Neal Waterstreet

Archives for March 2018

Solved: Presenting with Lenovo W541

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Recently I’ve been presenting much more often and have run into a problem during my presentations. It has to do with my Lenovo W541 connecting to projectors. I would connect and my main display was fine, but when I wanted to switch to the demos I was only able to extend the screen and not duplicate. This was a nightmare for my demos since I would have to turn and look at the screen instead of the audience. Obviously, this really distracted from the presentations and was noted in some of the feedback I received.

At first, I thought I had resolved this by switching resolutions. That seemed to work somewhat but made the screen unusable during the demos. 800*600 just doesn’t work very well for anything.

I did a little research and found out that the NVIDIA display card does not switch over by default. It must be updated in the BIOS and not through the NVIDIA Desktop Manager.

In the BIOS, go to Display >> Discrete GFX Perf Mode >> High Performance and restart.

There might be some performance hit after the display card is switched. I haven’t noticed any difference in performance or battery.

MDSERR310029

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MDSERR310029|The status of the specified batch is not valid.

This error occurs when using the entity-based staging process (leaf tables). If multiple entries of the same BatchTag value are executed concurrently, this error can appear. It can happen in the same entity or different entities or models.

The best solution I’ve found is to update mdm.tblStgBatch and set the status_id for the BatchTag to completed. You can then update the BatchTag name in the leaf and reset the ImportStatus_ID back to 0 and reprocess the batch.

An alternative is to append a timestamp to the BatchTag to make it unique. That should keep this from happening.

Credit on this to James Serra, who has a good post on this error, and to Microsoft.

Default value for “ErrorCode”

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MDS 2016 is a big improvement over the previous versions. There are many enhancements in almost every area. One change I had not noticed in MDS 2016 is that a default value has been added for the “ErrorCode” attribute in the staging tables.

One situation where this may be an issue is when SSIS is used to stage data. If the “Keep nulls” value is checked in the Destination configuration, the insert will result in an error.

Switching back to streaming…

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Well, today is the day… After a couple of years with cable, I’ve decided to again go the streaming route. Having cable was sufficient but I think streaming will work a little better for me now.

Here are my three main reasons for switching back:

  1. Gigabit Fiber. We have more consumers now than we did a few years ago. I’m seeing some evidence that we need more bandwidth.
  2. Channels. Just like everyone else, we watch less than 10 channels. All the rest are not needed. Now that almost everything is available this is an easy choice. This is one space that has significantly improved since we switched back to cable.
  3. Access control. We have a Circle to control access to the internet at home. It’ll be much easier to control television access without cable.

Here is the setup I’ll be using:
AT&T Fiber for internet. This is a big difference from what I currently have. Several of my neighbors have it and are happy with it. The price is a little bit more than needed for streaming but we wanted the extra bandwidth.

Roku for the main access point. There are other alternatives here but we will stick with this for now. We can always switch over to Xbox or just use the TV itself.

SlingTV for television. There are many choices of services now and it’s really hard to decide which one to go with. We chose SlingTV since there are international options. I did look at Hulu Live TV and YouTube TV too. DirectTV Now would have also been an option but there wasn’t a way to bundle with Fiber. I also selected the optional DVR. I haven’t used that yet.

Plex for local media. Plex is perfect, no complaints there.

One are I don’t have a solution for is local channels. Looks like I’ll need to set up the antenna again. This isn’t a big concern and I’ll need to dig up my old antenna.

T-Mobile announced they will get into television. I’ll take a look at what they offer. They usually make a big splash when they jump in.

This set up should work pretty well for us for now. I’d like to see what others are using though. The big test will come next year when GoT starts back up.