Random writings, thoughts, tools, and ideas....

Found this very true. Reposted from Noah Coad's blog: A good friend will tell you what you want to hear. A true friend will always tell the truth. A good friend seeks to talk with you about your problems. A true friend seeks to help you with your problems. A good friend will be there for you all through school. A true friend will be there till the day you die. A good friend will bail you out of prison. A true friend will be sitting next to you saying "damn that was fun!". A good friend brings a bottle of wine to your party. A true friend comes early to help you cook and stays late to help you clean. A good friend hates it when you call after they've gone to bed. A true friend asks you why you took so long to call. A good friend wonders about your romantic history. A true friend could blackmail you with it. A good friend thinks the friendship is over when you have an argument. A true friend calls you after you had a fight. A good friend, when visiting, acts like a guest. A true friend opens your refrigerator and helps himself. A good friend has never seen you cry. A true friend has shoulders soggy from your tears. A good friend doesn't know your parents' first names. A true friend has their phone numbers in his address book. A good friend expects you to always be there for them. A true friend expects to always be there for you. A good friend is someone you enjoy hanging out with. A [true] friend is someone you need. (Neil Diamond, Heartlight)

So if you are bored and have 5min to spare you can run through the which office application are you quiz. I ended up being Excel...go figure?!

I ended up typing this over MSN to a few people today (don't ask why) and I thought this is entirely possible and amazingly easy to customize MSCRM to do this (hell half a days work at most). The sales vibe is partly inspired by the Microsoft CRM Demo Days happening between the 13th and 15th Feb at Village Walk which we are involved in. I haven't posted this to the Information Worker blog since some people may not appriate my style of humour. New MSCRM ad: Are you a hitman, assassin, or garden variety serial killer? Do you spend too much time trying to plan murders? Do you have problems identifing the right match of critiea for your next murder? Well fear no more, with MSCRM 3.0 you can easily track all your potential victums with details specific to each of them and then using the powerful scheduling system easily plan that murder to be home in time to watch Friends or wash your mother. And wait, if you order in the next 15min we will preload your MSCRM installation with all your family members details!!! Order now!

You know what is really great about SharePoint 2007 (which www.informationworker.co.za runs on) vs Drupal which this site runs on? I can type my content up in Word 2007 or copy and past from Outlook to Word 2007 and publish directly (Office button -> Publish -> Blog) and I get full rich text editing on it, the ability to save it and work on it later, the ability to spell check. Here I need to login to the site, navigate to create content, navigate to create blog and type away. If I need to do a link I need to the <a href> tags (hell to get that to appear I had to &lt; to the the angle brackets). The expierence is just that much better.

I know there are add-ons for Drupal that give me rich editing but that requires more work to install them :(

I have seen some users post that it is possible to use Word 2007 to publish to Drupal, but for the life of me I can not figure out how to. There is no compatible format listed in the blog providers or under other.

Once again SharePoint 2007 + Word 2007 means the user does not need to know about any of the things like Drupal modules or special blog providers. It is simplier, better (?), faster ;)

What is this new and very powerful download for BI with MSCRM? Well you can find out more on my Information Worker blog.

About a week ago I posted about how the logic at my hosting provider Hetzner was flawed in regards to their upgrade policy and how it seems like a punishment to want to pay more. Well I emailed them, and got recommended to send an email to the customer services manager, so I did that one morning. Later that day I got a phone call from a very happy sounding woman (sorry I can't remember her name) saying she is the customer services manager and she is investigating and asking if it is ok to respond the following day.
The next day, no call but I did get an email from Hans Wencke who is the managing director.

I honestly was shocked, his email was great. He explained why the system is the way it is (makes complete logical sense now) and also outlined a plan for a review of the policy since changes have been made to their systems since the policy was originally made. Finally he offered my upgrade for free :)

This is one of the best service expierences I have ever had!

Mark Seemann has started a vote for the introduction of sets into the BCL. Funny enough I have not thought about them since the Delphi days and got on using generics in .Net and some extra items tacked on the top, but now that Mark has brought it up I can think of dozens of places in code this would have been useful. For more details on this view Mark's post or if somehow I have convinced you you can go and vote directly.

So the huy32.sys was not removed by Nod32 (what was removed then?! More reason to kill this XP installation and install Vista), so I started searching again and found a great post which refers to a nice application which runs very quickly, does two reboots and provides a report. The report clearly stated it found the huy32.sys and removed it :) We shall see if this is the end of saga...

So my work machine just magically started rebooting recently, great fun. Big project + tight deadlines + all source code on my machine + random blue screens = me losing my mind in panic

Today I actually read the blue screen of death out of deperation, had an odd line in it: system:huy32.sys

After a few searches I found out this precious little file (which is well hidden thanks to the ":") is part of a trojen. YEAH!! Like I don't have enough to think about.
The current supplied anti-virus at work is "Office Scan" which I would have thought would pick it up. I think I know why it is not (virus definations aren't 100% fresh right now, or maybe it's just crap). So after a call to Nic-Nap (the trusty office admin) to get the admin password for the Office Scan anti-virus, an uninstall of Office Scan and an install of the 30 day trial of Nod32 and a reboot. Nod32 picked it up, deleted it and the blue screen hasn't returned.....yet ;)

UPDATE: See the followup for more information on the return of the BSOD

Ok, I thought PowerShell was bad, I take it all back. It's not that bad, atleast what it is called is what it promises (a powerful shell). So in powershell today I ran this: Get-WmiObject -query "SELECT NetConnectionStatus FROM Win32_NetworkAdapter"

The assumption is that PowerShell would connect to WMI (which it did) and return network connection status. It is all lies, LIES!!!!
I have no idea what it did return but it was not the connection status this layman wanted, it is just lots of:
__GENUS : 2
__CLASS : Win32_NetworkAdapter
__SUPERCLASS :
__DYNASTY :
__RELPATH :
__PROPERTY_COUNT : 1
__DERIVATION : {}
__SERVER :
__NAMESPACE :
__PATH :
NetConnectionStatus :

Follow this up with Get-WmiObject 'Win32_NetworkAdapter' which I assume will give me useful network adapter info, which it does give, but it leaves out a little bit of useful info... THE IP ADDRESS! (and the speed but thats a nice to have)

ServiceName : iBcT0201
MACAddress : 02:C0:EE:XX:XX:XX
AdapterType : Ethernet 802.3
DeviceID : 12
Name : iBurst Modem Type02-01
NetworkAddresses :
Speed :

I don't blame powershell for this crazyness, I blame WMI. It promises so much in it's arguments and gives you something completely else.