Aggregated Intelligence

Thursday, August 06, 2009

Debugging blue screen of death issues

The biggest problem with BSOD issues is that you dont have a screen shot of the error, making it hard to Google for possible answers and fixes for the BSOD on your machine. NIIRSoft has a free tool called BlueScreenView, which parses the mini-dump files that Windows create during a crash and recreates the BSOD view.

Twittering for your organization

Twitter is geared for the individual user (a shared login is used to access the account). This model does not work for organizations. CoTweet.com allows you to associate up to 6 people with a single Twitter account (at least thats the limit for a free account). Each user logs in with their own email id.

CoTweet allows you to monitor tweets that target your organization. It also allows you to assign tweets targeted at your account to different users for follow up. I am still learning all the features, but the tool is very cool.

Now why didnt I think about creating this tool?

www.cotweet.com

Important: Dont use tools that ask you to provide them your Twitter login details (password). Instead, use tools that use OpenAuth to talk to your Twitter account. (CoTweet does this).

Other useful tools:

www.bit.ly – URL shortening tool. Also provides tracking of click throughs. (another important tool to determine how much your Twittering is impacting the use of your site)
www.tweetake.com – Backup your tweets (security** – does not use OpenAuth and asks you to provide your twitter password – BAD!)
www.twitterfall.com – View trends/monitor topics that matter to your organization (uses OpenAuth) – Very cool tool.
www.tweetlater.com – Automate different Twitter related actions (eg: automatically follow people who follow you)

Twitter monitoring and grading tools

www.tweetbeep.com – Get alerts based on tweets targeted at you.
www.twittergrader.com – Grade your twitter account (its important to be able to evaluate how successful your Twittering is)
www.twinfluence.com – Another method to measure your Twitter penetration level

Using Twitter in your organization

The following document was created as a roadmap for government departments in U.K. But a lot of the points talk to how you can implement it in your organization (private or public).

Template Twitter Strategy for Government Departments

Street Sweeping Reminders for Denver

Get street sweeping reminders for the City & County of Denver - http://bit.ly/WuOjA

Lesson to learn from Google & Apple – Simplicity

http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2008/03/05/simplicity/

Bing Maps – Coimbatore gets an update

http://www.bing.com/maps/default.aspx?v=2&FORM=LMLTCP&cp=11.00565~76.96365&style=h&lvl=17

log4net – logging levels available

OFF
EMERGENCY
FATAL
ALERT
CRITICAL
SEVERE
ERROR
WARN
NOTICE
INFO
DEBUG
FINE
TRACE
FINER
VERBOSE
FINEST
ALL

Levels lower in the list are considered to have lower precedence than levels that are higher in the list. Thus if you use the threshold filter set to ERROR, then only levels upto (and including ERROR : 1 to 7) will be output. (or DEBUG < INFO < WARN < ERROR < FATAL)

Filters available:

log4net.Filter.DenyAllFilter Drops all logging events.

log4net.Filter.LevelMatchFilter An exact match to the event's level.

log4net.Filter.LevelRangeFilter Matches against a range of levels.

log4net.Filter.LoggerMatchFilter Matches against a the start of the logger name.

log4net.Filter.PropertyFilter Matches a substring from a specific property value.

log4net.Filter.StringMatchFilter Matches a substring from the event's message.