After many years of searching for that elusive gold at the end of the rainbow, I've found it. Wasn't quite what I was expecting...

Here's a little tip to remember when scheduling tasks on a PC. If you setup a scheduled task to run as a specific user other than yourself (maybe in the case of a server maintenance job) you'll have to give that user some specific permissions so that the task will run unattended. The typical symptom of not having permissions setup correctly is the status "Could not start". A quick fix is to make the user a member of the Administrator's group. You don't want to do that, but it will tell you that the problem is likely permissions if the task runs as an admin. Once you determine it's a permissions problem, here are several things to verify:

1. Make sure the user has Read + Executable permission on the file being executed.
2. Make sure the user has proper permissions to access any resources being read or modified as part of the task's operation. If it's writing a log file to disk, it should have Write permission to the folder and file it's writing to.
3. Make sure the user has permission to execute C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe
4. Make sure the user is listed in the "Log on as a batch job" in the computer's local policies. (And not specifically listed in the "Deny log on as batch job" policy).

Our dev team has just upgraded all our dev machines to shiny new Dell T5400's running Vista. Very nice, especially with 3 flat-panel monitors attached. There's a little bit of excitement in upgrading computers even though it's a bit of a job. There's always a few little programs that get missed when you upgrade to a fresh computer. I noticed today that there wasn't a way to print to a PDF document. I remember having that on my old computer, but not sure how it got there. Anyway, a quick search turned me on to PrimoPDF. It was quick to install and does a great job on my Vista machine. It's also free which is great.

I've linked to a couple cheat sheets in the past (Powershell and CSS), but I've run across a post that lists a bunch for different languages and frameworks. Most of them are available as PDFs. See webtecker.com.

The image is from a VisiBone advertisement. That company sells some great cheat sheets and cheat books.

It's been several months since I've posted (not that anyone has noticed) because we at Mission Research have been heads down putting out a great upgrade to GiftWorks. The GiftWorks 2008 release has three major milestones and we've currently just finished up the second and are on to the third. We'll be done sometime in June if all goes well. The project started in the fall and got off to a slow start, but we're up to speed now and I'm very happy with the progress. Check out my company blog to see details of the release.

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.

In keeping with my postings about biggest dogs, here is one that is very well done, but very fake. The Internet postings read...

Hercules was recently awarded the honorable distinction of Worlds Biggest Dog by Guinness World Records. Hercules is an English Mastiff And has a 38 inch neck and weighs 282 pounds.

With "paws the size of softballs" (reports the Boston Herald), the Three-year-old monster is far larger and heavier than his breed's Standard 200lb. Limit. Hercules owner Mr. Flynn says that Hercules Weight is natural and not induced by a bizarre diet:

"I fed him  normal food and he just grew".... And grew. And grew. And grew.

The truth is that Hercules, the massive English Mastiff, was real but his time in the limelight was in 2001 when he was the Guinness world record for the World's Largest Dog.  For some reason the story began circulating widely on the Internet in March, 2007, and was accompanied by a picture of an enormous dog being walked near a horse.  That picture is not of Hercules because it's a Neapolitan mastiff and Hercules is an English mastiff.  The picture is definitely fabricated, but very well done.  The dog is about half the size of the horse and an average horse is around 1,000 pounds.

Here's a unique take on video tutorials used to explain some tougher topics. This video in particular explains Wikis. Produced by CommonCraft. Can't get any simpler than this and to me it does a great job explaining the subject.

Here's an interesting write-up that summarizes several sources of information about Amazon and high scalability systems. I thought some of the bullet points were pretty insightful...

• Between 100-150 services are accessed to build a page.
• Take it for granted stuff fails, that's reality, embrace it. For example, go more with a fast reboot and fast recover approach.
• Work from the customer backward. Focus on value you want to deliver
  for the customer. Start with a press release of what features the user will see and work backwards to check that you are building something valuable.
• Use measurement and objective debate to separate the good from the bad. Referred to as getting rid of the influence of the HiPPO's, the highest paid people in the room. This is done with techniques like A/B testing and Web Analytics. If you have a question about what you should do, code it up, let people use it, and see which alternative gives you the results you want.