A Smooth Sea Never Made a Skillful Sailor

I am finally writing mobile apps people! I am happy to announce that I finally sit down to develop mobile apps based on Android. I have tons of ideas and no time to implement them all. My friend and big inspiration, Felix is the driving force behind this and I am picking his brains as well as providing him with app ideas. Stay tuned for release! --Artem

I was left out of aftermarket firmware game once I got a new Linksys router as a birthday gift. This is no longer a problem because DD-WRT now supports my E3000. I prefer Tomato firmware myself because I find it more stable but as they say, beggars can't be choosers. I also found that there were three more stock firmware updates available on the Cisco site. I have a new project to do! Tomato DD-WRT --Artem

With recent news of Google collecting SSIDs and passwords while mapping Google Street View, comes this tip from Pauldotcom.com. Apparently, if you plug in the mac address that comes with SSID on a Google map, Big Brother can zero-in on your exact address. Add this to your long list of paranoia. Reconfigure your routers not to broadcast the SSID! --Artem

Hello, it's been awhile :)! I had a pleasure attending a workshop for running Oracle apps like PeopleSoft on SQL Server. Yes, there are shops that do that. The workshop also covered J.D. Edwards, Siebel and SAP applications on SQL. Even though I don't deal with any of these apps, I have learned a lot from just attending. Contact me if you would like to get the trainer's information. Anyway, the most amazing part of the workshop was when the instructor showed us his server setup at home. His Windows 2008 server contained SSD storage and one SQL Database resided on it. He ran an undocumented command BACKUP DATABASE DBonSSD TO DISK = 'NUL:' just to display reads that occur during backup and the speed was an amazing 1300 MB/s. Then just to show the difference, he ran the same command on a database that resided on local disk, the speed was 80MB/s. I am convinced! If you're interested, the SSD vendor is Fusion IO and I am sure you won't have a problem finding it. ...

I watched the show the other day and came away really impressed. I hate to admit but I actually liked Steve somewhat. He was soft of honest and funny about Microsoft. He talked about Windows 7, Zune, Windows Phone, XBOX and other stuff Microsoft is busy with. It was a good interview. No chairs were harmed during the filming of the show...

I picked a great day to fix my dual/triple booting problems. For the past two days, I was having problems with reinstalling OSX 10.6 due to partitioning and repartitioning. Finally, I stumbled upon a tip to reset my PRAM. That worked and I described the steps in my previous articles. Today in the morning I reset my PRAM, reinstalled OSX, applied the latest Time Machine backup and then installed Windows 7 64-bit with Bootcamp. Then I downloaded Ubuntu Desktop 9.10 ISO from the Ubuntu site. Burned it to CD and then booted to it pressing "C". Ran the usual install, during partitioning I chose the following: advanced settings resized bootcamp to allow for free space gave 8gb ext4 partition and assigned to root 2gb swap partition the rest ext4 for /home ext4 8gb / 2gb swap ext4 /home When it finished installing, I rebooted (I installed refit earlier) and chose the Windows partition. Once picked, grub appeared. Picked the first in the list, which was Ubuntu and then I was in. Ran ...

We are very lucky to have System Center Operations Manager in our shop. I can easily access tons of information that is typically hidden from DBA. At some point, I was able to find this strange phenomenon. One of my servers had low disk space and I started researching this. Turns out, msdb grew to 16gb. I started looking into this problem and found a table with a name Apex in msdb database. The table alone was 16gb. I googled the named of the table and found out that this is a log auditing application. It was removed awhile ago but add remove by itself won't cut it. There are server-side traces and events enabled as well. The funny thing is that this application is only installed on one node and not the other. Extended Stored Procedures were called every time SQL would start on this node. I followed instructions I found on Google to remove the extended procedures, DLL, exe and some left-over stored procedures, then I truncated the table and deleted it. My msdb is now 35mb. Whew. Wa...