As seen on soma.fm

The Copyright Royalty Board has announced new copyright licensing fees for internet radio stations. The new fees are a staggering increase over our previous annual royalty rate of about $22,000 to over $600,000 for 2006. And the fees are even higher in 2007, based on our current listenership, …

Today, as I received an email from CERT, I was reminded of the day in 2004 when it was announced that CERT merged with the US Government. I wondered what would change and even considered the possibility that red tape could turn the highly-respected CERT into something that people just didn't respect anymore.

By the …

I believe I have a pretty high tolerance for inconveniences but I just couldn't take it: running Windows Server 2003 as a primary OS on Macbook blows.

As a fan of Unix, Windows and beautiful UIs, I promised myself I would put down any amount of money for a small Macbook the day it came out and I did just that. Then I …

As a compliment to my MaxMind GeoIP Locator scripts and the parse top-level domain from URL function, I've created another function to parse the search term from an URL.

I've heard that T-SQL is a bit slow with parsing strings and wanted to test this myself so I created this in both C# and T-SQL. The difference is very …

You can now download SQL Server 2005 SP2 on Microsoft's website. Here's hoping that the install issues in SP1 won't plague SP2 as well!

I found this useful security tip on Microsoft.com.

SAFE is the recommended permission setting for assemblies that perform computation and data management tasks without accessing resources outside an instance of SQL Server.

We recommend using EXTERNAL_ACCESS for assemblies that access resources outside of an instance …

Well, 10 steps, give or take. This could have been executed in fewer steps had we not chosen such a useful function as an example . This function, which is only supported in SQL Server 2005 with CLR enabled, esentially performs a reverse IP lookup (nslookup -type=ptr), uses System.Net.Dns.GetHostEntry and thus requires …

Recently, someone asked if there was a way to be notified when servers have been added to an Active Directory domain. I looked around the Internet and it seems there's not a direct way to do this without some large software package. So in lieu of having an instant notification, I created a script that tallies up newly …

My friend Brandon messaged me this morning telling me that he ran into the same issues with Office 2007 Professional (which he won & subsequently downloaded from Microsoft's website). The Office 2007 file extraction locked up even though memory & cpu usage was next-to-nothing so, eventually, he cancelled out …

I'm nearly a year behind on this but I just found the free 7MB CHM of the Scripting Guy archive which contains every published article from August 2004 to June 2006. This is a great compliment to the Windows IT Pro Master CD which is still 50%off (now $30).