Geeky Ramblings

I just spent 2 hours helping a co-worker resolve a database connectivity problem. The software we were trying to install (our own product, as it happens) kept telling us it was having a problem connecting to the SQL server database.

We tried to install the software three times … each time it failed with same error.

Finally I looked at the database name we were trying to use … the my co-worker was telling me to use was ‘qa-db3278′ … but the database he created was ‘qa_db3278′.

Well of course it couldn’t create the tables … the database we were telling it to create them in didn’t exist.

Oh well

I’ve been the recipeint of a number of SSH scans recently … they seem to be testing a few accounts for obvious vulnerabilities.

Kasia has some good pointers for securing SSH against this kind of attack.

Note: I found this somewhere on the internet … but I can’t remember where.

Sometimes there just isn’t enough room for the all the text underneath those icons. Or, you maybe you are having some kind of overlapping problem. You can fix this by adjusting the space between your icons.

There is an invisible grid on your desktop the computer uses to place icons and associated text in to. This grid sort of looks like a checker board. You can adjust the size of the boxes. Here’s how:
Right click on any empty spot on your desktop. Click Properties, and then click the appearance tab. Next click the advanced button and you should find yourself in the “Advanced Appearances” window. Click on the pull-down window under “Item” and select “Icon spacing (horizontal). Note there is also an “icon spacing) vertical too. Click on the size arrows to adjust icon size. Do the same with Vertical. You will need to work at this some until you get the size/spacing you want. Click ok.

Note: You may have to uncheck and recheck the “Align to grid” option before your icons will move into place. Here’s how: Right click on any empty spot on your desktop. From the menu select “Arrange icons by” and click on “Align to grid” to uncheck it and then click to option again to recheck it. Once you do that your icons will move to your new grid settings.

Had a panic this morning … browsed to the weblog (you’re reading it now) and found that my main index page was empty!

Problem is: I hadn’t changed anything in the config to cause this.

I did try posting a blog entry through a new blogger interface with Gaim plugin. But that shouldn’t have caused any problems.

I checked the style sheets, templates, configuration, etc, and couldn’t figure out what was going wrong.

Well, it turns out that the MovableType configuration option for the number of days of posts to publish on the index means CALENDAR days (which I misunderstood). This basically means that if you don’t do a blog entry in x number of days, your index page goes blank.

I created a new category … “Things to remember” … ’nuff said?

First entry: Don’t leave the car door open for two days. It drains the battery.
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