Microsoft has finally come up with a web administration interface for SQL server (as pointed out to me by our trusty developer, Travis, earlier today). I have these conflicting thoughts about the product (which is not unusual for me. Oh, and since it's free, is it really a product?)

First of all, it's about time they did something like this. Having to load a copy of Enterprise manager on every PC you want to work from is more than just a slight pain. It sucks. So, on that level, great news - It does a lot of the things you would commonly do in Enterprise Manager.

On the other hand, from the perspective of security and running secure apps on a business network, I have to say that when I read this, I get a little nervous:

There are two versions of the SQL Server Web Data Administrator Tool. One runs under IIS and the other runs under a Microsoft .NET open source web server named Cassini. For more information on Cassini and source code please go to...

Oh Boy. This should be interesting. At our company, we will need to test this and have the security guys look at it before we allow it to be used - especially considering the sensitivity of the data we deal with in SQL databases.

But, for working with non-critical data in SQL databases and doing some basic database administration, it's pretty sweet stuff.

For some people, I am completely certain it's important to make sure certain types of email attachments never make it through the email client to the end user's machine. But I am - after all - a technically-savvy person (and I can spell savvy), so I want (well, actually need) to be able to receive a lot of the kinds of files that Microsoft Outlook seems to think I shouldn't be able to get at.

Enter OL2K2SEC (an Outlook 2003 version is also available, for all you acronym decoders who have not yet clicked). Sure, you could edit the registry, but frankly I have better things to do with my time, I deal with too many computers, and I might need/want to enable someone else to do the same thing on their computer (and I am leary to direct most people to edit their registries). Not for everyone, to be sure, but great for those who need it.

I had the privilege of spending the past few days at Microsoft for a set of sessions and meetings for IT execs, and while I can't comment about any specifics of what was presented there, I can say that it was a worthwhile venture. Nice to see that even a massive company of 52,000+ employees can make a real effort to be customer-focused and to reach out to the hands that feed it.

I also had a chance to catch up with a few “Microsoft-ies” that I had not seen for awhile, and for whom I hold a great deal of respect. One thing that always amazes me (given the size of the company) is the fact that Microsoft hires a lot of really smart, quality people. From my local rep (who is a truly good guy) on up to the big-wigs I get to speak with from time to time, it's a consistently high-caliber bunch of people who have a contagious passion for what they do.

Nothing earth-shattering to report, but I can say that it's always good to meet others in the field, to get out and see how other companies do their jobs, and to take that information and mold it into a useful tool you can use to critically review the way you do things. It's entirely too easy to fall into proverbial ruts in this business, and doing so means either falling behind in your career technically, or becoming careless and risking career damage as a result. A job like mine - where you're responsible for maintaining systems at a consistent state of high-availability, ensuring the network is fully secured, and making sure people have what they need to do their jobs, all while keeping costs as low as possible while at the same time improving services - is stressful enough. In my case, our company's employees, those who are shareholders, our customers, and about 25% of the online banking population in the United States all count (either directly or indirectly) on our company doing a good job in these areas. No need to hammer nails into our own coffins, and so a continual, honest review of the state of things ensures we stay out of that rut.

One really cool thing I got to do was paying a visit was the Center for Information Work's Office of the Future - a conceptual office if you will, where they showcase some of the ideas they are working on for placement in the market over the next five or so years. It's all cool stuff, has been publicized in the media quite a bit in the past, and it's a lot like the concept cars you see at the auto shows (the actual car never makes the streets and chances are it doesn't even run, but parts of it show up in other real vehicles down the road). It was a fun, interesting and eye-opening hands-on experience. One thing's for sure - we still have a long way to go in the world of computing!

I'm not one to tout tools developers would use (since I'm not a developer myself), but it just so happens that SourceGear released a new version of it's Vault version/source control server while I am in the process of evaluating it. For those who are wondering what source- and version-control means, well you can skip this. But if you are a user of VSS or CVS or similar (especially VSS), you know what I am talking about.

SourceGear Vault is a version control system for Windows developers, with full integration into the Visual Studio.NET environment. It is implemented entirely on the .NET platform, and uses SQL Server 2000 for its repository storage.

Vault is the only version control system designed specifically to offer a seamless transition from Visual SourceSafe. SourceSafe repositories are imported with no lost data, including history.

The user interface resembles SourceSafe Explorer, and all SourceSafe features are present, including Share and Pin.

And from there the improvements become quite apparent. Face it, VSS sucks as a version/source control product for more than a couple people - It's outdated, limited in capabilities and really is doing more these days than it was ever originally intended to do.

But they can explain it better than I can, so go here and check it out. There's also a list of what's new in this version. Looks nice. I'll have to give it a try.

EDIT: Price reductions announced, and single-user edition is - get this - FREE.

Ever had a problem with always losing your status bar in IE6? I got tired of always  having to turn it back on, so I went on a search. I found a number of similar solutions to the problem. This one worked. From MVPS.org by way of KC Lemson:

If your status bar disappears when opening a new IE 6 browser window:

1. With (only one) IE open, click View, select: Status Bar
2. Right-click on IE's Toolbar and select: "Lock the Toolbar"
3. Hold down the Ctrl key and click the close button (upper right)
4. Open Windows Explorer, click View, select: Status Bar
5. Right-click on Explorer's Toolbar and select: "Lock the Toolbar"
6. Click Tools | Folder Options | View tab
7. Click the "Apply to all folders" button.
8. Hold down the Ctrl key and click the close button (upper right)
9. Open IE to any page, right-click on a link and select: "Open in New Window"

Verify that these Registry entries exist:

• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main
  • "Show_StatusBar"="yes"
  • "Show_URLinStatusBar"="yes"

So, my friend Chris just anounced Gnomedex 4.0, which will happen later this year at Harrah's in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. For $99 bucks you can't beat it, and hey - for those who are inclined, OPEN BAR! Wow. That should be scary. And it's included. How'd they do 'dat?

Why Gnomedex? Here's why.

It's just been announced and doesn't actually happen til September, but keep checking the updates page for more info as it becomes available.

Seriously - this is a real conference, and people who attend are consistently very pleased that they did. I'll be there. Check it out!

"What goes up must come down. Ask any system administrator.”

(anonymous)

Ain't that the truth. Ever have one of those days where things start out okay, quickly go sideways, straighten themselves back out, then take another turn for the worse? Even days like today, ones where none of the problems I had to manage was what I would call “a big deal,” can wear on the nerves... Kind of a when-it-rains-it-pours thing I suppose. One thing's for sure: The level of complexity in troubleshooting sideways systems is exponentially related to the complexity of the system itself. I spent a few harrowing hours fighting a Blackberry server today that was doing nothing short of driving me crazy. I ended up rebuilding the app server, after doing some serious registry hacking, but all was recovered and well in the end. At times, when I see the level of st00pididity that goes into designing certain systems, I can't do much more than shake my head in utter disbelief, noting that somewhere along the way my disbelief was replaced with the occasional cynical disgust.

I don't like feeling that way. People will laugh when they read this, but I am actually not a cynic at heart, and I don't like acting or feeling that way. It's part of why I left my job in law enforcement a few years back and went on to other things (of course the paycheck helped in that decision, too). Today was just one of those days when I found myself frustrated, then content, then cynical, then calm and cool, then just ready to give up, and finally something I can only describe as triumphant.

I guess it's just one of those days when you're the passenger (or the kid on the hood of the car, as the case may be), someone else is barreling down the road, and all you can do is hold on tight and scream at the top of your lungs (metaphorically of course) and hope someone hears you and stops.

Of course, it's also days like that that make the good days look better.

Chris Pratley talks about Program Management, and in the process proves that he truly understands The Way Things Are:

Some years ago I realized that as a PM, my definition of vacation was not just going somewhere to have fun (work is quite fun most of the time). Vacation means getting to an environment where no decisions have to be made. I used to drive my friends nuts, since I would go visit them, and they'd say "what do you want to do?", or "where do you want to go?", and I would simply say "you decide".

Amen, brother.

More kudos to Scott and also to Stuart - Thanks to them I now have colored search results in dasBlog... Try it out in the search box over there in the menu bar. It makes the page that dasBlog spits out more meaningful, for sure.

One thing I noticed it does though - and I will have to bug someone to help me figure this one out - is that if you search for text that is, say, part of a URL, the results get returned as well. Need to adjust so if you search for XML, for example, it doesn't return results where “XML” is in some part of the blog entry other than the displayed body text.

But hey - highlighting is nice.

Not because it has to be (Excel can be a great tool when used correctly and in the right places). But go ahead, look me straight in the eye, tell me you've never run into some rendition of this:

http://neopoleon.com/blog/posts/434.aspx

Rory is hillarious. I've been reading his comics (and site) off an on for a while. He hits this one right on the head.

First of all, people should know that I am *not* a programmer - not even close (in fact, the people that work with me are reading this and laughing at the fact that my name now appears in the same paragraph as the word “programmer”). But, being the IT-Geek-Person-That-People-Think-Knows-A-Lot (guess I got ya all fooled, I do ), I am often asked to try to explain things I know only a little about. When I explain I don't really know much about some subject, for some reason most of the people I associate with tend to look at me like I am simply avoiding the conversation. They must assume I just don't want to talk about work-related stuff outside of work (and they are right, but still - the real problem is that I often don't know jack beyond the simple basics of what they want me to explain).

For example, take XML. Sure, I have a basic rudimentary understanding of XML, how to write it, how to work with it, etc. It's not exactly rocket science, after all, and I have to know the entry-level basics in order to hold a “meaningful” conversation with many of my colleagues. Plus the new Office System 2003 applications I am spending a lot of time with make use of XML in ways past versions could not, which is cool. But, that just means I need to learn more about it.

SideNote: Back in - get this - 1996 or so, I was a sweat-equity partner in a company that was building an online service for small businesses to respond to requests for quotes put out by the federal government. That was my first exposure to XML, back in the day, when it was pretty much brand new. I remember one of my friends, John Turner, back then telling me this XML thing was the way of the future, and I should just wait and see if I didn't believe him. JT was always right.

I have two main resources I can leverage to learn about geeky things like XML. One resource is the people I work with, and Travis and Scott from work are awfully good about humoring me and teaching me the salient details of what I need to know in order to be able to understand what the heck they're talking about on a daily basis. And for this I am grateful.

The other place I find the information is by scouring the web, RSS feeds, and other resources for *good* links to useful information. In this case, it was on the MSDN web site, in the Office Developer Center: The article, which ends up discussing XML in the context of the Office tools, actually spends most of its time introducing the reader to XML data, schemas and trasforms in general.

For those of us who yearn for someone to explain things on our level, this is an XML gem, and Bill Coan (the author) gets my vote. Anyone can understand this stuff (even me), and Coan does a pretty darn good job of showing the reader how XML is structured. So, if you're one of those people who are always asking me about this-technology-or-that, and if you have always wondered what the heck this XML stuff is, take a few minutes to read up, and you'll know almost as much as I do.

My friend and colleague, Scott Hanselman, showed me long ago the value of making sure people can see what's on the screen when you are presenting. I spent this week giving talks about some new web-based apps we are rolling out, in a large room, and toward the end of the week I actually remembered something Scott had told me, and something he recently posted on his blog.

Fact of the matter is, between my marathon presentations every day this week and the rest of the things I have to worry about/deal with/etc., some of the people who had to sit through a few of the presentations were short-changed somewhat by the fact that the amount of information required to be on the screen at any point in time was large, the fonts were small, and therefore it was hard to see what I was referring to.

Toward the end of the week, I tried the tool Scott mentioned recently - UltraMagnifier. And it's pretty cool. Using this, I was able to highlight the things on the screen in the magnifier window that were otherwise difficult to read. I can set the magnification level and a myriad of other settings too numerous to mention, and it worked like a charm. It will take some getting used to on my part to really be able to use this tool effectively in my presentations, just because it's a change that requires me to re-wire my brain, but it's a good change so I will put the energy into it.

And - for anyone who gives presentations (even just now and then) - This is for you. Read it, learn, use it. Scott is the best damn technical presenter I know (and I am not ).

In an earlier post, I manually attached a linked OneNote audio recording to the OneNote HTML email, which was then sent to my mail server in order to auto-generate a blog entry. I had to manually attach the audio file, because (I assumed) OneNote would not do it. (I've been playing more and more with OneNote's sharing capabilities both on the SharePoint platform and by leveraging the emails it can create, for Blogging or otherwise...)

I was wrong in my assumption: While it's true that the out-of-the-box settings don't attach a linked audio file, you can turn that ability on in one of two places - either in OneNote's Options/E-mail section, or you can use Windows Group Policy to set it for an entire organization (along with literally hundreds of other common settings).

To do this via group policy, you just enable the policy, and then activate the setting. Once you do this, the policy is propagated to all clients on the domain to which that policy applies:

If you don't have group policy (or if you have it but just don't use it - in which case see below), you can go to the OneNote Options dialog, choose the E-mail section and just check the appropriate box.

SideNote (pun intended): Practically ALL of OneNote's options can be controlled though group policy, along with a huge number of settings for the rest of the Office 2003 System family of applications - not to mention Windows domain policies. If you are running Group Policy and Office 2003, you need to take advantage of this - it makes things consistent and fast, two things IT groups love and need. Remember - group policies are not just for operating system settings - they are also available for a number of other applications.

I added a link to Chris Pratley in my blogroll, because his is one blog I find myself re-reading recently. Chris is Group Program Manager for Office Authoring Services, and is one of the main forces (among several I am sure) behind OneNote. Microsoft employees have started public blogging like mad recently, and Chris is one of the new additions - thank goodness! It's great to see program managers and other non-programmers blogging now (not to discount the developers - that's great too!).

Side note: It was a discussion on Chris' blog and similar discussions elsewhere concerning OneNote and blogging that made me realize you can blog from OneNote, if you want to. So, I figured I would just try it and see - and it worked for the most part. And now it seems to be catching on a little bit - which is kinda cool. While it's far from a complete list due to Google lag, it will be interesting to see if the results of this search change much over time (assumes people will leave the OneNote footer in there of course). Already several bloggers have started using OneNote to post blog messages, and hopefully some of them will make the Google index eventually.

Now, for what it's worth, this is far from perfect, and may not even fit the semi-purists definition of “good.“ And I know DonXML and Phillip Rieck would call it a “kludge” (and would be absolutely correct in saying so), but still, it's a valid “coolio” option for some. My vote is to open up OneNote's publishing features to include true XML output capability, as well as a cleaner email format - and do it in a way that would enable the code purists as well as the multimedia people to do their respective things. Maybe even a plug-in sort of capability? And when I say publish, I mean publish text and images to the blog, put the .wma audio files on the Windows Media server with the matching .asx file on the web server, ship it to the Wiki, and on the SharePoint server, and on and on... I have a specific list of what I mean, feature-functionality-wise, and sometime soon I might just need to put that onto paper.

Er, I mean into Ink.

Audio recording started: 11:21 PM Monday, February 02, 2004

 

 

Download: Blogging One note and Audio.one
Download: Blogging One note and audio.WMA

Note: Seems to work - added the windows media file as a second email attachment, and dasBlog seems to handle posting that just fine - so now I know from actual experience that more than one attachment definitely works for the MailToWeblog functionality in dasBlog. :)

Oh - and I think I have just reached a new plane of geek existence - recording the same lame thing I type, and them posting it as an audio recording to the web - heheheh... /me is sooo lame.