My roommate, Taylor (http://www.cs.purdue.edu/~tvenable/), runs Linux exclusively on his system.   Last Thursday, the following conversation occurred:

Taylor: "I sat here moving files around my computer all day."
Me: "That's because pushing the little pile of sand from there to over there is more interesting than watching the pile of sand."

At work I've been doing validation paper work (see https://www.ntldr.net/Lists/Blog/DispForm.aspx?ID=11), but that changed this Monday.  We've had some "productivity committees" working on making the company more productive since the spring.  Apparently, the latest finding of one of these groups is that we need better access/search to old reports and data summaries that are stored on one of the servers.  Ut-oh...that means these silly (waste of time, imho, since they don't seem to be addressing the real issues) things now affect IT.

 

So I've been reprioritized to be SharePoint-Intranet-Search development guy.  I started working on the intranet site during the holiday season last year, as a low-priority, "do this when you've got nothing better to do, like reimage perfectly good PC's", type of task.  Prior to my taking over, we had a basic intranet site that didn't work, and wasn't being worked on.  So my first task was to bring it forward 4 years and sit it on modern technologies.  Which is part of the reason I chose SharePoint.  I also chose it because I hadn't worked with it before, but had seen some interesting demos, heard some stuff about it, and figured I'd treat it as a learning experience.  As it turns out, SharePoint also had just about everything we needed in a Intranet site builtin, but the IT Director didn't like the UI, so I customized that a bunch, and got it looking decent.

 

So everything was going along great with the site and the test server it was on (our production webserver was still on NT4 with IIS4 limping along), until an instrument PC died.  The instrument actually makes money for the company, so I made the call and the test pc got appropriated.  This wouldn't have been a problem, except that the backup I shot of the test system, including site config, etc. turned out to be corrupted when I went to restore it after the instrument pc problem was permanently resolved.  I know, I know, VERIFY backups...

 

In any case, shortly thereafter it came time to upgrade the servers, and then do the validation, so work on the site got pushed back a bunch.  About a month ago I started work back up on the site, basically getting it back to where I was before the whole loss of the pc.  This included getting  the few custom apps I'd written (software inventory search, computer location on map, and basic document search) back up and running.  The one issue that I ran into here was that Kerberos seemed to not be working...impersonation was always failing when connecting to the db server.

 

It turns out Kerberos is completly broken in our AD domain.  I HAVE NO IDEA HOW THIS HAPPENED.  The network admin is going through the troubleshooting guides now and should have some answer for me soon.  In the meantime, it's back to Basic auth and debugging of the search stuff.

 

The current search mechanism uses the Indexng Service builtin to Windows Server 2003, and seems to do a fair job providing search results.  Large result sets do cause perf to take a bit of a hit, but I'm hoping that those wont be the normal search types.  Profiling and focus group testing should help clarify the extent of this problem.  The biggest problem isn't going to be coding related though, it's going to be dealing with the management personel who are advocating the search, since I get the feeling that this is more a reaction to the whole search phenomena going around the web right now.  Time to go get specs locked in...(but that needs to wait until finals week is over).

Today at work I just filled out more paperwork.  It was fun!  Look at screen showing report my custom data tools generate.  Copy column 2 to column 3, put a P or F in column 4, then initial and date column 5.  Oh the fun!  But it gets better!  If I put a F in column 4, I got to put a number next to it too.  Then at the bottom I got to write the number a second time (yes!  repitition!), and write a description (copy column 1, inserting "not's" every so often).  To finish it off, I got to sign and date each page.  The magical wonder of paperwork!

 

That process was repeated for ~50 pages.

 

And more pages to come next Monday.

 

And people wonder why I've come to think the FDA and drugs are evil conspiracies.

Note: this post is primarily intended for my parents, who keep asking me about it, but may be of brief informational use to those who keep asking we for it out of curiosity's sake.

 

Anyway, here's my list of desired birthday presents:

Well, it's been a couple of days since the last post. I'm striving for 1 post/day, but that hasn't been going too well. Too much work all the time. Plus, I'm still trying to figure out what to blog about. I read mostly technical blogs, so I tend to associate "blog" with technical stuff. Unfortunately, I don't have that much technical stuff to talk about. Any thoughts on what to write about? (ha! now I'll find out if my email server is really working, since the only way to send comments is to email me!). In general, I'm somewhat qualified to talk about IT stuff, CS at Purdue University, and misc. windows-centric user type stuff.

Okay, the post at the end of this deserves a link (hyperlinks not supported here?).  Anyway, this way I've actually posted content after having been WAY too busy for the last two weeks.

 

A couple of people (well, one) have asked me for my feed list.  Say without further delay, I've attached my OMPL file.  Enjoy!

 

Import Note: 2006-10-03:

It appears that the attachment has been lost during the migration.  Which pretty much renders this post useless.  Meh.

Computer problems are always frustrating.  Especially since I seem to encounter so many of them.

 

Most recent issue: SharePoint (at work).  Last Spring Break I build a decent prototype page using SharePoint on a developmental server.  However, because of a hardware failure on an instrument, that system had to be appropriated with much haste.  The backup of the dev system turned out to bad, something that only became apparent after the original drive had been wiped.  However, it seemed like everything would be okay: the original config and content databases were still intact on our db server. 

 

Not so.  I cannot get a new install of WSS to connect to the config db.  Keeps giving "invalid account" or kills the worker process or fails with some other error (I'll remember it eventually).  The final solution is going to be to dev on another server, pull out all the documents in the old content db (using a simple app I wrote up earlier today that just pulls out the blobs), and migrate over to the production server eventually.  Oh well.  That's what the paychecks are for...

 

Update: The reason for the large time interval between initial development and now was the upgrade of all the servers to W2k3, and hundreds of pages of qualification for EVERY computer in the building (which sucked).

This is more of a test post than a content one...I'm in PHYS B10 on a SunRay 100 connected to a SunFire V250 (Remus - this is actually a newer Remus than I remember working with last year for CS290), using an old build of FireFox 0.8. Any more extreme test I could try? Oh, Remus is also running Solaris 8, with indeterminate patch level.
Earlier, I couldn't get the Sign In button to work on this config, but when I tried posting a test announcement, it worked. Oh well, so much for consistency of system behavior.
Back to the sweet work of helping CS 240 students while waiting to be bored to death by Physics "Tutorial" for 2 hours.

I've managed to get the Announcements working (stupid 2 fields on the List that I forgot to update...).

 

For future reference, when working with bulk importing stuff into SharePoint lists, not only do the items have to be loaded into the UserData table, the [tp_ItemCount] and [tp_NextAvailableId] fields in the Lists table need to be updated for the list being bulk loaded.

It's interesting to note that I couldn't find any information on this using Google, but now that I know the fields to adjust and search on those, I get a couple of detailed hits about the problem, and how to fix it.  Probably just a sign that I need to sit down and refresh myself on how to use Google better, and how to do searching better in general.