At the last MSDN event I attended, there was some discussion of the new Microsoft Surface concept. If you are unfamiliar with this relatively new technology venture Microsoft is headed down I think you will be impressed with how neat the concept is. Basically it is bringing touch screen computing to a whole new level. Imagine a screen that is very large with software that is very interactive. You can start to explore and navigate in ways that a traditional mouse simply cannot.Â
Some say it is the future of computing, but I’m not sure. There is a great blog post here that actually discusses the technology behind it, it is pretty fascinating.
As you can see from the video below, the technology is amazing, but I’m not sure where it fits in my business. Don’t get me wrong, I think it would be sweet in my living room (so long as it could stand a few kids jumping, scribbling and spilling on it). I’ll be watching this technology, I’m sure it’ll be everywhere in the future as people start thinking of great ways to leverage it!
I made a frustrating discovery a few weeks ago that I’m still dumbfounded by and keep hoping someone will surprise me with an answer, but so far my forum postings have yielded no fruit.Â
We have standardized on the increasingly popular Microsoft SQL Reporting Services as our standard report writing architecture at the office. It is great because it is very similar to Crystal and offers a bunch of features such as a web service API, supports report subscriptions and tons of other useful elements.Â
The discovery I made however is that while the graphing components are a stripped down version of the Dundas controls, the ability to plot a simple trendline on a line chart or scatter plot is non-existent. We have gotten so used to looking at trend lines and Excel has made it so easy to do this, just a couple clicks and you can quickly see how things are trending using a variety of regression formulas. We use SQL Reporting Services 2005, and apparently, adding a trend line means you have to do it the hard way. Y=MX+B, how hard could it be?…let me tell you, it isn’t something they teach you in SQL 101. If anyone else out there has found a relatively painless way of doing this, please share!
As I mentioned previously, I am continually scouring for tools to make my life easier. Every now and then I find one that after a while I wonder how I functioned without it. Accountants can’t imagine how they’d live without Excel and Carpenters can’t imagine how they would live without their hammers. Well, IT professionals are no different! This posting focuses on the tools I use nearly every day (in no particular order).
While listening to the popular audio show DotNetRocks a couple of years ago, one of the guests mentioned a great up and coming version control system that had the potential to steal some thunder from the ever popular open source version control system CVS.  The system was called SubVersion (SVN) and has several client interfaces that are available to interact with it. I ended up doing some experimenting with it and was amazed at the simplicity of how it worked and how intuitive the interface was. We have been using this system internally for over two years now.
I had experimented in the past with CVS and some other commercially available packages at some clients I had worked at, but these systems were all hard to get setup and work with and some of them were very expensive. It just didn’t make logical sense a lot of times. That’s where SVN is so very different.Â
Everyone has probably heard the hype about how bad unsecured wireless networks are. As tools become more sophisticated for exploiting wifi vulnerabilities, it is probably important to remember the importance of taking protective measures when plugging into an unsecured hotspot.Â
An article over at the truckthis blog caught my eye which basically demonstrates exactly how one would perform a technique where packets are sniffed and data contained within cookies is then replicated on a rogue machine basically granting that machine whatever access you have at the associated site. Many sites use cookies, sites like popular webmail accounts for instance! Imagine you sign onto your gmail account and then 5 minutes later, someone else is signed on as you with complete access to your email account.
I think of my children anytime I get some new piece of hardware or software…I can’t wait to get it out of the box and toy around with it. The day I received my action pack subscription with my copy of Microsoft Vista Business Edition, I had to dive in head first.
I of course had been messing with the beta releases all along in a virtualized environment, but I thought now that it was live, I might as well make the jump and load it as my primary operating system.
I decided to take a Friday afternoon and eagerly make the jump. I made an Acronis copy of my work machine (thank God I did this) and started down the path of doing the upgrade from Windows XP Pro to Vista. Everything seemed to be going smoothly, then all of a sudden I got the blue screen of death. When it rebooted, things just continued to go south, it wouldn’t boot anymore and the installer wouldn’t continue, I was completely hosed. After an hour of googling and trying different things, I gave up, since I had to be operational by Monday.  I ended up restoring my machine back to XP Pro. I wasn’t about to let one bad install stop me from persevering though. Read the rest of this entry »
Normally when you apply a service pack, you’re just getting a batch of stability patches and bug fixes mixed in with some small feature enhancements, most times nothing to exciting. Microsoft Exchange Service Pack 2 however offered one huge addition that can be easily overlooked if you are not paying attention. The IMF (Intelligent Message Filter) version 2.0 is a greatly enhanced spam and mailbox protection system.  If you installed service pack 2 on exchange, you need to ensure you have properly configured the IMF, it is not uncommon admins may overlook this.
uShip.com is a free online marketplace where you can search for truck loads of nearly any type: furniture, freight, livestock, cars, even entire households. They have system that is very similar to eBay's in that it's an online auction. This makes it familiar and easy to use for both the shipper and the transporter.
I made a frustrating discovery a few weeks ago that I’m still dumbfounded by and keep hoping someone will surprise me with an answer, but so far my forum postings have yielded no fruit. 
As I mentioned 
While listening to the popular audio show 
Everyone has probably heard the hype about how bad unsecured wireless networks are. As tools become more sophisticated for exploiting wifi vulnerabilities, it is probably important to remember the importance of taking protective measures when plugging into an unsecured hotspot. 
I think of my children anytime I get some new piece of hardware or software…I can’t wait to get it out of the box and toy around with it. The day I received my action pack subscription with my copy of Microsoft Vista Business Edition, I had to dive in head first.
Normally when you apply a service pack, you’re just getting a batch of stability patches and bug fixes mixed in with some small feature enhancements, most times nothing to exciting. Microsoft Exchange Service Pack 2 however offered one huge addition that can be easily overlooked if you are not paying attention. The IMF (Intelligent Message Filter) version 2.0 is a greatly enhanced spam and mailbox protection system.  If you installed service pack 2 on exchange, you need to ensure you have properly configured the IMF, it is not uncommon admins may overlook this.
