\\file-server\mydepartment

Now, since Windows works a little differently to Mac OSX (and Linux / Unix) you’ll need to change that a little so before we start the next steps get your file server path ready and looking like this:

//file-server/mydepartment

Then follow these steps:

1. Open the Finder from the Dock (usually at the bottom of the screen), if you can’t find this cmd-tab to it.  

2. From the Finder’s “Go” menu choose Connect to Server (or just press cmd-K)

3. Type “smb://” followed by your reformatted file path as follows, then hit the “+” key…

4. Click on the newly added Favourite Server and then click Connect.

5. Enter your credentials when prompted then click Connect…

1. Go to System Preferences on the Apple menu (top-left of screen)

2. Choose the Network settings pane (you may need to back out of a previous pane first)

3. If you need to ‘unlock’ the pane, click the padlock and do so then/otherwise click the + icon

4. Choose Interface = VPN, Type = Cisco IPSec then choose a suitable name for Service Name.  Click Create.  

5.  Fill in the IP address and user name fields, then click Authentication Settings

6. Fill in your Shared Secret and Group Name, click OK.  Click, Apply and close System Preferences.  

7.  On the title bar, click the VPN icon (doesn’t really resemble anything relevant), then choose your new VPN service.  

8. Fill in your username/password (special considerations may apply for RSA Tokens, etc.) and click OK.  You may receive a message at this point regarding security, read and click OK as appropriate.  

9. Counter appears on title bar whilst VPN is connected.  

10.  To disconnect open the menu from the VPN icon once more.  

The only solution I could find was to manually reschedule all reports previously owned by the deleted user, if anyone has any better solutions or knows of a method to make a bulk change rather than individually I would love to hear it!

For anyone unfamiliar with MWC, it’s an annual coming together of the entire mobile industry from network operators (MNOs), manufacturers such as Samsung, LG, Nokia, HTC, software and services companies like Google, and a whole host of companies making apps, accessories, etc.  Having been once (see my MWC Impressions post), it’s quite an experience and well worth going if you can make it.

Anyway, on to the list – if you spot any I’ve missed please leave a comment and I’ll bump it up into the post.

• AppsFuel
• TechRadar
• Appscend (you have to build an app with them to enter)
• TechWeekEurope (sign up to newsletter)
• Mobile Monday London (send in a reason why you should win!)
• Developer Garden (just a tweet)
• InMobi
• Click Software

It’s not always obvious when the open/closed dates are so I apologise if any of the above are no longer valid, please leave a comment if you find that to be the case and I’ll remove the link.

The report shows that only 44% of consumers use the internet via their mobile phone and of those, this seems quite low based on personal experience but that could be down to bias from working in the technology sector.  Of those people that use the Internet on their phone 50% do so more than five times per day (with 33% reporting 10+ times per day).  The implication being that there is a demographic relying on their mobile for everyday tasks, especially when coupled with the result that 71% of people saying that it is important for them to use the internet whilst outside.

Naturally there is a skew towards the younger end of the market with 86% of respondents between 16 and 34 that use the internet doing so on a daily basis.   Additionally whilst 7% of all users rated the ability to use the internet as the most important factor whilst thinking about their mobile operator this rose to 14% for the 16-35 age group and drops to 2% for the 55+ group.

Reliability is a problem for internet users with 47% being satisfied with their operator, this is poor compared to voice and SMS usage which received a 74% satisfaction rate.  Furthermore 34% of consumers reported having experienced no signal/reception (10% frequently) and an additional 15% reported an inability to use the mobile internet.

In terms of non-Internet usage there weren’t too many unexpected results, the only surprising outcome of the survey to me was that 12% of respondents have used video calling and 25% do so on a daily basis – making 3% of all people using video calling on a daily basis.   The full report (33 pages) can be found here: source.

 The iOS Support Matrix 2012 was created by Empirical Magic and Pencil Studio…

WHILE (1=1)

BEGIN

	INSERT INTO tmp_snapshot
	SELECT field1,field2,field3
	FROM table1 WHERE field4 = 'value'

	WAITFOR DELAY '000:00:05'

END

Just change the time delay and the query and you’re off, of course you could be a lot cleverer with your WHILE conditions and rework this principle for loads of things.  I thought it worth posting as many database folk forget the power of the humble while loop!

I encountered this error whilst testing a Stored Procedure Universe in BO XI R3.1, given that it says “Invalid Parameter Number” you would naturally assume that it was something relating to the stored procedure itself, passing parameters from the front-end to the DB in SQL, etc. but in my case it was a classic red herring error message.

The issue turned out to be permissions problem, the user executing the stored procedure did not have permissions to execute it.  After running the following SQL statement everything ran perfectly…

GRANT EXECUTE ON my_dwh.dbo.usp_do_something_useful TO PUBLIC 

… though bear in mind that you may not want to grant permissions to everyone (‘public’), I just use it as a simple example.

What seemed to be happening is that two jobs would run simultaneously whilst other jobs sat showing a status of “Waiting for Worker Thread”.  After digging around I found that…

EXEC sp_configure;

… showed that the server was configured to automatically manage the max_worker_threads setting (value of 0), additionally…

SELECT max_workers_count FROM sys.dm_os_sys_info;

… showed that the value being used (based on the 32/64 bit status and number of cores) was indeed 512.  A quick check of…

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM sys.dm_os_threads;
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM sys.dm_os_workers;

… showed that the actual running values (54 & 46 respectively) were within expectations and nowhere near the 512 thread limit so what was happening?

Well, it turned out that whilst my jobs are a mix of OS admin tasks, legacy DTS jobs and SSIS packages most of them involve some form of PowerShell script to initialise them (usually moving files around, setting permissions, etc.).  The problem was down to an obscure setting that limits the max_worker_threads to just 2 for the PowerShell subsystem, the setting can be seen here:

SELECT subsystem,max_worker_threads
FROM msdb.dbo.syssubsystems;

In my case I just upped the running value to 40 (the same value set for CmdExec) and restarted SQL Server Agent:

UPDATE msdb.dbo.syssubsystems
SET max_worker_threads = 40
WHERE subsystem = ‘PowerShell’;

I’m yet to spot whether this has any other long term effect but things seem to be behaving fine, I will say that as part of my research I found other people saying that this setting did not persist through a restart on certain versions – I’m running 2008 R2 and that appears to be fine but it’s worth double-checking if you try this.

Thankfully queues at the Wii-U stand were short and I jumped straight into a demo of Nintendo Land, a series of mini-games themed around Ninty’s main properties.  On show during EGXP were The Legend of Zelda: Battle Quest, Luigi’s Ghost Mansion, Animal Crossing: Sweet Days and  Takamaru’s Ninja Castle.

The new tablet-style GamePad is comfortable to hold, provides two analogue sticks, triggers and an array of buttons that would look at home on a PS3 controller as well as a 6.2-inch resistive touch-screen.  Despite being only 158ppi the resolution of 854 x 480 is more than adequate for casual use and active gameplay but the decision to opt for a resistive touch screen seems puzzling since compared to the capacitive touch screens found on modern smartphones it feels noticeably unresponsive and I suspect small children may struggle with the force required to operate it.

The use of the second screen really comes into its own when used to provide one player with a different view of the action to the others which I saw during a series of five-player sessions with one GamePad and five Wii-motes.  In Luigi’s Ghost Mansion the player with the GamePad plays the ghost and can see all four players and himself whereas the other players can only see themselves and each-other on the television, a similar mechanic is also used in Animal Crossing: Sweet Days.  In these scenarios the four Wii-mote+TV players work together by shouting out tips and calling out the bad-guy’s location whilst the bad-guy tries to use stealth and independence to get the upper hand and it works brilliantly – classic Nintendo fun.

Despite the runaway success of the original Wii, Nintendo may face a struggle trying to promote the Wii-U with stiff competition coming from Sony’s PS3-Vita integration and the upcoming SmartGlass on the Xbox 360 (good article on PocketLint covering the three).  The other issues Nintendo may face are awareness and price, despite a release date of November 30th most of the techies in my office had heard of it but none of the ‘normal folk’ had and with a rumoured release price of £229 – £250 it’s going up against the Xbox 360 + Kinect (£250 with game) or the PS3 + Move (£250 with game) both of which offer significantly enhanced features such as Blu Ray, Netflix, iPlayer, Video on Demand, etc.

What about the rest of EGXP2012?

Last year’s queues wore me down a little two much and this year I just didn’t have the appetite having spent an hour queuing to get in then spend half the day queueing inside so I missed out on playing Call of Duty Black Ops 2 and Halo 4 but a spectator’s view showed more of the same so in both cases if you like the previous games you’ll probably like the new ones.  That’s not to disparage sequels though as I had a blast playing Tekken Tag Tournament 2 and was literally stunned by the graphics on show from Forza Horizon.

Thankfully the single most memorable game of the show was an original property: Tokyo Jungle,  starting as either a deer or a Pomeranian the player must to survive as long as possible in a post-apocalyptic world eating plants, fighting with Beagles and even mating (an act I performed to gasps from onlookers).  Along with the weirdness that Tokyo Jungle brought a fair slice of odd was on offer in the Indie Games Arcade, always one of the highlights of EG Expo this is where the one-man-band and small team developers get to show their wares which sometimes tend towards the bizarre like the first-person-ambler Proteus or one of my favourite indie games of all time shown at a previous Expo: VVVVVV.  Another highlight was the Retro Zone where I got the chance to play on and Amstrad GX4000 and a TurboGrafx-16, something you don’t get to do every day and a treat for lovers of retro gaming.

At the end of the day I was disappointed that I didn’t get to see Hideo Kojima’s Developer Session but as I said earlier, queuing for an hour or more just to get in just wasn’t worth it in my eyes and I think that Eurogamer ought to consider a pre-booking facility for the popular talks rather than making attendees waste time queueing.  All told though, it was a good day and well worth the trip – if you’ve not been I would definitely advise you to pop along to the 2013 show and if you can afford it I’d recommend going on opening day and buying early entry ticket as it’ll increase your chances of seeing what you want to. Oh, and wear comfy shoes.