Tom Lovie's weblog

How to convert a 16x16 bmp to a favicon.ico

I found this entry on somebody else's blog. I will update the url to point back to the entry I found if I can find that.

bmptoppm favicon.bmp | ppmtowinicon -output favicon.ico

This worked for me

Auction Sniper

Been a long time since I wrote anything here, but Auction Sniper is great.

eBay software to help you win more items.

Free Online Auction Software">
Free Online Auction Software

SQL Server - Scheduler 0 Appears to be hung

Been a little busy trying to resolve some locking and blocking issues on Microsoft SQL Server and came across a knowledge base article 814693. After obtaining the hotfix from Microsoft to resolve this issue, we started to get some level 20 assertion errors, and stack dumps when running some queries.

The errors in the SQL Server Error log look like this:

Using 'sqlimage.dll' version '4.0.5'
Dump thread - spid = 20, PSS = 0x575b31a8, EC = 0x575b3358
Stack Dump being sent to g:\MSSQL7\log\SQL00024.dmp

SQL Server Assertion: File: <somerge.c>, line=2808
Failed Assertion = 'sortdesP->soTimerActive'.

Error: 3624, Severity: 20, State: 1.

After a second call to Microsoft we determined that SQL Server 7.0 Build 1087 has a known issue (read bug) with certain types of queries and an updated Build 1145 was available. They describe the problem in knowledge base article 830262, but it doesn't look exactly like the problem that we were having. Still, we applied the hotfix, and the problem is resolved, however, I'm not sure how many people are in this boat. Ths problem is poorly documented, and required lengthy calls to microsoft technical support to resolve. SQL Server 7.0 is nearing end of life, and I feel that Microsoft is not being diligent about supporting it in an effort to force customers to upgrade to a newer version.

Gallery

Yesterday, I wrote about my adventures in resizing an NTFS image file inside of QEMU. Well that didn't go so hot, but the instructions I found at Eric Carlson's page were a start. While browsing his site a bit, I noticed he was using a really great open source picture gallery application. I was trying to integrate photo browsing into Serendipity but this is a much better approach. I am really excited about Gallery, because I didn't have any system to organize my photos. I've made some of my photos available, and I've been encouraging my friends and family to do the same.

QEMU

I worked on installing Win2kServer inside of QEMU 0.7.1. It went pretty smoothly, but I didn't configure the image disk to be large enough. I tried to correct the problem by following the instructions I found here, but every time I tried to boot the guest OS, it complained that the disk was not bootable. Eventually I just took the route of re-installing the OS on a larger image file.

UPDATE: Just installed SP3 on the guest OS and everything went bad.

Configured Serendipity

After almost no trouble at all, I configured Serendipity 0.8.2 for this blog. As you can see, I used the defaults in most places, maybe later I will change some of them. I hope to write more things down, hopefully this blog will be a good thing.