Posted by & filed under Mobile Technology, Social Networking.

 

After you update your iPhone to iOS 5, you can then update your Foursquare app via the App Store.  The newest version of Foursquare includes Foursquare Radar.

Foursquare Radar will “buzz” you via vibration or alert/push when you’re near a point-of-interest, or somewhere where you have a chunk of friends checked in (to let you know that you clearly weren’t invited to a suaré).

To enable Foursquare Radar:

1. Update your iPhone to iOS 5
2. Update Foursquare to the latest version using the App Store.
3. Launch Foursquare and click the radar icon in the top left corner of the Foursquare home screen.

That’s it!

 

If you enjoyed this guide – follow me on Twitter @dreys!

Posted by & filed under Mobile Technology, Social Networking.

 

One of the nice new features of iOS 5 is its ability to “deeply-integrate” with Twitter.  This allows you to do useful things like Tweet photos directly from the iPhone Photos app, and much more.

To enable this integration, simply open up the Settings app on your iPhone, find the Twitter menu, open it and then sign in using your Twitter username/password.

Once you’ve done this, launch your Photos app and Tweet a Photo at me!  @Dreys

Posted by & filed under Mobile Technology.

 

In case you’ve been away from the digital news-o-sphere, iOS 5 for Apple’s iPhone was released earlier today, with a plethora of new features.

Finding some of those new apps and features, like iMessage, might be a bit tricky.  But what about Find My Friends?

Apple’s new Find My Friends app is located on the App Store.  Simply search for it and install it, much like any normal app.

 

If you enjoyed this guide – follow me on Twitter @dreys!

Posted by & filed under Mobile Technology.

 

In case you missed the news, Apple released the brand new version of their iOS operating system for iPhone today around 1pm EST.

But are you having trouble finding the iMessage app?  Or having trouble enabling iMessage?

Well, look no further.  It’s actually just your regular old Messages app that you’ve always used for texting.  iMessage will automatically send iMessages to the recipients who support it, and SMS texts to those who don’t.  Enjoy!

If you enjoyed this guide – follow me on Twitter @dreys!

Posted by & filed under Tech Support.

Recently I had to make sure I was getting backups of my many little SQL servers. In this case, I wanted to replace an old batch file I was using with something involving powershell.

As always, it proved to be an extreme improvement in functionality.

This script will loop through databases and start a transfer of whatever backup file is created, and then delete the backup once it’s been completed. It will also make sure the backup hasn’t been running too long, and inform you if it has.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.

#Load Assemblies and Modules
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SqlServer.SMO") | out-null
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName('Microsoft.SqlServer.SMOExtended') | out-null
Import-Module BitsTransfer

#Define some variables
$smtpServer = "mx.server.local"
$smtpTo = "chris@mx.server.local"
$remoteDest = "\\backupserver\SQLBackup"
$backupDest = "C:\SQLBackups"
$scriptTimeOut = (Get-Date).AddHours(1) #You may have to modify this depending on backup times.
$sqlServer = new-object ('Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server') #'server\instance'

#Internal only function
Function DB-Backup([string]$name,[string]$type)
{
if ($type -eq "Database") {$fileExt = ".bak"}
if ($type -eq "Log") {$fileExt = ".trn"}
$fileName = $backupDest + "\" + $name + (get-date -format yyyyMMddHHmmss) + $fileExt
$backupObj = new-object ('Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Backup')
$backupObj.Action = $type
$backupObj.BackupSetDescription = "Full backup of " + $name
$backupObj.BackupSetName = $name + " Backup"
$backupObj.Database = $name
$backupObj.Devices.AddDevice($fileName, 'File')
$backupObj.MediaDescription = "Disk"
$backupObj.SqlBackup($sqlServer)
return $filename
}

#Kick off database backups and associated file transfers
$sqlServer.Databases | %{
#Do full backups on user type databases
if ($_.IsSystemObject -eq $False -and $_.IsMirroringEnabled -eq $False)
{
Start-BitsTransfer -Source (DB-Backup $_.Name "Database") -Destination $remoteDest -TransferType Upload -Asynchronous
#... and if the database isn't in simple recovery mode, lets do a log backup!
if ($_.DatabaseOptions.RecoveryModel -notmatch 'Simple')
{
Start-BitsTransfer -Source (DB-Backup $_.Name "Log") -Destination $remoteDest -TransferType Upload -Asynchronous
}
}
}

#Some fail safe on waiting for all transfers to have started... seemed like a good idea
Sleep 20

#While BITS transfer jobs exist, list the transfered ones and delete local copy
While (Get-BitsTransfer)
{
Get-BitsTransfer | ?{$_.JobState -eq "Transferred"} | %{
$_.FileList | % {Remove-Item $_.LocalName}
Complete-BitsTransfer $_
}
#Loop throttle
Sleep 10
#Better check to be sure we don't run too long
if ((Get-Date) -gt $scriptTimeOut)
{
Send-MailMessage -SmtpServer $smtpServer -From ("SQLBackup@" + ($env:computername).ToLower() + ".local") -To $smtpTo -Subject "SQL Backup" -Body "There is an issue with the backup job for SQL. You'd better check it out."
exit
}
}

Posted by & filed under Gaming, Social Networking.

 

To find your “Activity Score” on the social stock market Empire Avenue, the score by which you’re ranked among other people on your current index, simply open your My Profile page:

Then click the name of your current index (as seen above).

You will then be presented with a pop-up window that shows your current Activity Score (below)!

Have any other handy Empire Avenue tips?  Feel free to share them in the comments.

-@Dreys

Posted by & filed under Tech Support, Windows Administration.

I recently failed over my primary SQL database to it’s copy on the mirror SQL server. This part worked well, however when I went to fail back the database displayed “Primary / Synchronizing …” In this state it’s impossible to failover.

When looking into this further I checked the Mirror Monitoring tool in SQL and saw that there were 0KB of logs left to synchronize.

In order to repair the issue, I had a developer commit some minor changes to the database. This queued a log to move to the mirrored server and the status of the database changed back to “Synchronized”. I was then able to failover to my primary database server.

Posted by & filed under Mobile Technology.

 

If you’re like me, following today’s “Let’s Talk iPhone” conference from Apple where the iPhone 4S was announced, you may or may not have had some “questions” for AT&T customer service regarding your account and upgrade eligibility.  Unfortunately, AT&T makes it unnecessarily complicated to look up their customer service telephone number.  So, to save you some time, here it is:

Read more »

Posted by & filed under Mobile Technology.

 

Since Apple has announced that they won’t be streaming video of their “Let’s Talk iPhone” conference today at 1pm EST, I’ve put together a list of places you can go to keep up on the conference via Live Blogs.  a.k.a. froth at the mouth via text.

Mashable

TechCrunch

Gdgt

Gizmodo

Engadget

Macrumors

Washington Post

CNET

TUAW

Ars Technica

Wired

Yahoo! News

Wall Street Journal

Have some more Live Blogs you’d like to add?  Share them in the comments and I’ll get them added.