 Saturday, June 10, 2006
The World Cup .NET is Here!
The World Cup is finally here! Hopefully Team USA does as good as 2002. You need to install the Microsoft Football/Soccer Scoreboard here. It is a great little tool to keep track of the matches. 
Monday, June 05, 2006
Pakistan Developers Conference
See you in Karachi! You guys are making me do 6 sessions!
Writing Secure Code
ASP .NET Design Patterns
XML in SQL Server Part 1: XML Data Type
XML in SQL Server Part 2: XQuery
Merge Replication with SQL Server Everywhere Edition
The CLR in Action, A Query Governor (with Richard!)
Friday, June 02, 2006
Save as PDF...
Do you know what pisses me off more than the French falsely accusing Lance Armstrong of doping in the 1999 Tour de France? People who litigate, not innovate.
I would like to draw your attention today to Adobe. Adobe is trying to prevent Microsoft from implementing the File| Save As PDF feature of the next version of Office. (Office 2007.) But wait, it gets better. They want Microsoft to charge more money to customers who use this feature, even though it's a feature in both Wordperfect Office and Open Office! So it is free to use in Wordperfect and OpenOffice, but not MS Office!
The use of the PDF spec has ALWAYS been free for everyone to use, Adobe says that PDF is an open spec. So Microsoft should be able to implement this feature for free. Adobe is considering suing Microsoft for anti-trust reasons in Europe as well is a cheerleader for others who have sued Microsoft for antitrust.
Microsoft is not perfect. But this is the pot calling the kettle black.
NJ Code Camp Tomorrow!
Thursday, June 01, 2006
A Death on Everest-Don't Judge Unless You've Been There..
By now you must know about the climber on Everest with severe altitude sickness up at 28,000’. The climbers walked past him and let him die, and the morality of Everest is under attack.
First, I say to all of those who judge the climbers on the mountain that day: you can only judge if you have been at altitude on a climb. I have been on the mountain and lived and worked with the Sherpa for a month; they took me into their homes. If a rescue was possible, they would have done it.
But there is no way to rescue someone from 28,000 feet. Absolutely no way! If you have such severe altitude sickness like he did, the 18 hour journey down to base camp would have killed him. (Plus how would you get him over the Khumbu Icefall without killing him?) Base Camp is not low enough to recover from Altitude Sickness since it is at 18,000’ and there is exactly 1/2 the oxygen in the air than at sea level. And that is assuming that he would have had a rescue from Base Camp, the last time a helicopter tried to go to base camp, exactly 3 years ago last week, it crashed and killed everyone on board. (Remember I brought a piece of the helicopter home?) So he would have had to go down, all the way to Namche Bizarre for a helicopter or plane.
If it was me some friends have asked? I remember on September 11th we went over to the hospitals to give blood. What was amazing about that scene was that the Doctors set up a triage unit in the street. (Thankfully it was not necessary since there was so much less damage than there could have been.) But it gave me a lesson in triage. Sometimes it is ugly, but necessary.
I would have given some spare oxygen if I had some (which DID happen by 2 climbers and is not in many articles) and moved on. I walked past a climber in very bad shape at about 14,000 feet on Mt. Rainer. I stopped and said "Are you all right dude?" He said "No, but I will be ok, I’ll be going down with my guide when he returns from the summit." At that point lacking any emergency equipment and oxygen myself, not to mention the severe pain I was in, I moved on. (He did make it down, I checked.)
This is not the commercialization of Everest, this is the popularity of Everest, people want to do Everest and it gets crowded. Statistically more people die then in the 1960s when nobody was on the mountain. (Sir. Edmond Hillary is just bitter about that. Climbers disagree with his criticism.) Some "real" climbers want to keep the "paying" climbers like me off the mountain. Let me tell you, every "paying" climber I met was an amazing person in amazing shape with lots of experience. Anyone who trains, has some experience, and is willing to pay for an expedition should be allowed on the mountain. (Though the Government of Nepal should limit the permits it gives out.) They do have to understand the risks, you can be left behind.
Baseball, football, tennis, etc usually doesn’t involve death as one of the risk factors. Mountain climbing does. Get over it.
The death is a tragedy and sad, but unfortunately a risk we take when we climb Mt. Everest. One in seven climbers die above 28,000’.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Red Gate Releases SQL Prompt-Intellisense for SQL Server
Red Gate has released SQL Prompt 2.0, a pretty cool auto-complete and Intellisense for SQL Server Management Studio and Query Analyzer. The best part: t is FREE! Download it here.
When you load it up and connect to a database, it will ask you to connect.
Now when you are typing code in SQL you have real auto-complete and Intellisense!
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Monday, May 08, 2006
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