OK I'm wheeling out the Sharepoint Annoyances category for one last random show - until next time (kinda like the Rolling Stones)

The problem comes when you remove WSS 3.0 from a box and the instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Embedded Edition (SSEE) does not get removed. 

This is by design, however if the reason you are removing WSS 3.0 is because of a problem with the SSEE database you have a problem.

It turns out it is easy to uninstall after all - I found the answer via Jérémie Clabaut's blog.

The good news is it is a one liner to call msiexec.  Quoting Jérémie:

msiexec /x {CEB5780F-1A70-44A9-850F-DE6C4F6AA8FB} callerid=ocsetup.exe

As is documented elsewhere - don't forget to move away / delete any errant Mdf/Ldf files as they can interfere with the reinstall. 

Thanks Jérémie!

Listening To:  The Velvet Underground and Nico, The Velvet Underground

So I recently got my first Bluetooth phone.  The whole purpose of the phone was to keep my calendar on the road in sync with my shiny new notebook, and it worked out OK actually.

Being a nerd I was curious about the Bluetooth protocol and how it works, the following is an architectural overview of how the protocol is used to sync calendar and todo items:

Outlook: oh Hai, iz me
Phone: Hai
Outlook: haz new itemz?
Phone: ya
Outlook: o rly?
Phone: ya rly, Lulz
Outlook: Can has new itemz?
Phone: here iz itemz rite now, k
Outlook: I has new itemz2
Phone: Srsly?
Outlook: ya, here iz them
Phone: we kool? awsum. kthxbai

I got this message again this morning and I am so sick of it!

Only 16 chars?  O RLY?  What if my dog's name is more than 16 chars long?

Further investigation of the JS source reveals that other error messages include:

Password can only contain letters and numbers

I am always talking to people about password policy and no wonder people are confused.  So much good guidance out there is buried under so much rubbish.

Compare this to the other user experience that is becoming more common:

Much better!  There was a time when it would be appropriate to explain why the second case is better... but in this day and age it should be obvious.  It is all about coercing people to do good passwords until they are made obsolete in the future.

Since Version 1.0.60731.0 of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit there has been a quite good Password Strength control available to the ASP.NET platform.  Everyone else (like my first, deliberately anonymous example) can just Google it!  There are plenty of samples available.

One that I liked was at Gerd Riesselmann's blog, where he shares (GPL) a simple example suitable for learning how this is done.

What do you think?  Is there any excuse for giving poor password guidance in 2007?

So lots of people (18 or so) are interested in talking about nothing.

Not nothing per se, but null.

Looking at the 200-odd posts to the list in the last month or so, near half of them are on the topic of null comparison, that Greg Low started with regards to his connect item.

OK, so the discussion drifted all over the topic and my contribution, fair to say did not advance the start of the art...

At the end of the day however (is it done yet guys?), it turned into a really good discussion around null, the meaning of comparison and T-SQL semantics, so thanks guys.

Mine, as so many other software companies rely on camel case for brand identity.  I knew as soon as I had to spell it out to the lady at ASIC that I was going to be spelling it out every time it is said in meat space.  I ‘spose that’s why the business card was invented.

I found this piece in the current New Scientist.  The one with Africa/Face on the cover.

It’s entertaining, if a little bit old hat to us tech folk, and talks to usability in URLs indirectly.  (emphasis mine)

CamelCase

What’s with the outbreak of bumpy words – or should that be BumpyWords?  Do BlackBerry, MySpace, YouTube and LinkedIn signal an attack on the English Language?

Don’t Panic.  They’re examples of CamelCase (or medical capitals, BiCapitalisatioin, CapWords and InterCaps) and they’re all about forming compound words by capitalizing each chunk to preserve its identity.  This produces “camel” words with a range of “humps”.

CamelCase has been around since the 1950s in a few brand names like CinemaScope.  But it was software engineers who really took CamelCase to their hearts, using it in their program-writing conventions, and developing two separate styles; UpperCamelCase (UCC) and lowerCamelCase (lCC).

It’s not hard to see why.  If you have to wade through lines and lines of programs day in, day out, it helps to be able to tell the difference between structural elements, functions, procedures and objects provided by the language, and the names of things programmers have defined themselves.  If it’s defined by a programmer, you can’t look it up in the manual; you have to find it in the program to work out what it does.

As soon as computer keyboards were revolutionised in the late 1960s to include upper and lower-case characters, happy programmers were suddenly able to make distinctions.  For example, while “switch” is a programming-language element, “switchAddressFields” would be defined by the programmer.  The latter is virtually unreadable when presented in all lower case (switchaddressfields).

CamelCase has now made it into the world of techie products and web services, but will it go totally mainstream?  Very possibly.

In the internet age, CamelCase seems to be surging because it’s not possible to put spaces into web addresses.  Many companies feel obliged to compress their names into (www.)OneBlockOfText(.com) to preserve brand identity across all formats and media.  And consider PricewaterhouseCoopers (note the combination of lCC and UCC) and GlaxoSmithKline.

Marketing Directors at Corel, whose products include WordPerfect, say CamelCase boosts readability.  Not only that, CamelCase brand names are easily turned into catchy typographic icons and are also easier to trademark, even if made up of words which may be tricky to trademark individually.

Should linguistic purists be affronted by this corporate styling?  Jim Wallace, president of the Society for the Preservation of English Language and Literature (SPELL),  is sanguine.  “The use of such new names in daily commerce is no serious threat to the language.  We see no reason to shun them,” he says.

We wait with more than a little trepidation the break-out of a rival convention used by programmers:  underscore_delimited_names.

New Scientist, 27th Oct 2007, pg 58.

Jim Wallace may well be cheerfully confidant – what have contrived acronyms done for the language?, and I would not dare to ponder that SPELL may be a Backronym.

See ORCA - the Organisation of Really Contrived Acronyms for additionally sillyness... Actually, both the SPELL and ORCA sites are in desperate need of being pulled out of the 1990s 

Listening To:  Reggatta de Blanc, The Police

(I know, every year!  and you will see it next year too so long as I am able to type :) )

Because 31 oct == 25 dec

Listening to: You am I, Hourly Daily

So today I took delivery of my shiny new XPS M1330, here is my thoughts so far [end of day 1]

Background:

For years (and years…) I have been using a Dell Inspiron 1100.  I think of it as the little laptop that could.  I had a P4 and 1Gb of RAM but it didn’t take much to bring it to a halt.  It also generated enough heat that I had global warming protesters picketed outside for a month… I tried Vista on it and it had a WEI of 1, and to top it off I cannot live in 1024x768 for one more day!

So trying to run the latest hotness like Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 betas was completely out of the question.

It would also blue screen switching between screen and VGA out.  OK, enough space spent on the old, bring on the new!

The new hotness

So I bit the bullet and went in for a new laptop.  After much research I chose the Dell XPS M1330.  In red.  Pillar box red.  Sexy lingerie red.  Very very red.

While the 64Gb Solid State hard drive would have been an awesome inclusion, for the extra $1000 I just couldn’t do it.

Out of Box experience.

It comes in an XPS sleeve that is actually pretty good quality, down to magnetic fasteners and neoprene sides.

Further investigation revealed a folder to keep the CDs and manuals.  It looked something like an executive folder you might take to a meeting.  A nice surprise in there was an XPS microfibre cloth.

The first thing I noticed was the weight.  This is one very light machine.  Thin, small and light. 

Upon plugging it in, the screen struck me as being exactly what the doctor ordered for the 1024x768 blues.  It is clear, bright and crisp.  Also very thin!

Design, design, design

It’s the details. 

If you search for pictures of the M1330 you will always come up with a side profile but the coolness of the hinge design for the lid didn’t dawn on me until I saw it – no, until I felt it.

At the top of the keyboard are a set of controls to eject the CD/DVD, control the audio & playback etc.  These are not buttons per se, but little touch sensitive spots that glow when you touch them.  Very cool.

The XPS M1330 comes with Creative EP-630 Noise Isolation earphones that compare quite favourably to my standard work wear – Philips SHP805.  They have 3 sizes of rubber seal for your ear, dunno how they feel when used for extended periods yet.  This was a nice surprise.

...and there are other little supprises all throughout this machine.  Someone, somewhere put thought into the design of this machine and it shows.

Now, to uninstall the crapware…

Having had a bit to do with Dell over the years, first thing I always do is open Control Panel and uninstall the bloat.  I was pleased to see so little preinstalled on my machine.

I removed:

• Google Desktop
• Google IE Toolbar
• Microsoft Works  (I have Office and didn’t want to pay for a redundant CAL, so Works is the only choice when ordering)

Things that may go if they show me the first sign of trouble, but can stay for now:

• Dell Browser Address Error Redirection (whatever that is!)
• Roxio Creator Home

So, what’s not to like:

There are a couple of minor things – so minor I only list them for completeness.  None of these are an obstacle to being very happy with this machine:

1. When you eject a CD the sound is like strangling a pigeon. Don’t ask me how I know what that sounds like, it just does.
2. Chipset does not support Intel VT.  I use Virtual PC a lot, but VMs run fine without it.
3. The system comes with a 10Gb recovery partition.  This isn’t a worry to me with 250Gb but if I had gone for the 64Gb Solid State drive for the extra thou’ I would be nuking this straight away
4. The battery in the media remote is tricky to seat properly. 

The Essential Stats:

Dell XPS M1330

CPU: Intel Core2 Duo @ T7500 2.2Ghz

OS: Windows Vista Business 32 Bit

RAM: 4Gb RAM installed – 3.5Gb Visible to 32bit OS

WEI:  4.0, broken down as follows

• processor: 5.1
• RAM: 4.8
• Graphics: 4.0
• Gaming Graphics: 4.5
• Primary Hard Disk: 5.2
  

Video: NVidia 8400M GS w/ 128Mb RAM – 1280 x 800 x 32 on 13.3”

HDD: 250Gb WD SATA

Overall

Since it is only day 1 I can't be definitive, but this machine shows every sign of being a great developer PC.  Recommended. 

The SQL Server 2008 ("Katmai") CTP 4 VHD that was published to MSDN Subscriber Downloads last week is made available as a 4-part self-extracting RAR archive. 

It can seem to have an issue in while self-extracting.  As shown in the screen cap below is it looking for en_sql_server_2008_ctp_4_vhd_part_1_of_5_.rar: 

This is obviously wrong because a) part 1 is not a rar - it is in the exe, and b) the download is in 4 parts not 5.  So if you see this prompt, browse for en_sql_server_2008_ctp_4_vhd_part_2_of_4_.rar.

Likewise when asked for en_sql_server_2008_ctp_4_vhd_part_2_of_5_.rar browse for en_sql_server_2008_ctp_4_vhd_part_3_of_4_.rar. 

Finally when prompted for en_sql_server_2008_ctp_4_vhd_part_3_of_5_.rar browse for en_sql_server_2008_ctp_4_vhd_part_4_of_4_.rar.  You will not be prompted for a part 5.

Once you have done that, fire up VPC or Virtual Server 2005 and enjoy!

Also, don't forget:  You can check out the LiveMeeting events on the new features in SQL Server 2008 available through the Connect site.

Listening to: Aphex Twin, Selected Ambient Works, Volume II