12.30.2010

The office-pranks series; The sodium polyacrylate test ...

Tags: Office Pranks
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After the initial prank with the annoy-a-tron, I received my fare share of revenge-pranks. Needless to say, my coffee was polluted with oregano and salt all the time. A nice one was when they had lowered my electric desk down on my office chair, and unplugged it….

My next prank involved a small bottle named “STIFF”, obtained on a marked in Denmark. The description on the bottle was very sparse and desides that this chemical would stiffen water and coffee almost instantly, the whole “declaration” was Saltkalciumpolymer. And of course “Guranteed not poisonous” …. How reassuring!

After some searching on the net, I couldn’t find anything on saltkalciumpolymer, but “polymer” revealed that that the compound has something to do with long polymer molecule chains… After even more research I have concluded that sodium polyacrylate is closest. Sodium polyacrylate is in the form of gel-buds or powder and its unique thing is that it can absorb between 300 and 800 times its own weight. This is the stuff that make baby diapers dry!!!

In the clip below you get the idea;

Small demo of Sodium Polyacrylate ….

Now, I was soo lucky when I added just half a teaspoon of this chemical to his coffee. The coffee did not stiffen right away, only at the bottom!!

After a few sips he understood that something was wrong with his coffee, and we had a good laugh when I demonstrated the powder …

When you dive into sodium polyacrylate on the net, you find that the stuff also can make “instant snow” …

12.28.2010

The office-pranks series; The beginning ...

Tags: Office Pranks
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In February 2010 I changed employer, and at the local office we are 4 people sharing a cubicle….

Obviously I was bragging too much of my desire to exercise, so my colleagues started a process to get me started with spinning down at the local gym. As a punishment for not showing up at the super-early spinning sessions (06:30 …), a guy at the office one day removed all my stuff from my desk, even the desk itself!

Ha ha, let the games begin!!

The following Monday, I brought with me my Annoy-a-tron from Thinkgeek. This is a small electronic device …

image

…which emits a short, extremely annoying sound for a split second. This was the first time I was able to actually use, and boy I was looking forward to this!

I showed up early, so I could find a fine spot for it. As it has a magnet, it is pretty easy to stick it on any magnetic object, so I desired to place it underneath his desk. I was first afraid that it would be easy to spot its whereabouts, but it turned out to be impossible to track down!!

My colleague – the target - arrived, as well as an innocent colleague ….

They instantly noticed the sound …. “hey, what was that????” … looking bewildered around. They ask me if I heard it, and I said “no …” trying to not burst into laughter …

They gave me the best excuse …. “ahh, you probably don’t hear it because the sound was really high pitched…” (I am 46 and the target is 39!)

The annoy-a-tron emits a sound every 2 to 10 minutes, and can be adjusted via some small switches on the board, and from now on my colleagues became more and more frantic! For every sound, they tried to super-focus on where the sound came from. And believe me, watching my target staring with empty eyes at the wall, hushing on everybody in case another sound came along, will be remembered for ever ….

Every time they complained about the sound, I could tease them with “whhoo, don’t you start to bug me again with pranks, after all you did with my desk the other day!” … super excuse Smilefjes med åpen munn

After a couple of hours, all cupboard-doors was open, the server door was open … “it has to come from here …”. “…here”. “…here!!!!”, and the target was seriously planning to open the mains-sockets to see if something was short-circuiting inside….

My innocent colleague was poking her ear, and staring to feel uncomfortable ….

Several times during these hours I had to go to the restroom just to laugh it out. It was hilarious to see their frantic faces!!

I decided to abort the prank some hours after lunch, as the innocent colleague was getting really annoyed ….

Coming home that evening my cheek-muscles were completely exhausted …

My verdict for annoy-a-tron? One of the absolute best pranks I have ever pulled!!

12.06.2010

Lots of iaStor event 9 timeouts and faulting application whsbackup.exe. How I got my Windows Home Server back

Tags: Windows Home Server
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The last week my Windows Home Server got sick, and I started to receive dozens of error messages in the event log, and the WHS backup wouldn’t finish at all. In fact it crashed the server completely. This is not a good situation since I also run my Domino server on VMware-Server at the same box….

So, the event log was full of these …

image

 

Other messages were;

  • The shadow copies of volume C:\fs\H were aborted because of an IO failure on volume C:\fs\H.
  • Faulting application whsbackup.exe, version 6.0.2423.0, faulting module whsbackup.exe, version 6.0.2423.0, fault address 0x00063604.
  • Client Backup server failed at d:\wssg_src\whs_pp3\qhs\src\backup\util\diskfile.cpp(455)
  • The device, \Device\Ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period.
  • The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume C:\fs\H.

Obviously something was wrong.

… and when I search about “iaStor” it quickly turns out that this is the Intel Matrix Storage Manager and that it is an very important part of your OS installation. Searching also reveals that lots of people experience problems with iaStor, and often you don’t find exact answers. Answers like “try to reinstall” always makes me shiver ….

Lots of posts also suggested that I should actually do a chkdsk as one of the error messages also suggests. A chkdsk /r was issued, but it didn’t help at all. It wasn’t until I found a post with these lines …

 

net stop pdl

net stop whsbackup

chkdsk D: /x /r 

chkdsk C: /x /r

for /d %%1 in (C:\fs\*) do start chkdsk /x /r %%1

 

First of all, it didn’t take down the WHS completely, so my VMware server kept running. Secondly it properly stopped the WHS’s pdl and whsbackup services (persistent drive letter service, and the backup service repectivly) properly. Third and most important, it issued a chkdsk on each of the file systems in WHS. This step took approx 36 hours on my system, but when it was finished, and after a reboot, my system was all good again!

Thanks to the site We Got Served for a good forum – and thanks to all persistent individuals out there that keep on analyzing, working, sweating, swearing and fixing problems out there.

12.02.2010

Is it just me? Domino Designer for Eclipse contains some copy/paste issues ...

Tags: Lotus Notes LotusScript Question
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Using the latest and greatest Lotus Notes 8.5.2 All Clients installation on a Windows 7 64-bit machine…

Let me start by saying that DDE is absolutely a huge step in the correct direction, and I wouldn’t even dream of going back. Just having a serious editor for my LotusScript classes is such a pro that I can’t ever go back to the old editor Smilefjes

But …. some issues almost drives me nuts …. and probably has to do with the way Notes expose LotusScript to Eclipse. That said, most of the problems below doesn’t occur when you edit Java code, so I guess this has to do with LotusScript tooling somehow…

  • First of all, almost no matter when you paste, Eclipse insist on placing the cursor at the end of the line …. This means if you copy parts of code, such as as the “viewNew” from the code below …
    SNAGHTML11a5f83[6]
    …copy “viewNew” to the clipboard, and now doubleclick on the “viewOriginal”, then paste;
    SNAGHTML11ce526
    … the cursor ends up after the Refresh method!!! I don’t like this. Paste and stay at the end of the pasted value, like any other normal editor!!

    This is however, not really a huge problem, just annoying ….
  • Much worse problem! Sometimes the editor inserts the text in reverse order!!!!

    Now I have a problem, this is super-annoying! Below you see how the editor insists on inserting the word “portal” backwards!

    SNAGHTML122b0ae
    I start at (1), and at (2) I have written the first 4 characters “port”… and at (3) I have finished “portal”. Nice eh?!

    When I try to delete this corky text, I always gets the next problem…
  • Something obviously goes completely wrong when deleteing text…

    It always happened when I try to delete reversed text as descriped above, but sometimes it also happens when deleting text for no obvious reason;

    SNAGHTML1265028

    By the way, which log?!? Certainly not log.nsf Smilefjes

    I have also learnt the hard way that when I see such errors, Its best to quit the editor session to get out without corrupting the code.
  • The auto-identer goes haywire and takes forever…

    SNAGHTML12807e2

    As soon as I paste something, the auto-indenter normally indents the pasted text fast. Sometimes it needs a long time to think, and the above dialog box (2) stays on for 15-20 seconds, while the class-explorer marked with the arrow (1) blinks intensively.
  • The class-explorer suddenly doesn’t show all members…

    This problem only occurs if I choose to continue to edit the code after error messages like…

    SNAGHTML12bc9d9

    The code compiles if I try to Recompile All LotusScript, but methods (typically the last ones added to a LotusScript-class) aren’t visible. Sometimes I have to end Notes completely (like kill to get rid of all processes …) in order to make DDE show them again. Hasn’t lost any code yet due to this problem, but it has sure scared me a lot (like “where the h…. is the latest method !!!!!” …)

Has anybody else experienced one or more of the issues above? I hope they get ironed out in future releases Smilefjes

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