Teeeeejirrrrr

Perspective matters. Particularly when you're not terribly sure which way you are heading.

Around this time last year, I had been in up to my neck dealing with a messy repair job at work. Every day my team and I had to work with issues revolving  The Tickler, The Reacharound, and The Dumptruck. No, this isn’t some unsavory gay porno I’m talking about… these are real project names we have given to various software components of a fairly complex job. Specifically, these are the functional pieces of a physical access control system that we use at work which needed some significant tuning.

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This topic comes up for me not necessarily as a rant, but as I was going through some old notes before tossing them away, and this issue came up. How much damage can an organization do to themselves by hiring discount, unqualified programming resources?

The answer: A hell of a lot.

If you own a small software development shop, do yourself a huge favor and keep reading.

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Warning- this may not be really all that funny unless you are a database administrator or a geek with the right knowledge. This rather silly product I am working with stores its data in the backend via a Microsoft SQL Server database. There’s nothing wrong with that… but on further examination of the schema I found a pretty ridiculous jewel of a table setup. Click on the picture to see the bloody details.

For those not technically inclined- this is precisely NOT how you would utilize a relational database server. It’s poor design, and rather an extreme and laughable example.

You’re probably here because you searched for this:

Microsoft SQL-DMO (ODBC SQLState:42000)

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server] To connect to this server you must use SQL Server Management Studio or SQL Server Management Objects (SMO).

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We use Xythos at our workplace to provide a file repository for students and eventually faculty and staff. It’s basically a web front end for a file system.

My personal feelings about the product are somewhat ho-hum and indifferent. It makes funny noises under the hood, it’s a bit clunky, but it works, runs on Linux and it’s reliable.

So you’re probably here because you searched on this error:

java.lang.ClassFormatError: Truncated class file

The problem is that you’re probably running your Xythos installation over port 443 (as you should) but there are still components trying to pull files down from port 80. With Xythos, if SSL is enabled, any requests to port 80 get dumped over to 443, and you will get truncated errors like above.

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I use Gallery2 for the backend service of photos. It works rather well, despite a few quirks. But none of these issues are nearly as bad as something in the world of a closed-source vendor.

I recently tried to upgrade the Gallery software and found this nasty error in the logs right around when I was trying to push the big red ‘Upgrade’ button:

...Unable to selectAdminUser for core upgrade...

Hopefully if you are reading this, it is because you found this page on a web search and are grasping for some answers. I’m not saying I have all of them, but this is the process I used to figure things out.

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