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Matt Broadstock

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SMS Utilities

June 2006 - Posts

  • WinFS officially dead?

    It isn't much of a surprise but apparently WinFS is pretty much being scrapped. You can just read through all of the comments to see how I feel. It has been years since this was promised to us and I think it is one of the truly innovative things that MS could do to their OS. Maybe there will be some value out of them using what they have learned and applying it to SQL/ADO.Net but nothing nearly as revolutionary as an object-based file system.

    I think Vista is going to be an overall improvement to XP but I really expected more from an OS that they have been working on for this long. I'm not sure what real value we are going to get other than UAC (and hopefully that works a little better in its final implementation). Honestly, what are we getting other than bells and whistles with Vista? I suppose DirectX 10 will force a lot of people to it. It appears that Vista has better searching based on document properties (useful for indexing photos I suppose but there are tons of apps that do that already). I'd rather have a new OS where the only new features were UAC and WinFS than all of that other junk.

    Here's another good link on some of the things that WinFS could have delivered for us. Maybe it takes a company as innovative as Google to make something like this happen. I'm sure when they release their first OS in 2009 it will have some interesting ideas embedded in it. :)
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  • Our Congress blows - the rich get richer...

    This is total crap. Once again they give themselves a raise...and somehow they find a way to justify keeping the minimum wage where it is. During my time in other countries it was interesting to see how they handled the minimum wage. Both Australia and New Zealand seemed to have a much higher minimum wage--from what I gathered it was easy to support a family with a couple of people working minimum wage jobs. Here, you are forced to live in poverty.


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  • My "new" game to kill time at home

    I don't game as much as I did 10 years ago but every once in a while I catch the gaming bug.

    I was hooked on World of Warcraft for a while but eventually got bored once I had a couple of alts up to level 60..

    Recently, I've been going old-school for my gaming. I found a copy of Magic the Gathering for the PC (plus all of the addins/updates) and spent a couple of months playing that in my spare time. I remember playing Magic with my buddies back with it was the hip thing to do. (in fact, I think I probably still have hundreds (thousands?) or cards sitting in some binders somewhere...maybe I should see how much they are worth). So, that was a lot of fun for a while--even though I spent 4 hours getting it to work on XP properly.

    Now, I am playing one of my favorite games of all time - FFVII. I recently discovered that I still have all of my PS1 games in a storage box when I had to dig through them looking for something. So, I downloaded a great emulater (epsxe) and burned all of those PS1 discs to ISOs. I don't remember when FFVII was made but the graphics are still impressive. I remember being absolutely blown away by some of the full-motion-video sequences in that game. I also remember spending a few hundred hours trying to hunt down every freakin' side-quest in the game. :) I doubt I'll bother with any of that this time around but I'm enjoying it so far. It must be a sign that I am getting old but I think most of the new games are crap. How many FPS games can you play? Or maybe all of the easy, innovative ideas are already taken. Mostly, I think it is because--like music and movies--it is big business now. And corporations like to take the safe route because it is easy money.  As for me, I'll be happy killing spare time with FFVII...

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  • Tired of working in MS Access

    I've been working on a directory cleanup project to prepare for a metadirectory implementation for the last few months. What a pain in the a$$... Cleaning up AD and the LDAP directory used for external authentication has been a breeze because we can just check last logon dates and disable/delete as needed. Domino, on the other hand, is killing me. I've probably spent 100 hours writing queries, analyzing data, trying to come up with new approaches, etc. Every time we think we have the data that we need in order to find accounts that are safe to delete, we keep finding new exceptions that throw things off. Not all of it is because of Domino--of course half the users seem to have different account names in each of the directories. That cleanup is the biggest pain. But, just today, I found another 1000 accounts where the Notes username doesn't match the mailfile name withing Domino. This makes it impossible to match up Domino activity data with anything--even other Domino data that I am pulling via LDAP.

    Ok, rant over. The good news, Horizon was just in and they are doing a serious evaluation on moving to Exchange...I just won't be consulting here anymore by the time anything happens with it (at least I certainly hope I'm not!).

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  • Messing with PowerShell

    I finally decided to start messing around with PowerShell a bit. I'm hearing great things about the (free!) IDE at powershell.com so I'm gonna download that right away. I dabbled with one of the betas but haven't taken the time to check it out since. Now that it is RC1, I figure I should have another go at it.

    I'm sure PowerShell will end up being a great tool but I wonder if MS plans to port it into MSOffice at any time in the future? The reason I am curious is because just today I was able to steal a couple of fairly long functions from some VBS scripts that I wrote and throw them right into MSAccess--without making a single change. If we all start using PowerShell for our admin scripts instead of VBS, that code portability will be lost. VB, VBS, and VBA are all a bit different from each other but you can usually take a code snippet from one and get it to work for one of the others. From the reading I've done on PowerShell in the past, this won't be the case. I don't think you will even be able to easily port code to C#. Maybe I'm just underinformed at this time or maybe that's just the price of progress.

    And if you have any interest in PowerShell, their blog site is a great place to start.
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  • Finding the menu in IE7

    Something silly that I found on accident...hitting ALT toggles the visibility of the menu bar in IE7. Web browsing is one of the few things I do on my computer that is mouse-centric so I guess it is no surprise that I am just now finding this.
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