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Testing shortcodes

Well as another weird year begins I’ve managed to break some time off to do a bit of housekeeping. I’ve remove some old forks, added licenses, tags etc. I’ve also been renaming the default branch to main. git branch -m master main git fetch origin git branch -u origin/main main

A really annoying problem I hit recently with a some Azure Runbooks was the following message occuring: Invoke-Sqlcmd : The WriteObject and WriteError methods cannot be called from outside the overrides of the BeginProcessing, ProcessRecord, and EndProcessing methods, and they can only be called from within the same thread. Validate that the cmdlet makes these calls correctly, or contact Microsoft Customer Support Services. After doing some digging, I found out that Invoke-SqlCmd isn’t thread safe, so other runbooks running on that Azure Automation account, could interfere with each other....

It’s the time again that I go in search of a new laptop to replace my current one. Following on from my previous success with the Toshiba laptop - buying cheap and upgrading the RAM and HDD. I went in search of a cheap laptop. My requirements remained all but the same except for a Full HD screen. I once again settled on a Intel CPU. I did spent a large amount of time trying to find a AMD Ryzen based laptop and although they seem good I just couldn’t seem to find the right one, most seemed to have a optical drive which nowadays seems like a waste of money and just adds pointless weight to the laptop....

One of the annoying things about AWS S3 is the error messages. Below is an error, see if you can figure out what it’s saying. I’ll give you a hint. We’ve connected and authenticated. Here is another hint, we can read from that bucket. Give up? It’s permissions. Incorrect AWS keys returns a helpful message, so does invalid bucket, as does no access to read bucket

So the NHS Hack Day retweet this We're a UK non-profit dedicated to open source in Healthcare. Can anyone help us with some VPS instances? @rackspaceUK @digitalocean @linode — NHoS (@_nhos_) April 30, 2017 Which made me think why is Ubuntu creating a NHS specific distro (OS) and why are they begging for some VPS instances? Turns out, it has nothing to do with either Ubuntu or the NHS. Its a group of people building on-top of Ubuntu, aimed at the NHS....

Idempotent – something that is repeatable, that remains unchanged in value when repeatedly executed either independently or on by itself. SSRS – SQL Server Reporting Services part of Microsoft SQL Server. Used to deliver static reports that can be viewed via a web browser and exported to a number of formats including Excel, PDF and CSV. SSAS – SQL Server Analysis Services part of Microsoft SQL Server. SSIS – SQL Server Integration Services part of Microsoft SQL Server....

I’ve been thinking lately about how the web industry needs to change in order to improve. Cyber attacks appears to be on the rise and alot of the time they appear to be caused by someone doing something silly. Perhaps this is because everyone is a web developer, it certainly isn’t down to lack of available resources on the matter. Thinking positively about cyber security, the card companies banded together to form PCI-DSS – Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, with the goal to help businesses process card payments securely and reduce card fraud....

If you ever need a lesson in the importance of picking a good domain registrar, then read about Rosetta@Home recent problems. Dear Rosetta@Home participants, We — like many of you who have contacted us — have been extremely frustrated by the long project downtime. We (bakerlab.org) had a domain name registration verification lapse, and our registrar (dotster.com) and ICANN turned off DNS for bakerlab.org. We went through the steps to...

WordPress is an amazing blogging platform. However it does require a fair amount of love. Despite Mythic Beasts managing a large portion of my stack (hardware, OS, Apache, PHP, MySQL) and WordPress having automatic background updates I still find myself logging in and finding pending updates for WordPress. The solution was WP-CLI. With the shell add-on, I SSH onto my account, then What the above script does is download WP-CLI, grant it execute permission, then downloads my script and again, gives it execute permission....

Been trying to find out the following from my local council: How many resident parking permits have been issued How many resident parking bays are available What exactly has the money been spent on in terms of fines issued. To say they are being evasive is an understatement. So far, I’ve got, the response of: _This info is fluid as it is not only static residents who can apply for waivers within a given zone but also agencies who provide medical needs and other statutory services....

So once again we have another major security leak. You can read about it, here and below is the email CEO Matthew Prince wrote to customers: Dear Cloudflare Customer: Thursday afternoon, we published a blog post describing a memory leak caused by a serious bug that impacted Cloudflare’s systems. If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to read that post on the bug: https://blog.cloudflare.com/incident-report-on-memory-leak-caused-by-cloudflare-parser-bug/ While we resolved the bug within hours of it being reported to us, there was an ongoing risk that some of our customers’ sensitive information could still be available through third party caches, such as the Google search cache....

Caching always seems to cause problems, still, we can’t have it all. Today’s caching problem was to do with Redgate SQL Prompt, a really amazing plugin that helps you write better SQL code. The problem with it is the cache of database object metadata was out-of-date. I had updated a table so when I typed select * then press TAB to expand the * into a list of columns, I got the old names....

I was re-entering my password into our NowTV box in the bedroom when it occurred to me. Authentication sucks on the Internet of Things (IoT). The problem is you have a simple device with minimal extras. On the NowTV you have a basic remote that looks like this: Can you imagine entering a password with a length of over 20 that’s a mixture of numbers, special characters and both upper and lower case characters?...

This is absolutely amazing, Microsoft, running SQL Server, in Linux Redhat (RHEL)!

Cut-down version, I’m not working with SIMS anymore and I can’t pass on my work without them getting a large bill from Capita for using the business objects. Years and years ago I was working on a SIMS help desk at a Local Authority (LA). I had a school log a call asking about importing email addresses. Like many schools this school had just purchased a messaging service that allows sending emails and texts, the problem was they needed them in SIMS ....

With rise of the internet high street businesses are rushing to adapt so they don’t become a thing of the past. However in their rush are they being a storm trooper? Are they missing the point? First, lets look at two successful hybrid business. Hughes, a electrical store based in East Anglia and Argos, a British catalogue retailer operating in the United Kingdom. If we focus on Argos as its more well known business....

So one of the really nice sponsors at SQL Saturday had a vending machine that was rigged up to release a treat when you sent a tweet. Like so I'm at #sqlsatcambridge home of @redgate #redgatetreat #red668 — Matt Smith (@matt40k) September 10, 2016 and give you… In mine had a SQL Prompt license. At first I was a bit disappointed, I hoping for SQL Test license or a full blown SQL toolbelt but the more I’ve been using it, the more I’m loving it....

https://twitter.com/matt40k/710468378050339000 It’s nice to see Microsoft fixing old bugs – the I noticed today they updated the MSDN article about Actions in Multidimensional Models. It now supports HTTPS! Woot!! https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/692837/cannot-specify-https-in-an-analysis-services-report-action

Unfortunately this year I’ve not been able to make any of the pre-cons, however the (free) community day looks epic – the hardest part is going to be selecting which session to attend, the final one looking the worst. Aghhh!!! I’m going to have to roll a dice or something! CDC – Change Data Capture in Detail Uwe Ricken What’s new in the SQL Server 2016 for a BI Professional...

Today one of our older SSIS packages failed which loads data into our warehouse, it turns out one of the fields had been expanded as the business had started to use a different standard for one of the codes. Despite not being told about this, it causing it fail and generate extra work on an already busy Monday it was actually a really good thing. Firstly, once we identified the problem (and fixed it), our main business contact was aware of it, was able to explain why it was happening....

A while ago I got a new laptop at work with Windows 10 Enterprise and for a while I just kept using my old Windows 7 Enterprise laptop for bits I hadn’t yet transferred over. The last thing on the list was AD tools. This should just be a question of installing Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 10 (KB2693643). Unfortunately Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 10 is available only in English (United States) for this release....

The only thing you search for on Bing is Google. Microsoft has for a long time been in the search engine business with numerous rebranding exercises – MSN Search (1998 – 2006), Windows Live Search (2006 – 2007) then Live Search (2007 – 2009) and finally Bing (2009 – present). Despite all the time and money Microsoft has poured into its search engine Google still has 3 times the number of of the search engine market share as Bing....

Yesterday I went to investigate a problem someone had reported only to discover a butt load of releases As you can see, I have more releases then commits. A build was triggered by a commit, but this doesn’t explain why. I tried switching it up so it only builds when you put [build] in the commit message – which resulted in having to commit the yaml file as the feature isn’t available via the web interface, it does make sense to have this under version control....

Over the summer holidays I got my son to create a spreadsheet detailing some of his toy cars which we then imported into PowerBI. Created by a 7 year old in under an hour