Category: Uncategorized

I missed my first newsletter today. It wasn’t until I went to schedule tomorrow’s that I realized I hadn’t sent last nights. I had prepped it, done the work, gotten the editorial written, podcast done, articles scheduled. Things were ready to go, but I didn’t get the newsletter out. I think that I was just too busy with life yesterday, kids back in school and having projects due and for some reason when I knocked off work, I forgot the newsletter.

And when I get home from karate, I was exhausted, and didn’t check the senders to see if they were working. No backup from the home office either, and I suspect everyone there was busy after having two days off (Fri/Mon) in the UK.

There’s one goal I didn’t set this year, which I did last year: not missing any newsletters. I missed a couple last year, and once again, missed one this year.

I hate doing that, and now tonight I feel like a bit of a failure. Somewhere I need a check that will alert me if I don’t have one scheduled by some xx time and ping my phone.

I’ve always seen business cards with my phone and business address, which for the past 8 years has been my home. However concerns about identity stuff have prompted me to consider changing things. I’ve been meaning to get cards without the address and today I did it.

I got a mailing from VistaPrint, offering free business cards (you pay shipping) and so I updated my business card to have my Twitter and FaceBook addresses, but removed my home. I left my cell on there as it’s a business line for me. $10 in shipping, and avoiding about 30 other offers VistaPrint gives you (I like those options, just don’t need them now), I have business cards on the way.

It’s not often that I’ve had the need to trace back a client to their host computer, but there are time it’s handy. I had thought that the easy way to do this in the past was with sp_who.

However that’s not correct. I checked back in the SQL Server 2000 BOL entry for sp_who and it has hostname, but not IP. That could be the same, but not necessarily.

I saw a post where someone had listed this code

declare @IPAddress as varchar(15)
declare @data XML
set @data = EVENTDATA()
set @IPAddress = @data.value(‘(/EVENT_INSTANCE/ClientHost)[1]’, ‘nvarchar(15)’)

That’s interesting. It uses the EVENTDATA(), which tracks data about events. I presume that the IP is in the clienthost all the time, and that it likely comes from the view below, but I can’t find documentation on that. The XSD schema for EventData is beyond me.

I kept thinking this had to be stored in a system table/view somewhere, and sure enough I found sys.dm_exec_sessions. It actually contains the client IP and port, so you can trace things down at a more detailed connection level.

On my local instance it doesn’t seem to work great, but if I connect remotely, I see an IP.

I saw a note that T-Mobile is accepting trade-ins of an iPhone for credit towards a new HTC HD2. That’s interesting, and almost tempting. Not that I don’t like my iPhone, but I’ve been tempted to look on eBay for a 16GB one as I’m running low on space. Plus I’d like to have a GPS on mine. That’s one thing I miss from my G1.

I read a review on the HTC today, and it said that it was like an iPhone, but had better hardware in the device. The only thing lacking was apps.

Like that’s not a big deal. The apps make the phone. That’s the power of the iPhone/iPad package. All those apps, the silly one the useful ones, the quick reference ones, those are all the things that make the iPhone powerful. I listen to music, read books, check mail, and just handle a bunch of little things.

I do wish I had multi-tasking, and I’ve been slightly scared to add Backgrounder to my jailbroken iPhone, but I might do that soon. It would be nice to keep a few things going at a time. Not often, but there are times that it’s slow to switch between things. If nothign else, I might like to keep the Kindle app running all the time.