Posts by Brent Ozar

It’s that beautiful time of year when everybody watches the colors. No, not the changing browns and reds of the foliage, but the red and black numbers on P&L statements. That’s right – it’s budget time. In order to build a good database budget, we have to ask our managers a few key questions: Are…

The ever-brilliant Jeff Atwood wrote a fascinating blog post about why building software is hard: it’s never been built before.  He was following up on a similar blog post, but in a nutshell, software projects are harder than construction projects because they’re nothing like projects at all.  Every time we build a new piece of…

I finished my first 5k race last night, and I look forward to more of ’em. My official time was 37 minutes 46 seconds. I placed 40th out of 42 in my division (30-34 year old males), 415th out of 496 males, and 866th overall out of 1163 runners. The average male ran 30 minutes…

Today, I signed up for my first 5k race – well, my first race period – the 12th Annual Fantasy of Lights 5k. While this will technically be a race, I will in no way be judging my results by the time it takes me to finish, or where I finish in the pack.  I…

The below screenshot is what you see when you try to go to Google.com with Flock: When I go to a web site, and software tries to hijack my session to go to a different web site, that’s bad software. It doesn’t matter how well-intentioned the offer is – if the software has the gumption…

This weekend, I was determined to set up my Cingular 8125 PocketPC phone to play movies, TV shows, and music videos. It was faster and easier than I’d even expected. Step 1: get the free PocketDivxEncoder. Install this on your desktop computer. It converts your existing videos to PocketPC-friendly formats that take less space, and…

Upon viewing The Sheep Market, Erika remarked: “People on the internet will work for nothing, and they buy everything.” I got a good laugh out of that. It’s pretty much true, and The Sheep Market is a great piece of evidence. Aaron Koblin used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to get 10,000 drawings of sheep at a…

Tara Hunt posted her BayCHI presentation notes, and she touches just a bit on why startup companies (heck, any companies) need to focus on building active user communities and listening closely to them. The community phenomenon is something that everyday project planners need to recognize and acknowledge. Internal IT projects benefit by building this kind…

You wonder why I’m so damn chipper on the mornings of Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays? Blame Penny Arcade, my favorite web comic. It’s chock full of in-crowd jokes, but the commentary by the authors is almost – but not quite – accessible to everybody. Take a line from today’s commentary where Tycho is talking about…

I’ve had so many hilarious things going on lately, I don’t even know where to begin. Last weekend, IBM Director started emailing us that a couple of servers were overheating. In a matter of minutes, the heat problems were spreading across different racks, and the IT crew all started driving into the office simultaneously. Our…

I try not to wear too many computer-related t-shirts because they emphasize my fashion ineptitude, but when Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror blog came out with their logo t-shirts, I could not resist. The logo is great, the blog is funny and spot-on, and let’s face it, every geek should have at least one good inside…

Ernie and I took a trip this morning to Animal General Hospital, and Dr. Campbell says she’s got a rash. Might be scabies, but probably not, and he didn’t want to do the required skin scrape test on her right now with the skin being so sensitive. She got a shot in the bottom to…

I spent some time yesterday going through an evaluation of the upcoming release of Microsoft Operations Manager 2007, and figured I’d share my evaluation notes with you, dear reader.  I’ve used MOM before, and I wanted to see what was new. I’m looking at SCOM 2007 because I’d run into a showstopper with UniCenter: it…

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Ernie goes to church, originally uploaded by BrentOzar. On Lincoln Road, no less.

This past week, we had an IBM guy come in for a quick-start session on implementing IBM Director. Maintaining dozens or hundreds of servers can be a chore, and Director is supposed to make it easier by automating hardware checks, firmware updates, and even phoning home when there’s a problem. Part of this package is…

Oh yeah, I gotta have me one of these. Here’s the deal: as of about a year ago, Apple started moving their entire lineup over to Intel processors instead of Motorola ones, which means Apple computers can run Windows. During the boot process, the user can pick which operating system they’d like to run –…