Gareth Bezett

Had a call from a lovely chap at Hewlett Packard about 1:30am this morning to say that my EVA4400 had reported a bad cache backup battery. The original firmware had a tendency to throw this particular error so I wasn't too concerned. I did, however, get up and check the management software which did show an actual error. When I arrived at the office at my normal time, I double-checked the physical hardware and it had the amber LEDs of an HP device with problems.

It took HP a little while longer to get back to me than agreed but once I had confirmed the error, a replacement was with me in a couple of hours. My assistant swapped out the unit and things appear to be back to normal. All very painless.

Labels: Work

For anything other than our standard, predefined sales reports, our users have relied on pivot tables in Excel from granular data outputs. This is fine, if a bit slow, for users that are familiar with them. Pivot tables can take a while master if you don't use them regularly so I wanted to make things easier for those who don't.

There are plenty of how-tos out there for a stored procedure in SQL server that will dynamically create a cross-tab report. I decided to replicate the basic approach in an ASP page for a custom sales report. I allow the users to select to column and row heading fields and fields to filter one. The next page asks for a date range, has drop down boxes with the possible values for the filters selected and the choice of web page or Excel output. The value field defaults to value but I will give the option of quantity as well as increasing the field options down the track.

Labels: Work

The consensus on the interweb seems to be that:

Unlike most long-running popular American TV sitcoms, The Wonder Years has still not yet been released on DVD as official season box sets due to the cost of securing the music rights.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonder_Years)

I guess this makes sense, the music from era was a critical element of the programme and securing the rights would be complicated to say the least. I guess we should be grateful that people have made the effort to upload Wonder Years content to YouTube.

Labels: Nostalgia

Last night I knocked together a portal for my company intranet designed for our Blackberry mobile devices. There is nothing overly complicated about this when you are using Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES). Some simple design considerations are obviously required and I managed to produce a good result for a version 0.1 portal by just using the most basic html tags, just like it was 1996.

The complicating factor was that I use Windows Integrated Authentication in all parts of the intranet. This is so I can limit sensitive information or experimental features by user groups. The authentication passes nicely through the IIS web server to SQL Server so I can control data access in a granular way as required.

I didn't want my BB users to have to log on through their BB browsers and I didn't just want to start giving permissions to the default IIS anonymous user account. I created a user (domain\mobile) and set it IIS as the user for anonymous browsing for the mobile directory where I had made the BB-specific pages. When I tried to access the pages from either my BB or my laptop's browser, I got an error. Nothing I googled really answered my questions but eventually I figured out that I needed to grant rights for that user on the server (of course the server was a domain controller so I have to use domain security policies). The combination that seemed to work for me was "log on locally", "act as part of the OS" and "log on as a service". One of these may not be required but I was just pleased to have things working.

Now I can give my mobile user permissions that I'm happy for my BB users to have like access to the staff directory and the news service.

Labels: Blackberry, Intranet, Work