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 =)

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

17 Ways to Appear to be in the Office While Actually Working from Home

I borrowed part of the title of this post from Wired's Wiki How-to but I thought their list was kinda crappy so I decided to make my own. I created the list below based off of what I've been told by my friend Trevor, an out-of-office ninja.

Trevor is always calling me from the beach or the lobby of a hotel (breaking rule 8 but it works for him), to show off his ninja skills and tempt me into joining him. Even though I've always been impressed by how successful Trevor is in evading the attendance police, I always pass. But, in the event that you are willing to take the risk, I've made a comprehensive list of his techniques.

I'd like to stress that creating the opportunity to work remotely without being noticed requires that you change your in-office habits and possibly even your office location. Think of it not as something you do every now and then, but as a lifestyle that many of your behaviors and decisions cater to.

Some things will likely be impossible for most people but I've included them as they are the optimal settings for being an out-of-office ninja. While some of these points mention getting caught and failing servers, these are just worst case scenarios that unfortunately must be addressed. The bottom line is, be prepared.

Requirements: VPN access, broadband, laissez-faire management

Culture Changes
1.	Be a star worker and kick ass at everything you do. This helps in two ways: first, if you get caught, you likely won't be fired. Second, being a star makes your schedule less likely to be scrutinized.
2.	Send your boss progress reports to let him or her know how awesome and busy you are. Do this when you are in the office. It will make you feel accomplished and give you the confidence to work from home without permission.
3.	Try to work at a branch office if possible. Branch office managers tend to be more lenient and aloof. Also, If you can physically separate yourself from your immediate boss, that is beneficial.
4.	If given the freedom to decide where you would like your office to be, always select the area with the least foot traffic. This way, fewer people will notice when you aren't around. It's also better all around because there are fewer distractions when you are in the office.
5.	Find ways to encourage your colleagues and boss to call you on your cell phone rather than your direct line, even if your office phone has an Out of Office feature. That way, they won't be suspicious if you need to call them from your cell phone.
6.	Live near work. In the event that you must return to the office, being an hour away makes it harder to quickly reappear.
7.	Embrace events where you must work from home and let key people know that you have done so. For instance, say a server or service goes down at 8:00AM and, while you don't have to report to work until 9:00AM, you are paged and must bring the server back up remotely. Bring the server back up, take a shower and e-mail the receptionist to let him or her know that you will be late because you were working from home, responding to an emergency. CC your boss and address him or her directly in the e-mail so that the receptionist will see you are legitimately allowed work from home.
Execution
8.	First thing is first, WORK from HOME. Work - don't watch TV or take a 2 hour nap. And don't go to an environment that you can't control. In the event that you are remotely working to bring up a failing app or database, it would be a nightmare if you were forced to relocate from the hotel lobby/restaurant/coffee shop for whatever reason mid-way through. It would also be unfortunate if your boss' forwarded call (see #9) to your cell phone and a baby were to start yelling in the background.
9.	Explore all the Call Mode features on your office phone and forward all calls to your cell phone if possible. Out of Office features are generally more robust than simple Forward/External Assignment features. If your office phones suck for forwarding, get your colleagues in the habit of calling your cell phone. If forwarding is impossible, you may be in trouble. Perhaps you can ask your coworkers to contact you first via e-mail before trying to call. That way, you can call them back.
10.	Try to route your office calls so that whoever you are calling can't tell that you are dialing from your cell phone. Calling the front desk and getting transferred instead of dialing directly sometimes helps the system "lose" your number.
11.	Check your e-mail often and reply promptly. This helps to prove you were working in the event you get caught.
12.	Never lie. Ever. But think on your feet when answering questions such as "Where are you?" The answer "Working." followed by some distracting conversation will often suffice. For instance: "Working. I tried to contact Roger about the TPS reports but I'm still waiting for his response. Meanwhile, I decided I'm going to call the printer company to see if the warranty covers complete destruction by bat. Do you have their number by chance?"
13.	Never lie. This is worth repeating. Lying is dumb and gets people fired. If your company requires you to check in with a receptionist, let the receptionist know that you are not at your desk but are working and can be contacted via phone and e-mail. While vague, it's truthy.
14.	Buy a Jawbone bluetooth headset to make your cell phone conversation sound like you are at the office. In the event that you must hop on a bus or in your car to rush down to the office (because you live nearby..right?), the Jawbone can make it sound as though you are sitting quietly at your desk. The Jawbone is incredible in non-emergencies as well -- it uses military technology and the vibrations of your jaw to distinguish between your voice and background noise. I use it daily during my loud bus/walk commute. The Jawbone's only downfall is its extreme inability to block the wind.
15.	Buy a Sprint EVDO card and subscribe to their Mobile Broadband Network. The service is $60/mo and while my employer pays for mine, I would absolutely pay out of pocket for this gem. Srsly, I use it all the time. I went without it for 8 or 9 months while I suffered with a Rev A Macbook and life was not as fun. So how does it benefit you, as a disappearing telemagician? Well, wherever you are, you can access your employer's network remotely. Granted, this breaks a prior rule but sometimes it's necessary to not be at home.
16.	Use Remote Desktop and VPN to connect to your office workstation and work directly from there. Answering e-mails from mobile devices or even corporate web-based clients (such as Outlook Web Access) can change your fonts/overall presentation and even give away your remote IP. Automatically attaching signatures such as "Sent from my Blackberry" can also be avoided by answering e-mail directly from your workstation. If you work with Unix, your remote IP can be exposed and your habit can be tracked. But you knew already that 'cuz you work with Unix.
17.	Set limits. If you find that your strategies are wildly successful, you may be tempted to start abusing them. Avoid the temptation -- don't work from home more than twice a week. People will start to notice your absence and may even start to ask if you work part-time.

While the above have helped Trevor successfully avoid detection, you may find yourself not as lucky. If you get caught, immediately own up to what you've done. Have some reasons prepared and focus on your positive performances executed both in and out of the office.

If ever you tire of the stress induced by illegitimately working from home, pick up the book Secrets of Power Negotiating by Roger Dawson and use it create a memo asking for permission to work from home, starting on a temporary basis. As Dawson's book will teach you, focus on how the company will benefit from your telecommuting and how successful other companies have been with their implementations. If you live in California, or another progressive state, feel free to mention how beneficial teleworking is to the environment. Unless you work at a 100+ year old law firm, this may just work for you.