netnerds.net

Welcome, Brandon!

This blog has been modified to accommodate postings by my right hand tech companion of over 13 years, Brandon Abshire. Brandon has always been a part of NetNerds but only recently has decided to become more visible. Brandon has been working primarily at Qualcomm Inc for the past 7 years but starting this month, will begin a new endeavor as a SQL Server DBA at Sharp Healthcare in San Diego.

Brandon's posts are initially likely to focus around Android application development, SQL Server and SharePoint. You can view Brandon's resume here.

Free Fundamental CDs for IT Pros and Developers

I found a link to this site on Facebook's SQL Server Magazine fanpage. Free Fundamental CDs for IT Pros and Developers While you can order the CDs, I just went ahead and downloaded the zip files. The SQL Server CD is pretty basic, but I still managed to learn something from it =)

April Fools Joke 04: I Just Can't Even Top This

It's been 5 years, since I pulled this very geeky and very successful April Fools prank on my then girlfriend and it still makes me laugh.

If you haven't read about the HOSTS prank yet, click on the picture above for a few good chuckles.

A Case of the Haves: Should I Get My Degree and/or Microsoft Certification?

OK, I realize this is my fifth blog post in two days after a seven month blog posting deficit. Is it obvious I'm procrastinating? Well, I am, but writing blog entries is way easier than studying. Apparently, my brain is fed up with learning what Microsoft recommends I do with SQL Server 2005. So until it decides to cooperate, I'll just write about SQL Server, or related topics thereof.

So.. on September 1, 2001 I just submitted my resignation to the CEO at Trellion Technologies because I no longer felt challenged and thought it was time for me to move on. The dotcom was still sorta going on and numerous calls from Microsoft recruiters left me confident I'd be able to immediately find a job or contract. Then September 11th happened.

For months, my phone didn't ring. My resume was out there on Monster and the jobs were there (sorta) but nobody seemed to need a 2 year DBA with no degree and no certifications. I didn't want to just sit on my hands so I started self-studying for the MCDBA in late October. I studied a ton and fortunately, I learned a whole lot. My study time in Tahoe was especially nice; I'd snowboard during the day and study for my certification at the coffee house at night. I felt totally West Coast.

I finished my MCDBA sometime in early January 2002 and updated my resume on Monster and around the web. The calls started coming in immediately. Within three weeks, I had two job offers. One of which was from Luce Forward, my very amazing employer whom I'm so fortunate to still be with, ~7 years and one cross-country relocation later.

             
I found what I learned while studying immediately useful both on my side projects and at Luce. Remembering this, I've worked to obtain my BS in Information Systems and upgrade my MCDBA to an MCITP-DBA, even though my employer did not request I do so. I love the challenge of getting certified and I appreciate how much I learn while studying. Just recently, I finished up the SQL Server 2005 Administrator's Pocket Consultant and oddly enough (or not), I thoroughly enjoyed almost the entire book! Wrox's Professional SQL Server 2005 Administration is also pretty good, as well as the Microsoft Press Training Kit for exam 70-431. Those books, coupled with nearly 10 years of experience as a DBA, helped me pass my first SQL Server 2005 exam with relative ease.

I'm currently studying for the last two of the SQL Server 2005 certs and hope I find the next exams as easy as I did the first.

So to answer the question posed in the subject of this post, I recommend getting a college degree to everyone and I recommend obtaining certifications to techies aiming to work for Corporate America. Geeks who specialize in working for or creating start-ups (like many of my friends in Silicon Valley) probably won't benefit much from certifications, but I do believe they will benefit greatly from CS and CE degrees, and to a lesser extent, IS degrees. But that's just my two cents. For reasons deeper than "it works for me," check out these posts from other bloggers about this topic.

The Simple-Talk Cookbook: A Cookbook for Geeks by Geeks

I can't believe I forgot about this! I blame it on my crazy school schedule back in the day. In December of 2006, I was asked to contribute a recipe to the Simple-Talk Cookbook. Of course, I gladly obliged. The editor, Claire Brooking, published the very professional-looking cookbook to the opinion section of simple-talk. where she stated:

With over ten contributing chefs, all MVPs and experts from the SQL Server and .NET community, the cookbook is written by geeks for geeks. To get cooking, simply download the cookbook by clicking on the zip file in the top right-hand corner of this article or on the link below.

Happy cooking from the editorial team at Simple-Talk and all the starring chefs!

I won't lie, it made me feel great being addressed as an "expert" in my community. Thank you, simple-talk! Sorry for saying Phil Factor's anonymity kinda freaked me out

Anyway, to download the cookbook which has my recipe titled "Chrissy's Favorite Bread Pudding," visit the article on on simple-talk.com. Alternatively, you can see the recipe here on RealCajunRecipes.com, or buy our Real Cajun Cookbook for yourself or a friend

iTunes Alternative: Songbird is to iTunes What Firefox is to IE

When I first moved back to Louisiana, I bought a car that fulfilled a few of my childhood dreams. It's an Audi A4 2.0T with rims, tint, sport suspension, BOOM and a Pioneer touch-screen iPod-compatible/GPS-enabled stereo system. I'm such a teenage kid. Haha. Anyway, what's even better is that I'm able to have a dedicated "iPod" for my car at no cost because I was able to recycle my friend's broken iPhone. After she dropped her iPhone in a drink at the bar and broke the touch screen, she got a Blackberry Curve and gave me her iPhone. I didn't need to use the screen (my stereo navigates through it via it's interface), so I was able to just wipe all of her data and load the disabled phone with my tunes.

It was at this time that I began to use iTunes extensively. Its speed was decent initially, but just recently, as my library grew, the load up time became unbearable. I didn't think I could find an alternative, however, because I didn't want to give up my iTunes store access and I figured all other media managers would be incompatible. So I was even looking for love when I found Songbird via a blog posting on audiojungle.net.

The first thing that caught my attention was Songbird's tabbed browsing. Then the add-ons. Then the mega-integration with one of my favorite sites, last.fm, which pretty much sold me on trying it.

During the install, I learned that Songbird stays in sync with my iTunes library/playlists so I can continue using iTunes when necessary (such as when I want to buy an album, though recently, I began buying more from Amazon MP3 [which my genius friend Ross helped to build ]). Once Songbird was up and running, I went load up on some add-ons. There's quite a few, some useful and some not so much. Here are the ones I used to pimp my Songbird:

LyricMaster
One of my favorite features! Songbird automatically gets Lyrics and displays them, plain text, in a selected pane.

iPod Support and Last.fm Scrobbling
Kinda boring but totally important.

Song Notifier
Pops up the name/artist of song near the system tray.

Concerts (by Songkick.com)
Ohhh, this would have been more useful when I lived in San Francisco. Takes the artists in your library and let's you know where they are playing in a given city or region. Apparently, not a lot of my favorites are playing in New Orleans/Baton Rouge or Lafayette anytime soon.

Last.fm Album Art
Awesome! Although I wish there was an option to just have last.fm's album art fill in the gaps and show the file's picture if there's one embedded.

Music Recommendations
Powered by Last.fm. Love the Dykeenies? You might like Little Man Tate, too (I totally do!)

MinimizeToTray Revived (MinTrayR)
This helps fill in the gap for one of the features I miss most in iTunes -- its built-in Windows Toolbar. But I can't have that right now, so at least I can minimize to tray and have Song Notifier tell me what's playing.

Click to see the prodigiousness up close.

Songbird 1.0 is totally my favorite app of 08. If you haven't tried it yet and you are iffy about your current media manager, I suggest giving it a shot. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Whoa.. Microsoft Goes Open Source with the .NET Framework

I'm kinda late on this but arstechnica reports that "Microsoft has opened the source code to the .NET Framework libraries under a read-only reference license. Developers who want to check out the source code need only upgrade to the newly released Visual Studio 2008 to gain access to it."

This is something I've always dreamed about -- learning by a large software firm's example. I can remember how disappointed I was during the first dotcom when companies would go down and take their source code and website designs with them. Woudln't it have been amazing if they would have donated their site templates to OSWD.org? As for the code, I realized the other year after looking at my own dotcom code, that the styles were probably pretty bad and not so good to learn from.

Check out Scott Gu's blog entry for more information on the libraries that are being opened.

If You Dropped Out of College…

For those of you who dropped out of college and want to finish your undergrad degree, you may want to consider the online university, Western Governors University. I'm sharing this on my blog because I actually shared the URL with many of my tech friends who dropped out. I found an ad for WGU in some tech magazine (maybe TechNet?) and it made me curious. Here's what I found:

• Its accredited by the same org that accredits traditional universities (such as BYU), Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities. It also earned some other national accreditation and was the first online and first non-traditional program to do so.
• Members of Sun and HP are on the board of trustees and a ton of big companies are listed as corporate collaborators including AT&T, Cisco, Dell, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Qwest, Sun and HP.
• It's only about $5,000 or $6000 a year
• The CEO of Google said: "Google has pioneered the idea of access to information. The reason Google thinks WGU is such a good idea is because WGU has pioneered the concept of competency- based education whenever you want it."
• You get a bunch of certifications while you are at it.

WGU offers undergrad and graduate degrees in IS, teaching, nursing and business.

Another alternative for those wanting a Masters in IS is Carnegie Mellon's Distance Learning program. It seems pretty awesome.

8-bit tie, 8-bit face

Hah! I bought an 8-bit tie the other day from ThinkGeek. It arrived, I sported it at work much to everyone's pleasure then I went home and took an action shot.

My smile in the picture looked silly but the tie was rockin so I 8-bitted my face and submitted it to ThinkGeek. I checked out the page today and there I are!

mosaic in the house

In other news, Microsoft is awesome (but y'all already knew that). I dropped by their SF office today to pick up some swag for a gathering I'm having and they gave me the coolest swag of my life -- some wine tools (thermometer, corker, uncorker thing, something else I don't know how to use) in a cherry wooden box w/ a gold placard that reads "SQL Server 2005." Receiving this gift comes at the perfect time too, I've been drinking wine like a fish since I moved to the Italian part of San Francisco a couple months ago.

Thanks, Microsoft. You are and will always be my favorite overlords.

Love,
Chrissy

Customize Your whos.among.us Character Key

Thanks to my favorite site on the planet, I discovered a new service called whos.among.us which provides a really cool AJAX based web stats app. The setup is very simple -- it only requires you to embed a picture on your website to begin tracking visitors. There's no setup or registration required. My favorite part is the Firefox plug-in that let's me see who's on my websites in real-time.

In order to "sign up", all you have to do is load their showcase page, click the widget you want and copy/paste the code into your website. The code generally looks something like this:

The easy setup does have one downfall -- what if you lose the above code and thus, lose your key? The key is important because it is used both in the URL of their stats site and in your Firefox plug-in, should you choose to use it. If you lose the super random key, you lose your stats (unless Google has a cache of your HTML).

As I e-mailed myself the 8-character code and saved the URL to delicious, I began to ponder. Because the key, in this case nff4aa4e changes each time the page is loaded, would it be possible for me to create my own 8-character key -- something that would be easier to remember than a random set of alpha-numerics. As it turns out, the answer is yes. I plugged in "netnerds" as my character key and my stats worked perfectly.

If you hover over the picture, you can see that the link points to an easy-to-remember URL: http://whos.amung.us/show/netnerds. My Cajun site uses something similar -- realcajun was one character too long so I deicded to go with mmmcajun. Someone should totally take kthnxbai while it's still available