I have had an interesting experience with the X-25M. I bought one as soon as they were available (around last November). I put it in my Lenovo X61s tablet and was very pleased with the performance increase. Then I got one of the new Macbook Pro’s and installed the drive in my new hotness laptop. In the process of partitioning and installing OS X I managed to screw up the drive. When I plug the drive into my Mac or my PC it now reports that it is an 8 MB flash drive, not an 80 GB SSD. I expect that somehow I managed to get the Mac DiskUtility to erase the firmware.

I have been on an interesting journey attempting to restore the drive to usefulness. Having read a number of articles (for example) that clearly show that the device has firmware and it can be written I figured my best course of action would be to find a way to write the correct firmware image to the to the drive.

So, I looked on Intel’s support site. No downloads for the X-25M. I called support on got a very friendly person who suggested several partitioning tools as options and that if these options didn’t work that I could get the drive replaced under warranty. I was surprised at the very positive experience given the strange nature of my request. I tried the options suggested (GPart, etc.), but I was unsuccessful in restoring the drive to service. I called back to arrange a warranty claim.

The second support representative I spoke with was very adversarial and told me that I should approach Apple as clearly the problem was Apple’s, not Intel’s. I pointed out the numerous articles in the press reporting the firmware upgrade. These were dismissed as not official Intel sites and therefore equivalent with sites providing information on Big Foot, Black Helicopters and the Illuminati. When I explained that the drive wouldn’t work in a PC either I was dismissed. I asked for a supervisor to call me and I believe one did but I was unable to take the call and they left no message.

So, being someone who prefers to master my technology (versus the reverse) I thought about what additional course of actions I might take. I wrote a note to the authors of the various review articles that mentioned the firmware upgrade process during the course of the review. I asked very politely if they could provide me with the firmware, or if they were uncomfortable with that just putting me in contact with someone at Intel who might acknowledge that these devices had writable firmware and might know how to get me a copy. I didn’t get any responses.

Next during one late night work session I thought I might find something in some of the P2P networks out there. Having largely ignored these services until now I was elated to find that a site that claimed to have some files relating to my search terms (Intel X-25M firmware). My elation quickly turned to dismay as I realized I had been suckered. Once you sign up and pay the site for entrance they have no recollection of any files associated with those search terms, but would I be interested in some porn?  I usually pretty savvy about these things so I found it humbling to be so desperate for firmware to feel like a country bumpkin at the ring toss booth on the midway.

I moved on to the next scheme. I decided to move the mountain to Muhammad. I went out and bought another X-25M. I reasoned that surely that drive would have a copy of the firmware and somewhere in the set of interesting free or commercial tools out there I could find something that I could coax in to extracting an image of that working drive’s firmware and then write that firmware to the old drive thus restoring it to service. So far I have had no luck with this approach. All the tools I have tried see a blank 80 GB drive.

So dear readers, if you have any suggestions on returning my drive to service I would love to hear from you.

 

The Neat Works SP1 (version 4.1.1) available for download on your website offers support for 64 bit operating systems. However it refuses to install unless Neat Works 4.0.7.256 or 4.0.8.136 is already installed.

Recently I had a need to setup a local instance of JIRA to do some prototyping work and I decided to configure it to use SQL Server Express 2005. I have been working on our internal methodology and we are in the final stages of putting the practices into a set of tooling. JIRA is a nifty tool from Atlassian that is primarily used as an issue tracker for the QA of software development projects. It predates my time at Blast Radius and I am currently expanding its use from a QA only tool to a scope management tool.

In using Agile Methods for software development (and in our case for overall solution development) the management of work units is a core part of the execution. Derived from the Kanban cards used in lean manufacturing each work unit is small and well formed and requires good visibility. This corresponds well to the notion of an issue in an issue tracking system. In Microsoft Visual Studio Team System these are called work items.

Getting SQL Server Express 2005

Microsoft makes SQL Server Express available in a number of forms here. I chose to install SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services SP2 because it includes the SQL Server Management Studio Express. It also includes Reporting Services and Full-Text Search, but I didn't expect to need these features.

Installing SQL Server Express 2005

I did the install on a single computer running Windows Vista Business. There are a few questions during installation that you don't want to skip over to get the configuration correct for use with JIRA. Here is a set of instructions with the important screens.

I wasn't planning to use IIS for my prototyping purposes so the warning below that IIS is not configured to support SQL Server 2005 didn't bother me.

Next is the registration screen. Be sure to uncheck the Hide advanced configuration options. We are going to provide SQL Server 2005 Express some advanced configuration options.

I suppose you could just choose:

Database Services:

• Data Files
• Shared Tools

Client Components:

• Connectivity Component
• Management Studio Express

I threw in the other items for potential future use.

I just went with the default Instance Name. You will need to know this later to get the jTDS JDBC driver configured.

Now I cheated here and used the built-in System account as the Service Account. It would be a best practice to create a new local account to be the Service Account. If I had done this SQL Server 2005 Express should grant that operating system account the necessary attributes to run SQL Server 2005 Express. But, I didn't try that so I can't report on it. Be sure to make sure that both the SQL Server and SQL Browser services are checked under "Start services at the end of setup".

Mixed authentication mode allows me to have SQL Server 2005 Express accounts for holding JIRA data without having to have a local machine account. Nice for portability if I wanted to move this database or have another server access it.

Uh, defaults look fine to me for Collation Settings.

I do want to be able to administer this installation with my normal login so I check "Add user to the SQL Server Administrator role"

Always willing to help my friends at Microsoft figure out how to make better software.

Click the Install button and listen to the disk drive spin.

All done, hit Finish and move on to the configuration tasks.

Configuring SQL Server Express 2005

You now have some nifty tools in your Start Menu. Start the SQL Server Configuration Manager found under the new Microsoft SQL Server 2005 group on your Start Menu. Open the SQL Server 2005 Network Configuration node. Choose Protocols for SQL Express. As you can see TCP/IP is disabled.

Click on it and choose enable.

You will get prompted to restart.

Open the SQL Server 2005 Services folder and click on each service and turn and hit the little blue restart button.

Creating SQL Server Express 2005 Database

Ok, enough fun and games with installation of SQL Server 2005 Express. It is time to create the database and user information that JIRA will use.

Start Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express (found in the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 group on your Start Menu). Log in and you will get the main window. Right click on the Databases entry and choose New Database.

I need to work with multiple versions of JIRA so I am going to create a database and a user for each version. I start with jira393.

Now choose Logins node under Security. Right click and choose "New Login…"

Create user jira393 using SQL Server authentication. Once again I make a poor security choice and uncheck the password policy items. Be sure to set the Default database to the one you created earlier. Be sure to choose the new jira393 database as the default for this user.

Now we need to give our user permissions in our new database. Open the jira393 node under Databases in the main window and navigate to the Security | Users node. Right click on the Users panel and choose "New User…".

Enter the jira393 user name, the default schema jira393 (it will be created next) and make sure the user has db_owner role membership. Click the OK button to add the user to this database.

Next chose the Schemas node. Right click in the display area and choose "New Schema…".

Enter the schema name jira393 and owner jira393 and hit OK.

We now have a jira393 database with a jira393 schema and a jira393 user. Time to setup JIRA.

Installing JIRA

The directions for installing JIRA from Atlassian are pretty straight forward. Download the release you are interested in - I am using 3.9.3. The instructions for installation using SQL Server are located here. We have already done step 1 and 2. Step 3 (turn off SET NOCOUNT) wasn't something I had to do as it was already unchecked. I installed to C:\Program Files\JIRA-Enterprise-3.9.3

We will need the jTDS driver to allow JIRA to talk to SQL Server. I got version 1.2.2 here. Follow the instructions to copy the driver to the C:\Program Files\JIRA-Enterprise-3.9.3\common\lib\ directory under wherever you installed JIRA.

Next we need to edit the C:\Program Files\JIRA-Enterprise-3.9.3\conf\server.xml. The default install has as a section like this:

<Context path="" docBase="${catalina.home}/atlassian-jira" reloadable="false">
  <Resource name="jdbc/JiraDS" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource"
    username="sa"
    password=""
    driverClassName="org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver"
    url="jdbc:hsqldb:${catalina.home}/database/jiradb"
    minEvictableIdleTimeMillis="4000"
    timeBetweenEvictionRunsMillis="5000"
    maxActive="20" />

It needs to be modified like this:

<Context path="" docBase="${catalina.home}/atlassian-jira" reloadable="false">
  <Resource name="jdbc/JiraDS" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource"
    username="jira393"
    password="password"
    driverClassName="net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbc.Driver"
    url="jdbc:jtds:sqlserver://localhost:1433/jira393;user=jira393;password=password;instance=sqlexpress"
    maxActive="20" />

And finally we need to configure the JIRA Entity Engine. Edit the file E:\JIRA-Enterprise-3.9.3\atlassian-jira\WEB-INF\classes\entityengine.xml. Find the datasource tag and change it to look like this:

    <datasource name="defaultDS" field-type-name="mssql"
      helper-class="org.ofbiz.core.entity.GenericHelperDAO"
      check-on-start="true"
      use-foreign-keys="false"
      use-foreign-key-indices="false"
      check-fks-on-start="false"
      check-fk-indices-on-start="false"
      add-missing-on-start="true"
      check-indices-on-start="true">
        <jndi-jdbc jndi-server-name="default" jndi-name="java:comp/env/jdbc/JiraDS"/>
<!-- Orion format: <jndi-jdbc jndi-server-name="default" jndi-name="jdbc/JiraDS"/> -->
<!-- JBoss format: <jndi-jdbc jndi-server-name="default" jndi-name="java:/DefaultDS"/> -->
<!-- Weblogic format: <jndi-jdbc jndi-server-name="default" jndi-name="JiraDS"/> -->
    </datasource>

Starting JIRA

Finally we have it all ready to go. Choose "Start JIRA Server [8080]" from the JIRA Enterprise Edition 3.9.3 program group and JIRA should startup and automatically create it's tables.