Much Ado About Nothing) June 10, 2009
Posted by frater in All, General Interest, News, Rants/Opinions.add a comment
Well, I finally got around to watching the second episode of the third season of Chaser’s War On Everything, the current whipping boy of Australia’s Moral Guardians and Supreme Example Of All That Is Wrong With The Media Today.
To recap, Chaser performed a sketch entitled “Make a realistic wish foundation” which involves presenting pencil cases and a stick to children in a parody of the make a wish foundation. It ended with the now infamous line that prompted complaints, a two week ban and the censoring of all future repeats of the episode. “Why spend a lot of money on them, when they’re going to die anyway.”
I feel like a bit of disclosure is due at this point, I myself have spent some time in contact with disabled and dying children and my wife has devoted her career and a large amount of her life to them. Personally I think the make a wish foundation does a wonderful job of providing some small comfort to the children and their parents, who have to face continuing after their death. It is not a fun situation, it is very serious and painful.
I hate censorship and would be here defending them regardless of what they said. With all I said above I sat down with my wife and we watched the show fully prepared to be completely offended.
How surprised was I then that the skit was incredibly short, and made me giggle. It wasn’t roaring funny but neither was it this filthy searing insult to sick children everywhere. It was obviously an irreverent poke at a revered institution. I did wince at the end line, I do think it was in bad taste, but without the controversy I would have forgotten it minutes after it was over.
Sure it was bad taste, but it’s chaser. If you don’t like bad taste humour you’re watching the wrong show, and it’s not like all Australia doesn’t know what they’re like by now.
It’s well overblown, astonishingly so, and it’s disgusting that we have all spent so much time on this issue. It’s also insane how many comments on this issue begin “I haven’t seen the show but…” and then go on to denigrate and abuse them based purely on hearsay, from which you would almost be expecting them to be assaulting sick children in their beds.
To my mind they’ve done far worse in the past and have done nothing but upset the over sensative now. As George Carlin famously said, there is no subject so sacrosanct that you can’t joke about it. He punctuated this with a quite funny routine about rape that elicited much the same response.
That was about thirty years ago. Guess we haven’t come all that far after all have we.
Grow up Australia. If you don’t like it, turn off.
Pirate Party takes seats in the European Parliment June 9, 2009
Posted by frater in All, News.add a comment
Pirate Party wins seat in European Parliament • The Register
Apparently membership and support for the controversial party has spiked recently following the circus that has been the Pirate Bay trial.
In case you’ve missed the coverage, here are the highlights.
1. The judge in the trial found the founders of the Pirate Bay guilty of copyright violations and liable for a four year term of imprisonment.
2. The defence moved for a mistrial following revelations that the judge was actually a member of the same copyright special interest groups as the prosecuting lawyers and their clients.
3. Another judge was assigned to review the case to determine the extent of the bias and whether a mistrial was called for.
4. -This- judge was also then asked to step down, following revelations that they too were a member of the same group.
Personally, I think this series of events defies all belief. It’s a bad conspiracy plot from a hack novelist. Just how many judges do these people have in their pockets anyway?
Welcome to the 21st century.
The power of Death April 7, 2009
Posted by frater in All, General Interest.add a comment
http://bananasfk.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/hp-lovecraft/
A capsule note on H.P. Lovecraft, noted weird fiction writer and father of modern horror, which is more of a link between Lovecraft and Stross than any real comment on Lovecraft himself.
Other than a forgettable note on the author, this post is notable for one reason anyway: The line “As Lovecraft is dead, his ‘horror’ is rather over wordy…”
I can only imagine what will happen to my own works, already quite wordy, after my death! What a fascinating idea, words mingling free of their creator’s gaze, free to multiply and procreate and turning regular works into wordy ones!
The mind boggles.
Technical Debt, or: Doing the Work Properly April 7, 2009
Posted by frater in All, Software Development.add a comment
I read an interesting article recently about the idea of “Technical Debt”,
Technical Debt – 10x Software Development
This article raises several issues for me. Firstly it is a sane and readable analysis of a problem that everyone working in the Software Development Industry has faced at some stage or another. The idea that we should track our shortcuts, hacks and the “hey, I just noticed we screwed this up, but there’s no time to fix it” moments with an aim to paying them back is laudable.
Personally, I’ve always had a problem with this part of our industry. No builder of houses would ever say “well, we promised it’d be ready tomorrow, they’ll pull the job if it’s not, so I’ll just wrap it up with duct tape and they’ll never know the difference in the inspection and fix it properly later.”
Actually I can’t actually -know- that this has never been done, it probably has, but I know if word got around that builder would be out of work before he could blink. This, however, is exactly what we do when we get into the “There’s no time, I’ll just hack it up so it works for the demo” frame of mind, and it is not only accepted but seems to have become “Standard Working Practice” for the industry as a whole.
I’ve always felt this to be a betrayal of my integrity and have felt it keenly every time I have been forced to do so. Even moreso by the fact, as everyone knows, that the later fixes Never Happen.
That, in my mind, is the big problem with this article. An awful lot of software developers are working to fixed price contracts, and when the release is delivered with hacky code that is dangerous but satisfies the customer, there is very little incentive to go back and fix it. It’s easy to say that “when things slow down we’ll fix it”, but in the current economic downturn many large software shops have to account for all of their developers time and work. Try explaining to an account that “Yes, it worked, but it wasn’t good enough.” For that matter, try explaining this to a client who wants to know why you want an extra couple of days to work on functionality that, as far as they can tell on the surface, already works fine.
That is the big problem we have as software developers. Whilst people can immediately understand why a building held up with chicken-wire is a bad idea, it’s not so obvious why an application held together with hacky glue code is a bad idea.
It’s also important to note that if you’re unwilling to go to the client and say “We need a few more days/weeks to work on this functionality”, then you’re probably not telling them that the code they’re looking at is hacky either. Odds are good you’re hoping they wont notice and planning to fix it quietly in the background before too many more releases go by. This means that at the end of the release cycle when the project is nearly done and you’ve still not found the time to fix these problems, you’re not going to be able to explain to the client why you need “just a few days or weeks more”. You can’t tell them that you’ve been dishonest, and the functionality they think works fine is only a few coincidences short of crashing and burning horribly.
So you’ll deliver the final version with the hacky code still in it, you’ll console yourself that maybe you’ll have a chance to fix it during the support period though you know it’ll never happen so long as the hacks hold together. In the end the company just holds it’s breath and hopes nothing goes wrong before the warranty period expires.
The techniques in this article might help a bit, by encouraging teams to pay back the instances where such hack work in unavoidable. It also sounds as if it would work far better in cases where an application is being developed in-house, rather than to-contract. I think the industry as a whole though needs to focus more on scaling back just how often these “Technical Debts” are incurred, and understand that the majority of them never get paid back, and the eventual cost may well be to your reputation.
The problem of “Salary + bonuses” April 6, 2009
Posted by frater in All, General Interest.1 comment so far
http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2009/04/the-bonus-babies/
Frederick Pohl on the credit crunch. This is the simplest explanation of why the banks made sub-prime mortgages that I’ve yet seen, finally the reason we’re in this mess makes some kind of sense. The fact that people -fell- for this line just goes to show that the world is full of stupid people. Or at least, somewhat naive and gullible people.
It did remind me of a story I heard at uni that seems to be an apt comparison here. One of my lecturers was interested in graphics, machine learning and evolutionary computation, similar research interests as I have as a matter of fact.
One day he set up a virtual robot environment with a straight line joining two points. The robots, he decided, had to start at the first point and learn to travel along the line to the second. In order to do this, rather than attempting to code some sort of routine to control it, he decided to run evolutionary algorithms to evolve robots who could perform this task.
Just to make it more interesting, he decided that physical appearance of the robot’s should be evolvable too, to see if the system could come up with a robot that could perform this task the fastest within the programmed environment physics.
The wonderful thing about evolutionary computing is that sometimes (read, often) the systems themselves can surprise you. It did indeed evolve a robot capable of quickly following the straight line to the second point. It was a large rectangle as tall as the distance between the two points, which, when the simulation was started, promptly fell over – reaching the second point in the process.
Give people (or evolution) a results-based reward and expect them to cut corners and find a short-cut to get there. The problem is of course, capitalist propaganda aside, the process is generally as important as the result.
Stylophone Goodness March 30, 2009
Posted by frater in All, General Interest.add a comment
No Matter How Hard You Try, You Will Never Out-Nerd This Man « Whatever
I’d never heard of a “Stylophone” before. 80’s Nerdy Goodness.
