Avoiding the Autoclose and Autoshrink Options

Q
In the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Resource Kit, I read about a procedure that checks all databases for options that you should avoid using. I understand why I should avoid using options such as offline, DBO-use only, statistics off, truncate log on checkpoint, and so on. However, the inclusion of two of the options—autoclose and autoshrink—puzzles me.

Autoclose. Closing a file when it is not in use sounds like a prudent thing to do. Yet I see files opening and closing all the time in the error log in SQL Server, even though I know that I never use the database except for viewing in Enterprise Manager. Does viewing a list of databases in Enterprise Manager make the files open? It makes sense to me to use autoclose on databases that I use only occasionally as import staging areas, and which I access for only a fraction of the time my online transaction processing (OLTP) database is in use. SQL Server Books Online says that the autoclose option is automatically set to YES for the SQL Server Personal Edition and to NO for all other editions. Has this option been included only for the Personal Edition?

Autoshrink. The autoshrink option also sounds helpful. However, would using autoshrink on my import staging areas, where I bring in quantities of data for short periods of time, keep these areas small for backups?

A
Autoclose is available in all editions of SQL Server 2000. The amount of memory you save by using this option is relatively small but might be important on memory-constrained systems running the Personal Edition. However, enabling autoclose for the other editions isn’t a good idea, because every time you try to access the database, the query will be slowed by the amount of load time it takes to mount the database. As for the question about your files opening and closing, yes, when you enumerate a database in Enterprise Manager, you access the database, which opens the files.

Leaving autoshrink on for production systems also isn’t a good practice (unless you really need to), because autoshrink might start when your system is otherwise busy with production work, and slow down the system. However, enabling this option is a good idea for desktop or remote systems that don’t get a lot of DBA attention and whose databases could grow out of control before you detect the problem.

Your Health and Safety

How can I protect my health when I travel?
If you have any food allergies, learn the names of those foods in the languages used in the countries you’ll be visiting. This way you’ll be better equipped to stay on the look out for them.
Find out what types of diseases are common to the area you’ll be visiting and take actions to prevent your exposure to those diseases.
Find out what types of vaccinations you will need to enter the country, there may also be medications you’ll need to take before, during and even after your trip. Get you vaccinations done early in case you have a reaction and need some recovery time.
You should consider a dental appointment if you haven’t had a check up in a while.
Be careful what you eat and drink.
Carry complete health information with you on your trip.
Consider joining Medic Alert or IAMAT, the International Association for Medical Assistance to Travelers.
Where can I find information that will help keep me healthy while traveling?
www.cdc.gov/travel
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Travel Information web page. This site contains updated information and articles on diseases. It also includes guidelines for travel to areas that have suffered a recent natural disaster. The most valuable section of the site is the destination section. This area of the site contains detailed specific information on diseases common to particular regions of the world, along with the recommended precautions and vaccines advised to avoid those diseases.

www.who.int/ith/english/index.htm
The World Health Organization’s International Travel and Health web page. This site contains information on recommended vaccinations and general health advice for travelers.

www.who.int/ith/english/region.htm
The World Health Organization’s Geographical distribution of potential health hazards to travelers web page. This site contains information, divided by regions of the globe, on potential health hazards for travelers within that region.

Where can I find information that could help me to secure proper medical care while I’m traveling?
www.sentex.net/~iamat/index.html
The International Association for Medical Assistance to Travelers homepage. This is a nonprofit organization that helps travelers to avoid illness while traveling abroad. It also helps guide travelers in 125 countries to competent medical care with doctors trained in Western countries that speak either French or English in addition to their native tongues. There is no charge for membership in this organization, but donations are appreciated to help continue IAMAT’s work.

www.medicalert.org
The Medic Alert homepage. This is a nonprofit organization that provides bracelets that identify diseases or allergies from which you suffer. The bracelet also contains a phone number that can be called so medical personnel can have access to your medical records 24-hours a day. There is a registration and yearly membership fee to receive this service.
What health information should I carry with me?
Complete and take with you a personal medical history. Your doctor should be able to help you complete the history. It should include:
Your Insurance Company’s name and address.
Trip Insurance contact information.
Contact person in case of emergency.
Your blood type.
A copy of your eyeglass prescription.
A list of current medications with their generic names, brand names can vary in foreign countries.
A list of allergies, including any known food or drug allergies.
A list of immunizations with their dates.
A basic description of your past and present medical condition, including past hospitalizations and any current problems.
Do I need Trip Insurance?
Check with your insurance agent to see if your current medical coverage will cover you outside the country.
Even if you are covered, you may still be expected to pay the bill in cash and be reimbursed from your insurance. Make sure you receive a completely itemized bill, in English, if possible.
Medicare and Medicaid do not provide payments for medical care given outside the United States.
If you don’t have any coverage that will apply, you should strongly consider travel insurance that will cover you outside the country.
Be sure to read the trip insurance policy carefully, noting any deductibles, exceptions or exemptions for pre-existing conditions, activities, diseases or areas of the world.
You also want to see if the policy covers any medical evacuation costs, especially if you plan on traveling to an area of the world that may not be able to provide you the type of medical care you will need.
You may be making your travel plans months in advance. Many things can happen in that time that would cause you to have to cancel your trip and possibly lose your deposits.
You are susceptible to travel delays, often ones beyond your control, which can cause you to miss all or part of your trip.
Check the policy to make sure you are covered for expenses caused by travel delays, as well as, cancellation coverage.
How can I protect my safety while traveling?
Do the research so you’ll know the particular risks you face.
Know the local laws and abide by them.
Dress conservatively and try to blend in.
Take care when choosing your hotel and transportation providers.
If you haven’t left your valuables at home, leave them in your hotel’s safe.
Don’t draw attention to yourself, avoid wearing flashy jewelry and don’t display large amounts of cash. Carry only enough cash to make it through the day and leave the rest in the hotel’s safe.
Avoid traveling alone.
Be careful about sharing your travel plans with strangers.
Stick to the main roads and avoid taking shortcuts down narrow alleys and/or poorly lit streets.
Always be aware of what is going on around you.
Only use taxis, tours and other transportation services with official markings. Only select transportation from official pickup points at transportation hubs.
Never accept gifts or packages from unknown parties.
Approach any “special deals” with caution, especially if you have to go off the beaten path to get them.
Take precautions to protect your money and avoid pickpockets.
How can I avoid being the victim of a pickpocket?
Don’t travel in narrow alleys or poorly lit streets.
When possible, avoid having crowds of people surrounding you.
Carry a dummy wallet and put your money in your front pocket.
Place a rubber band around your wallet, it will make it much more difficult to remove from your pocket without your knowledge.
Carry your purse under your arm.
Carry your money under your clothes.
Know some of the pickpocket’s tricks.
What are some of the pickpocket’s tricks?
There are lots of situations that pickpockets use to create opportunities to relieve you of all that heavy cash. Be especially aware of your money when you find yourself in the following situations.
Getting bumped by someone else.
Having something spilled on you or someone pointing out a spot on your clothing.
Someone approaching you and asking for help or directions.
Someone causing a disturbance that draws everyone’s attention.
Being surrounded by a crowd, especially if you are surrounded by groups of children.

Create Cool Images With a Wet Floor Effect Maker

Ever since the beginning of “web 2.0″, designers started creating logos or images with reflections that look pretty cool. Most of the time these images are done by professional in-house web designers which most of us bloggers don’t have the skill or access to. Fortunately there are two sites I came across that can add this effect to any image you’d like to apply it to.

The first one is called Wet Floor Maker which has several options such as angle, camera height, brightness, reflectivity, and more. Just upload your image and adjust the options to your liking and voila….you’ve got a cool new wet floor effect image. Here’s the end result of one test image I created:

The second site is called Image Reflection Generator and it doesn’t have nearly as many options as Wet Floor Maker does. The final image did look a bit more professional, however but you have no control over the angle of the reflection which I don’t like. Here’s the same image but after converting it with Image Reflection Generator:

These are convenient and quick ways to create images with a wet floor effect without any photo editing experience. The one thing I don’t like about both of these sites is you can’t preview the image before you click the “create image” button. Several times the end result image wasn’t exactly what I wanted so I had to go back and start over again. Kind of a pain but since the service is free, I can live with it. Try both out and let me know which you like better!

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A Quick Solution to Protect Your Blog From Spam Harvesters

Are you tired of getting a ton of spam everyday? I am too but unfortunately there is no solution to eliminate it 100% but there are smart ways to avoid and reduce spam. The method I’m going to talk about is aimed at bloggers and how they can easily implement a preventative measure to reduce the amount and chances of spam being sent to them.

With the popularity and ease of setting up a blog, the number of people blogging increases daily. This is great but one main problem is most of these people aren’t usually educated in proper techniques such as spam prevention.

Did you know that putting your email address anywhere on your blog or website is an open invitation for new spam? Yes, you heard me right. Little do you know that trying to be nice and provide a method for your readers to contact you only causes you more harm than good.

Let me give you an example. The usual way to include your email address on your blog is to use the mailto: tag. This is the case if you use Blogger and any other blogging platform. Unfortunately for you, spam harvesters use “web spiders” to troll the internet and look for email address links on websites and blogs. When they come across your site they will look at the html code and grab your address.

Prevent Spam Harvesters From Getting Your Email Address

The best way to beat spam bots as well as giving your readers a way to contact you is to use a contact submission form. That way your email address is never displayed and a script handles the entire mailing process. This is a great option if you use WordPress but for people using Blogger, it’s not an option.

You don’t know how many Blogger blogs I’ve come across and just rolled my eyes. There it is…their email address listed right on their site. Look out spam, here it comes! So my quick solution to protect all blogs (especially Blogger users) from spam bots is to replace your email address with an image.

There are several sites out there that can create free email icon images for you but I like using this email icon generator site because it provides several cool options. My favorite is the branded email image based on your email host provider.

Here are some examples of email images I created in a few seconds:

As you can see, it supports all the popular email domain addresses as well as an option to create your own custom email address. It even hosts the image for you if you don’t want to copy and upload it to your own server. I recommend uploading it to your Blogger site so you’ve always got it available regardless.

Make sure after you use these images you do NOT turn them into a mailto link. If your email address is anywhere in the html code, spam harvesters will find it. I had a friend that I shared this trick with and he replaced his email address with this image but didn’t remove the mailto link! He might as well of not even used the image.

Damage Control – Where is My Email Address Today?

Ever wonder if your email address is publicly available today? A good test to see what sites publicly list your email address is to just Google it. If your email address is sjobs@mac.com then you’ll see that there are over 500 results in Google which is obviously a bad sign (I hope Steve Jobs has one heck of a good spam filter). There should be zero listings of your email address when you do a search. If not, you should go down the list of sites and ask them to kindly remove your email address because they are just feeding it to spam harvesters!

I usually Google my personal email address a few times a year just as a safety check. Just last year as I was doing my check, I noticed there was one site listing it! I was so mad and immediately contacted the site owner to take it down. It was an article submission site and they were carelessly publicly listing all their users email addresses. That’s just bad business. Eventually they took it down and I told them they should do the same for everyone else in their system.

Conclusion

If there’s one thing to take away from this article it’s to remember to never ever ever list your raw email address on your blog. It’s a guaranteed way to get spam faster than you can say “spam me please”. If you don’t believe me try setting up a new temporary email address and don’t use it for anything except this test. Now paste it on your blog and see how long it takes before you start getting junk email.

I hope the end of spam comes in the near future because just like you, I’m tired of wasting time in my day filtering and deleting junk email. Google or someone, please come up with a solution soon!

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Erase Your Data Trail

Start the Registry Editor by clicking Start, Run, and type “regedit” (without quotes).

Go to this key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\
Session Manager\Memory Management

On the right, locate the ClearPageFileAtShutdown value.
Right-click the value, select modify, and change the data value of the registry key to 1.

If the ClearPageFileAtShutdown value doesn’t exist, add it. Right-click the right side of your specified key and add it as a DWORD value. Then change the data value to 1.

Restart for your changes to take effect.

Note: Your shutdown time may slightly increase.