Fun watching Snowfall…

 

It snowed most of the Wednesday morning in this area. It was fun watching snow and sipping a hot cup of Jeera tea (cumin seeds) [a.k.a jeerige kashaya #kannada]

Watching from inside reminds me of my initial days of stay in the US, living in a company provided apartment, awaiting interview calls, and sipping hot cup of coffee, preparing all sorts of food; eat bread toast + crunchy peanut butter with a full glass of orange juice sitting by the window on 7th or 8th floor watching snow and moving cars.

There used to be mixed emotions:
a. new place and anxiety to find a living thousands of miles away from cozy home where i grew up.
b. great to be around the snow that i had never seen in my life before
c. it is cold to get out even to a grocery store, we had to walk a mile to get stuff

being nostalgic

Purchase price different from Advertised price?

Interesting to see the purchase price different from the advertised price on the same site between two pages…

This company has put up a front page banners saying 80% off on 100pk DVD spindle that turns out to $9.99/- . Proceed further to place an order for this item, the item results page shows $14.48.

Now proceed further to check out page or the shopping cart, it shows the $14.48 and other summary of delivery charge etc…

Amount inconsistency? Where might this have gone wrong?
data Configuration?
intentional?
latency in price points?  so the images for advertisement did not have this price?

 

 

Looking at the coupon page, i realized if the offer was In-Store only, and went back to the home page to check if it was available online too. Well, it looks like it does the advt shows “in store and online” .

#WhatIsWronghere #PricingBug #AmImissingSomething

ps: i am not posting this to pin point an issue on the site here. The intent is to probe other software professional visitors here to think what might have happened and how such scenarios can be prevented in their work situations.

Tags: Software quality, User Experience

Great learning on TFS2010 and warehouse ….

I have been playing around the TFS2010 (Team foundation Server) and the way it manages the data between the operational database and its counterpart Data Warehouse. It has been a long time since I had ever tried the warehouse concepts and learning some of those concepts…

At the same time Microsoft Team Foundation Server also offers the Client side of the tools like Test and Lab Manager and they are part of the Microsoft Visual Studio Test Professional SKU. Being a v1.0 of this client utility, obviously we can say there are some limitations, but on the positive side there are great features to leverage with Source control, work item associations, work item management overall and several others…

Computer account trust relationship – Excel to Analysis Server

 

This issue popped up on my computer several weeks ago on my Excel instance when  connecting to the SQL Analysis services. Enquired several people and searched several blogs.

Here is how I had installed the applications on my machine .

Client config: 
                Windows 7   [7600]
                Office 2010 
                VS 2010 ultimate

Sequence of installation, if that matters:
     Windows 7 –> Office 2010 –>  VS2010 –>  uninstall/reinstall Office 2010.

This is pretty straight forward, right? I don’t see any conflicts here of course, and the add-ins that were required were still in place. And I thought i didn’t have to reinstall VS2010 at this time.

Here is how i would connect the Excel instance to an Analysis services

1. Launch Excel
2. Data –> from other sources –> Analysis services
 
3. Provide the server name on data connection dialog, and connect if you are connecting with windows authentication
  
4. takes a while and boom – gives this following error message:

“The following system error occurred: The Security database on the server does not have the computer account for this workstation trust relationship”

5. well, apparently i tried logging in with the same user account but via providing UserName and the Password.
6. it would go through the first level ok and gives the list of cubes and perspectives available
7. select one of those and proceed to create a Pivot –> now again, gives the same error message as above….

It is at times frustrating when the message doesn’t say exactly what is wrong and how it can be fixed. It gets more frustrating if the issue wasn’t resolved for longer time.

Well anyways, finally found the solution – who would have thought the issue was something completely *repeat* completely unrelated in nature with an Excel application connecting to a SQL Analysis service, and where did Live ID assistant come into picture.

Yes, thanks to the following MSDN forum post – http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sqlanalysisservices/thread/b058635f-6d3e-4240-a555-1dbd945ae25a – that said three options
1. to update the kernel on the Server
2. check the windows Live ID assistant on client
3. connect as NTLM from the client machine

…and recommended #1. Well, why should I be looking at the server level configuration when i know another person could connect to  the same server and i was unable to. Well, I was also able to connect to the same server from different client machines and not from this current machine…  So, i chose option #2..

yes, uninstalled the Windows Live Id Sign in Assistant:
1. Launch Control Panel –> Programs and Features
2. look for Windows LiveID sign in Assistant
3. right click and uninstall
4. if cautions close all the applications suggested (Outlook, Visual Studio, etc)
5. Restart the machine
6. go over the Excel –> Analysis service connection process
7. wow! connects through and able to retrieve the data..

ufff! this hard just because the message was not that friendly and the event log didn’t have the right message?