The Ji Village News

季庄新闻–Haidong Ji’s Blog

I’ve gotten a number of recruiters contacting me lately, and the opportunities ain’t so bad. So it seems that the market is looking up.

What is your experience?

Today I tried to install Linux as a guest OS on Windows Virtual PC. I got Fedora Core 2 late last year during a training. So that is what I tried.

I picked “Other” OS and created a new virtual disk. Installation started and I picked Graphic mode installation. The Anaconda hardware probing processing started. After it dected the monitor, mouse, it then tried to start the X. At this point, the process failed. Below is the error message I got:

An internal virtual machine error (13) has occured. The virtual machine will reset now.

So I started the text installation mode. And I picked Personal Desktop as the image I’d like to install. Most of the rest of the customization stuff were left as default.

The install seemed to take forever. It did finish finally but when it is time to start Fedora Core 2 Linux, it was never successful. Below is the sample of error messages I got:

Checksum for device 1 is not valid
Unsupported Intel Chipset
/etc/X11/perfdm: line 80: 317 Segmentation fault unicode_start $SYSFONT $SYSFONTACM

INIT: Id “x” respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

So I figured the problem maybe caused by X and graphic stuff. I then reinstalled without X, gnome, kdesktop and all that. The install was successful, and Linux can be started.

However, when I login as root and issue commands, I periodically got Segmentation Error and the system is not stable. When I try to open or write a file in vi, I got E212: Can’t open file for writing. So essentially, it is useless.

Alas, Cygwin is much easier. But the good thing I found is that mutt seems to be included by default in Fedora.

We saw Joseph and the Amazing Techincolor Dreamcoat on Sunday at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago. It was a wonderful experience.

Joseph was the second live musical I saw. The first is Cats. We saw it on Broadway in New York City in 1998, the year before Benjamin was born. At the time, I was working for a consulting company.

My home office was in Chicago, so my stay in NYC was considered business travel. I was there for about 6 months. The company I worked for at the time rented an apartment for me on Wall Street (probably 110 Wall Street, not exactly sure now), about 100 meters from NYSE (New York Stock Exchange). Often I would walk to Borders Bookstore at ground level in World Trade Centre, browsing books, newspapers, and magazines. The dot com bubble was well and very much alive then. I was doing QA testing with a bunch of young folks like me. I struggled a bit but in hindsight, it was a great learning experience.

Since I was on company dime, I really lived a high life. I dined nicely in quite a few nice and upscale French restaurants. I often visited Chinatown in Manhattan. I also went to Flushing, Queens a few times. Both places have great Chinese food. Before my New York trip, when I read a restaurant menu, I would always look at the right column first;) That was totally changed after the New York City experience. So much so that we would joke that New York really corrupted the soul of a communist boy. (I am Chinese. By the way, if you still view China simply as a communist country, then you really should change your mindset.)

Maria visited me in NYC before we flew to Sweden, my first visit to that great country. We visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Central Park, and probably a few other places that I don’t remember now. We also had a nice dinner with my sister-in-law, either somewhere close to NYU (New York University), or in the Village (Greenwich Village).

One day we had a good lunch at a fancy restaurant, whose name I cannot remember. The restaurant was on the top floor of a building, with NYSE almost dirctly across the street on Wall Street. It was said that it used to be J.P. Morgan’s private dining place. After lunch, we went to Central Park and had a horse carrige ride in Central Park, which was really great. After the ride, we bought some carrots to feed the horse. That was a lot of fun.

Before we walked into Central Park, we went by a building that looked very nice. I remarked that this is a great building, I wonder who lives there. Later, the horse carriage driver told us that is the Dakota Building. John Lennon was shot and killed there in 1980. Later, we saw the Strawberry Field in Central Park dedicated to him. I am not into idols and hero worshipping, but if you have to ask me who my idol is, I will have to say it is John Lennon.

At the time, there was a ticket office in Times Square that sells that day’s available Broadway tickets at a discount. Maria wanted to see Cats. I went along but wasn’t really looking forward to it. I thought, geez, a musical, I am gonna be bored to death, suffer silently for a couple of hours, put up a happy face, and act cultured and civilized. Are you kidding me?!

The show totally blowed me away. I don’t know how to describe it, except to say that it is something that is very, very beautiful. It turned out that I’ve listened to Cats theme melodies in cassete that belongs to my Elder Brother No. 2 in China. But I didn’t know then it was from Cats. I was then a high school student. My Elder Brother No. 2 was in college. He also brought back home some classical music cassettes during school break. And they are all very nice. Thanks brother for introducing me to classical music!

We recently saw the movie edition of The Phatom of Opera via Netflix rental. Let me tell you, that Andrew Lloyd Webber guy is a genius. I know I can never do things like that. We also saw the movie version of Chicago (I don’t think he wrote that, though). Once again, it was great.

It’s getting late and I will retire now, but it feels great to write this and get it out of my chest.

Wow, PASS board member and Sql Server guru Randy Dyess is on a roll. I love his posts on planning, career development, and training. Very candid, thoughtful, and insightful. I sure learned a lot from them.

Sometimes you may have the need to find out the date and time a particular database was last restored. Here is a simple way to do it. It should work in both SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005:

use msdb
select max(restore_date) from restorehistory where destination_database_name = ‘MyDatabaseName’

By now you probably can tell that I am a big fan of sqlcmd;) Here is one more nugget on sqlcmd that I can throw at you:

You can set a variable so that sqlcmd would run a query whenever you launch it from the command line interactively. For example, you can let it run a query and return some useful information like version number, edition level, and patch level. All these are great to know for a DBA. Here are steps to set it up:

1. Creat the script file. Let’s call it c:\work\scripts\sql\Initialization.sql. For example, you can put statements below, customize it to suit your needs:
–Begin script
set nocount on
go

print ‘You are connected to ‘ + rtrim(CONVERT(char(20), SERVERPROPERTY(’servername’))) + ‘ (’ + rtrim(CONVERT(char(20), SERVERPROPERTY(’productversion’))) + ‘)’ + ‘ ‘ + rtrim(CONVERT(char(30), SERVERPROPERTY(’Edition’))) + ‘ ‘ + rtrim(CONVERT(char(20), SERVERPROPERTY(’ProductLevel’))) + char(10)

:setvar SQLCMDMAXFIXEDTYPEWIDTH 20

set nocount off
go

:setvar SQLCMDMAXFIXEDTYPEWIDTH
–End script

2. In DOS prompt, type:
set sqlcmdini=c:\work\scripts\sql\Initialization.sql

3. You are all set. Here are some sample results:

C:\Documents and Settings\Haidong>sqlcmd
You are connected to MARIALAPTOP (8.00.194) Enterprise Evaluation Edition RTM

1> exit

C:\Documents and Settings\Haidong>sqlcmd -S.\ssistest
You are connected to MARIALAPTOP\SSISTEST (9.00.1399.06) Standard Edition RTM

1> exit

Please share with me if you have clever script that can display additional information that is useful by commenting or email. Thanks and enjoy:)

PS. I noticed that when you restart your computer, sqlcmdini info is lost. You need to reset it again. Microsoft, is it possible to fix this in SP1?