Even though sitemap_generater will ping all of the major search engines when you build your sitemap (which you should rebuild regularly with a rake task), you will want to configure the sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools. Unfortunately, Webmaster Tools will only let you set a sitemap to come from your domain, not another host. What can we do to fix that?

Well, the easiest solution I came up with was to create a controller to handle your sitemap, but redirect it to the location of your sitemap on S3 (via CloudFront obviously). So, lets get to the code. Create a file called sitemap_controller.rb and paste this in:

class SitemapController < ApplicationController
   def index
      redirect_to SITEMAP_PATH
   end
end

This will redirect a call to the index action of this controller to the value of SITEMAP_PATH. But what is SITEMAP_PATH? Well, in my case, my application relies heavily on a custom Rails engine where all of my controllers and models are defined. So I figured it would be nice to configure the location of the sitemap on a per application basis. So in my actual rails application, I created an initializer and set the value of SITEMAP_PATH. Put this in sitemap.rb in config/initializers:

SITEMAP_PATH="http://somepathtoyoursitemap.com/"

That's the actual location of your sitemap on S3 (again, most likely via CloudFront). Now all that's left is to wire up a Rails route to actually respond to a request for sitemap.xml. That's done easily enough with the following:

match "/sitemap.xml", :controller => "sitemap", :action => "index"

That's it! Simply restart your app if its already running so the initializer will load and access your sitemap.

But, I ran into a problem. The platform I’m building leverages a Rails Engine to implement most of the application’s functionality. Thinking Sphinx wasn’t setting up any models to index, even though I had defined them. Turns out, that if you don’t define your models in a typical path that Thinking Sphinx is looking at, i.e. app/models, then you’re in trouble. However, after a bunch of searching, I found the solution to my problem. Create an initializer sphinx.rb in your config/initializers directory of your application. To it, add:

module ThinkingSphinx
  class Context
    def load_models
      MyModule::MyClass
    end
  end
end

I defined my models in a sub-folder of app/models and put them in a module, so hence the MyModule::MyClass. This explicitly tells Thinking Sphinx which models to load. Running rake thinking_sphinx:config after that change set up the sphinx config file as I expected it would. Then I ran thinking_sphinx:inde and I was off and running. Jumping into the rails console, I was able to verify that searching worked as expected. Hope that helps!

She’d picked up some rice on the way home to dry it out, but unfortunately she’d already tried to power it on after she had picked it up out of the water. Regardless, we dried it off some more and put it into the bag of rice for the next 24 hours. Oddly, the LED flash started flashing while in the bag of rice which lead me to believe we were up the proverbial creek as far as getting it to work again. Electronics don’t just do things like that on their own unless something is wrong. We still let it sit for a while before messing with it.

The next day, with the battery dead, I blew some compressed air into the port on the bottom of the phone, the speaker vents, and the ear piece vent. After that, I plugged it in to charge. Well, to my surprise after the initial charge took hold, I heard it chime. Weee! So I ran over to check it out and yes, it was on, but nothing showed on the screen. Doh! After a few resets and restores it was obvious that while the phone could receive calls and texts (and make them using Siri), the phone was broken. It turned out that the screen wasn’t 100% dead as you could make out some icons and settings pages if you were in the right light.

Yesterday I decided to take it in to our local Apple store to see what they could do for us (after making my Genius Bar appointment of course). I had read online that they would replace it for a $199 “repair” fee even if you didn’t have AppleCare+. I explained our story to the Apple Genius telling him exactly what had happened to the phone. I didn’t try and B.S. him or anything. Just flat out told him the truth. He said, well, I can take it out back, pull it apart and see what might be wrong with it. Having nothing to lose, I said sure. After about 5-10 minutes he came back and, after a long pause, said “Well, today is your wife’s lucky day.” I was floored, we were going to get it fixed! But it got better. He said that only one of the moisture sensors had been activated and there was no sign of water damage in the phone other than that. Since there was no sign of real water damage, they were going to swap the phone out. FOR FREE!. I couldn’t believe it. He returned to the back of the store to prepare some paperwork regarding the phone replacement. When he came back again he handed me a new phone out of a nondescript black box (not one of the retail boxes), made sure it worked, and sent me on my way.

Obviously we got a little lucky with the phone and the water damage, but the best part of the whole experience was it was 100% hassle free. I didn’t have to argue with the guy. I didn’t have to plead my case about not having the funds to buy a new one or pay the $199 “repair” fee (which probably would have done had it come to that). A lot of people complain about Apple, their products, or even their service but I’ve had nothing but awesome experiences with them. They stand by their customers and their products.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. No matter what you read about issues with these batteries, its my experience that Apple will just stand by their products and give you a replacement. I’m sure this battery will swell again at some point and I will no doubt be bringing it back to my local Apple store for another replacement!

Netflix continues to annoy me; and I’m not even a member anymore. My wife and I canceled our account earlier this year when Netflix announced their price hikes on their DVD and Streaming subscriptions. I had thought about just canceling the Streaming subscription because the titles available sucked, especially compared to what we could get on HBO/Cinemax/Showtime, but I was just overly annoyed so I gave them the boot. We weren’t alone as thousands of subscribers punted on their Netflix subscription. My mother on the other hand, kept her subscription.

She lives alone and having access to movies to watch, especially during the winter, was worth the price she paid. This year for Christmas (hopefully she’s not reading this in case I figure out how) I wanted to get her a year long subscription to Netflix. I figured it was a gift not only she could use, but she’d enjoy. When I went to Netflix’s site though, all I could see where subscriptions to their streaming packages. It would cost $99.85 for a full year to their subscription service. Ok, great, $100 for crappy titles on-demand. No DVDs. Not even the option to gift the DVD subscription and not streaming.

Now, I could be totally off base here and their streaming service could be 1,000 times better than it was, but I haven’t had anyone tell me, “Bill, get Netflix! Their Streaming is awesome now!” If someone had, I’d probably at least check it out for a month. But no, no evidence of that. So my deal here is why would I spend $99.85 on something that I’m not convinced is of value as a gift? Why wouldn’t Netflix offer both as gifts? I understand that streaming is the wave of the future, but until you can get every title on-demand, it just doesn’t seem worth it. What do you think?

http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/t-sql-programming/using-and-monitoring-sql-2005-query-notification/

http://dimarzionist.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/how-to-make-sql-server-notifications-work/

Both of those articles should get you started for sure. I ran into issues keeping our application from crashing after a period of time though while leveraging Query Notifications for caching in a few of my sites. The biggest issue I found was that I would see the following exception in our logs:

When using SqlDependency without providing an options value, SqlDependency.Start() 
must be called prior to execution of a command added to the SqlDependency instance.

Never did quite get a handle on what was going on here. I did figure out though that I could always find this in my Application log around the time that exception was thrown:

The query notification dialog on conversation handle '{A1FB449B-DEB3-E011-B6D2-002590198D55}.' closed due to the following error: '-8470Remote service has been dropped.'.

So, does this mean that I called SqlDependency.Stop() and now queued notifications aren’t going to be delivered. Are these critical errors that keep the application from coming back? I’ve read that a lot of the Query Notification messages you see in the log aren’t critical errors and can be ignored. I can’t ignore the timing of this error and the exception being thrown above though.

Anyway, I finally decided to pull this stuff out of our application until I get a better handle on what’s going on. The last straw was that I was trying to sync some database changes during a maintenance period and I couldn’t get them to sync because of a bunch of these SQL Query Notification issues. As I write this, I can’t even get my database back online as I’m waiting for ALTER DATABASE SET SINGLE_USER to complete (approaching 3 hours!!!). As I keep waiting, my Application log keeps filling up with the following Query Notification messages:

Query notification delivery could not send message on dialog ‘{FE161F6A-D6B3-E011-B6D2-002590198D55}.’. Delivery failed for notification ‘85addbaa-ce66-431d-870f-d91580a7480a;d527d584-9fd4-4b13-85bc-87cb6c2e166f‘ because of the following error in service broker: ‘The conversation handle “FE161F6A-D6B3-E011-B6D2-002590198D55″ is not found.’.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

I had a response to a post I made on the ASP.NET Forum and it was suggested that with all the cached items in the system, that SQL Server really could not catch up. This is a problem because not only does it slow the entire system down, but when you have to cycle the SQL Server service itself, it takes forever for the system to come back up because all of the notifications get requeued or something.

Recently I had started to notice that the Settings app on my iPhone 3GS was really slow to load. It was probably taking 2-3 seconds to load up. This was a pain especially when I wanted to adjust the brightness on my iPhone so I could use it as a flashlight. Silly I know, but its damn useful in a pinch. Anyway, I started to think that the issue was how many applications I had installed on my phone and also how many of them installed a settings widget on the phone as well. Flipping through the 6 or 7 pages of apps I had installed on my phone I decided that half of them I never used or had only used once or twice to play around with them. So I removed a bunch of them. Turns out, I was right. More times than not, the Settings app loads right up with very little waiting at all. I know that 2-3 seconds isn’t really that long, but when you’re impatient, it can seem like forever.

• Malwarebytes
• Spybot Search & Destroy
• Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool

Each program found different issues with the system and I was able to remove some nefarious programs that were causing his issues. I also ran CCleaner from Piriform which allowed me to remove any unwanted files from browsing the Internet as well as removing any unnecessary Windows Registry entries. At this point, I figured that the system was clean so I gave it a reboot.

I logged back in to Windows in normal mode and used his Windows account. The Windows 2011 Security Center spyware was gone, but something else had happened in the process. Even though Windows had Automatic Updates turned on, I was getting a popup in the toolbar suggesting that it wasn’t. This lead me to believe that there was still some spyware installed. So I ran the above utilities under his username to just make sure I got everything. Nothing.

At this point I decided it was time to install some of the utilities Microsoft provides to protect your system (as well as turning Windows Firewall on). I downloaded:

• Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool
• Windows Defender

I ran installed and ran Windows Defender first. After the install, I couldn’t update its definitions, which I thought was odd. So I installed and ran the Malicious Software Removal Tool. It didn’t find any more spyware. At this point, I was pretty confident there wasn’t anything else wrong with the system in terms of spyware or viruses. To get the Windows Defender definitions to update, I ran Windows Update manually. I selected the updates to install, but none of them worked. Now I was starting to think that whatever spyware that was installed, had hosed the system. So back to Google I went to search for a solution.

I found this Microsoft Knowledge Base article outlining some steps to take to get Windows Update to work again. I was a little wary of running some of the scripts they recommended, but I figured it came from Microsoft so it might be worth the risk. Besides, his computer was still sort of hosed. I followed each step in order, then rebooted the system. The Windows Update alert in the toolbar was gone, but Windows Update still wasn’t quite working.

Some more searching lead me to another Microsoft Knowledge Base article outlining how to obtain the latest version of the Windows Update Agent. I downloaded this (x86 in my case) and installed it. I rebooted the machine again and crossed my fingers.

Low and behold, upon restarting, Windows Update and Windows Defender definition update worked. All because of a little spyware that was installed. Bottom line folks, don’t click on or install any sort of security popup you see online. They’re bad news.

A couple of other issues I had with this laptop. It kept shutting down on me. A search on Google revealed that dust will cover the fan cover on the bottom of the laptop and cause it to overheat, which is bad. I cleaned it off with a little compressed air and made sure the vent was exposed when working on the laptop. It stopped shutting down and didn’t get nearly as warm. Another issue, from the laptop shutting down actually, was that it shutdown while running chkdsk. After restarted, I got the UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME blue screen. I just booted the system into Recovery Mode using a separate install disc and ran chkdsk from the Recovery Console. Specifically, I executed two commands:

• chkdsk /p
• chkdks /r

The first one verifies the disk and makes sure its not marked as dirty and the second actually runs through any repair steps to make sure the disk is in good order.

Anyway, a lot of work to fix one silly issue. I’m just glad that I was able to remove the spyware and get the laptop to work properly again.