August 2005 - Posts
Seen
this from Kevin Kline?
We went back and forth along with a few others this morning looking at
the many places, including a book, that Rahul Sharma plagiarized. Seems
like the only things he can write are short pieces that don't contain
more than a paragraph of prose.
I'm annoyed, actually that doesn't cover it. As an author, I'm pissed!
I work hard to write things and it takes time and effort. And having
someone rip off my content and take credit for it is amazing.
I've contacted Tom Rizzo at Microsoft about this and included a few SQL
Server MVPs in the discussion. A public announcement and outing needs
to be made and will be coming on the site.
In the meantime, don't buy Sharma's book:
Microsoft SQL Server 2000: A Guide to Enhancements and New Features
It's got stuff ripped directly from TechNet in it. Better yet, send them to SQLServerCentral.com and we'll burn them.
Grr, it's annoying, but it's a good thing.
After the ASP.NET errors, I ordered memory a few days ago from
Crucial.com. They had a decent deal, $184 for 1GB, but they've been
good to me, so I'll stay loyal. $10 or $20 isn't worth it. So they send
a message back late Friday that says the billing address is wrong. We
have a company address, but the company card is on a different one. So
I change that and then get a note today that the shipping address is
different than the billing address. I used a company card for SSC so I
wasn't floating money, which I hate doing. So they can't ship.
That's annoying. So I have to try and track things down with the bank,
get my address added, and then get memory that I can drop into the
server.
In the meantime, I did some searching for potential ways to
troubleshoot ASP.NET stuff, but most of it is written for IIS6 (W2K3),
not W2K. So I'm digging through 90 Google results that all link to the
same two whitepapers from MS or to threads that are nonsensical and not
related.
There's an interesting series about technology in schools in Milwaukee
(
part
1,
part
2, and
part
3) and it inspired me to an edditorial as well as some
thinking about the subject. Actually the <a
href="http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/23/0032216&tid=146&tid=103">discussion
on Slashdot</a> probably got me more inspired.
Technology in schools is something that I've thought was a great idea
for a long time. A lot of that comes from my high school times where I
had a computer at home (Apple II knockoff) and had to share time at
school for a CS class, which was less than fun. In college I studied
computers and always wished that I could have a laptop, a dream that
came somewhat true in graduate work at ODU. I worked for the power
company and got a laptop from them to use for remote work. So I took it
to class and the Norton Editor, running in DOS was how I took notes in
quite a few classes. I've also got two kids in public school, and I've
seen a little of how computers are used there as well as at home for
assignments.
And I've kind of changed my tune. I'm not sure that computers are a
great idea in school, at least for most tasks. Granted as a
technologist, computers rules lots of my life and I use them everyday.
Actually my job, as a web publisher in a virtual company, wouldn't be
possible without computers. I definitely type more than I write in many
cases. If you've ever gotten a handwritten note from me, you might
argue that this is a good thing.
A computer is a tool. That's all, like a phone, and while it does help
you complete some tasks quicker, it isn't the end all be all in terms
of moving through life and learning things. In schools I think there
are times and places where computers are handy and they help out. My
oldest was in the Cherry Creek middle school system in Colorado and
every teacher had a computer in their room. The ability for them to
take attendence, enter grades and assignments, and communicate with
parents I thought was a fantastic use of technology. I think that
students can benefit from using computers to type papers, especially as
working with manual typewriters and white out isn't a skill they should
need in the future.
But writing is a skill and I don't think my 2nd grader should be
getting out of it. I think learning to write, take notes, handle the
listening and writing at the same time is a great skill. Language is an
important part of his education and I think computers can abstract us
away from language with shorthands and the lack of the imprinting that
occurs when you write things down.
I do think my 7 year old should be exposed to computers as their use in
terms of email, writing essays, etc. is pervasive. Checking onto a
plane and applying for a job at your local retailer all seem to require
some computer skill these days and that's good. But the computer in
primary school, probably at least through 4th or 5th grade is a helping
tool, limited to perhaps some basic testing intrigued and might want to
do some programming, but they are the vast minority. For those kids
they might get a laptop or get the opportunity, but for most kids I
think the basics of education are important.
I do think somewhere about the time middle school starts, 5th grade
perhaps, kids should get some keyboarding instruction and start to
learn to write essays on the computer. However, they still should
perform library research and learn to write rough drafts. Those skills
are important. Part of them is also the mistake making process. If you
know that writing the wrong thing results in a redo or an effort to
erase and correct, you slow down a bit and think a bit more. It's only
natural and that's a skill in an of itself.
School is not the place for super efficiency and results. It's a place
to make mistakes, try things out, and teach yourself a little about
what works for you.
I do think that simulations to explain concepts, like Chemistry, math,
biology, can be done better on computers. And having a teacher show
those is a nice use of technology, but I don't think that kids should
be thinking that the Web is the answer for everything because there is
too much unvetted information. Nor should they be spending vast amounts
of time on email and IM. We have too much of that as adults, myself as
guilty as anyone, and middle school is still the time to be interacting
face to face with friends. It's also the time that learning you need to
wait until school is out or homework is done before spending time with
friends is something parents should control. Allowing someone to work
at the comptuer with IM and email available is a bad idea. Kids will
get enough of that later. A little patience won't kill them.
Technology in both middle school and high school can be a great asset.
I'm not sure if Powerpoint presenations are better than the hand
created ones I had to do, but testing could be done on the computer in
quite a few subjects. Anything with an essay could be put onto a
computer, perhaps a few computer testing labs that are shared by all
teachers and scheduled to allow every student to take an online test.
It would make things easier for teachers to grade and eliminate the
sloppiness that sometimes occurs, but you'd have the whole
I-can't-type-fast-enough problem from some people. And if the computers
were down then you'd have to have a fallback plan.
The more and more I read about this the less I'm convinced that
computers help. They can assist teachers, and I do like that kids are
sometimes shunted to a computer while the teacher works with others
because these days the teacher-kid ratios are not great. But that
requires and needs some education and research on how and when to
incorporate the comptuer into the lesson. Not as a babysitter, but as a
way to provide additional education that a teacher is too busy to
provide.
We had a major out of memory error on ASP.NET this morning and I woke
up to a few dozen messages from concerned people about the errors in
the forums.
Grrrrr. A quick reboot solved the problem an IIS restart didn't. I knew
that there were major improvements in the restarting of a site in IIS
6.0, but our web is running 5.0 on W2K. So I rebooted rather than try
to solve it. I could see that of my 1.3GB of RAM in the web server over
500MB was eaten up by ASP.NET.
It's something I need to research and also order more memory. It's a
DELL that takes 3 banks of 3 with 2 banks full, so I'm likely shooting
for another 2GB to add. Not cheap :(
The
top ten MS blogs were
listed in Redmond magazine and two were SQL Server guys. I do get quite
a few things from Matt Stephens and I can see him as #2, but Tom Rizzo
as #5? I guess he blogs about as much as most others, but he posts
pretty rarely from my perspective, even more rare than I here.
the more I'm sure that I'm getting dumber with SQL Server.
This week I've been working on some QODs based on SQL Server 2005. I've
used some of the articles, white papers, and blog postings that I've
been reading lately to learn a few things about the new features. And
so I fire up my June CTP to do some testing and ensure that the code
compiles and works. Hopefully this will cut down the complaints in the
QOD forums.
But as I work through the different areas, getting 2-3 questions from
each, I'm amazed at how much stuff has changed and how much new stuff
there is in the product. It seems like it grew exponentially whereas
2000 seemed like a point release from 7, which is originally was. This
is a new beast and if you're looking at moving to it, there's some
testing to be done.
Not that things won't work the same that you used in 2000, but you
might have third party products, tools, add-ins, etc that need testing.
I know we've been hoping to get in some testing on our search
component, but time just gets away from me. Maybe next week :)
I scan about 30 or 40 blogs these days, all from various SQL Server
people around the globe, and enter the SQL Server related and
interesting items into each week's Database Daily newsletter. Actually
they're added throughout the week when I see them.
However, I kept forgetting to scan our own blogs and missed adding Adam
Machanic's great TSQL post. It's up there now and also a few posts
before this one.
I got asked by someone to technically review their SQL Server 2005
book, so I'm betting that there will be lots of opportunties to learn a
few things as I test code and work with the June CTP in the near future.
I also learned a few things with the September magazine, which focuses
on High Availability in SQL Server. Database snapshots, which are
incredibly easy to use to recover your db to a point in time, are one
article. There's also mirroring, clustering, and partitioning in there.
The snapshot thing is interesting. It makes a copy of changed pages
only, so queries against tables that haven't changed since the snapshot
was created run against the original database. Not such a good idea for
large tables to use this as a development environment. James
Lukehoelter wrote the article and one of his suggestions was to combine
mirroring on another server and then running a snapshot off of that. An
interesting unique solution.