Matt40k

The bins gone from the bus stop outside Ravenswood Primary?!?

If forgot to renew my Code Signing with Certum. I’ve just had to request a new one, the new rules meant I now have to have Matt40k – Open Source Developer in the CN (name).

I bought the missus SIMS 3, she said to me this morning that she couldn’t get on to EA Download Manager (so she can get a load of extra stuff). Now, if it was my works laptop I would have said it was the proxy settings.

Well I had a look and sure enough it had somewhere stuck in the system, the proxy settings from waay back when I was pratting about. Anyway, if anyone finds this do the following:

Open CMD (command prompt) – Start > Run > CMD [ENTER]

proxycfg [ENTER]

It should then display the proxy settings, then use:

proxycfg -D [ENTER]

to go direct, or, if you are using a proxy server:

proxycfg -U [ENTER]

This will grab it from IE and set it for the system. Job’s a good’un.

As you may have seen, Microsoft has “this software is Windows X approved” program. The Windows 7 Software Logo Program (more information available here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dd203105.aspx) allows software publishers to test there software for Windows 7 and display to the world the fact it works by displaying the “Compatible with Windows 7″ logo.

Program Benefits

• Microsoft Partner Points
  When your application earns the “Compatible with Windows 7” logo, your business will receive up to 30 Partner Points for use in the Microsoft Partner Program*. The Microsoft Partner Program provides valuable software, training, and support; you can learn more at Program Membership.

  *Total points awarded subject to rules of MSPP program; see MSPP calculation details for more information.

• Priority Listing on the Windows 7 Compatibility Center
  Logo-qualified products receive special priority on the foremost showcase of Windows products: the Windows Compatibility Center.
• Logo Artwork & Marketing Guides
  Logo artwork is provided to display on your packaged product and websites to help communicate to your customers that they can be confident your product will be compatible and run reliably on Windows 7.  The logo marketing guide provides you with details on how.
• Windows Error Reporting
  Once in market, access to Windows built-in error reporting (WER) enables you to monitor issues being experienced by your customers and respond pro-actively.

Best of all, there’s no charge to submit.  Once your application passes the logo requirements, you simply submit for the logo and will begin receiving the benefits above.

So, what’s the problem? Well you need to code sign your work, which costs? Or does it? Well although you can get it for free from some companies, it won’t be able to be used. You need to use a Verisign code signing.

So isn’t that anti-competitive? Well yes, but why have they done it? Well I signed up for a free code signing (30 days), and the company in question didn’t even check who I was. So I could sign up as Capita and then start issusing code signed by “Capita”. Verisign however, appears to actually check who you are. So, if you want something Windows 7 approved, it’s $99.

Just started having a play with MS-SQL 2008 R2 and creating a database. Progress is slow. The night is long and it’s neally at an end. Mistakes are common, but at least they are friendly

Well that was an eventful match, better than the previous matches, just wish we won!! 4-1, it’s going to stick in a lot of peoples throats for a while.

Shame about the ref and England’s second goal. Maybe that would have raised our sprints enough to have pulled it out of the bag.

At least Wayne controlled himself, still he played shitta. Only one question remains, what colour will Wayne’s caravan be?

Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

Come on England!!

Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

I’ve have just submitted some private code I was working on that uses the SIMS reporting engine to extract data from Capita’s MIS package – SIMS .net. I’ve submitted under the BSD license, I offer no support, as is.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/simsextract

Come on England, we should win for just having a better anthem!!

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SQL backups (.BAK) are, by default, large in size and over time they tented to add up. They do however, compress extremely well. You also have the problem of getting rid of the old backups, I doubt you’re boss would be happy to know you have a backup from 3 years ago which you could restore from. After all, backups are like fruit, the older it is, the less likely you are to want it. With this said it worth going slightly off topic.

The only time you would want to keep a backup would be pre and major event. So in the case of schools and SIMS .net, before a SIMS release or patch. In this modern age where discs are pennies, I would invest in a spinal of DVDs and copying the encrypted backup onto the disc and labelling correct and storing it in a secure place.

Anyway, getting back to the day-to-day backups, we need to have a way of removing the old backups, so, what’s the solution. Well you could use Microsoft SQL Studio Management and create a task to deal with backups, but that starts getting complex. To keep it simple we going to use a tool called TidyBackups. Which was created by yours truely. TidyBackups will remove the old and compressed the uncompressed.

You can download TidyBackups from Sourceforge.

An example of TidyBackups would be:

TidyBackups is saved to C:\SIMS

Schedule Task details:

Run: C:\SIMS\TidyBackups.exe /DAYS:45 /PATH:”C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.SIMS2008\MSSQL\Backups” /ZIP /LOG

Start In: C:\SIMS

Schedule Task: Weekly – Mon – Fri 17:30

This will then run every weekday at 5.30PM, it will delete any files with the extension .bak (even if they are compressed), that are older then 45 days and compress the remaining .bak files. All of this will be logged in a text log file in C:\sims called TidyBackups_log.txt