Domain Name Expiration Notice: Domain Registry of America

The other day I received a Domain Name Expiration Notice from Domain Registry of America. Many of my clients have received these notices and panicked that they would lose their names if they did not respond by the "Reply Requested By" date on the notice. To my knowledge none of our clients are currently using Domain Registry of America as their registrar. This notice is simply a marketing effort on the part of Domain Registry of America. If you read the document thoroughly you will notice statements like "This notice is not a bill". Please do not think that you need to respond to this letter. Just about every one of our customers for whom we manager domain registrations is configured to auto-renew with the current registrar; in which case the prices are less then those being offered by Domain Registry of America - based ont the notice I just recieved.

You can find some typical pricing via the following registrars:
DIYInternetServices and GoDaddy.

Tracking SQL Server Reporting Services activity in Google Analytics

With a SQL statement like this:

select ex.UserName, ex.Format, cat.Path,
cat.Name, ex.Parameters,
convert(nvarchar(10), ex.TimeStart, 101) AS rundate,
ex.TimeStart, ex.TimeEnd, ex.TimeDataRetrieval,
ex.TimeProcessing, ex.TimeRendering, ex.Status,
ex.ByteCount, ex.[RowCount]
from ReportServer..ExecutionLog AS ex
join ReportServer..Catalog AS cat on ex.ReportID = cat.ItemID
order by ex.TimeStart DESC

you can get a lot of details about your your SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) activity. But everyone uses Google Analytics, so wouldn't it be nice to have the data in GA?

Here's how you can do that.

First download the Google Analytics tracking code. Open the GA tracking code and copy it to the clipboard.

Then find the Reporting Services JavaScript file (reportingservices.js) on your server. It's usually located in a path such as C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.3\Reporting Services\ReportManager\js. Open it and paste the GA code at the very bottom.

Below that paste in the code to activate GA, replacing the question marks with your own Analytics ID:

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-??????-??");
pageTracker._trackPageview();

Now you can track your SSRS activity in Google Analytics.

One drawback to this is that you are now effectively using a cached version of the GA code, so if Google releases any important updates you'll have to manually update your local copy. Theoretically you could dynamically load ga.js from within reportingserver.js and then run the activation code after the load is complete. But this is much simpler. And I wouldn't be surprised if the next version of SSRS gives you more access to the layout of Report Manager so that you can embed GA the normal way.

Verizon Internet Services: Blocking Outgoing Email | SMTP Port 25

To all Byzet customers and any Verizon customer who finds this page.

"Outbound port 25 blocking will be applied to FIOS and High Speed Internet services that use dynamic IP addresses. If you subscribe to a static IP address service, you will not be affected." - Taken Directly from Verizon's Site.

Please be aware that during 2009 Verizon will begin blocking third-party outgoing email for all FIOS and High Speed Internet Service customers who have a dynamically assigned IP address. (Third-party email basically means your email that is not hosted by Verizon. ) This means that most residential customers and business customers will be required to reconfigure their Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora or other email client. The outgoing email is only being block on SMTP port 25 if it it not hosted by Verizon. You can easily change the outgoing mail server port number in you email settings. If you are not using SSL try one of the following: 587, 8025, or 2525. We recommend that you consider changing your settings to use SSL. If you are sending your email over SSL then you will want to use one of the following port numbers: 465, 587, 8025, or 2525. If you need detailed instructions or assistance changing your Byzet hosted email settings please do not hesitate to contact us.

Fix for Canon scanner error "Unable to open TWAIN source"

I discovered this on a Canon LIDE 25 scanner but it seems to apply to many Canon LIDE scanners. Sometimes the CanoScan Toolbar will fail to scan documents and give you an error along the lines of "Unable to open TWAIN source". You need to find the directory where the Canon TWAIN drivers were installed and add it to the path environment variable. Typically it is located in c:\windows\twain_32\cnqlXX. XX will vary depending on your particular model; for an LIDE25 it would be CNQL25. No restart is required.