Josh Wieder

Some site that calls itself "The Secret Tool" (without a hint of irony) has started linking to my site and sending junk traffic my way. Its maintained on Blogger and apparently I'm not the only one to be dismayed by the sudden rush of hits being had by these Spam-holes. While I was reading through the reports of others who have found their web traffic sullied by The Secret Tool, I found a recurring theme - folks are having difficulty finding where they can report naughty behavior like this to Google. Here is the link. Just type in the name of the blaaaag in question to produce an alert that will be delivered directly to the Trash Bin of a Google administrator: http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/request.py?contact_type=spam&blog_ID=&blog_URL=

On my way to do some grocery shopping, I came across a gun show at the local fairgrounds. With not much else going on, I decided to check it out. There were some cool stuff at the show - my favorite was an impeccably restored Thompson sub machine gun with gold trim. What really caught my eye though, and what I ended up purchasing, had nothing to do with weapons. I found a set of 10 original Astounding Science Fictions magazines. Not in the best of condition, but certainly readable and with the unmistakable Old Book Smell that leads me to despise things like Keendles. Some of the less interesting covers (seriously) For those of you without retainers, can breath through their nose and that have girl friends, Astounding Science Fiction was a pop sci fi serial that ran from 1938 to 1960 (when it became Analog magazine, itself a great read). Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein were both regular contributors who published some of their earliest work there. This man's side burns co

Sunday is a busy day for me. It starts with getting up early to go to the local game store and see how many video games I can get for $20. Today's haul was good, and I brought home eight games for that princely sum. I've gone through different periods with my Xbox 360, but for the moment I have decided to rebuild a game library on the cheap and not sell them or trade them back in. I've also made the commitment to spend no more than $10 on any one game during this process, and if possible, I keep it to $2 per game.  You might think that limits me to horrific schlock, but you would be wrong .  Here is what I got today: Fallout 3 Fallout: New Vegas Il-2 Sturmovik The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Quake 4 Afro Samurai Too Human Afro Samurai Replaying Fallout 3 and New Vegas has lead me to reading some great articles by the original game's lead designer that are  definitely worth checking out .  After video games, I have scheduled a nap. After w

Check out this amazing article written by R. Scott Campbell , on his years working at Interplay and the inside scoop on the creation of Fallout, one of the best videogames of all time (90's Interplay was a dream factory - remember Wasteland and Battle Chess?)

This is an image from the Star Wars Holiday Special. The special is quite possibly the worst thing ever committed to film. I cite the image above as evidence. May it sear itself onto your brain as it has mine. You're welcome.

Whether you are using MSSQL 2005, MSSQL 2008 or MSSQL 2012, orphaned users are common when restoring a database. It happens like this: you restore the database successfully. Being a thorough and awesome database administrator, you check the user mappings for the owner/primary database user assigned to the database, and see that the user exists in your server instance, but is no longer assigned the correct mappings. You attempt to restore the mappings, but when you do, the MSSQL server responds with the error below  Error 15023: "User already exists in current database" Below are a series or commands that can be used to immediately resolve errors like this, followed by a series of stored procedures that can be used in a number of ways to keep your MSSQL instance orphan-free on a more long-term basis. The scripts below assume a number of variables. Keep these in mind and replace them with the correct values before executing the respective queries. The $ character i

When restoring an MSSQL database, it is common to receive an error similar to this one:  " The database could not be exclusively locked to perform the operation ." Msg 5030, Level 16, State 12, Line 1   This error can occur in MSSQL  2005, 2008 or 2012. There are a number of workarounds for this. Some will tell you to disable the website's application pool in IIS, but this doesnt help if someone remotely is connected using SQL Management Studio. You can go into Performance Monitor and manually kill each process, but often the processes jump up faster than you can disable them by hand.  Where that is the case, perform the following procedure. Assuming your restore job task window is properly configured and just open, keep it open. You can right click on the database server and select New Query without closing the restore job task window, which wastes time when you must recreate it. Then, enter the following script into the query menu (be sure to update the