So a fairly major change has happened in the last few weeks which I let pass without commenting here. A week ago I started a new position as a Principal Consultant with Sogeti USA. It's been a good several years making it on my own as a consultant working with my wife's company Tech-Knights, but it was time for a change. Sogeti is focused on a regional practice, which is really what I was looking for, but with global reach. My first assignment is with HealthMarkets, formerly UICI, which is great because I used to work for their sister company InsurData before it merged with HealthAxis. It's fun to see some of the same faces I used to work with in '99-'00.After a week getting settled and helping with some small problems, I'm off for a week on vacation to visit Virginia and then go down to Charolette, North Carolina to attend the wedding of my brother-in-law Chad. It's been a while since I could take a vacation so it's nice to get away and clear my head.
I'm writing about this in the hopes that no one else ever has to suffer the way I just did trying to get a BizTalk install configured at a client site. The symptom was that it would start to configure, reach the BTS WMI phase of the process and suddenly end with an "Unspecified Error". If you review the log file you would find error 80004005 was returned from btswmi.cpp and absolutely no other useful information.The cause of this problem is that NetBIOS is being used to determine if your computer is already in a BizTalk Group. NetBIOS only supports machine names of LESS than 15 characters.The solution is to rename your machine to something with less than 15 characters. This will of course take a Domain Admin in a domain situation.The gotcha is if like me you run off an immediately rename, you can be left with orphaned jobs on your SQL Server if it is on the same box. The sys_jobs table contains the machine name. Before you rename, be sure to remove any BizTalk jobs which were created or if you forget like I did, open Query Analyzer and update sys_jobs to have the new correct computer name. If you do not update sys_jobs Enterprise Manager will not let you delete the jobs, and the BizTalk configure will now fail even earlier in the process.The other gotcha is that your BizTalk Administrators Group will not longer have access to SQL Server because it will be known by it's fully qualified name <machine>/BizTalk Administrators and so you will need to give this group rights to the SQL Server again.
The time has come to retire my faithful Audiovox SMT-5600, it has served me dutifully for the last several years but since I am now a Cingular customer, the quality of service on Cingular's network compared to AT&T Wireless' network left much to be desired. I reviewed my options, including the concept of becoming a Verizon customer and getting a Treo 700w, and finally settled on staying with Cingular and taking the Cingular 8125 aka HTC Wizard. So far I'm loving the increased usability that comes with the full QWERTY keyboard and Pocket PC Phone Edition OS. I will say that, like all Pocket PC Phone Edition devices, this is a Pocket PC first, Phone second. The dialing interface leaves alot to be desired but the flexibility of programs and data-entry makes up for that to me. Of course the first thing I did was installed the Compact Framework 2.0 so I could port over several wonderful helper programs I've written like TKRoller (simple dice roller, now empowered by a touch screen). Also I've upgraded the Tablet to run Office 2007 Beta 2 (more on that later) so it was also nice to be able to install OneNote Mobile 2007. I've also downloaded several wonderful programs for it including Informant 2005, Audible Player, Audible Air, and Atomica . I've gotten Bluetooth Sync to work with the tablet (I never did get this working with the 5600) and it can be easily used as a USB Modem for the tablet for those times when a network connection with un-filtered access is hard to come by.
