I found this on a site and found it very funny. Sadly, it is reality!

My hourly rates should be:
$35 per hour.
$45 per hour if you want to watch.
$65 per hour if you want to help.
$95 per hour if you tried to fix it, and failed.

I was reading today this great article, Can you hear Apple’s iPad competitors sobbing?, and just thought to myself that instead of making a huge pile of Android devices – why don’t all these companies that built IPad look alikes and failed miserable – instead of just throwing them away they give them away for free to children in third world countries.

It is not exactly a one laptop per child, but it is a one internet-enabled-device-that-children-can-use-to-learn that could make a difference in the upbringing of many underprivileged financially minds that can also have potential for a better life.

It all makes sense to me, maybe not Nicholas Negroponte’s dream, but still it is a great way of helping the poor and not throwing a way those devices. Some of these companies might even get some good PR… you know… help the children… third world… which as we all know some big corporations would never give something away without a tax break or good PR in return. But who cares! What I care is about giving opportunity to those that don’t have one.

Am I being just too naive?

A while ago I wrote a quick review of what I thought about Skype, and as time has gone by I’ve grown even more fond of Skype. It is a great tool, the “communication lifeline” for a great deal of us. It really doesn’t bother me how many hundreds of dollars I’ve spent on it, because it has saved me a bundle plus made my life a lot simpler.

A few months ago Microsoft decided to acquire Skype, making a lot of people very nervous. With a price tag of 8.5 billion (which apparently B is the new currency… just think of Dropbox 6.5B or Twitter/Facebook which soon will probably cost bazillions of dollars – don’t forget the most valuable company in the world, Apple at 345B). Why nervous? A lot of people are wondering if MS is going to kill it or change it in a way so that it is not as useful anymore.

I’ve thought long and hard at why are they doing this if they already have MSN, Live Messenger, Lync which can do pretty much the same and maybe even Lync is actually better.

For me the reason is very simple, so I am going to cut this blog post short:

Skype has my credit card on file, same as millions of others around. We trust Skype even further with autorecharge. How many of you have your credit card on file with Microsoft?

Microsoft did not buy a technology, they bought millions of credit cards on file so that they can be linked directly to XBox for people to buy directly from MS.

Apple has done a great job on this too, they have my card on the Apple Store. Why hasn’t Microsoft been able to do the same?

Also, given they haven’t been able to, this is how much money they are losing in their online business -> http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-microsoft-online-operating-income-2011-1.

IMHO it was so simple… What do you think?

A fellow SharePointer was having many strange errors when installing SharePoint 2010. He suffered, reached out for help all around and at the end it turned out to be something pretty simple. The problem was that the communication between the Fast Admin server and the query server worker node was not working.

After running the command get-fastsearchsecurityworkernode from the Fast Admin server, you get this:

dead net.tcp://fastservername.com:13279/

Also when he did the installation of Fast for SharePoint he was able to crawl just fine but when doing a search he got this:

“The search request was unable to connect to the Search Service.”

Oh FAST for SharePoint….

Solution: The firewall needs to be turned ON during installation

You can read the full installation requirements here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381239.aspx#BKMK_WindowsFirewallMustBeConfiguredOnAllServers

So one of my hard drives started to fail, and I NEED to have enough storage for all my stuff. I guess 3.5 TB overall wasn’t enough, so I just got another 2TB more. Yes…. Just let me be clear, those 5 TB are distributed among my many computers and external hard drives.

Anyway, I have multiple Western Digitals but decided to be bold, so I got a Seagate Home GoFlex 2 TB with wireless printing and I don’t remember what more promises I got from Amazon’s description.

Bottom line: genius idea all around, EXTREMELY CRAPPY EXECUTION

Being honest: it gets the job done, 2 TB accessible without being attached to a computer. Connects directly to the router, speed is “decent”, around 10 MBPS with two 500GB WD pounding on it at the same time. Not quite what I expected, but I can live with it.

Why is it bad execution of a great idea:
- Setup is not fit for a regular human being. The “out of the box, one disc, easy set up” did not work. I tried on the work network and then directly plugged in to my router at home. I had to log in to my router, find the ip address from the MAC address list and then slash slash my way to the drive.
I am quite geek and it was not pleasant at all

- When installing, it installs all kind of stupid applications that are supposed to help. Again, a horrible user experience IMHO. How easy would it be to have a folder in your computer, where everything would be synchronized with the hard drive, just like dropbox.com did to beat the crap out of Microsoft’s skydrive. Simplicity beats features IMHO. Or just a picasa folder selector style where you chose what to back up. Again, common sense did not get into the design of this product.

- It then installs a control panel that has all kind of stupid options too. It also has a web access, so why do you want to install a “Seagate Dashboard” that would only confuse end users?

- Moving forward, I tried to add another user. It hung, but cancel worked. So I try again and to my surprise the textboxes are disabled. Some crappy programmer forgot to do “MyTextbox.Enabled = true;” on cancel. Something as simple as that worries me about what else is inside this code.

- Here comes one of my favorites, you CAN’T change the name!!!!!! That means that you can only have ONE in your network.

Oh well, I think Seagate knows how crappy the user experience is with their software that they don’t expect anybody to buy a second one. A for effort on this one, but F for execution

My personal recommendation is stick to what works, go for a Western Digital that you simply plug into your USB port.

Seagate: c’mon… you can do better than this… And in case you are wondering, yes I can do it better. It just takes some good ol’common sense.

What would’ve I’ve done differently
- Add a little led that would display the ip address, that way when I connect it I can see “10.10.20.123″
- So I can go to http://10.10.20.123, log in as admin admin and create users. Don’t make the user install a dashboard, give web access which even my mom would be familiar with.
- If you have different areas like backup/personal and others, use different ips for those. I am pretty sure that is possible with one ethernet, not a full requirement but nice to have
- Now have a VERY SIMPLE application to install in the computers you wan’t to back up. Allow either “backup everything inside MyStuff(i.e.) folder” or the Picasa style folder selector
- Let the user change the name, so he can personalize his HD (who knows, this might be possible but all forums say it isn’t). More importantly, that allows people that LIKE this HD (if the previous steps are done) to buy additional ones
- Have a simpler way of explaining to users what the pro version does. Very simple, just have a “Do you want to access this drive from outside your home/network? Just pay $20 a year and we give you a way”. If you go geeky tech and explain, you are getting your users scared and can’t convince them no matter what.
For me, this simple steps would make a big difference on this product.

Ohh… don’t get me started on the printer!

So, you want to get certified? I did today and got a 981 out of 1000. I think I missed just one question

I used the same modus operandi as when I got my SQL Server 2008 Technology Specialist

Caveat: No specific book but you can get other similar ones from Amazon

Suggestion: Read the measured skills table and determine what you know and what you don’t know

So I am faced with my next challenge, getting certified on SharePoint 2010. I’ve been involved with SharePoint for more than 6 years, actually deploying a site for Microsoft SMSP back in 2006 when I lived in Seattle.  At the time it was just a CTE, then migrated from Tech Refresh to RTM.  Bit of a pain one must say!

Well, so now I going to attack head on this next test

Exam 70-576:

PRO: Designing and Developing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Applications

All about it can be found here http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=70-576

Funny to mention, this test counts against the Search competency for Microsoft Gold Partner

At home I have a decently sized server that pretty much covers every role that I need.  It is a hyper v server, active domain, file server and if you are a geek like me you know what else it has.  What is really annoying is that every time I turn it on it has local connectivity only and I have to “Diagnose and Repair” and then “Get new IP settings for Local Area Connection”.

Well, here is a workaround to fix this issue, simply disable and reenable the connection via command line.  I actually created a batch that is executed at startup so that I don’t have to go through the tedious step of doing it myself.  (You could solve it once and for all doing a netsh to reinstall TCP, but I didn’t try it):

Open a command line and run the following two commands

To disable:
netsh interface set interface “Local Area Connection” disabled
To enable:
netsh interface set interface “Local Area Connection” enabled

I did not find this on my own, I read it from a post from RobWill in experts-exchange, which is only for subscribers.  But here is the link to the guy just to say thanks.

http://www.experts-exchange.com/M_877631.html

I wasted today some time while studying for the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Development (70-433) exam because every time I attached the AdventureWorks database to test, it was marked as “suspect” so I was unable to use it.

I found a very easy way to avoid the “Suspect” issue for adventure works.  I was a bit annoyed by it but then I decided to read the error message.

It is complaining about the file placeholder.txt being corrupted.  Simply delete that file and reattach.  Problem solved!

70-433\Databases\AdventureWorks2008\Documents

You can read one of the posts regarding this issue here:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/pl-PL/sqlserversamples/thread/7abfc1f6-fb74-4a41-8272-c44c34f060d3?prof=required

Ayer tuve un intercambio de correos con una gente que yo les instale el correo para el dominio de ellos sobre Google Apps(GA) y ahora me contactaron que la persona que se los esta desarrollando quiere quitarle el correo de GA y ponerle un POP regular, si no me equivoco en Godaddy.com.

Veamos lo que estoy significa, primero con Google Apps:
- Ahora tienen 7GB de espacio por cada usuario.
- No tienen que borrar NUNCA un correo
- Como GA usa IMAP, pueden tener sincronizado su correo(como yo) en el iphone, ipad, laptop, compu de la casa y acceso web.
- Pueden organizar todos sus correos por medio de labels, digamos que un label para cada cliente, y mantener su inbox limpio con el feature de Archive
- Y lo mas importante de todo. NUNCA se les va a perder un correo por que como no tienen que borrar y GA usa el mismo search de google entonces siempre van a encontrar el correo que quieran de la persona que se lo haya mandado cuando sea y donde sea. Esto por si solo vale oro.
- Y como bono adicional pueden usar Google Spreadsheets & documents, archivos en la “nube” ademas de un calendario compartido para la organizacion. Por que uno va a dejar de usar herramientas que lo ayudan a simplificarse la vida?

Imaginense q un cliente les dice que uds no hicieron algo que tenian que hacer y uds revisan (encontrando facilmente el correo usando el search del inbox). Con eso se finaliza la disputa. Se tiene prueba escrita de lo que el cliente dijo en primera instancia. La gente se aprovecha de que a los seres humanos se nos olvida las cosas, pero cuando algo esta por escrito no hay discusion adicional.

Si cambian a pop es ir como el cangrejo, para atras… GA es POP y mucho mas. Con solo pop van a perder correos, no van a tener el search tan eficiente, no van a poder sincronizar devices, la archivacion va a ser complicada y demas.

A mi criterio una persona que escoja pop sobre Gmail lo haria por:
- desconocimiento pues no sabe como funciona GA o como configurarlo
- por que en el hosting en el que lo tiene instalado no puede usar otro servidor de correo, i.e. Godaddy que te fuerza a que compres el servicio de mail de ellos
- No le interesa ofrecerle algo superior a un cliente

Estos son mis $0.02. Nadie quiere pelear ni insultar, es solo que no me gusta cuando a un amigo cercano le ofrecen algo que le va a complicar la vida cuando ya tiene algo que se la simplifica.