Blog

General, News

Reorganizing… again…

So my employeer is making a small organizational adjustment, to follow market trends and to adjust to the rest of the company, making the company more normalized in its organizational structure throughout. It happens once a year or so so you kinda get used to it. This time it actually feels more understandable than before though. Not because I can say that I think it was needed (I dont spend time thinking about such things very much) but because there hasn’t really been any noticeable change since we were bought (or merged) and I think most of us have been expecting one. As always on a local level it mean less then it sounds, my experience is that it’s business as usual for us and the change is more or less restricted to the management level. This time however it has a more direct impact on my closest surroundings. The (Microsoft) ‘Enterprise Architecture and SOA’ group I belong to will cease to exist and will be merged with two other groups ((Microsoft) ‘Solutions Architecture’ and ‘Java Architecture’) to form a new organizational unit under the name ‘Solution Architecture’, and a new manager. I like my current group composition and my manager, but then I do my new manager as well and I’m hoping that the closer relationship to the Java people will be educational. I’m sure it will will turn out that it’s just business as usual this time as well. And I actually feel more comfortable going by the name solution architect than enterprise. The latter implies to much strategy and higher level issues to me, while the former feels more suited to the technology affinity that I would like to keep.

General

Website moved, availability improved?

Over the last week our domain has been moved to new servers. We are hoping that this will improve the availability.


The most common visual representation of the problems we have had are the ever annoying Service Unavailable and more seldom the site has loaded but the stylesheets haven’t, comments have not been filed as expected etc.


If the problems persist we may have to move the site again and upgrade to premium hosting. We’ll just have to wait and see if it comes to that. The old saying that you get what you pay for somehow works for this situation, since we pay about $5 a month for the hosting. So far it’s worked fine, but starting this august the availability of the site became poor, which was what motivated the move. We are hoping everything will work smoothly now for awhile.

BizTalk, PAL, Performance

PAL not working with restricted account

Just thought I’d post this since I couldn’t find a concise hit myself when searching for it. I’m using the PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs) tool in a restricted environment where my default user isn’t an administrator. In certain scenarios this will cause PAL to fail. The definition of certain in my case is when the LogParser CSVInMaxRowSize registry key is too low, causing PAL to want to write a new value, on line 173: WshShell.RegWrite “HKLMSOFTWAREMicrosoftLog ParserCSVInMaxRowSize”, iRowSize, “REG_DWORD”. The error message that PAL will display in its Command window is: C:Program FilesPALPAL v1.3.3PAL.vbs(173, 9) WshShell.RegWrite: Invalid root in registry key “HKLMSOFTWAREMicrosoftLog ParserCSVInMaxRowSize”.


I “solved” this by running PAL (the call to CScript that is) as an administrative user, since I had that option. I guess smaller (less counters collected) logfiles than mine would not get this error, as would situations where the LogParser maximum row size is already set to a large enough value.