Google hates Bing and is evil? Surely not!

So Microsoft has an outage in their data centre for Bing travel.  I’ve heard great amazing stories over the grapevine about this one, but anyway…
Bad Microsoft – slap on the wrist – don’t put your eggs in the same basket!

Google caches it (on 4 July) – and displays it in their search for bing – long after the Bing servers are up and operational again (it is now 10 July).

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=bing&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=
(Google result for Bing – currently)

http://www.bing.com/travel/
(Bing travel is running fine now!  And has been – for the last 5 days!)

Makes you wonder if GMail (their own internal product), or CNN (a major external website), or even Microsoft.com (MS itself!) had an error whether Google search would continue to show the cached error page for 6 days.

I guess bing.com (their competitor) gets special cache rules.

SharePoint – Blank IIS manager, events 6398, 6482, 7076

Working on a client’s SharePoint site – I wanted to pop into the IIS configuration screen:

Now when your IIS manager shows you a blank page – you know something’s up.
Event log shows a horrible series of errors repeating event IDs:
6398: The Execute method of job definition Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.ApplicationServerAdministrationServiceJob (ID <guid>) threw an exception. More information is included below.
Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.

7076: An exception occurred while executing the Application Server Administration job.
Message: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.

6482: Application Server Administration job failed for service instance Microsoft.Office.Excel.Server.ExcelServerSharedWebServiceInstance (7d2d13a5-e9ca-4b92-972c-8e3bdfcaced4).
Reason: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.

Fortunately, many people have blogged about this issue – if you bing it you’ll see many references pointing to the same MS KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;946517

This is scheduled to be included in the next service pack – affects both Windows Server 2003 sp2 and 2008 sp2.  In our case we needed to request the hotfix and install it right away.

Facebook – tattoo ad and privacy?

So I was looking at my wife Lina using her Facebook and saw this ad on the right:

I exclaimed oh wow – Facebook told the advertiser what her husband’s name is.  Look it says John.  I started to wonder what are the privacy implications of that, and whether there are privacy controls for this…

So I flipped back to my Facebook account, and started refreshing the page to look for the same ad.

She exclaimed oh wow – who is Jen?

I am in so much trouble because of Facebook :-(

So it was all a false alarm – it looks like the ad only knows your gender, and displays John or Jen accordingly.

A lot of regrets for one evening

Interrupting the usual tech blog to talk about an awful thing that happened tonight.

• I got home around 8pm – we got ready to head out for a quick dinner out in Pyrmont.  We didn’t bring our phones – we wanted it to be one of those little uninterrupted evenings.
• We saw two guys near the door opposite our apartment complex – both are about my height (170cm) and slim, one guy was climbing the metal outer door, and hopped off as we approached – telling the other guy not to forget his keys.  I think I heard a wog accent.  He had short black hair and was wearing a white jumper.  The other guy was slightly bent over and wearing a gray jacket/jumper – I thought it had a hood but may be not.
• I had a nasty suspicion, but as they back away from the door, we continue to have our dinner at the Korean eatery on Harris St, and quickly forgot about them.
• Dinner was relatively good – simple and yummy.  We sat outside the little cafe as Keith likes to squeal, we know the owners very well and we’d like our baby to not interrupt other patrons.
• The dinner was spoilt when I saw the same two guys, now walking along Harris street.  The guy in grey was trying to fit a laptop in his large dirt-green canvas bag better.  I got a better look at the guy in grey now – he’s Caucasian with short blond hair.
• The guy in white tells him stop fiddle with it.  They split up a bit – with the guy in grey (and green canvas bag with laptop sticking out) walking along our side of Harris St.
• The guy in white was on the street trying to wave down a taxi – he didn’t seem to care which direction the taxi is heading.  He waved one down heading towards central station (up towards UTS).
• The guy in grey emerges from the shadows, crosses the street and joined him in the same taxi, which then leaves.

My gut was churning by this point.  There’s far too many things wrong.  Lina notices this and tells me that I couldn’t have done anything and we didn’t have our phones.  We figure we’d best drop by that unit and see whether anything had happened on our way home.

• We went back – and this time we can see lights on in that house, and a couple of girls moving around inside.  The window above the door is open.  The blinds behind the door is twisted.  My heart absolutely sank.
• Lina says I look suspicious standing outside the door and tells me to ring their bell, I couldn’t see a bell so I knocked on the door (through the outer metal frames).  I figured out later that this was actually the rear door.
• A girl peaked through the twisted blinds and asks who am I and what do I want.  I asked if they are ok – was there a break-in.  She called her roommate and they quickly open the inner door – the outer metal door was still locked.
• Yes – they just had a break-in.  I swore.
• I explained what we saw, and I explained that I think they ran off with a laptop that they couldn’t fit properly in a large green canvas bag.
• She then told us the rest.  Two of the roommates had gone to swim – in the same complex.  One was in the shower.  The guys broke in from the back-door, through a window above it that they have never opened before, and took three laptops – carried away in a bag that one of the girls owned – a large green canvas bag.
• The girl in the shower freaked out when she heard male voices – then called her friend – who rushed back from the pool.  The guys had already left.
• They had already called the police – while we were talking two police showed up – Lina and I both gave our witness statements and the police issued a call to lookout for these two people.

The short dinner had turned into about an hour and a half – baby was being cranky, so we wished them well and turn around and went upstairs.

• There are lots of regrets, lots of what-ifs, lots of may-be’s
• I guess my little relief was that the home-alone girl in the shower was OK. 

I hope the police catch those guys.  I seriously won’t know if I’d recognize the faces or even the voices if they aren’t in the same cloths.

Hopefully I help myself vent as I write down all these, as well as record down what I saw in case I’ll need to recall these in the future.

I told Keith – the world isn’t a nice place.  What a sad story to tell a 1 year old kid.

Ah another weekend is upon us…

And I’m well equipped for this weekend, I’ve got two fun activities to do:

1. Go camp out in http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneral/ and ambush people asking simple SharePoint questions – going to aim for two badges – don’t really know how long that will take.
2. Peter Gfader introduced me to http://projecteuler.net/ I’m up to question 3 and decided to solve them using a combination of FireFox + FireBug Console and JavaScript (ECMAScript)