I have occasionally had trouble getting Writer to open.  I will click on the shortcut, the splash screen comes up and then I get an error.  Then it is gone.  I finally got around to digging into the cause and did a search and found this post from one of the Microsoft guys that builds this tool:

http://jcheng.wordpress.com/2009/02/08/windows-live-writer-2009-wont-start/

We’re getting ready to ship an update that fixes the problem, but in the meantime, there is a straightforward workaround to get Writer running again:

1. Start | Run
2. On Vista, enter this command:
   %AppData%\Windows Live Writer\Keywords
   On XP, enter this command:
   %UserProfile%\Application Data\Windows Live Writer\Keywords
3. You should see a bunch of files whose names begin with “keyword” and end with lots of letters and numbers. Delete all of these files.

That should fix it.

The problem, as you may have guessed, is that one of these files is getting corrupted. This is due to a race condition in our code where the settings file can be closed while it’s still in the middle of being written. Our update will both fix the race condition, and also deal more gracefully with corrupted settings files (by ignoring them).

Well, that didn’t fix it for me.  In that post, Joe has updated to say that version 14.0.8064.206 includes the fix for this problem.  That happens to be the version I am running.    So back to searching…

I was digging around trying to figure out if I had just missed something, but instead I found a log file.  In my case the log is in the \AppData\Local\Windows Live Writer\ directory and it is named, funny enough, “Windows Live Writer.log”.  I looked in the log and found lots of stuff, but the part that stuck out was:

The network location cannot be reached.

That got  me to thinking and after doing some testing, I went back to Joe’s blog entry and left this comment:

Joe,
Another potential cause of the for the problem, Splash screen and then error and then nothing, could be My Documents redirection.
The company I work for as a policy doesn’t back up user machines, but we do redirect the My Documents to a network share. Most of our users have their My Documents set to be available offline. I don’t.
When I tried the steps that you recommended, it didn’t fix the problem, but then I remembered that I have had this problem before, and that it seemed to work fine when I was in the office.
I have two work arounds for this:
1. Open Windows Live Writer while still at the office and don’t close it. Hybernate the machine until I get home and use as normal.
2. Use Run As to run it as a local account so that it doesn’t fall victim to my My Documents being unavailable.
This is a good reason (among others) that it would be nice to have the option to change the default location for post data to be saved.

So, there you have it.  Another reason to NOT use My Documents redirection…  “Let me tell ya about My Documents redirection…”

introducing worldmaps

See where your website visitors are from with WorldMaps. WorldMaps (currently in Beta) is an IP address to geographic mapping service designed to give website owners the ability to visually see where their visitors are coming from (red dots represent the top 5%, i.e., the most active visitors). These images can be displayed publically on the home page, or on a private page for administrators.

It looks to be a very similar idea to cluster maps, but this one has a bit of variety in the way it marks the map, and you get a few more options on how to display it.

http://www.structuretoobig.com/development/worldmaps.aspx

Anyway, I was looking for a quick way to copy a table from one Database to another and came across this blog which I think has a lot of good queries just waiting to be tinkered with:

http://www.sqlservercurry.com/

And the particular post that got me there was:

Copy a table from one database to another in SQL Server 2005

4:09 AM Posted by Suprotim Agarwal
Labels: SQL Server Administration

If you have a table in a database and you would like to copy the table to another database, use this query:
SELECT * INTO AdventureWorks.dbo.CustomersTemp FROM Northwind.dbo.Customers
Just remember that using this query will only transfer the schema and data. It does not transfer the indexes, foreign keys, statistics etc.
If you want to transfer all the objects from one database to another, open Sql Server Management Studio > Right click on your database > All Tasks > Generate SQL Scripts. Then run these scripts against the new database.
Transfer both schema and data
To copy both data and schema, use the Microsoft SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard 1.1. This tool works for both SQL 2000 and SQL 2005 and generates a single SQL script file which can be used to recreate a database (both schema and data).