Here's a funny cartoon that I found while looking through some of my old files.  Not sure where it's from, but it always make me laugh.

Here's a very interesting interview of Jason Fried (of 37signals) by Walt Mossberg. It's from a conference on innovation in business. Jason explains how 37signals' business model helps them avoid the pressures of feature creep and how that makes his product a success. He emphasizes the use of the word "No" in developing software and trying to please everyone is the road to mediocrity. He comes up with a fitting analogy using Italian restaurants, but you'll have to watch the interview to hear it. The interview goes on to examine how feature creep affects the success of open source.

Ran across this short demo video from a Microsoft employee blog. This is really cool and is supposed to be using some prototype hardware, software and services being developed by Microsoft. The OS's on the different devices are barely recognizable. Check it out.

I was trying to clean up one of our servers the other day that was running low on memory. There was an old installation of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Beta on it (which included an instance of SQL Server Embedded). It wasn't being used, but the database process was using up memory and I wanted it gone.

Uninstalling was not so easy. The uninstall would fail within a minute. I then read somewhere that you needed to remove the SharePoint Language Packs first, so I tried that.  That just made things worse. After the language packs were removed the SharePoint installer wouldn't run at all, saying it "The language of this installation package is not supported by your system." Now what?

Whenever I run into uninstall issues I turn to a shareware product called MyUninstaller. It gives you a little more control over the uninstall process than the Add/Remove programs does in XP. I'm not totally sure of everything it does, I just usually try it when my uninstalls fail thru traditional methods. In this case it showed 3 install packages for SharePoint and one of them actually worked (as far as I can tell).

Uninstalling SharePoint in this manner failed to uninstall the SQL Server instance. SQL Server was not listed in Add/Remove Programs but was listed in MyUninstaller. Unfortunately the embedded edition does not allow you to uninstall it. Some searching on Google brought me to this website that shows how to uninstall the embedded edition from the command line. You just need to get the uninstall string from the registry (or right from MyUninstaller) and append an argument. That worked.

It was a bit of a hassle to clear that software from the server, and I probably would have given up if I didn't know about MyUninstaller. Great app.