Yahoo Groups’ message moderation is behaving weirdly (I think its a bug). I moderate various groups on YG. For all the groups, I’ve setup posting to the group such that first post from any new member will be moderated and after that they can post messages without moderation.

But for a large number of members, for some reason, all their messages are moderated. On checking their setting it shows:

“Posting Messages: Override: This member’s posts are always moderated”

I don’t understand why YG is behaving this way.

Solution: Edit the user’s membership. Under the edit membership page, there is a small edit link next to the “Override: This member’s posts are always moderated”.

Once you click on the edit link, it takes you to Edit Message Posting Privileges page where you’ll have to select the “Use current group message posting setting” option.

Save the settings and you should be good to go.

Lot of people think resistance is the worst enemy of an influencer.

Over the years, I realized that resistance is really a bliss in disguise.IMHO

• Without resistance there might be only one side of the story
• Without resistance one might seize to find new, better ways of doing things.
• Without resistance the risk is completely on you. If anything goes wrong, it would be easy for people to just point at you saying it was her/his idea.
• The worst thing is without resistance I feel people are not passionate about the topic at hand and they are just indifferent. Which means they will not give in their best to make it happen.

Some people talk about healthy resistance and baseless resistance. Personally I don’t see these 2 forms of resistance. When something appears to be baseless to me, I think I’ve not done my job of actually understanding and seeing from the other person’s point of view. A lot of times doing so, provides very interesting insight to various other things as well.

As easy this might sound, dealing with resistance is quite taxing and sometimes the best policy is to let it go and then try to change it later from a different perspective. Influencing is a two way street and is a great opportunity to learn something new.

Clarity of Thoughts and Clarity of Actions is very important when it comes to influencing people around you.

The how do you get clarity of thoughts and clarity of actions?

Staying in the trenches yields insights.

Continuously reflecting yields clarity and fuels new ideas.

Trying to teach others help in formulating and articulating your thoughts.

Last but not the least, working with smart people helps you become a good influencer.

Working with smart people is very important because they don’t just ask you “Why?” but they also ask you “What is the alternative?” or “What are the trade-offs?”. Lot of times, I get into the mode of “This is THE way to do this”. And when faced with the alternative or trade-off question, really forces me to think. This really helps me find new, interesting ways to solve the problem or at least helps in clarifying my thoughts.

I find “Leading by Example” is a great way to influence others. I see a lot of people trying to influence others by pointing at their mistakes and trying to correct them. But they themselves don’t walk their talk. This form of influencing is very harmful and short-lived. Agile Consulting is a great example of this.

Most User Group moderators will agree with me that keeping the spammers out of your mailing list is a big pain. Different groups have different definition for spammers. For me, recruiters, marketing folks and people interested in self-promotion are also part of the general spammers.

Some of the main groups I moderate are:

• Agile India on Yahoo Groups
  
• Agile Philly on Yahoo Groups
  
• Agile Alliance on LinkedIn
• Agile Coaches on Yahoo Groups

For different groups I’ve used different tactics to keep the spammers out.

For example, for Agile India and Agile Philly, first post by any new member is moderated. Once approved the person can make further posts without any moderation. If you have a lot of new members (mostly valid members), its gets quite time consuming to moderate the list. It also discourages new members from posting on the list.

For the Agile Coaches, we use the list only for announcements by the moderators. Members are not allowed to post to the group. Instead they post it to the moderators and the moderators in-turn post it to the group. Alternatively the members can use the wiki to start discussion there. Which is what we want to encourage.

The Agile Alliance list on LinkedIn is very interested for me. LinkedIn does not provide any pre-post moderation and it also allows all users to post to the list. So what I end up doing is, I scan the discussion board every 2-3 days and see if there are any posts which are spams. I go ahead and delete them. Earlier I used to send an email to the person who posted it, saying I’m deleting this message because our group treats this as spam. But it turned out to be too much work. So now I just go ahead and delete the message.

This leads to a very interesting phenomenon. If I’m a human spammer and see a discussion forum where there are no spams, I’m afraid to post any spam messages. It discourages the spammer. Its like the broken window syndrome. If you see a house with broken windows, you don’t mind throwing another stone at it. But if you see a clean house with everything intact, you are generally scared to damage the building.

Every now and then I do get a spam, but its quite manageable.

Today all of a sudden, one of my MsSQLExpress servers refused to start. On looking at the Windows Event Log, I discovered the following errors:

FCB::Open failed: Could not open file c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQ\DATA\mastlog.ldf for file number 2. OS error: 2(The system cannot find the file specified.)/

FCB::Open: Operating system error 2(The system cannot find the file specified.) occurred while creating or opening file ‘c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\DATA\mastlog.ldf’. Diagnose and correct the operating system error, and retry the operation.

I wanted to find a way to quickly restore the Master database. Unfortunately I did not have any backup. (This was a playground server, not a production box). Since I had nothing changed on the master db, restoring a fresh copy would not make any difference.

Luckily I found out that there is a directory called “C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Template Data” and as the name suggests it contains a template DB. So I simply replaced master.mdf and mastlog.ldf files in “C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data” directory with those found under the Template Data directory.

Hurray! My MsSQLExpress server started fine without any further complains.

Today, I wanted to move a SVN repository from my windows laptop to my Mac. So I was trying to dump the SVN repository from Windows machine and load it on my Mac. I was accessing my SVN repository via an URL (svn://machine_ip) instead of a Path (file://machine_ip)

Unfortunately svnadmin dump seems to accept only file paths:

svnadmin dump svn://localhost/project_name > project_name.svn_dump
svn: ‘svn://localhost/project_name’ is an url when it should be a path

Luckily I remembered the location of the repository on the file system. So then I tried the following and it worked

svnadmin dump /users/naresh/local_svn_repos > project_name.svn_dump

Please note that the local_svn_repo folder must be the actual root of your svn repository. This folder usually contains the following folders:

• format (file)
• conf
• db
• hooks
• locks

I’m trying to install restful_authentication plugin on a rails project on a Windows platform.

Every time I try “ruby script\plugin install http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/restful_authentication/”

I get the following error:

Plugin not found: [“http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/restful_authentication/”]

This really does not help. When you pass the verbose parameter to the install command, it give a more meaningful error message.

ruby script\plugin -v install http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/restful_authentication/
Plugins will be installed using http fetching from ‘http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/restful_authentication/’
Plugin not found: [“http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/restful_authentication/”]
# openuri::httperror: /openuri::httperror:

When you search for this error, it becomes very clear that its a proxy issue. Following is the solution given by Nick Chistyakov

This `407 Proxy Authentication Required’ happens because along with proxy address and proxy port two additional params must by supplied:
1. user
2. password

In open-uri.rb (under \ruby\lib\ruby\1.8 folder), method OpenURI.open_http, line 216 there is a record:
klass = Net::HTTP::Proxy(proxy.host, proxy.port)

The full signature of that Net::HTTP::Proxy(…) method is:
def Net::HTTP.Proxy(p_addr, p_port = nil, p_user = nil, p_pass = nil)
So just add proxy.user, proxy.password:

klass = Net::HTTP::Proxy(proxy.host, proxy.port, proxy.user, proxy.password)

Note that your environment variable http_proxy must be set in a way it described above (http_proxy=http://user:password@host:port)

On Windows, if you are trying to run commands which access internet and stuck behind a proxy; here is a quick solution:

set http_proxy=http://username:password@proxy_ip_address:port

Thanks to Jigar Gosar for pointing this out.