Retrieving data from my CPAP machine wirelessly

I use a CPAP machine to treat my sleep apnea. The machine I use, the Philips Dreamstation, keeps a copy of the nightly monitoring data on an SD Card inserted in the machine. I discovered I can take the card out of the machine, insert it into my computer and run a piece of software such as OSCAR to view the data and see how my treatment is going.

After a while, I figured there had to be an easier way to get the data without constantly moving an SD Card around. I did some research and found this device:

FYSTEC SD Wifi

After purchasing it and setting it up, I am able to map a drive to it on my windows machine using WebDav. I can then point OSCAR to the WebDav drive instead of the SD Card, and it can read the files directly off of the SD Card inserted into the CPAP machine.

Service Management Automation (SMA) Child runbook not found when starting parent runbook if runbooks published out of order

Imagine a scenario where you have two runbooks; one that is the “parent” and one that is the “child” because the parent runbook calls the child runbook synchronously during execution. If these two runbooks are imported and published in the wrong order, associations between the two runbooks are not made correctly and the parent runbook cannot run.

PowerShell: Physical CPU count and Motherboard Manufacturer

Getting how many physical CPU sockets are in the machine:

$myArray = @()
$myArray += Get-WmiObject win32_processor
$myArray.Count

Geting the motherboard manufacturer:

Get-WmiObject win32_computersystemproduct

This returns something like this:

IdentifyingNumber : MXQXXXXXXXX
Name              : ProLiant DL360 G6
Vendor            : HP
Version           :
Caption           : Computer System Product

Microsoft “Atlanta”

I recently evaluated Microsoft codename “Atlanta” and assisted my colleague John Joyner with the writing of an interesting  blog post which is now posted on the System Center Operations Manager Unleashed Blog.  This new product provides cloud-based SQL Server monitoring in the web browser.

To view the blog post, go to here: Microsoft “Atlanta” on System Center Operations Manager Unleashed

Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools

My first post in a while — but decided I wanted to share new tools I found.

Last week I attended a presentation by two Microsoft employees at my local Dot Net User’s group meeting.  They previewed a new set of tools available for Visual Studio 2010 starting this week.  I couldn’t find these in the extension manager in my copy of Visual Studio yet, but you can go to this page to get the extension:  http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/d0d33361-18e2-46c0-8ff2-4adea1e34fef

The Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools include several new features that have been asked for by users:

Where To Draw the Line Between SharePoint Customisation and SharePoint Development

I just wanted to highlight a blog post that I found to be interesting.  It deals with a topic that I’ve struggled with as our company begins to sell SharePoint solutions to our clients.

http://wss.made4the.net/archive/2008/11/25/where-to-draw-the-line-between-sharepoint-customisation-and-sharepoint-development.aspx

SQL Server 2000: Error 14274: Cannot delete a job that originated from an MSX server

I don’t work much with older versions of SQL server, but I came across the following error today when trying to disable a scheduled SQL 2000 job while trying to backup a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 database.

Error 14274: Cannot delete a job that originated from an MSX server

This error message has two possible causes: either

1. the SQL server is not a standalone server, and this message is appropriate, or
2. the name of the SQL server has changed since the scheduled job was created.

In my case, the scheduled job had been around for over 6 years, and the server had been renamed about 5 years ago.  The job has continued to run and noone needed to make changes to it.

I looked in the sysjobs table in the msdb database and noticed that in the originating_server field, the old server name was still there.  I updated each of them with the following statement:

UPDATE sysjobs SET originating_server='yourNewServerName'

and all was well.

SharePoint Error: Cannot complete this action. Please try again.

We were getting this error on one of our SharePoint sites, and I found this helpful post in a Google search.  I have linked to it here for reference.

http://cregan.wordpress.com/2006/10/20/moss-2007-sharedserviceprovider-cannot-complete-this-action-error/

URL Aliases for your SharePoint site

We have a server that we installed SharePoint on to use for our new production intranet site.  We needed the site to be accessible from a friendly name.

Preventing a form from opening more than once

Suppose you have a form named frmMain (Main) and a form named frmInformation (Information).  You want to open the frmInformation from frmMain as a modeless window (so the user can return to frmMain) but prevent the window from being opened again and having two copies of the Information window open.