Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes Who shall keep watch over the guardians? Some may  think I write about this subject ( example ) too often, but frankly, I don't think I write about it often enough: Your server (or workstation) machine is important. Having it not boot up properly or operate normally  can often mean serious loss of income. That's real hard-earned dollars that you CANNOT GET BACK.  So why is it that so many Admins don't have a reliable backup and recovery strategy? Maybe we just think "it can't happen to me". Or maybe we're just plain stubborn and dumb! The single most important ingredient of a recovery strategy is the ability to restore a known good Registry.  Registry corruption often occurs when the machine is shutting down as OS changes are being written to the Registry. It can also occur if there is a network (TCP)  glitch or a power glitch. The bottom line is this: NOBODY IS IMMUNE TO REGISTRY CORRUPTION!  NOBODY! R...

Cows (livestock) produce 18 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, more than all the cars and trucks on earth. -- U.N. report I've been watching the buzz around Silverlight 2 Beta 1 since it came out, and there's a new beta that will be out this week (yes, I was the guy that asked Scott Guthrie when it would be released at the MVP Summit conference).  If you look at my "Playground" short url site with a Silverlight tag query, IttyUrl.net , you'll see hundreds of new Silverlight - related links, as developers and pundits post their creations, articles, and streaming videos to show what they've learned and to share their techniques. The underlying Silverlight technologies (XAML/WPF/WCF and .NET) are encouraging client-side Windows developers to think beyond boring forms apps and get into the promising world of vector graphics with 3D, streaming HD media and "animated everything". Microsoft is simply extending existing proven technology to  enc...

This is an issue that I personally deal with almost every day: How developers approach a programming problem from the standpoint of THINKING. I bring this up because recently a co-developer asked for my help with overriding a base class property in an RSS library, and it turned out that the version of the library he was using was, more or less, defunct. Yet this individual doggedly continued to try various ways to override a base class property of type Image that returned a string, and wanted to try to coerce this in some way (programmatically) to return a different type without having to disturb the base class library. This was ostensibly because the base type was already baked into a production application that used it, and he now wanted to be able to modify it without changing the base class library. Sound familiar? We, as programmers ("Developers", if you prefer) -- are paid to THINK. The way we think has, in great part, a deterministic influence on what we produce -- how...

Do you believe that much of the commercial software you see in the marketplace as a developer is overpriced? I'm talking about software that developers buy - tools, frameworks, special-purpose stuff that you could probably write by yourself, but you feel it would be cheaper in terms of your valuable time to purchase it instead? I muse about this because recently my site partner and I purchased some ad - serving software for our site. We got a discount from the $700 price, but I still thought it was kind of pricey. Like any developer, the first thing I looked at was "how easy is this to install and configure". The other thing I did was go to the vendor's site and look around. The first thing I noticed was that there was one of those annoying animated drop-down "in your face" advertisements when their home page loaded. I don't think I have to explain why this tactic immediately puts you on my "do not visit this site again" list. It's tacky, u...

If you have worked with Microsoft products to any degree (I have, I was actually a beta tester for Microsoft's BASIC COMPILER back in 1985 - before some current script kiddies were even born) - then you know that Microsoft (and, to be fair, many other vendors) has developed a finely - honed penchant for buzzwords and name-changing. A big ingredient of this seems to be the year (hopefully) that the software was introduced. I think "Windows 95" was the first one, but I could be mistaken. Followed of course, by Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, Office 97, Office 2000, Office 2003, and now - (gasp!) - Office 2007. Frankly, with all the issues in the last few years, I wish they'd just learn to drop the year off the names and come out with it WHEN IT'S READY. I speak with great trepidation, since the RTM is downloading from my MSDN Subscription as I write this. It's taken a long time to get used to some of the nice features of say, Excel 2003 - features...