Techie Nostalgia

I love things like this!

24″ LCD for less than $300!

Sliced Bread, Remote Controls, Cordless Telephones… and now this!

http://stealthytech.com/200711/1920×1200-24-lcds-fall-below-300/

Thank Goodness for Science and Cheap Asian Labor!

Wikipedia as a class assignment?

An Interesting Idea for sure…..

Wikipedia Becomes a Class Assignment from PhysOrg.com
(AP) — Some academics cringe when students turn to Wikipedia as a reference for term papers.

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Crystal Reports XI – Freezes when opening a report

I ran into very strange situation with Crystal Reports XI recently.  Basiclly, after going File –> Open and choosing a file, Crystal would come to a screeching halt.  5 minutes, 45 minutes, still NOTHING happening…. so I fired up the old task manger and killed my dear friend Crystal.

To make a long story short…. neither I nor Business Objects tech support could figure out what was going on….. that was until I tried to work at home that night on my laptop and BANG the same thing almost happened…. Almost?….. Yes This time I got an “This Report Uses an Invalid Printer” Dialog Box.

Eureeka!

I realize what had happened in my IT universe…..

1.) An OLD Windows 2003 member server had been decommissioned over the prior weekend.  This used to be a print server.

2.) The OLD print server had a static DNS entry which was never deleted.

Because Many of the Crystal Reports in my production environment are very old,  They were designed using a printer from that old server as the default printer!  Crystal was VERY determined to find that printer (obviously a bug!).  As soon as I deleted the static DNS entry and then flushed the DNS cache on my workstation.  I was able to fire up Crystal and open the report.

2 Morals in this story:

1.) Don’t use Static DNS entries in Win 2K3, unless it’s for something that can’t register itself with DNS.
(this one predated me and I can’t figure out why it may have been put in there. )

2.) Don’t design Crystal Reports with Default Printers unless you really have to.  They have that File–> Page Setup –> No Printer option for a reason!

So here it is….

I finally have a blog.

For a techie type, I admit I am very slow to adopt these new fangled gizmos….  but IT4201 requires it so here it is.   I haven’t decided if I will use this to finally contribute to the world and post IT type things I come across in my day, or if I will just use this to promote my flamingly liberal political agenda….  more to come