September 2005 - Posts
We get a referral fee from PASS for each person that registers for the
Summit with the "SSC" source code. It's their way of showing us that
they appreciate our efforts at promoting the conference.
But that fee isn't why we do it. All three of us (Andy, Brian, and
myself) have had a great time at the PASS Summit over the years and see
it as the best SQL Server conference to attend. So last year we made a
decision to blow the entire referral fee on prizes and gifts for
people. We did an
XBOX promotion last year, giving away 7 XBOXes in a late night event that we think went over very well.
So this year we were working on this in March and April, but somewhat
stumped about what to do. With the XBOX 360 not releasing until late
Novemeber, we had to really work on things. We looked at a large game
night, with customized chess or checker sets for everyone, but decided
to go adult, with more mature games.
Like Poker!
So we booked a casino party, and last week I started buying prizes.
It's a little nerve wracking getting ready for the event, hoping
everything goes well, worrying about the prizes being well received,
worrying about the setup and food and everything else. It has been fun
as well, and I am looking forward to giving away some nice prizes.
So we've got our fingers crossed as we go down to the wire, last minute prep, and ironing (NOT!!!) our new Hawaiian shirts!
The
September CTP of SQL Server 2005
is not available and I'm sure lots of people have downloaded it. I
actually grabbed it the night before it was announced, got some
pre-release info :), and got it burned onto a CD. Or I got the
downloaded EXE burned at least.
You see I tried to expand the .EXE and put it on my workstation,
thinking I'd burned the setup to CD and have it ready. However my C:
drive is low on space, down to about 900MB and so when it asked for a
path, I chose the E: drive, which has about 6GB.
And about 10 minutes into the process I got a "not enough space on c:"
message and it failed. And cleaned up, so no files on E:. So I clean
off some space, kill temp files, etc and I'm at about 1.1GB. Same thing
happens, which #@%#$%#$%'d me off and I just burned the image.
I'd held off installing it, however, or at least I held off once I
verified the upgrade from June didn't work. Mostly because I'm tech
reviewing a book and wasn't sure if June or Sept would apply. I got the
news a couple days ago that Sept is fine, so I ran the Build cleanup
wizard and removed SQL Server 2005 and .NET 2.0. Then I tried
installing and got ".NET 2.0 components, beta components, error" and it
failed. I remembered I had VS2005 setup, so I uninstalled that,
rebooted, and tried again.
C'mon guys. No space on the c: drive when I specified another one?
Cleanup and uninstall not working because of some proper order!! These
are rookie mistakes, Windows 3.1 or 954 mistakes. I'm annoyed and
disappointed that this type of stuff is still occurring in MS products.
It makes the Linux guys, for all their craziness with packages and dependencies, look good!
Surprisingly the DELL server showed up late Friday afternoon last week
when I was expecting more of a Wed-Thur delivery this week. It was a
pretty small box, only about 2/3 or so of the length I expected. Since
I'd grabbed an LCD monitor as well I wasn't actually sure if I'd gotten
a monitor or server and had to open the box.
It's a
PowerEdge 750, which is a small 1u server, designed for web farm type environments. We got it from the
Dell Outlet
for a great price. US$1444 for the server, 2.4GHz, 2GB RAM, RAID 1
(2x36GB). A good deal as the cheapest servers there this week are over
$2k! After checking that this was the right box, I put it in the car,
planning on going Mon morning. As usual I got delayed, and that was ok
since the monitor showed up the morning and I took both over yesterday
afternoon.
I opened the boxes, made some room on my shelf and put the monitor in
there. There's a crash cart in the data center with a monitor and
keyboard, but last time I was there it was in use and I couldn't work.
That's annoying, so it's why I grabbed an LCD monitor. So that went in
easy and then I opened the server box and grabbed the rails, checking
to be sure I had right on the right side and same for left. And ...
I figured out relatively quickly that square connectors don't fit into round holes :(
They'd come with the server and I never checked to see about the rails.
DELL servers and racks are square hole by default, while I think most
of the rest of the world is round. No huge deal as I have a couple
servers rack mounted, so I put it on top of one of those. I hooked up
power and was ready for KVM when I realized that I didn't have any more
KVM cables. A few years back when my startup failed I'd lucked into an
8 port KVM and 4 cables that had been sitting in my basement
until we got this site up and running. We've grown to 5 servers
now and I was out of cable. No worries, I took the ones from the KVM
and used them, booting the server and starting setup. Then I was off to
Microcenter for 2 new KVM cables.
I didn't get back last night, but today I hooked things up, called the
firewall guy to get the new server connected, and I'm getting ready for
IIS configuration as I type this.
I setup an announcement for today (Sept 14) that the Sept CTP for SQL
Server 2005 was released and that Database Mirroring is disabled. It's
also got more language support and a few other things.
Apparently, however, my coding skills were a bit challenged. I forgot a
primary rule in working with data, especially outside of SQL Server.
x > "10" does not equal x > 10
I setup a time check based on the current time and a number I was
checking, but I used the first expression, which is a string comparison
expression. So "2", "3", etc. are all > "10". Only "1" would be
less. So the article text got released a little early and hopefully MS
isn't too upset :(
I've gotten so used to working with SQL Server data and I always check
the time values when working with dates. In VBScript, however, it's a
little more complicated. I should have used the CINT() function to
ensure I was comparing a numerical value and then comparing that to a
numeric, 10, not "10".
Bill Gates keynote is on webcast now, grab it and check it out.
Also a hint. Paul Flessner is speaking tomorrow and he always has the
big SQL Server information, so take a look tomorrow for more
information.
I still not sure that this blog service was a great idea, but some of
you seem to like it, so we'll keep it going. Who knows, maybe this will
be the most popular part of the site one day :)
However I ran across this article on
corporate blogging
and I wanted to be sure that while you are posting stuff here that it's
not violating company policy where you work and you are careful not to
disclose information that could get you in trouble.
There's a
blog running at LiveJournal from one of the guys at directnic. There's evidently an ISP that is still running down in New Orleans.
It's an amazing account, albeit a little rough in places.