How to spice up your LinkedIn profile with cool characters

Hi people,

There’s nothing wrong with being different like, why would we all want to be like everybody else? One in a dozen? Showing a bit of personality is character and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be different from the rest. So instead of being a white or a black sheep be a blue one. As blue is just one of my favorite colors ☺

It all comes down to be different to the wright occasion, you like to be noticed or get somebodies attention. In some LinkedIn profiles you see people have stars ★ or cute little hearth ♥ around their name. Everyone is free to do that of course but in my opinion I would keep that for Facebook and keep LinkedIn as your business invite.

☃ ♚ ☠ ☭ ♘ I guess you guys get the picture.

So what can you do?
I decided to use special characters in between keywords and for bullet points, just because it reads easier and of course we like to show the people who showed interest in you how cool we can be. And hopefully they remember us as the guy or girl with that proper LinkedIn profile.

So how do we do it?
Of course you can use the characters from your keyboard but then you’ll only upgrade your status from a white sheep to a grey one. We want to be cool but annoying. The other way is copy and paste the characters from LinkedIn profiles you come across or select your own by using the Windows Character Map under accessories.

Just choose a nice font (MS PMincho is nice) look true the characters which one will suite your purpose. A phone ☏  in front of your number or an envelope with e-mail just remember don’t overdo it. Not all the character work so test it before you publish again.

 

 

 

Event ID 10 – Windows Management Instrumentation

Whenever I scroll true the Windows Event Logs I have the tendency to try to get rid of all the nice red error en yellow warning messages. They appear for a reason and if it’s possible I always like to fix it. 

Sometimes I notice a WMI error with event ID 10 in the Application Log section. It seems to appear every time the system reboots.

 Event filter with query “SELECT * FROM __InstanceModificationEvent WITHIN 60 WHERE TargetInstance ISA “Win32_Processor” AND TargetInstance.LoadPercentage > 99″ could not be reactivated in namespace “//./root/CIMV2” because of error 0x80041003. Events cannot be delivered through this filter until the problem is corrected.

 

What is WMI?
WMI stands for Windows Management Instrumentation and let you control certain tasks or read information of a local or remote system. Here you find more information about WMI. ttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee692772.aspx

 

How to fix it?
There are two ways of fixing this,

1. Boot in Safe mode
2. Stop the “Windows Management Instrumentation Service”
3. And take ownership of the folder or the contents of the folder “C:\Windows\System32\wbem\Repository”
4. Restart the system and notice it will not come back. The old messages stay until you delete them.

The method Microsoft gives us is by a VB script. This will script will fix the error but will not stop WMI functionality it continue to work as long as the Windows Service is started. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950375 

1. Copy and paste the script below in a text file and rename the extention *.txt to *.vbs
2. Run it and a few popups with interesting reading flash by, just click ok a few times.
3. Restart the system and you notice the message is not appearing any more.

 

strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" _
& strComputer & "\root\subscription")

Set obj1 = objWMIService.Get("__EventFilter.Name='BVTFilter'")

set obj2set = obj1.Associators_("__FilterToConsumerBinding")

set obj3set = obj1.References_("__FilterToConsumerBinding")

For each obj2 in obj2set
                WScript.echo "Deleting the object"
                WScript.echo obj2.GetObjectText_
                obj2.Delete_
next

For each obj3 in obj3set
                WScript.echo "Deleting the object"
                WScript.echo obj3.GetObjectText_
                obj3.Delete_
next

WScript.echo "Deleting the object"
WScript.echo obj1.GetObjectText_
obj1.Delete_

Copy Paste between two environments

I wanted to copy paste something from my laptop which is in the production domain to a VM in the staging environment. I found out it wasn’t that easy. Instead of using notepad and deployment servers I decided to dig in to it. Just because I knew it’s possible. 

It turns out that VMware disabled the copy and paste functionality by default since vSphere version 4.1 because of security measures. To re-enable it you have to undertake the steps below. Just keep in mind that if an option is grayed-out it eighter means the VM need to be shut down or you don’t have enough admin rights.

 

1. Log in to vSphere Client and select the virtual machine in the inventory.
2. The configuration page for this virtual machine appears with the Summary tab displayed.
3. Power off the virtual machine.
4. Right-click the virtual machine and click Edit Settings.
5. Click Options >> Advanced >> General >> Configuration Parameters.
6. Click Add row.
7. Type isolation.tools.copy.disable in the Name field and false into the Value column.
8. Type isolation.tools.paste.disable in the Name field and false into the Value column.
9. Power on the virtual machine

 

 

 

 

 

Compare differences in Word files using SharePoint versioning

A moment ago I got a question from a user who wanted to know what the differences where between two files (versions) in a document library which where uploaded.

I knew in Office there was a function to compare two documents but how to use it with SharePoint versions I never tried. Sometimes the answer is so close in front of you it turns invisible.

The trick is to just open the file from SharePoint in Edit mode. Word will open and under the review tab you find a button called compare. Just choose Specific version from the pull downmenu and a list with the versions inside SharePoint is being displayed. From here Word will take over and do the rest. Even if you choose to combine SharePoint will turn it in to a new version.

This function only works if versioning is enabled for that document library and is not available in Office Web Apps. You need the full Word application for this.

I had to shamelesly steal some images of the internet and make one with a Dutch version of Word, but all together it gives a nice image of the words descibed above  🙂

Windows Updates error 9c48

At the moment I’m deploying 10 new VM’s to host a SharePoint 2010 farm. Beside a little bit of clicking here and clicking their I’m running multiple v-sphere consoles with the good old Windows Updates. After a few reboots I’m getting a nice error message forcing me to stop. No magical reboots can help me out of this one.

I made sure no group policies are aplied to the VM so how to get rid of the pescie Windows Update 9c48 error

The solution is simpeler then exspected. Just go to the control panel and uninstall IE 9.0. After an other reboot just run the updates again but first click check updates so you get more updates then Windows show you. After this little escapade it’s back to business.

SharePoint warm up scripts

Why a warm up script?
SharePoint is a beast and is being walked by his friend the IIS server. Every night by default the application pool is being recycled by IIS. This means that things like cache is being cleared. This is a good thing but also has a down side.
After the application pool is recycled and you enter your SharePoint site this will be slow and can even cause a time out error in some cases. A warm up script can prevent this. 

There are two ways to set a script. One with the good old fashion batch file and *vbs script which you can download from codeplex or with a nice tool made by Spencer Harbar. The last one will touch the sites directly after the pool is recycled as the batch file has to be scheduled with the windows scheduler.

 

Batch file
Download link

 

Application Pool Manager
For MOSS 2007 servers you need to use v2.0 as v3.0 is only for SharePoint 2010. After you configured it you need to place a shortcut in the startup folder in case of a reboot.

http://www.harbar.net/articles/apm.aspx

 

 Resources

• http://www.harbar.net/articles/apm.aspx 
• http://sharepointgeorge.com/2010/warm-sharepoint-web-applications-windows-2008-r2-iis-75-application-warmup-module/ 
• http://www.gokanozcifci.be/subsite/warm-up-script-for-sharepoint-2010.html
• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/joelo/archive/2006/08/13/697044.aspx
• http://www.gokanozcifci.be/subsite/warm-up-script-for-sharepoint-2010.html
• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/joelo/archive/2006/08/13/697044.aspx

 

 

 

 

 

Unable to display Excel workbook after configuring the SSA

Sometimes it can happen you configure the SharePoint Service Application for Excel Services and when you add the web part to show a Excel workbook you get a nice friendly error message about authorizations and all.

The reason for that is that the Application Pool account from the Excel Service SSA doesn’t have any authorisations on the web applications your trying to use it in.

The PowerShel script below will fix this. Just change the url in the one from your site collection. 

$webApp = Get-SPWebApplication “http://UrlSiteCollection”
$webApp.GrantAccessToProcessIdentity(“DOMAIN\SPexcelSSA_Pool”)

 

Hide LinkedIn notifications

Since I’m quite active on LinkedIn keeping my business network active and expand it with useful contacts and all I keep track of my business buddies and their notifications as well.

LinkedIn has a nice feature that you can connect your Twitter account or by the a browser bar post directly on LinkedIn and share cool and interesting things with your network. Only with everything it’s cool until you over do it. I love ice-cream but 20 on a day is too much. Now one of my contacts is flooding LinkedIn with practically anything he loves to share with the world. Maybe it works for him but not for me. If you got one of the guys as your contact here’s how to hide just his LinkedIn notifications and clean up your homepage a bit.

I’s all very simple, just hover over one of the posts and in the right top corner the word hide appears in light gray. Just click it and voila all the messages are gone. Hope this tip can help you to good use.

 

InfoPath form cannot be displayed because sessionstate is not available

Yesterday I had to place an InfoPath 2003 form on a MOSS 2007 farm. Everything seemed to be configured correctly. Accept after publishing I found the newly created form library and the form but when I tried to open it I was spoiled with a nice error message in a soft lightgray kind of way. It could have been red cause an error is an error people light gray or not it was not going to work.

Error Message
The form cannot be displayed because session state is not available.

 

Solution
The solution to fix this is simple, in the web.config of your site collections you find the SessionStateModule commented. just uncomment >> iisreset /noforce (so do this outside office hours 🙂 ) and you are up and running again.

To find this section just use ctrl+F and search on HTTPModules

 

Before

After

 

I have not checked it in SharePoint 2010 but I think it’s default already as it should be.

 

 

Run as an Administrator

 

And then people dare to say administrators a lazy people :+)

For some programs it’s essential that if you use them you are in Administrator mode, for instance PowerShell or Visual Studio. Just because we admins are humans, special once of course we tend to forget things to from time till time and to make sure we don’t need to remember everything we got these little tricks.

Just to make sure you always run the program as an administrator choose properties of the shortcut and choose the compatibility tab. Nearby the bottom you find Priveledge level and a nice option Run this program as an administrator with a checkbox beside it. Mark it and from now on you don’t have to remember.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Want to stand-out with your LinkedIn profile?

 

If you want to have more than just another profile here’s a need little trick for if you want to post a website but not, Blog, Company web site, and the others like everyone else has on their profile.

Go to Profile >> Edit Profile >> at the website section click edit. In the boxes that appear choose the bottom one, “Others”. Because if you choose the bottom option you get an extra field so you can personalize the name. instead of Blog you can type My SharePoint Scrapbook or something more business-like.

 

 

Disable SSL Protocols and weak Ciphers IIS SSLv2

 This week at our office we are undergoing a security audit. It’s always a good Idea to let your system being checked out by external guys  who have some tricks up their sleeve. So to security cowboys armed with Linux laptops found a minor issue on my portal. Actually I’m really happy because I learned a new trick.

It turns out that SSLv2 is really old and easy to decipher, only clients who really have an old machine cannot enter over SSL anymore but XP with a recent browser will still work. Anyways they asked me to disable SSLv2 and let their pearl script do his magic. I passed   😉

Here’s what I had to do to turn it off and here ‘s a link to a GUID tool for the people without uber cool pearl scripts.
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http://foundeo.com/products/iis-weak-ssl-ciphers/

Run the test now for a before and after test, 

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• Turn your WFE’s off and make a VMware snapshot if you use VM’s that is. better safe then sorry.
• Open regedit and place a DWORD key with the name “Enabled” and the default value off  “0” (zero). at the following registry keys.
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• HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\Ciphers\DES 56/56
• HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\Ciphers\RC2 40/128
• HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\Ciphers\RC4 40/128
• HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\Ciphers\RC4 56/128and one more
• HKey_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders \SCHANNEL\Protocols\SSL 2.0\Server

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Now run the test again and your checkmarks are both green.
If you have any banking information you should also do something about the SSL 3.0 medium security to pass an audit. This is just voor SSL 2.0

By the way I did this on a Windows 2003 server with IIS 6.0 As I don’t know the exact keys for 2008 R2 yet but maybe it’s the same.

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