Teleidoscope

Thu, Nov 12, 2009

Plumbing

Posted at 1:45 pm MST to Miscellaneous

My great plumber -- James Johnson of Nautilus Plumbing -- was here today to fix some small things.

The kitchen faucet was binding in the hot water lever and leaking slightly around the base of the spout.

I got a snazzy new shower-head gadget at Costco a while back that needed to be installed.

And the bathtub has been draining slowly and sort of burping air up through the water that is draining, which didn't seem right.

In 2002 I partially remodeled my bathroom. As part of the changes a company called Master Plumbers installed vinyl inserts to cover up my ugly old tub and deteriorating tile with the icky grout, changing the tub stopper mechanism in the process. It turns out they didn't remove enough of the old stopper mechaism and over time it had fallen down until it partially blocked the drain. James was able to clear the blockage and remove the offending components so the problem should not recur.

When I made the changes in 2002 I had James rig up the shower so I had both a flow control regular shower head and a hand shower head available. That has worked OK over the years, but the (slightly kludgey) mechanism for switching between the two heads never fully sealed -- whichever head was active, there was still a little flow through the other one. The new shower gadget is a single unit that is designed with both types of shower heads, with levers and seals to direct the flow as desired, or temporaorily turn off the flow completely at the shower head with changing the temperature and flow settings of the faucets. This should be nice.

But I think I'm going to stay away from Master Plumbers in the future -- not difficult since I have had no contact with them since 2002.

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Reconnecting ClearQuest to DB2 after changes

Posted at 1:22 pm MST to Technology

When changing the password of the DB2 database itself (as set in the CQ Maintenance tool), it is not enough to create a Connection in the Maintenance Tool that uses the correct password. Even though the Connnection succeeds, the other CQ
tools will not be able to access the database, and the connection will act as if the new password value is not sticking.

After creating the connection successfully in the Maintenance tool, Select Schema Repository->Update->Current Connection and set the new password again, then apply the changes. At this point the schema repository will be accessible using the ClearQuest Designer tools.

Then update the user database(s) if the password changes affect them too. The usual Database->Update User Database Properties tool in the Designer seems to be effective once the schema repository is connecting properly.

This update requirement is documented for Options changes. It just isn't clear in the IBM docs that it applies to password changes, too.

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