A Smooth Sea Never Made a Skillful Sailor

I personally use Boxee on my Mac Mini but I am always open to new things. Watching CNET Live yesterday, I heard Tom Merrit talk about Miro 2. I was curious to see what this application does and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it's a podcast aggregation/media center for your computer. It works just like Boxee sans the social networking aspect. It lacks the GUI aesthetics of Boxee but it gains in functionality. First, it has a Windows client already. Second, you don't need to sign up for private alpha to run this software. Subscribing is as easy as clicking the subscribe button. Quality is amazing and it's a wonderful feeling that this amazing app is open source. I'm surprised I've never heard of it. I haven't played with it to give you a much better overview of it but I highly recommend this to anyone who didn't sign up for Boxee yet. You may search Youtube and Hulu videos straight from the interface that resembles iTunes but it runs so much more ...

I use SQLPing to do discovery of any hidden SQL Servers on the network. It is a great tool that's easy to use and is absolutely free. I usually run this tool to get an idea of version level for each SQL Server. The tool gives information on blank SA password, version level, instance name, name of service accounts. Pretty much anything you'd like to know about a server at hand. I find myself using this tool a lot in order to revise my best practices for SQL Server Installations. It is also good to devise SLAs between IT Department and your distributed business departments. More on this later. I highly recommend this tool to anyone with at least some curiosity for SQL. until next time...

I do a lot of hot fixes and service packs installations in my environment and needless to say that some do not go well. Usually failures occur on clustered servers. A good rule of thumb is to check whether previous service packs are installed correctly. This rule applies mostly to clustered servers but sometimes it works with single machines as well. On clusters, I would pull up Add or Remove Software panel on both nodes and go through every application installed on both machines. Usually inconsistencies in .Net framework version, SP, hot fix will solve your pains and sorrows. These usually are services failing to start or failed installations of hot fixes. Be sure to check the box for view hot fixes and updates in the Add or Remove Software dialog box and compare any updates as well as general releases. On single machines, view logs for previous installations that can be found in the boot strap folder of MSSQL directory for SQL 2005 and 2008 at least. Review and rerun previous service...

My friend's Windows laptop crashed and he doesn't have a recovery disk. What do I do? Install Ubuntu of course. He needs nothing but Firefox so he's good to go. Let's see if he continues to use it.