Bill Rowell

A few weeks back my wife went to her work holiday party for a couple hours while I stayed home watching the baby. Great bonding time with my daughter! Anyway, she came home a few hours later with some bad news. She’d dropped her iPhone into a toilet (I’m famously telling people she tried to make it swim…which we all know that iPhone’s, indeed, can’t swim). Ruh roh!

She’d picked up some rice on the way home to dry it out, but unfortunately she’d already tried to power it on after she had picked it up out of the water. Regardless, we dried it off some more and put it into the bag of rice for the next 24 hours. Oddly, the LED flash started flashing while in the bag of rice which lead me to believe we were up the proverbial creek as far as getting it to work again. Electronics don’t just do things like that on their own unless something is wrong. We still let it sit for a while before messing with it.

The next day, with the battery dead, I blew some compressed air into the port on the bottom of the phone, the speaker vents, and the ear piece vent. After that, I plugged it in to charge. Well, to my surprise after the initial charge took hold, I heard it chime. Weee! So I ran over to check it out and yes, it was on, but nothing showed on the screen. Doh! After a few resets and restores it was obvious that while the phone could receive calls and texts (and make them using Siri), the phone was broken. It turned out that the screen wasn’t 100% dead as you could make out some icons and settings pages if you were in the right light.

Yesterday I decided to take it in to our local Apple store to see what they could do for us (after making my Genius Bar appointment of course). I had read online that they would replace it for a $199 “repair” fee even if you didn’t have AppleCare+. I explained our story to the Apple Genius telling him exactly what had happened to the phone. I didn’t try and B.S. him or anything. Just flat out told him the truth. He said, well, I can take it out back, pull it apart and see what might be wrong with it. Having nothing to lose, I said sure. After about 5-10 minutes he came back and, after a long pause, said “Well, today is your wife’s lucky day.” I was floored, we were going to get it fixed! But it got better. He said that only one of the moisture sensors had been activated and there was no sign of water damage in the phone other than that. Since there was no sign of real water damage, they were going to swap the phone out. FOR FREE!. I couldn’t believe it. He returned to the back of the store to prepare some paperwork regarding the phone replacement. When he came back again he handed me a new phone out of a nondescript black box (not one of the retail boxes), made sure it worked, and sent me on my way.

Obviously we got a little lucky with the phone and the water damage, but the best part of the whole experience was it was 100% hassle free. I didn’t have to argue with the guy. I didn’t have to plead my case about not having the funds to buy a new one or pay the $199 “repair” fee (which probably would have done had it come to that). A lot of people complain about Apple, their products, or even their service but I’ve had nothing but awesome experiences with them. They stand by their customers and their products.

In November of last year, I posted a picture of yet another MacBook Pro 17″ swollen battery. At the time, I figured that the battery was out of warranty so I didn’t run right off to Apple to get a new one. I ended up purchasing a new battery at an Apple store while running errands one day and didn’t have the battery with me to show them. This week though, I had to go to Apple to get my wife’s iPhone 4S looked at (topic of another post) and I decided to bring my swollen battery with me. I hadn’t thrown it away (bad!) and hadn’t taken it to be recycled. Good thing. After getting the iPhone sorted out, I showed the Apple Genius my MacBook battery. No questions asked, he walked over to the shelf, picked up a new battery and opened it up and handed it over. He just took the old one and put it in the box. I was floored. No hemming and hawing over it not being under warranty. Just flat out handed me a new one. So now I have two!

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. No matter what you read about issues with these batteries, its my experience that Apple will just stand by their products and give you a replacement. I’m sure this battery will swell again at some point and I will no doubt be bringing it back to my local Apple store for another replacement!

Netflix continues to annoy me; and I’m not even a member anymore. My wife and I canceled our account earlier this year when Netflix announced their price hikes on their DVD and Streaming subscriptions. I had thought about just canceling the Streaming subscription because the titles available sucked, especially compared to what we could get on HBO/Cinemax/Showtime, but I was just overly annoyed so I gave them the boot. We weren’t alone as thousands of subscribers punted on their Netflix subscription. My mother on the other hand, kept her subscription.

She lives alone and having access to movies to watch, especially during the winter, was worth the price she paid. This year for Christmas (hopefully she’s not reading this in case I figure out how) I wanted to get her a year long subscription to Netflix. I figured it was a gift not only she could use, but she’d enjoy. When I went to Netflix’s site though, all I could see where subscriptions to their streaming packages. It would cost $99.85 for a full year to their subscription service. Ok, great, $100 for crappy titles on-demand. No DVDs. Not even the option to gift the DVD subscription and not streaming.

Now, I could be totally off base here and their streaming service could be 1,000 times better than it was, but I haven’t had anyone tell me, “Bill, get Netflix! Their Streaming is awesome now!” If someone had, I’d probably at least check it out for a month. But no, no evidence of that. So my deal here is why would I spend $99.85 on something that I’m not convinced is of value as a gift? Why wouldn’t Netflix offer both as gifts? I understand that streaming is the wave of the future, but until you can get every title on-demand, it just doesn’t seem worth it. What do you think?

There’s a lot of scattered information out there on how to configure ASP.NET applications to leverage Microsoft SQL Server’s Query Notification and Service Broker services for caching in ASP.NET applications. The two best step by step tutorials I’ve found online are:

http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/t-sql-programming/using-and-monitoring-sql-2005-query-notification/

http://dimarzionist.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/how-to-make-sql-server-notifications-work/

Both of those articles should get you started for sure. I ran into issues keeping our application from crashing after a period of time though while leveraging Query Notifications for caching in a few of my sites. The biggest issue I found was that I would see the following exception in our logs:

When using SqlDependency without providing an options value, SqlDependency.Start() 
must be called prior to execution of a command added to the SqlDependency instance.

Never did quite get a handle on what was going on here. I did figure out though that I could always find this in my Application log around the time that exception was thrown:

The query notification dialog on conversation handle '{A1FB449B-DEB3-E011-B6D2-002590198D55}.' closed due to the following error: '-8470Remote service has been dropped.'.

So, does this mean that I called SqlDependency.Stop() and now queued notifications aren’t going to be delivered. Are these critical errors that keep the application from coming back? I’ve read that a lot of the Query Notification messages you see in the log aren’t critical errors and can be ignored. I can’t ignore the timing of this error and the exception being thrown above though.

Anyway, I finally decided to pull this stuff out of our application until I get a better handle on what’s going on. The last straw was that I was trying to sync some database changes during a maintenance period and I couldn’t get them to sync because of a bunch of these SQL Query Notification issues. As I write this, I can’t even get my database back online as I’m waiting for ALTER DATABASE SET SINGLE_USER to complete (approaching 3 hours!!!). As I keep waiting, my Application log keeps filling up with the following Query Notification messages:

Query notification delivery could not send message on dialog ‘{FE161F6A-D6B3-E011-B6D2-002590198D55}.’. Delivery failed for notification ‘85addbaa-ce66-431d-870f-d91580a7480a;d527d584-9fd4-4b13-85bc-87cb6c2e166f‘ because of the following error in service broker: ‘The conversation handle “FE161F6A-D6B3-E011-B6D2-002590198D55″ is not found.’.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

I had a response to a post I made on the ASP.NET Forum and it was suggested that with all the cached items in the system, that SQL Server really could not catch up. This is a problem because not only does it slow the entire system down, but when you have to cycle the SQL Server service itself, it takes forever for the system to come back up because all of the notifications get requeued or something.

I had to replace my MacBook Pro 17″ Battery again a few months back due to the swollen battery issue. I just left the old one on my desk on top of a few Apple product boxes figuring I’d take it somewhere to have it recycled. Just last night I was cleaning up in the middle of the night (don’t ask why I was up) and noticed that it had had swollen even more. In fact, it looks like leaving it charged kept feeding the expansion of the battery cells. Its at the point where the entire case is separating. I think I’ll take it to an Apple Store and have them recycle it so that they can see how bad they get. Hey, maybe they’ll give me another one!

Recently I had started to notice that the Settings app on my iPhone 3GS was really slow to load. It was probably taking 2-3 seconds to load up. This was a pain especially when I wanted to adjust the brightness on my iPhone so I could use it as a flashlight. Silly I know, but its damn useful in a pinch. Anyway, I started to think that the issue was how many applications I had installed on my phone and also how many of them installed a settings widget on the phone as well. Flipping through the 6 or 7 pages of apps I had installed on my phone I decided that half of them I never used or had only used once or twice to play around with them. So I removed a bunch of them. Turns out, I was right. More times than not, the Settings app loads right up with very little waiting at all. I know that 2-3 seconds isn’t really that long, but when you’re impatient, it can seem like forever.

Recently I offered to fix a friend’s Dell Vostro 1000 laptop running Windows XP Home Edition. He said that he hadn’t been able to get on to the Internet for 3-4 days and that he kept getting these weird security pop up windows. I had a good idea what the issue was as I’ve seen these attempts to install the same type of software on my systems. So, once he dropped the laptop off, I started to look at what the issue was. Oddly, I was able to connect to my wireless service, so I’m not sure why he couldn’t connect to the Internet. Perhaps that’s another issue. But, on to removing the spyware. The first thing I did was create my own account with Administrative privileges. Then I started the system in Safe Mode with Networking and installed and ran the following programs:

• Malwarebytes
• Spybot Search & Destroy
• Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool

Each program found different issues with the system and I was able to remove some nefarious programs that were causing his issues. I also ran CCleaner from Piriform which allowed me to remove any unwanted files from browsing the Internet as well as removing any unnecessary Windows Registry entries. At this point, I figured that the system was clean so I gave it a reboot.

I logged back in to Windows in normal mode and used his Windows account. The Windows 2011 Security Center spyware was gone, but something else had happened in the process. Even though Windows had Automatic Updates turned on, I was getting a popup in the toolbar suggesting that it wasn’t. This lead me to believe that there was still some spyware installed. So I ran the above utilities under his username to just make sure I got everything. Nothing.

At this point I decided it was time to install some of the utilities Microsoft provides to protect your system (as well as turning Windows Firewall on). I downloaded:

• Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool
• Windows Defender

I ran installed and ran Windows Defender first. After the install, I couldn’t update its definitions, which I thought was odd. So I installed and ran the Malicious Software Removal Tool. It didn’t find any more spyware. At this point, I was pretty confident there wasn’t anything else wrong with the system in terms of spyware or viruses. To get the Windows Defender definitions to update, I ran Windows Update manually. I selected the updates to install, but none of them worked. Now I was starting to think that whatever spyware that was installed, had hosed the system. So back to Google I went to search for a solution.

I found this Microsoft Knowledge Base article outlining some steps to take to get Windows Update to work again. I was a little wary of running some of the scripts they recommended, but I figured it came from Microsoft so it might be worth the risk. Besides, his computer was still sort of hosed. I followed each step in order, then rebooted the system. The Windows Update alert in the toolbar was gone, but Windows Update still wasn’t quite working.

Some more searching lead me to another Microsoft Knowledge Base article outlining how to obtain the latest version of the Windows Update Agent. I downloaded this (x86 in my case) and installed it. I rebooted the machine again and crossed my fingers.

Low and behold, upon restarting, Windows Update and Windows Defender definition update worked. All because of a little spyware that was installed. Bottom line folks, don’t click on or install any sort of security popup you see online. They’re bad news.

A couple of other issues I had with this laptop. It kept shutting down on me. A search on Google revealed that dust will cover the fan cover on the bottom of the laptop and cause it to overheat, which is bad. I cleaned it off with a little compressed air and made sure the vent was exposed when working on the laptop. It stopped shutting down and didn’t get nearly as warm. Another issue, from the laptop shutting down actually, was that it shutdown while running chkdsk. After restarted, I got the UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME blue screen. I just booted the system into Recovery Mode using a separate install disc and ran chkdsk from the Recovery Console. Specifically, I executed two commands:

• chkdsk /p
• chkdks /r

The first one verifies the disk and makes sure its not marked as dirty and the second actually runs through any repair steps to make sure the disk is in good order.

Anyway, a lot of work to fix one silly issue. I’m just glad that I was able to remove the spyware and get the laptop to work properly again.

I just saw a press release here stating that Microsoft has an agreement to by Skype for $8.5 billion. Nice chunk of change for those parties involved (Silver Lake, eBay, etc.). What I find most interesting about Microsoft agreeing to buy Skype is that it appears they want to keep pace with Google in this same space. Google offers their chat service through Google Talk (MS does too through Live Messenger), but more importantly they have their Google Voice which allows people to communicate via voice from their computer or even their cellphone. I think it makes sense for Microsoft to get into this space to just keep pace with what Google is doing out there. What Microsoft does with Skype long term (hopefully doesn’t kill it or make it suck more than it does) will be interesting.

I opened up Chrome tonight and did a Google Search and noticed that the styling of the search results has changed. When I did the same in Firefox 4, I didn’t see the same changes. This leads me to believe one of a handful of things:

1. This is specific to Chrome
2. Their testing the changes on a limited basis

It could be either really, but here’s a screen shot of what I saw:

I kind of like the changes. A few other things I noticed is that the styling for search results and AdWords is almost exactly the same. Nothing really jumps out at you, which I kind of like. It means everything on the page has the same “weight” when a user is looking at results. Thoughts?

I was doing some keyword research for a site the other day and ran into a page from Google based on my searches and looking for SERP results:

There are tools out there that can do this, but we hadn’t finished our signup process for one of the better tools out there. Anyway, it looks like my constant searching (for similar terms probably) and paginating looking for our placement caused Google to notice. Their message:

So apparently Google will get wise to the number of queries you make, the types of queries, and how you use the results. Personally, I have no problem with this. After typing in the Captcha phrase (I hate Captcha by the way), they return you to the next results page.