The past few days, I have been playing around with mirroring on SQL Server. Even though there is a GUI to guide you through setup, it isn’t that easy until you understand a few things. I won’t go into details since there are tons of great resources to help setting up mirroring, I will just point you towards some of those resources. The step-by-step guide - This has most of the info you need for mirroring, but it is way too long. »
My dad was early adopter of webcams. I was not. Looking back on it, he understood their power to bring people together that aren’t geographically close at all. During that time, he experienced the pain of bad internet connections, terrible drivers, and installation hell. I waited until all that disappeared. I bought the Quickcam Pro for Notebooks because I have an increasingly growing number of people I want to talk to that aren’t anywhere close to me. »
I use Noteworthy Webmail all day, every day. Yes I work for Mailtrust. Yes I coded on the Webmail team for a while. But that doesn’t change the fact I love the webmail interface. Yesterday, I got back to my desk after a meeting and started attacking the 30 emails that had accumulated during that time. After reading through them, the next step was deleting because I use my Inbox like a task list. »
Refactoring to Patterns provides some of the glue that Design Patterns (GoF) and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (PoEAA is missing. The concept of the book is very simple: to provide examples of how to use design patterns to refactor code. A side product of this is the reader should really have an understanding of the two books previously mentioned before reading this book. If GoF and PoEAA is the bible, then Refactoring to Patterns is the Sunday school teacher. »
The product backlog is one of the hardest parts of using an Agile process in my opinion. It quickly becomes a daunting list of tasks that can be unmanageable. What I hate most is the subjectivity of picking what items should be worked on. How do you really weigh what it is important and what isn’t? Mike Cohn gave a sweet presentation on just this topic. Listen up for Kano analysis, which I think is the simplest and probably most powerful way to weigh new features. »
I was browsing Codeplex and found the Touchless SDK and video. Looks freaking awesome. Definitely adding to my ever-growing list of things to play with. Think anyone wants a touchless email application? Doubt it, but I have seen worse email applications. »
Three weeks since I purchased it, and a broken scroll wheel. My Amazon review has changed from 5 stars to 2 stars. I would not recommend this mouse to a friend. Back to Logitech mice for me. And I was so happy when I got this mouse… I guess aesthetics only go so far when a device’s functionality is what really matters. »
I started playing around Amazon EC2 today. After hearing cloud this and cloud that all day long for the past few months, I decided to get some experience with cloud computing myself. Unfortunately, Amazon Web Services aren’t as casual user friendly as I had hoped. Here are just a few thoughts on EC2 after 24 hours of use. Elasticfox to the rescue. Elasticfox is a must have for the trial EC2 user. »
F2 = Double click on cell Hopefully this can help everyone out that hates using the mouse. »
Backing up a SQL Server database and restoring it to another server is a common operation done for reporting, testing, or development. When restoring on a different machine, a common problem is the login principals don’t actually correlate to the restored database users. This is because they are linked by an SID. This SID isn’t the user name, its some hash value, probably a GUID. The problem is fully described in this article. »