Simmons Consulting

Limit of 32,000 bytes? Really?

Toby Simmons — Fri, 06 May 2011 17:51:02 +0000

I cannot believe we have purchased a product based on a database that has a 32,000-byte limit on fields returned using their own ODBC driver!

Welcome to 1984. Wow.

Update: This limit also applies to their .NET driver.

MobileMe still doesn’t support Outlook reminders

Toby Simmons — Mon, 02 May 2011 20:36:56 +0000

Apple’s MobileMe is a great idea. It has been the only real answer to keeping contacts and calendars synced across multiple Apple devices (iPhone, iPad) and multiple computers using both Windows and OS X. Despite a rocky start (see this article) the service has gradually become better and better. But a problem developed for Outlook users when Apple moved to a new calendar format. The upgraded calendar no longer synchronizes your local Outlook calendar with the MobileMe remote calendar (including your alerts/reminders) — instead you get a second, external CalDAV calendar linked in Outlook and stored “in the cloud,” separate and distinct from your local Outlook calendar.

And now the upgrade is mandatory. The problem is that you can no longer create or edit reminders in this new calendar using Outlook. If you try to create an event using Outlook in this external MobileMe calendar with a reminder attached, you will get an error message that says “The reminder (SUBJECT) will not appear because the item is in a folder that doesn’t support reminders.” Since I use Outlook all day long, I tend to live and die by my calendar and the alerts it provides. Not being able to create or modify alerts in Outlook is crippling!

In addition, if you receive a calendar invitation in Outlook via email and accept it, it will place the calendar event in your (default) local calendar — not in your MobileMe calendar. And there doesn’t appear to be any way to make your MobileMe calendar the default for invitations. The only way to get your accepted calendar event in your MobileMe calendar (and synced across all your mobile devices or other computers) is to manually copy the event from your local calendar into your MobileMe calendar. And even if you do that, you cannot create a reminder or alert for that item using Outlook.

Back when the “new” calendar was in beta, Apple had posted these two problems in their list of “known issues” — they have since removed these from their current “known issues” even though these problems still exist. Apparently they are not interested in fixing it, since they no longer list it as a problem.

And starting May 5, 2011, those of us still using the old calendar format because it is the only one that works properly with Outlook will no longer have a fully-functioning calendar sync.

This is just not right, Apple.

Here are some of the links I found when researching this problem.

Clear Outlook 2010 contact MRU

Toby Simmons — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 16:54:03 +0000

It took a while to find this answer. To clear the Outlook 2010 contact search drop down (what used to be called the QuickMRU in earlier versions of Outlook) you have to go to this registry key.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\profile_name\0a0d020000000000c000000000000046\101f0446

You can edit it or delete it, but it is a binary type so it appears to store the information in Unicode.

I found the answer here.

Why it costs so much

Toby Simmons — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 21:36:16 +0000

If a client asks “Why do you charge so much for X hours of work?” simply tell them “You are paying me for the X hours of work and the 35,000 hours it took to learn how to do your project in X hours.”

New website launched!

Toby Simmons — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 21:49:04 +0000

A large ecommerce project of mine recently launched. The site is called Ridge City Media and they offer disc repair services, for CDs, DVDs and game console discs. If you have scratched or unworking discs, CDs that skip or won’t play, check out their site for excellent disc repair.

Cindy Lou’s Books website

Toby Simmons — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 19:01:17 +0000

It’s been a long time since I have had a new site launch, but just recently I designed and launched a site for a friend who was opening a used bookstore in honor of his wife who recently died from ovarian cancer. The book store, in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, is called Cindy Lou’s Used & Loved Books. You should go there and read about Cindy and what Mark is doing now.

QuickTime – Error 47: Invalid URL. ()

Toby Simmons — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:52:53 +0000

My hard drive crashed on my workstation at the office about two weeks ago, so I took the opportunity to upgrade to Windows 7. Most everything seems to be working well but QuickTime has some networking issues — it appears that it cannot make any HTTP connections. For example it cannot load the “Content Guide” when you launch the standalone player — it just says “Loading…” at the bottom.

It also cannot update the application within the player — instead it displays an error message saying “A connection with the QuickTime software server could not be established. This computer may be having trouble accessing the internet or the server may be off-line.”

Finally (and worst of all) it will not load any content from the web. For example, if I try to open an HD trailer from the Apple trailers site, it displays a popup saying “Error 47: Invalid URL. ()

We have verified this on three different computers, two running Windows 7 Professional and one running Windows 7 Ultimate. We also tried every version of QuickTime 7.x we could find, and they all display the same error.

Finally, we tried disabling the firewall and adding an exception for the QuickTimePlayer.exe but nothing seems to fix it.

I am using QuickTime Pro (this is purchased software) so I called Apple support hoping to get a resolution. I spoke with James (who was very friendly) who pointed me to the following article in the Apple discussion boards. I had already seen this in my initial research but, unfortunately, none of the recommended fixes worked for me. After telling James, he informed me that Apple doesn’t really do troubleshooting support for QuickTime (O_o) so my only hope was the web site.

So until Apple gets its act together, I recommend NOT upgrading to Windows 7 unless QuickTime is not important to you.

Anyone out there with a similar problem?

Save /admin /console setting in RDP

Toby Simmons — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 16:58:26 +0000

When using Microsoft Remote Desktop to connect to remote computers, you can force the option to connect to the console session by using the /admin switch (or /console switch if you run older versions of the terminal services client.)

You used to be able to use the setting:

connect to console:i:i

to save the option in an RDP file. This stopped working in the latest version of the RDP client (version 6.1).

After doing a lot of research (I don’t know why Microsoft doesn’t just list the current available options for RDP saved sessions!) I finally found out how to save this option in the current version of the RDP client from this obscure posting.

To save the “connect to console” setting — essentially forcing the “/admin” switch, put this line in your RDP file:

administrative session:i:1

Dell PowerEdge 1750 – Press F1 to Continue

Toby Simmons — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:25:19 +0000

We had a Dell PowerEdge 1750 that, every time it was rebooted, would stop in the BIOS bootup sequence and prompt you to “Press F1 to Continue, Press F2 for Setup.” This was a huge problem because it made remote rebooting the server impossible. More than once, I forgot and rebooted the server assuming it would come back up, then realized 30 minutes later that it was never coming back until I mashed that F1 key. This was particularly problematic when working from home — resulting in a 30 mile drive just to press one key.

It turns out there was a small problem that was severe enough to prevent the server from booting. During the BIOS sequence, there was a notice we had overlooked that read “CD-ROM not found.” Once we pulled the bad CD-ROM drive and replaced it with a good one, the message went away and the server booted without interaction.

Since the CD-ROM isn’t necessary for booting, it seemed odd that a missing (or bad) CD-ROM drive would prevent the server from starting up without keyboard interaction. Sounds like a flaw in the BIOS to me.

Integrating WP in external PHP pages

Toby Simmons — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:00:11 +0000

I have several external pages that use the WP theme engine to wrap the content. I use the method found here, which worked great under WordPress 2.9.2. After upgrading to WP 3.0, these pages no longer worked as expected but instead generated 404s; it turns out the fix is rather simple.

The code to include the WP theme in external pages used to look like this:

< ?php

require('./wp-blog-header.php');
get_header();
?>
<h2>This is the external content.h2>
< ?php
get_sidebar();
get_footer();
?>

The newest version of WP merged the old WordPress Multi-User (WPMU) and the standalone version of WordPress. Since this merger, the new way to include WP in external pages is to change the require() statement to pull in wp-load.php (instead of wp-blog-header.php) like this:

< ?php

require('./wp-load.php');
get_header();
?>
<h2>This is the external content.h2>
< ?php
get_sidebar();
get_footer();
?>

Now your external pages work just like they used to! I found the answer on a BBPress forum post from nine months ago.