There is a true story behind this odd ensemble of a title. I remember it like it was yesterday. In fact, it was yesterday…..

The Story.

I was packing up my laptop when I was abruptly cornered by an energetic fellow.  He rattled off his problem in such a degree I could only process bit and pieces of his story.

He had spent 9 hours working with a software vendor who-must-not-be-named for credit card processors. They had gotten no where.

The first question screaming in my mind was why I being singled out to help him with a computer problem? I hide my geekness very well.  I strive to to prevent the typical questions like: will you fix my computer, vcr, dvd player, etc? Will you build me a website? Teach me HTML, please?

People fail to realize the differences between developers and IT. They also fail to see the different roles and specialization of certain knowledge for various parts of software development.

Touching a computer makes you liable for scape-goat-itis to consumers. Not only that, people have a bad habit of donning  you to become their free tech support [expletive deleted], whether you want it or not.

I turned around to see a co-worker,  that I now call Brutus, paying for coffee at the counter.  Having this flaw called empathy, I caved to energetic man in red. I agreed to look at the program and see what I could do.

Surprising the daunted man in red and the owner of this awesome local coffee house in the downtown mall of Charlottesville: I fixed the issue in about 3 minutes.

I’ve never seen the software before. The help desk and the developers of the software who connected remotely could not fix it. Why could I?  And no, I’m not super-developer-guy in skin tight and equally frightening spandex.

The Real Problem

The first part of the problem of is because many software vendors use a broken system. The help desk personnel reads scripted dialog, they don’t know the ins an outs of the software.

Some of help desk personnel at various companies even refuse to take initiative to go past the script. Even if its simple as searching google, they won’t do it.

Software developers are seldom familiar with the nuances of the operating system or system environments. They  are paid to develop software, not administrate or navigate all the pitfalls of minor differences in environment.

Thats why testing software and working with IT staff, users, clients, and people who know the business is so important.  Its important to have people who specialize in different aspects, like the desktop environment, performance and usability testing.

The attitude and mindset of the developers you hire is also important. If they stamp it “well it works on my machine” or “it the users fault”, its going to hurt your business and even hurt your clients/users.

The other major issue was that the developers did not take the time to really analyse the error message.  Instead they chased Alice down the rabbit hole, rather than simply listening.

The Solution.

I used the tech support cheat sheet that most of us savvy developers use to fix family computers and other things.

Taking the key parts of the error message, I put them into google. I glanced over a couple of posts. I saw a feasible issue. I verified the issue. The program was being started in a compatibility mode for windows 2000 on windows XP.

I tweaked the folder settings so the compatibilty mode was showing. Changed the compatibility mode. Restarted the application. They were now on their way.

So the solution was really listening to the problem and resolving to fix it.

The Story. Second Act.

It was an inconvenience to me. Helping people generally is.  But I’ve lost hours of life to soul-sucking computers and software issues.  I know pain and thy name is crappy software.

Besides with only a few minutes of my time, I was able to save a few people hours of pain and possible even a few premature grey hairs.   It was a good feeling to help someone and not deal with scape-goat-itis.

The man in red was certainly gracious. The store owner was kind to present me a token. A gift certificate for coffee. I really did not want anything, but its also rude to refuse a gift. It was kind of him.

With a few minutes of my time, I was able to help a local business owner and the man in red. The man in red, turned out to be a recent veteran, who was in business of credit card  processors.

It always cool to be able to help someone who served for this country.  They work hard and almost never expect anything in return.  They deserve much more than they ever receive. They never complain about it. Its humbling.

Even during lunch at a near by restaurant, the man in red came by to thank me again. Then voiced his disheartening opinion of the software that was just installed. I have a sneaking suspicion that the man in red, won’t be using that particular brand of software again anytime soon.

Things to ponder.

If you are using consultants, hiring software developers, or buying software; the question you should ask is who are you actually doing business with?

How much is your time worth?

Are they honest and transparent?

Do they cost more because of quality or support they provide, or because they are a brand name?

What is the EdUI Conference?

The EdUI Conference is a new conference held by the University of Virginia for the niche of web professionals in higher education. Do not let the tag line fool you. A good portion, if not all information, provided by on-the-front-lines professionals easily translates into other domains of business on the web. The various headlining speakers were all top notch.

I had the privilege of going to one workshop and visiting the condensed version of another. Both were wise investments of time. This website, my BHAG website (amptools.net), and O.S.C. (opensource connections) clients will be able to reap the rich benefits from EdUI in the near future.

Workshop Beyond Blah Blah: Creating Great Content for the Web.

This great workshop was created by David Poteet of NewCity, a company Mr. Poteet founded. The workshop was centered around the ‘best of’. Concentrating in areas of creating/writing great content and essentially it’s architecture.

Some of the sources used to put together the workshop were the “Wizard of Ads Trilogy“, Made to Stick by Chip & Dan Heath, and a white paper called “Designing for the Scent of Information” by Jared Spool. Anyone related to or responsible for marketing in your business should/must read the Wizard of Ads trilogy if they have not already.

The notes that I took from the workshop are pretty much in the actual slides. They center around 6 tips for developing and organizing content on your site. That being said: the notes and slides are pale in comparison to actually doing the workshop with David. We actually were lead through the KJ session, writing exercises, and more during the workshop. All of these were invaluable experiences.

Beyond Blah Blah: Creating Great Content for the Web. takeaways

See the notes are at the end of this blog**

Workshop New Insights In Web Standards

Molly E. Holzschlag, former group lead of WaSP, co-author of The Zen of CSS design, and all around free spirit, did the workshop on new insights in web standards. The focus here was definitely on HTML5. The results of even the condensed workshop was eye opening.

Unfortunately, I was only able to see the condensed 2nd day version of this workshop. I generally keep tabs on emerging software technology, HTML 5 and CSS 3 being a few of those. I even read W3C specs, which read like legal documents on a good day.

The opportunity of getting the word of mouth version from someone like Molly, saves me a few headaches and hours of reading. Plus gaining another perspective from someone never hurts.

New Insights In Web Standards Takeaways

• HTML 5 is an application markup language.
• HTML 5 is here (partially). Google Wave is an HTML 5 application.
• Backwards compatibility on the web is a must. (however this should be pushed more onto the browsers supporting old documents, not developers/designers)
• The web means open standards, HTML 5 is pushing that, with forcing browsers to provide things like video and audio codecs, animation, etc.
• First html spec that all browser vendors are behind, which is almost scary.
• XHTML 2.0 and its w3 group is gone at the end of this year, no more xhtml. yes. i’m serious.
• XHTML is considered to be a failure.
• IE still slowing down the web. (Well we’ve know this for years, but it might be wise for everyone to charge extra to clients who require IE 6 compatibility or just render plain white document style content to IE 6 users).
• HTML 5 will come in 2 flavors SGML/HTML syntax & XML.
• Opera has the lead on HTML 5 completion, including web forms 2.0 at the moment.
• Javascript is the glue of the web. (fellow Javascript developers, can we say job security?)
• Designers who work CSS and HTML, will now have to be pseudo developers with HTML 5. For Hybrids like me who can do both, that is not a big deal. However being able to do design and development is a rarity. So this will place a burden on many who see themselves as designers.

My Notes from David Poteet’s workshop**

1. Give them what they want.
   1. “people come to your web site running”
   2. what are you audience’s key goals.
      1. decide what is important.
      2. take away choices where i do not need them.
      3. make choices clear & distinct.
   3. how do you know what they’re looking for?
      1. listen to them.
         1. interviews & focus groups.
         2. social media sites, blogs, forums.
         3. search logs.
         4. mental models.
         5. carewords survey.
         6. KJ Session.
2. Use words that smell like goals.
   1. Readers are like bees
      1. • people hunt for information like bees seeking nectar or hounds on the trail of a fox.
      2. “Scent” or “Trigger” words
         1. What worlds would be in someone’s mind if they were pursuing a particular goal?
      • information Scent Theory
   2. What they don’t do
      1. read left to right, top to bottom.
      2. look at all the options and choose the best one.
      3. Instead, they SCAN and SATISFICE.
   3. Write for scent
      1. each link needs to have a strong “scent for the content that lies beyond it.”
      2. 5-7 words are optimal.
      3. Users expect each click to lead to information that is more specific.
      4. when users click on triggers words, they expect to see those words on the next page.
      5. Don’t let clever kill clear. Trigger words need to be readily understandable
      6. Users search when they can’t find the words on the page.
   4. Am I in the right place? Are your credible?, where can i go from here?
3. Write “visually.”
   1. Do they ever read?
      1. yes, when they get to the content they’re looking for.
      2. % of the story read by format:
         1. 75% o
   2. Shorter sentences and short paragraphs
      1. in most cases not more than 50 words per paragraph
      2. one sentence paragraph is ok
      3. So are fragments.
   3. Lots of headings/sub headings.
   4. Using Images
      1. User pictures that mean something on context
      2. Use icons if meaningful.
   5. Meet users’ expectations for visual formats, for example:
      1. address
      2. game stores
   6. Use lists
   7. Use tables. collage mural
      1. data compare
      2. cross reference
      3. options
4. Show don’t tell.
   1. give sensory details and substantive facts.
   2. let them come to their own conclusions.
   3. They’ll realize it with greater conviction.
5. Not everyone thinks like you.
   1. Write for temperaments
      1. four temperaments
      2. Guardian(sj) idealist(nf), artisan(sp), rational(nt)
      3. Methodical, humanistic, spontaneous, competitive.
   2. Methodical
      1. details
      2. fine print
      3. how does it work
   3. spontaneous
      1. quickly
      2. superior
      3. customize your product/service
      4. narrow your choice
      5. enjoy life more?
   4. Humanistic
      1. How will the product make you feel
      2. who uses your product service
      3. who are you, let me see bios
      4. what will it feel like to work with you
      5. what experience other have with you?
      6. Can I trust you?
      7. What are you values?
      8. How will this help me strengthen relationships?
   5. Competitive
      1. What are you competitive advantages?
      2. Why are you superior choice.
6. Say something they’ll remember (and care about)
   1. Left Brain vs Right Brain
      • logical vs intuitive
      • Sequential vs Chaotic
      • Objective vs Subjective
      • Analytical vs Holistic
      • Right or Wrong vs Likes or Dislikes.
      • Grammar & Vocabulary vs Intonation & Accentuation
      • Exact Numeric Computation vs Approximates, Estimates
      • Tempo, tone, & interval vs Music
   2. Implications
      1. Intellect and Emotion are partners who do not speak the same language. The intellect finds logic to justify what the emotions have decided. Win the hearts of the people.
      2. Keys to the emerald city
         1. storytelling
         2. the unexpected
         3. verbs
         4. poetic meter
         5. humor
         6. leave something to the imagination
      3. Storytelling
         1. we are hardwired to remember stories.
         2. Adrenaline is the biochemical adhesive that turns short term memories into long-term memories.
         3. Stores are a great way to both SHOW an idea and engage the reader mentally and emotionally, resulting in:
            1. transfer to long-term memory.
            2. Persuasion / conviction that something is true.
            3. motivation to act
         4. Who is your story about?
         5. simple
         6. unexpected
         7. concrete
         8. credible
         9. emotional
         10. stories
             1. the sooner you can put a verb in the better.
             2. put words to music.
                1. music enters through Right Brain, bypassing Broca entirely.
                2. Poetry allows us to put music to words in our minds.
         11. What do you remember?

You might be aware of it’s existence, even if only on a subconscience level. It might even be a scary thought that Software Cults exist or worse that you could be a part of one. Whether it’s political, social, religious or even software related, people tend to cling to their opinions, beliefs no matter how illogical they are at times. Not only that, they sometimes fail to see how annoying or how dangerous being blindly overly passionate coercion of others can be. The point of this blog is to point out how people get religiously caught up in software and that can negatively impact a product, a person’s image, business value, and the bottom line.

Software Zealots

You have probably run into them or perhaps you are one. They are not technology evangelists or experts who know the ins or outs of a certain hardware/software and hired to sell the product, they are the nutcases, overly righteous zealots for their software cause. Beware of having your own original opinion or preference around these people, especially if it differs from their own opinion, it can be detrimental. They spout company rhetoric like it is sacred text and they will spend hours and loose days suffering in pain to fix their beloved software and not speak a word against it.

They either constantly build up the image of their beloved software or tear up anything that isn’t up to their understanding or standards. It comes in many forms, they detest pieces of software where its websites like myspace, facebook, linked-in,  or software like aim, twitter, wordpress, expression-engine, etc. Or they highly praise their software and then mock others in a mighty python like fashion.

One of the bigger groups that tend to stray into this area, especially in Charlottesville, are Mac Users. “You never have to reboot a mac”. “Macs are easier to use than windows/linux”. “Macs are more secure”. While I can tear 90% of a mac’s zealots comments to shreds, its not worth the waste of thought or life. However I would like to point out the negative affects. For me personally, I spent 4 years in a mac lab so I know how to use a mac (esp after living on photoshop, cool edit pro, Quark express, etc). However, I use a pc because I tend to develop using C#/Ruby/Javascript and I like to use visual studio when possible. It is a preference. But every time a zealot makes a serious snide remark against anything non-mac, my opinion and my trust in their judgement and ability to logically weigh things drops tremendously. Their value and ability to make the right decision for clients rather than themselves dramatically falls short after seeing something like this.

In light of the above I’ll probably never buy a mac for 2 key reasons at the moment. (but hey apple if you want to buy me one, i’ll use it to make screen casts).

1. I can’t run OSX on virtual box while running windows/linux as the host, not only is it not currently possible, its also illegal.
2. The remarks that typically come from overly zealous fans of mac have left a bitter taste and venomous vibe, that I do not want to ever really be associated with them. (which is the opposite of affect of what some zealots hope to accomplish).

But extreme occult like fandom isn’t the only place where strong belief systems and software intersect. Legality of software, source code, languages, tools, architechture, software theory and strong opinions often cause heated discussions, debate, even split in software teams or even cost tax payers huge sums of money because someone let personal preference or pride rein where it should have let logic prevail. It is actually interesting to see how much of human emotion and systems of beliefs still comes into play even among geeks and programmers. You would think people of this nature would have more detachment from these things that hold only so much meaning in life.

Prejudice against Software due to it’s Company

An example of recent biased behavior from a legality/source code sense, thats been making public waves is Richard Stallman’s stance against Mono. Microsoft is a corporation out to make money (obviously), they can no longer afford to battle opensource software, they have to embrace it. In fact, they’ve launched sites codeplex, port 25 and helped Mono development moonlight so that they could bring silverlight to the linux platform and released C# and CLI under the community promise. They would stand to lose and enrage their developer base at this point should Microsoft decided to ever go back to trying to destroy Open Sourced software. Also with such markets as Software as a Service, Operating in the Cloud, and Selling Advertising at stake, they don’t have the time or resources to waste on it. Granted this shift has probably cause heartache to hardcore proprietary ms fans of old. oh well. However Stallman still lives in a world where the evil empire patiently waits to spring its trap and forever dominate software so that it can never be free.

Software Language (This translation must be Gospel)

People get in a habit of saying this language beats all. But you know, I just don’t see ruby beating out Java in building a performance search tool like lucene. I don’t see .Net beating out Java in available open source projects (though .net has come along way). I don’t seeing Java beating out .Net or Mono for building user friend thick client desktop applications. Each tool or language has it’s uses, which should be considered depending on the business value and the goals of the company, not what the developer prefers. Like Twitter using Scala, its not entirely replacing the rails application, but it is using Scala to help scale twitter, cause its compiled into byte code and runs faster. It has business value and its using the tool for its particular strengths for certain part of the whole. Though you can’t beat using ruby and rails for prototyping a website quickly.

Free Software/Tools, (the best things in life are free)

If you believe that, you obviously skipped economics in college or missed out on the discussion of opportunity cost. Paying $200 for a piece of software that will save you hours of work during a project or daily will actually having a higher return on investment in opening up time which is a valuable commodity. So many people are stuck on the concept of free they don’t realize free is costing them precious time of their lives they could be doing something else more important. So weight the actual cost of time, efficiency, vs the importances of free software tools that don’t work as well or free open source solutions when you can buy source code that has a better performance. Also weigh the converse.

Software Commandments

Some software commandments to maul over in your moments of free thought (thats if you can think for yourself).

1. thou shalt not slander thy neighbors preference in software/hardware.
2. thou shalt not force a new language dependency on a project, if it does not provide business value. i.e. a ruby script in otherwise totally php project.
3. thou shalt not cost tax payers or businesses extra money just because you like a certain os or language.
4. thou shalt detach software predjuice for your clients well being.
5. thou shalt weight opportunity cost and business value before ruling out open source or properitary software.
6. thou shalt only use logic when comparing technology versus spouting marketing proproganda unless you just want to look stupid (cough ie cough)….
7. thou shalt get a life.
8. thou shalt take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceedest on to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it. Amen

Any disregards for these commands and thou shalt be forced to build a giant gundam without food or sleep within 30 days or sent to the rain forest without your iphone, mac, pc, palm pilot, black berry, etc for a year.

any commandments that should be added? thoughts?

Every year people tend to spend the first month or two making promises they are going to break a few moments, maybe weeks later.  We tend to lack resolve and have seasonal habits.  We act nicer in December to our fellow man (woman), unless it comes to taking the last tickle-me elmo off the shelf, then its every person for themselves.  We pull out the big grill  that you probably won’t use for the rest of the summer for labor day weekend that you got for xmas to outshine your neighbor’s 2k stainless steal beast he got the year before, all the while making tim the tool man tailor grunts while cooking, .  And of course, its January, its time for a new diet fad (this year it seems to be acri berry diets that boasts you don’t need to really diet or exercise, all thanks to Opera Winfrey having a show about the most nutritional foods with acri berry being #1).

But I digress.  However I do have some suggestions for the new year because more than likely people are more open to ideas this time of year and hopefully maybe one or two will stick, thereby making your life that much more productive and a little easier, or fun.

Optimize the way you work on a pc, Pimp your desktop.

You don’t need to be a power user like on linux or have to buy a mac to have an intuitive and shiny UI (User Interface, in this case, desktop) to be productive. Its taken me some time, but I’ve finally found the tools that really help clean up the desktop. 

First off clean up your desktop, its rare that you really need those icons, especially if you have windows vista with the new start menu. If you like the mac’s quicksilver application, but like me, tend to work on a windows os, you can try launchy, skylight, or slickrun. Right now I prefer skylight since its written using .NET WPF and its extendable.  With Alt + Spacebar, the window appears and you can quickly find whatever program you want. 

Take time to find a desktop wall paper you like, deviant art is good place to start.  People in general tend to enjoy working with things that are appealing to eye. Everyone has different tastes and different styles of work flow. Experiment not only with the wall paper, but also where the taskbar is placed and what toolbars are shown, etc.  Also play with the visual styles of windows as well. Right now I tend to like the vista glass with a lil black in it.  If you have xp, you can get vista glass.  

Add lifehacker.com to your RSS feed, they always have some pretty nifty desktop ideas, tools, and even lists of pimped/tricked out desktops, and just good productivity tips in general. 

If you need icons or if you like the Mac’s Dock, give rocket dock a try, its pretty customizable and you can replace the icons for whatever your trying to open. 

Gadgets.  If you have windows vista, you can try the gallery for finding some halfway useful gadgets. If you’re using xp or want better gadgets on vista you can try yahoo widgets or google gadgets.  Though gadgets are a cool desktop concept, they have really yet to take off with usefulness or high end eye candy, but you might find one or two to meet your needs.

Practical websites

Live Mocha – This is actually social networking language learning website that really has nothing to do with coffee other than the colors of the website. Its a decent learning tool and not to mention a good way of finding pen pals or other people interested in the same languages that you can practice with.

Live Strong – Calorie Counter that has tons of foods, and exercises taken into account? check. Must have information on the latest diet fads?  check. Must have it as an IPhone or ITouch application? check.  Must be a social network so you don’t feel alone… loser, i mean check.

Mint – looking for a good online free way to manage/budget/invest your money with a ton of awesome tools and that you can take with you on your IPhone or Itouch, then mint.com is the place for you

Life Hacker – need ways to be productive, find new gadgets that are worth the money, or just like to learn new ways of doing things…

Mozy – online data/documents/files backup that is unlimited for just 5$ a month isn’t bad, especially if you’re the tech geek for your family. If they have under 2 gigs of stuff, its free.

Remember the milk – Into the GTD (getting things done) way of doing things? Then check out remember the milk for your task lists. They also provide google gears, iphone application, gadgets and many other ways of entering and keeping track of your tasks. 

Doing dot .net?

Pimp your color themes…    Visual Studio Color Themes and Is your IDE hot or not?

T4 (Text Template Transformation Toolkit) – Visual Studio has code generation that has been there for while under the covers, not really used, but very useful.  Why are people spending money on code gen tools when you already spent a fortune on visual studio and comes with this gem?

Gallio – The one stop shop for running your unit tests and it comes packages with the killer mbunit 3.0. 

Moq – need an mock library that doesn’t suck, isn’t confusing and uses lambda? then take a look moq (mock you). 

Test Driven .net – I’ve been using this on my opensource project.  This is one of the very few add ons that I install for visual studio. It lets you run tests, code coverage reports and other nifty things right inside of Visual Studio. A time saver.

Reflector – Red gate now owns and updates reflector, but its still free, want to look at the source code for a dll, check this out.

Linqpad – need to write some linq queries and want to make sure they execute correctly, check out linqpad.

General Coding.

E-Texteditor – The power of text mate on windows.  This is pretty my replacement of note pad.  If you have mac font envy, you can grab monaco for windows. Or you can just use Consolas.

Stylizer – css styling for ajax applications, even with tools like firebug, can be a pain, cause that doesn’t exactly help you with IE and it doesn’t always help with doing heavy ajax applications with pops up and such. Enter stylizer (also coming to macs soon), which lets you style with a real time preview of how it would show in the actual browser (IE and firefox). 

FTP

winscp – you can ftp down, edit in e-texteditor and ftp the file right back when you save changes to the file.  nifty. 

filezilla – slick fast opensource ftp client and server. 

Instant Messenger?

pidgin – all your fav instant messengers and even ones you don’t know wrapped into one program.  

skype – voip, phone calls, sms texts, chats.  Definitely the professional grade instant messenger/ communications program. calls are even encrypted.

meebo – you online web page instant messaging client, in case your away and can’t download a client. 

Challenge.

Anything that will help you to be more productive always costs something. It could be money, but most of the time, its costs time. But invest some time now that might reap huge benefits later.  So I challenge you to take some time, get organized, find new efficient ways of doing things that fit your way of life and if you know of anything, programs or otherwise, feel free to add those in the comments below.

Typically speaking in the past, critics would have laughed or promptly smashed any one who supported the “evil empire” in any way, shape, or form.  However, times change and the pendulum swings.  Thanks to people like Scott GU,  there has been much change to how Microsoft is doing development and relating to developers who work on their platform.  Granted its not perfect or without incident, but there is change from within the evil empire.

On the skirts of the empires domain, there has been for some time, open source projects that really have been the cornerstone and often taken for granted to daily development.  NUnit, NDoc, NAnt, Log4Net, NHibernate, Spring.Net, just to name a few projects that have really helped .net development community in general.

However, in the last couple of years, the reach out to developers of .Net who use opensource projects, software, tools, etc, has increased, with the likes of web sites like CodePlex and Port 25, which were not only created, but constantly improved upon and continued to be improved upon. CodePlex now supports SVN as a code repository.  Not only that in the last year or so; Microsoft has actually been helping Mono (which is an open source project that helps bridge .net to work on other platforms like linux or mac) with its adoption of Sliverlight, called moonlight.  Microsoft has even released their own shared/open source licenses like Ms-PL to the community.

(more…)

3 years later and it never ceases to amaze me with how many surprises SQL Express comes with when you try to install it on a windows 2003 server for whatever reason.  So today when I was playing the role of “Server Admin” and attempting to install SQL Express, I ran into a couple of issues.

The first one was

The SQL Server System Configuration Checker cannot be executed due to WMI configuration on the machine <mymachine> Error:2147749896 (0×80041008)

So after the initial, “why, God, why?????”, I found this nugget off of google. It’s basically a command script that goes through and fixes possible errors for the WMI configuration (FIXWMI.CMD).  So after running this, I could finally get SQL Express installing, well, sort of. 

Evidently SQL Express sometimes has issues installing, when it installs itself in “stealth” mode which is how it installs when you run the “SQLEXPRE32.EXE” installer.

SQLexpress fails with the error: An installation package for the product Microsoft SQL Server Native Client cannot be found. Try the installation again using a valid copy of the installation package ‘sqlncli.msi’

So to get around this, you need to create a temp folder where ever your evil server admin heart desires. I chose to be spontaneous and created: “c:\temp\sql”.   Then you need to open a command line and change the directory to where ever you have the file “SQLEXPRES32.EXE” kept and run the following command:

$> SQLEXPRES32.EXE /x:c:\temp\sql

This will unpack everything into that folder.  You should now have a “c:\temp\sql\Setup” folder, inside of which is a file/msi called … (drum roll), “sqlncli.msi”. Double click on that msi file and run “repair”.  After that rerun the “SQLEXPRES32.EXE” and all should be golden. 

This blog was sponsored by the letter S and number 5 and does not imply warranties of any kind, use at your own risk, the same kind that you take when you open up regedit and begin mutilating various keys and values. 

PHP was one of the first languages that I learned when web design was my primary focus as a career. It seemed to be simple with plenty of examples on how to use it as well as plenty of code to grab to use on the fly in order to get the job done so that I could concentrate on what I loved the most, doing design. However along the way, I somehow got sucked into the programmer paradigm and ended up being a professional code monkey.

As such, my exposure to quite a few other languages, features, and coding paradigms have drastically increased as I’m a sucker for new technology and things of the geekified nature minus star trek, dungeons & dragons, and obsessions with super models. Now PHP seems to be more of a thorn in my side as a programmer than anything. Since I do have working knowledge of the language, especially its Object Oriented Features, magic methods, its various editors, extensions, and its limitations and quirks, I tend to get drawn into PHP projects. Working on a PHP project makes me long for a good rails or asp.net project because PHP just makes me feel dirty as a programmer.

PHP has gone the way of PERL: somewhat usable, a few good features and scripts, but stagnating with its ability to push the language itself to compete with other modern languages.

So what makes PHP so bad to work with? (more…)

Let’s get crazy for a moment and declare the iPod touch the New Breed of PDA, a personal digital assistant, not to be confused with public display of affection, even though there are few zealous Apple proponents who might blend the two for their obsession with Apple devices. The iPod touch or iTouch is essentially the iPhone, minus the phone and things like Edge, but keeping the cool touch screen and allowing for connectivity not just through iTunes, but Wi-Fi as well. With the iTouch having the strength of the new iPhone SDK, the tech savvy jailbreak applications ranging from NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) emulators to Apollo Im, and even possible enterprise support similar to its cousin the iPhone, like syncing with a Microsoft Exchange Server; what is to prevent this extendable portable music player from becoming a full blown PDA device?

(more…)