Posts by Brent Ozar

It’s noon, and I’m on the second install of Xandros. The first install hung when booting – the NVidia logo came up and wham, no workie. I had a very nice Geforce2 FX video card that could handle both of my flat panels, but everybody tells me NVidia drivers in Linux are horrid, so off…

My office is littered with installation cd’s burned from LinuxISO.org. I’m about twenty-four hours and three Linux distributions into this, and all of them have had flaws big enough for me to start over with another distro. I tried Mandrake first, and looking back, it was the best. Mandrake detected both the NVidia GeForce FX…

This morning, I lost four hours of work time due to Active Directory flakiness. Thank goodness I have three machines here, so at no time was any of my work in jeopardy, but I decided enough is enough. First off, I’m going to stop hosting stuff at my house, and I’m going to be done…

JinWicked drew me a set of icons to use in online forums, and I’m really tickled with the way they turned out. The one shown here is my favorite, because it captures the way my eyes close when I smile. I gotta rescan them at a higher quality and chop ’em up in Photoshop this…

I’ve resisted splurging on a flat panel because the cost is usually at least double what a similarly sized CRT monitor goes for. Today I took the plunge because I found an internet guy who was selling a new IBM T541 15″ LCD dirt cheap. I couldn’t pass it up, and I’m thrilled with the…

The coolest thing so far about my Audiovox Thera PocketPC phone isn’t the integration with Microsoft Outlook, the speakerphone quality, or the form factor. (Definitely not the form factor – this thing’s pretty bulky.) No, the coolest thing is that it runs so many Windows CE applications, like Microsoft Chess. I love playing chess, especially…

My Sprint phone from work can’t seem to get any coverage at the new house, so I sent it back and ordered a new Audiovox Thera from Verizon. I’m a big fan of Verizon: I’ve had an account with them since around 2001, their coverage can’t be beat, and their customer service deserves kudos. Anyway,…

We’re doing a migration to Java at work, so I’m getting started on some Sun training material this morning. I’m hoping to be done with the initial training by next Wednesday, when I go on vacation to close on the house and move in. Finding the right training material is such a challenge. The particular…

When I saw this ad slogan for a computer case company, my first thought was that it was run by a couple of my ex-girlfriends. Then I looked closer and saw the word “stable” and realized it couldn’t possibly be them. Anyway, if you’re into computer cases, Tom’s Hardware ran a great summary of the…

I can see why big companies have a hard time getting traction with new systems. Today I had amusing conversations with two web design opinions at opposite ends of our organization, both doing web development: one wants to build an all-Flash version of our marketing web site, and the other wants to remove all graphic…

This morning’s MSDN Flash email almost made me spit coffee through my nose. Ordinarily you have to take this stuff with a grain of salt, because it’s written to sell more Microsoft products, but this one takes the cake. Here’s the snippet: “How to Process E-mail Orders Using Outlook and Access: Learn how the authors…

About two years ago, on the morning of September 11 2001, I was working from home as a computer programmer. A friend of mine in our Dallas office emailed me asking what was going on, that they couldn’t get to any news web sites. I turned on my favorite news channel, MSNBC, and watched the…

I’m never going to make it to the show Inside the Actors Studio, but the questionnaire they ask each guest amuses me. I’d love to sit in the chair across from James Lipton, but since the odds aren’t looking good: What’s your favorite word? Solution. (I like words with multiple meanings, and I’ve always wanted…

I run a free class reunion site. It’s a lot like Classmates, except it’s free and there’s no ads. I originally wrote it for my 10th reunion for high school, and being the wild and crazy programmer that I am, I designed it to be hugely scalable from the beginning. Anybody can sign up any…

It’s gonna be a long day. A long weekend, in fact. I’ve got a Monday deadline on a project, and I’ve got a few kinks to iron out and a lot of testing to do. I don’t work on work-related stuff on weekends very often, but this particular project is a lot of fun because…

Looks good, doesn’t it? That’s a chocolate swirl cheesecake, first one I ever made. Made it last night. Even had to buy a springform pan just to make it. Erika and I are still somewhat on the Atkins Diet, so I made a sugar-free cheesecake with one of their recipes. This particular recipe looked extremely…

Someday (hopefully soon), our house will be here. This photo (taken May 25) shows the corner of Perry’s new Park Square development where our house is going to go. We didn’t quite make it in for Phase 1 – there were only 2 houses with the floorplan we wanted, and both of them got sold…

Oh, man, have I been waiting for this day. One of our developers needed me to check something in Mozilla, and I just happened to pull up our company intranet in Mozilla. I don’t know when this happened, but all of a sudden, Mozilla handles Microsoft NT challenge/response authentication. I’m totally psyched – this was…

There’s been a lot of talk lately around Microsoft’s subtle hints that Internet Explorer will no longer be available in “standalone” versions after IE6 SP1. In a nutshell, MS is saying that there won’t be a standalone Internet Explorer 7. So why are they doing it? More revenue. Browser upgrades don’t cost consumers anything, but…