Life: Do I need more water to sleep well at night? Second night experiment

I have been terrible with my water consumption since my last attempt about a month ago, and I haven't been sleeping through the night. Fortunately, I do not stay up (for the most part) and can fall asleep after I move to the couch. I'm not sure why changing my sleeping place helps with my sleep.

Yesterday while cleaning my place, I drank more water and again I was able to sleep without any interruption. Odd part is that I actually feel more tired than usually when waking up. The energy catches up soon though and now I feel I have more energy than usual.

So unsure if water is my problem, but seems suspiciously correlated. It may also have to do with the cleaning and possibly racing the neighbor's kids. I am so out of shape that the little "jog" may have been a workout for my body.

Reference

https://douglastclee.blogspot.com/2021/07/life-do-i-need-more-water-to-sleep-well.html

Work Life: I hate IT people who cannot figure things out (vent)

I have spent countless hours of my life showing "IT" people how to do things, especially things that my role is not even supposed to do. 

Currently as a release manager, I also manage:

1. Entire department wiki (including managing user access)
2. Troubleshoot defects
3. "IT" people's IT support desk
4. Onboarding IT access
5. Explain, re-explain, re-re-explain processes that are not even related to me
6. Gatekeeper for managers

#3 is the worst of the worst. At this point of my career, I hate supporting this the most. Why are we hiring IT personnel that cannot figure things out? I do not even mean learning cutting edge technology or tools. I am referring to just getting access to a network folder. In most corporations, this is done through a ticketing system.

The worst culprits of these people are boomers or older. Is it that hard to go to the ticketing system that everyone already uses and looking through the options? It is not my tool. I figured it out. So, just open the page and just skim through the text. Our ticketing system only has 7 options, the third option is called Request Access. One of the saddest parts is that I already walked them through it in the past. It is only three steps. The third step is basically an open form where the user has to ask the question that they just asked me: "please give me access to blah blah blah."

And then..... the worst of the worst culprits are when they are managers who request the exact same thing 10+ times. These are not even my managers. So now not only do I have to ask why are we hiring these people, but also how did we promote these people?!?!

I do these at first because I am only a jerk in the inside. But I also slowly include the steps to do their requests. Each time they ask after that, the turnaround becomes larger and larger... sometimes to the point where I literally sit there staring at the email thinking how it would have been faster for me to do it than just sitting here but then they'll never learn eventually just not doing it for another X days where X is the number of times they have requested the exact same thing.

Buggish: Microsoft SQL SP Rename for SMO TextHeader and ScriptHeader

 Background: I use SMO to promote objects from one database to another.

Issue: I get error "The name specified in the TextHeader property of StoredProcedure 'StoredProcedureName' must match Name property."

Cause: The one cause I found related to this is when a developer renames the stored procedure. I am assuming they use the sp_rename function. For some reason, this proc does not update the TextHeader or the ScriptHeader. When pulling these properties, these still reference the old name. In my old post, this was a speculation. The reason I found this was because this specific promotion includes renaming an existing stored procedure. In the past, my best guess is that they renamed during development so never needed to submit a rename change in higher environments.

Workaround: My fix is to use SSMS to get the alter stored procedure and execute as is. This unfortunately updates the updated date, but better than being stuck.

Fix request: When renaming object, make sure to update other properties that references the old name like TextHeader and ScriptHeader. 

Reference

https://douglastclee.blogspot.com/2020/09/buggish-c-smo-error-name-specified-in.html

Buggish: The full path must be less than 260 characters long; other restrictions apply. If the report server is in native mode, the path must start with slash.

One of those moments where I just want to pull my hair out. I had this working last night, and suddenly stopped working. I just spent the last several hours troubleshooting the error: tried different configurations, parameters, figure out how to use Fiddler, several google searches, etc.

The problem/answer was basically that I was using the wrong slashes. The path should be using forward slashes '/' not back slashes '\' and without rdl.

\Folder1\ReportName

Psychology

To give myself the tiniest of credit, I initially solved this while rushing to pick up my daughter. It's a lame excuse but I think it important to why I didn't remember what I did. It worked and I left figuring I could return to see my work.

I think I left my project running and stopped the debugging, so I didn't see what values I ended putting in. This probably wouldn't have helped because I probably wouldn't have looked at the direction of the slash. I figured I had it in the code because I got tired of entering the data so I hard-coded the initial value.

I assumed that was correct and maybe I just put in the wrong path. I tried several paths like http://SsrsServer/ReportServer, http://SsrsServer/Reports/, http://Ssrs/Reports/browse, /folder1/reportName, /folder1/reportName.rdl, and also sorts of permutations of paths and file names.

I do not know why I didn't even check the slashes as that should have been one of the first things to check. To make it worse, I do not know why I even thought of it so suddenly. After this entire ordeal, I recall how I figured it out in the first place was because I used the http path then removed the beginning part. Because it used forward slashes, this fixed my problem.

Sometimes I really find how amazing my brain is at forgetting things.

Workaround: Infrastructure messed up DNS hostname and I can no longer access a server but server is up

I have a custom tool that uses server name to access server as that is the highly recommended method to access servers. Suddenly I no longer can access a server. I can no longer remote desktop or ping. Ping is not just a timeout but does not even resolve the name. I really, really, really wanted to avoid having to modify my configurations for a temporary change of a hostname to ip address.

One major reason that I want to avoid this is because Windows is extremely finicky about what users is logged into the server. I have to use a special admin account to login not the default one that I use to log into Windows (which also translates to the default IIS user that the web tool uses). Resetting this password to set a new password is still unclear and very messy. The cleanest method that has worked consistent is just to reboot the entire server which runs other web applications.

Anyways, I recall during a cloud custover where we used the host file to resolve names that have not been set up yet. I used to use this for web hostnames. I thought it was worth a shot and found that it also works for network folders.

The file for Windows 10 is located at (default) C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts. You may need to run the text editor as administrator for this to save. Anyways, this saved me a lot of time and the hassle to revert it back once infrastructure team fixes the issue.

There should be a cleanup to remove the entry in the host file. I am likely to forget this as I probably will soon to forget to follow up with infrastructure team on my ticket.

Buggish: Windows calculating time stuck at zero to copy/unzip with windows explorer

Today I've had it. I tried to unzip a file from my local drive to a sub-folder in the same folder and the Windows download window pops up with its calculating. The zip file has around 20 files with each no more than a few kilobytes.

The popup just stayed at 0% for at least 15 minutes with the animation still running like it is thinking. I read a post that it should still be doing the activity while it is calculating but this is definitely not happening on a Windows 10 as I only see a single file in the sub-folder. After I cancel, all I see is that one file.

I do not know why this happens. This is not the first time. I have this issue with copying files from folder to folder. It is also kind of random with a small number of files, maybe under 10 files. Usually it will eventually copy/unzip/move. But the calculate time takes way, way, way longer than the actual action so what is the point of calculating the time?

I downloaded 7-zip and unzipped the files then canceled the windows unzip which was still calculating. So I waited 15 minutes, download another app, did the same activity that I originally requested, and checked the files before the calculate even reached 1%.

If it is something holding it up, it should either fail quickly or at least explain why it is taking forever.