Wyoming is the least populated state so it makes sense, but I still figured at least one person would of stumbled on to it.

Here is an example I just did from the NY Times site:

Boxes and Arrows - The best place to find articles and experts.
IA Institue - If you are at all interested in IA you have to visit this site.
Step Two Designs - Found some very good tutorials here that helped with card sorting and other techniques.
IA One Sheeters - A great idea, these are simple examples to help promote IA within your company. I have used a couple of these and also used them as ideas.
IA Summit - I haven’t been, but would like to check this out in the future.
NN/g - I have attended a NN/g conference and it was an eye opener. Jakob and crew do some great studies. We purchase their Best Intranet reports each year and they are loaded with great ideas and examples of what have worked for others.

You can add a line to the end of a file, such as your CONFIG.SYS file, without using an editor if you use the COPY command in the following form:
copy filename.ext + con

This causes MS-DOS to echo the file and CON, with the cursor. Enter the text to be added to the file, then press CTRL+Z and ENTER to end your modification. The following example adds a line to the end of a todo.txt file:
C:\>copy todo.txt + con
(A) @online Research text files
(A) @phone Call shop
^z

1 File(s) copied

If only one line is to be added and that line doesn’t contain any redirection, you can also use the ECHO command as follows:
C:\>echo (B) +SharePoint Create FAQ feature and test >> todo.txt

Check out todo.txt, List your life in .txt, and Living in text files for more information on using a text file to keep track of your own crazy life.

Ruby Inside - The top site to find new articles and information about Ruby and Ruby related sites.  Updated through out the day.
O’Reilly Ruby Blog - Great articles and how-to’s on here.
Try Ruby! - An online parser that allows you to check out exactly what Ruby is all about.  Very cool.  They have a couple tutorials that will walk you through some things to try.  You will be amazed!
Ruby Quiz - I haven’t enter one of these weekly contests yet…but I plan to this year.  They have lots of great challenges (some of which are very hard, but there is some easy ones too) listed along with all entered solutions so it is a great way to learn Ruby.
Ruby Corner - Aggregator of Ruby blogs….
Poigant Guide to Ruby - There is some interesting folks in the Ruby and Rails communities, but I would say the auther of this series takes the cake.  He goes by ‘why’ and you will have to check it out cause it is hard to describe.  Can’t promise you will learn Ruby from it unless you like comic books…but it will bring a smile to your face just thinking if all documentation was this fun to read.

The distinction between information architecture and usability may seem like semantics, but there are significant differences between the two disciplines. Though they are often discussed interchangeably, and practitioners are often well-versed in both, information architecture and usability differ in their scope and areas of focus.

The article really focuses on Peter Morville’s thought of “information architecture is a subset of usability, and usability is a subset of information architecture”, which really helped me understand what an IA does and doesn’t do.

• Coding Horror - Daily articles about a full range of topics relating to programming and computer science. A quick way to learn something new each day.
• A List Apart - Great articles on design, development, and web standards. One of the top sites for this type of information.
• Joel on Software - Joel runs Fog Creek, a software company in NYC. Lately his articles haven’t been as useful to me…but his archives are gold. He actually has two books published that are just reprints of his blog articles.
• XKCD - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. You have to be a geek to enjoy these…I showed a couple to my wife and she didn’t get any of them. I guess that is a good thing.
• Smashing Magazine - Great daily finds on here, from free fonts to best designs. Browse their archives for a quick way to get ideas on your next project.
• David Seah - Hard to really describe the articles he writes, but if you are searching on how to be better at what ever you do I think they might be helpful for you. Productivity, Printable CEO Series, design work and more just to list a couple.

Did you know you can use it with a intranet as well?  One thing that you have to watch out for though is if you use http internally and SSL (https) externally.  If so, check out Reuben Yau’s post on how to handle both cases with a little extra javascript.  If you want to use it with SharePoint 2007 you will just need to place the javascript within the master page so all your pages get tracked.

If you have some money to burn, I have read/heard that Mint is another package to check-out.  Leave a comment on others that you like or if you have used Mint.

Here is the error message you will see when you run the dbSPSReporting.sql script:

Msg 102, Level 15, State 1, Procedure usp_Insert_FactWSS, Line 57
Incorrect syntax near ‘WSSList’.
Cannot add rows to sys.sql_dependencies for the stored procedure because it depends on the missing table ‘usp_Insert_FactWSS’. The stored procedure will still be created; however, it cannot be successfully executed until the table exists.

The problem is there is a missing comma after WSSDoc nvarchar(255):

Create table dbo.tblTempWSS_ToFactLoad ( WSSFactID bigint identity not null Primary Key, SiteGUID uniqueidentifier, WebGUID uniqueidentifier, -- WSSDate datetime, -- Fix for Bug #: 403546 WSSDate smalldatetime, WSSTime nvarchar(8), --WSSUser nvarchar(150), --Fix for Bug #: 403546 WSSUser nvarchar(255), --WSSDoc nvarchar(50), --Fix for Bug #: 403546 WSSDoc nvarchar(255) WSSList uniqueidentifier 

Simply add the comma before you run the SQL script and everything will work fine. I find it very ironic that the new bug is right below the “Fix for Bug” comment that dealt with the previous problems in the first version. Bugs often introduce other bugs, but you would think something released for a Windows administrator would be checked a little closer. 

Forfiles -p c:\path\to\backups -s -m *.* -d -5 -c "cmd /c del /q @path"

This will  delete all files older than 5 days in that path.  You have several options with the flags if you want to delete other time periods.  Also, check out Scott’s post for details on how to display what files will be delete so you can make sure you don’t delete last nights backup.  One thing to note is that you have to run this on a 2003 box as XP does not support the ForFiles command.

The keynote meeting Sunday night was a mixed bag.  Scott Guthrie started it off right and went into some of the new ASP.NET developments like Orcas, LINQ, and WPF/E. A couple cool demos were given and I can’t wait to work with those technologies more.  Just from Scott’s blog you can tell how much passion he has for what he does and it showed during his talk.

The rest of the keynote was disappointing.  A program manager from SQL was next and while it an okay presentation, it wasn’t geared for everyone. Did see a couple things like the SQL Performance Dashboard that I didn’t know about and will have to check out more.

The last presenter of the night was suppose to be Lawrence Liu, but his flight was delayed so Stacy Draper stepped in at the last minute.  I don’t think I would be able to do any better of a job in front of that many people, but his overview of WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 was really poor.  If anyone was hoping to get excited about SharePoint during the keynote they had to be disappointed.

As I get ready to take my first of two tests for the MCTS: .NET Framework 2.0 Web Applications Certification I found this table of the total number of people Microsoft certified worldwide, broken down by cert, interesting.  Not all certs are listed and I wish they were broken down by discipline, but never the less if you have one it is nice to know how many others have it as well.  Maybe if I time it right I can be number 25,000.

This issue has been identified at the this time and is being tested and reviewed for inclusion at the earliest possible date. The escalation to the development team will remain open and active until work is completed on the issue however this support ticket will close.

Well, I never heard back from them, but tonight I noticed that the published date on the Download details page was changed to 3/20/2007 and it lists Office 2007 as an option under Application Requirements.  I can’t test it from my home Linux box, but will update this tomorrow after I test it.  Hopefully the add-in pack with Outlook 2007 will become “Live” and usable.

Updated 3/21/2007 - The update appears to fix the Outlook 2007 issue in my testing. Also, you can check out this Readme for all the issues that were fixed.

—

You have to enjoy that helpful IE7 error message right?  This past Monday I started getting an error everytime I tried to open an Office document from SharePoint 2003 (to be specific, a WSS 2.0 Team Site).

The exact error was:

I am looking forward to the next version of CRM due out this summer.  We have used it for two small internal projects.  One quirk about the current 3.0 version is having to install each CRM instance on it’s own server.  I have heard that this won’t be the case with 4.0 which should really help the product scale.  Although CRM is typically used in sales/marketing arena, it has been useful in one off solutions here and I think 4.0 will build on that.

To disable it, you simply open RegEdit on the CRM server, browse to the MSCRM key at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SOFTWARE -> Microsoft -> MSCRM and add the DWORD “IgnoreChecks” and give a value of 1.

You will have to reinstall CRM on the box and reconfigure what SQL server/instance you want to use there.  You will get to the screen that has the warnings/errors, and the SQL line item will still give you an warning/error, but with the registry edit you can still click the Next button to proceed (without EDW disabled you can’t proceed).  After finishing the install you can delete the registry entry you added.

As a disclaimer: backup everything, don’t do this on your production box, and if you’re unsure about any of this call MS support!

They have a big selection of clocks, here are a couple examples: