.

Art on the web

My son is really into making "sigs." ("Sigs," as in what a person might put in the signature line of an e-mail. I think that's what it means.)

He's pretty good at it. Quite good.

He took a look at the header image on the landing page of my blog (the top of the page at http://snowstormlife.com/blogs/bliz) and volunteered to spice things up a bit. So he snagged a couple of pictures that I'd taken and mocked them up as samples for the site.

So what do you think? Which one should I go with? (click on 'em to enlarge)

#1

#2

#3
 

I like them all, but I'm leaning towards the sunset picture right now.

No power?

So what happened yesterday afternoon? If you live in Florida you probably know what I'm talking about. Around 1:10 PM we lost power at home. And apparently most of the state lost power at the same time. I was on the phone with people in Tampa and Ft Lauderdale and both of them lost power too. My wife's school lost power for two hours.

What's up with that? 

As I was resetting my alarm clock last night in my sleep-fogged brain, I accidentally set it an hour ahead without realizing it (kinda like an early daylight savings time present to me). It wasn't until after I'd showered this morning that I looked at my watch and noticed it was only 5:15 AM. Whaaaaat? I'm currently on my 3rd cup of coffee.

I just checked CNN online and found a story about it. (http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/02/26/florida.power/index.html) There was a failed switch and a fire at an electrical substation outside Miami. Utility workers are still trying to figure out what happened.

Did you lose power too?

Alabama Code Camp: Huntsville - Feb 23, 2008

Nothin' like southern hospitality. It was great to see everyone at the Alabama Code Camp in Huntsville today. I should have done a Part 1 and Part 2 for my talk, because 45 minutes was just too darn short. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my session.

Here's a link to the slides.

I'm so glad I checked the weather forecast on Thursday night. I had already packed my short sleeve shirt and no jacket, but then remembered - it's still February and not everywhere is as warm as Tampa. And it was just a bit chilly today even with my long sleeve shirt and jacket. I should have brought gloves as well. It's nothing like what's going on in the northeast with the foot of snow in NYC, but it's still cold enough for my thinned blood. :)

Power Tools for Team System DB Edition

Hurray! The Power Tools for Team System 2008 DB Edition is now available. You can find more information about it at Gert Draper's blog and Dave Scruggs' blog.

A couple of the things I'm really interested in looking at are the "Dependency Viewer" and "Wildcard Expansion" for refactoring. I just installed it. (Note: I needed to be running as Administrator to install. Don't know if you'll have the same experience. I opened up a command line as Administrator and executed the installer from there.)

Check out all the cool options for refactoring:

And what's this? Static code analysis for TSQL??? Sweet!

There's a neat-looking new Regular Expression Builder UI underneath the Data Generator option:

And there's a list of pre-packaged Regular Expressions included:

And if you're in Schema View, you can see the Dependency Viewer option when you right click:

Here's an example of everything that references the Categories table in the Northwind sample database:

 
As you expand the nodes you can see that it's recursive:

Very cool stuff indeed.

I believe most of this was available for Database Edition in 2005, but now it's available for 2008.

Tampa SQLSaturday - Feb 16, 2008

That was a blast. Small room, filled to capacity. Engaging audience. Dancing bears. Jugglers. Nothing better than a Saturday afternoon talking about cool stuff. Thanks for coming to my session. I hope you enjoyed the format and found the information useful. Here's a link to my slide deck - totally new and improved from the other times I've presented it. (Let me know if it's a thumbs up or down. I really appreciate the feedback.)

Next Saturday I'll see you in Huntsville, Alabama, at the Alabama Code Camp. I'm giving this talk at 11:00. (I don't know how I'm going to squeeze it into 45 minutes.)

Activate Windows Server 2008 RTM (MSDN Subscriber Downloads version)

This weekend I downloaded and installed Windows Server 2008 RTM from MSDN Subscriber Downloads. I was building a VPC image with that + SQL Server 2005 + TFS 2008 + Team Suite 2008 + Office 2007. Everything installed smoothly, but when I tried to activate Windows Server 2008 I received the following error:

And when I clicked on the "More Information" link, this popped up.

Um, OK. So what's that supposed to mean?

I poked around and found a KB article with a similar error message for Vista activations (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/938107), which says:

When you try to activate Windows Vista, you may receive an error message that resembles the following:

Activation Error: Code 0x8007232b DNS Name does not exist

This problem may occur if you use volume-licensed media to install Windows Vista.

OK. Lovely, but what do I do now?

I went back to the MSDN subscriber downloads to make sure I'd used the right product key, and read something interesting at the very bottom of the page:

1. Go to Start
2. Click Control Panel
3. Choose System
4. At the bottom is Windows activation
5. Click Change product key (do not select automatic activation as this is the KMS option)
6. Enter the correct product key (MAK) for the edition you are activating:
   • To activate Windows Server 2008 Datacenter use the key titled Windows Server 2008 Datacenter and Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-based Systems
   • To activate Windows Server 2008 Enterprise use the key titled Windows Server 2008 Enterprise and Windows Server 2008 Standard
   • To activate Windows Server 2008 Standard use the key titled Windows Server 2008 Enterprise and Windows Server 2008 Standard
7. Click Next
8. After a minute you should see the Activation was successful confirmation

OK. Let's make something totally NOT intuitive. Instead of Clicking on the "Activate Windows" link, I should have clicked on the "Change Product Key" link. Riiiiiight. Makes sense. And after clicking on the link, I should have entered the exact same product key in the dialog box that I used during setup. Ooooookaaaay. Suuuurrreee. And from that dialog box I should have told it to Activate windows. Aaaaah... Now I get it.

Bottom line: when you're ready to activate Windows Server 2008 that you've downloaded from MSDN Subscriber Downloads, Click on the "Change product key" link on the Control Panel | System page. Just like the instructions tell you.

I kid you not.

Parallel? Nothin to it.

Back in the day, did you ever try to write a multi-threaded application? Simple ones aren't too difficult. But as the program has to do more things, the difficulty of keeping deadlocks away becomes almost impossible for mere mortals. Keep it simple, and you're OK.

Ever try to write anything that truly does parallel processing? I've never tried it. But now, dang, it's going to be dirt simple. My friend Jeff Barnes has an excellent overview of the new .NET Parallel Extensions (ParallelFX) posted on Channel9. Go ahead and watch it. I'll wait. (But prepare your mind to be boggled.)

Fighting the good fight...

Wow. Last week Joe Healy tried his best to give me his whopper of a head / chest cold, and I've been fighting it for a few days now. I brought in the big guns last night: Mucinex, Robitussin, Claritin, and Tylenol. I'm trying to avoid the prescription drugs for now, and I seem to be holding my own. (But my stomach rattles when I walk.)

Good news is that I've been able to stay upright all day today and accomplish a bunch of things . Yesterday afternoon was a bust.

Why upgrade?

Well, for one thing, the Visual Studio .NET 2003 products and the .NET Framework 1.1 are about to reach their mainstream support end of life. . .

 
See http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=3040 and http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=1249 for more information.

There have been significant advances in the .NET world since 2003. If you haven't taken a look at Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio Team System 2008, you owe it to yourself to do so. You'll be glad you did. 

South Florida Code Camp - Feb 2, 2008

Thanks to everyone who attended my Code Camp talk on Database Change Management with Team System 2008. Hope you enjoyed watching it as much as I did presenting it. Congrats to everyone who got some free stuff. (And my apologies to everyone who wasn't an XL - maybe next time.)

Here's a link to my slides: http://snowstormlife.com/files/folders/samples/entry1705.aspx