Kim had a really nice SLR style Kodak digital camera that died a horrible death when it met pavement accidentally (not either of our faults).  We’ve been researching new cameras together for a while now, and yesterday before we got home from the lake we stopped into Best Buy to get it.  We were spurred into action b/c we forgot to bring a camera to the lake with us to capture the high flying inner tube action (along with Heidi’s dragboat racing skills).

We picked the Canon S2 IS:

It looks like a great camera with loads of nice features (including a 12x optical zoom) but the reason we bought it is because it passed the moving hand test the best.  Kim’s biggest pet peeve with digital cameras (and Brendon’s too, apparently) is that when you look through the view finder or LCD screen and pick what you want to capture, you press the button and some time later an image is captured.  The moving hand test demonstrates this.  Take your hand and move it in an exaggerated arc slowly from one side to another, in front of your face.  Have the person testing the cameras try to capture an image as soon as your hand is in front of your face.  Most digital cameras will catch your hand way off to one side, if it’s still in the frame.  The ideal camera will catch your hand exactly in front of your face, as it was when you press the button.  Of the half dozen cameras we tried – the Canon S2 IS came closest to this ideal image.

I haven’t really played with the camera yet – I was too sore last night with my sunburn to actually do anything other than whimper.  I’ll test it out later – maybe a shot of how sun-burned my back is or something…  I know everyone wants to see something like that, right?

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

The last three days I was in Hong Kong, I spent wandering around the town shopping, eating, and generally mixing with the population.  I noticed a few things I found interesting, so I thought I’d share them:

• Toyota cars rule the road, but I did see plenty of other models, including a Ford!  No GM vehicles, but plenty of cars I couldn’t identify.  Lots of the familiar manufacturers were selling models I had never seen before.  All of the taxis were Toyota Crown Comforts – big and boxy.  I didn’t write down the rest, but aside from the ever present Corolla and Camry, some BMW, Lexus and Mercedes cars, there were lots of cars I couldn’t place
• The public transit is so good and so effective, that most of the vehicles on the road were being driven by professional drivers – cabs, buses, and trucks.  Lots and lots of trucks.  The entire time I was driving around (in a bus) I didn’t see a single accident nor a single person pulled over by the police.  Must be nice to not have traffic jams caused by morons and moron rubberneckers!
• If Toyota rules the road, Nokia rules the cellphone market.  Three out of every four cellphones are made in Finland!  The majority of the rest of the phones are Sony Erickson.  I even asked someone about the Nokia phones vs the other phone brands and they told me that no one liked anything else.  Nokia was where it was at.
• Everyone has an MP3 player, even people my grandmother’s age!  When you spend lots of time waiting on buses and trains, you want something to help you zone out, I guess.  The variety is HUGE.  I’ve seen every model Best Buy carries and then some.  My favorite little ones were tiny little cubes the size of a single die (you know, from a pair of dice).  Apple has pretty good penetration here as well, but I think the most popular brand was JVC – they have a cheap little 1Gb player popularly worn with a neck strap.
• It is far more common to tie a strap to your cellphone and hang it around your neck than it is to put it in a belt case.  With all the cellphones, MP3 players, random ID cards, and more hanging from around people’s necks, it made me wonder if their clothes didn’t include pockets!
• The people there were super nice.  Most of the people speak some English, and if they don’t speak enough English to talk to you they go get the person who does speak English.  I only walked into one restaurant where I was immediately given silverware instead of chopsticks b/c I was the Westerner.  Everywhere else I was treated like a native (except of course for the people trying to sell me copy watches and suits from the side of the roads.
• I’ve already commented on how the schools in Hong Kong are starting to minimize the importance of English next to Mandarin Chinese due to China’s booming market.  On my way home, I was pleased to meet two good ol’ boy college students from Alabama who were spending two years in school in China so they too could work with the booming Chinese market.  After ten months in school, immersed in the Chinese language and culture, these two guys were anxious to get home and relax for a bit.  We found a Subway in the airport in Korea and all had subs for breakfast – food they’ve not had since December!  Taco Bell and Chick Fil A were also high on their TO DO lists.  Great guys, we spent time chatting and watching movies during our 5 hour lay-over in Korea.  They were bringing home several pirated movies purchased on the streets of China and we managed to find a plasma screen TV and a DVD player not currently being used.  Good times in Korea!

Hong Kong was like New York City.  You should visit both if you get the chance, but a visit to one of them is a requirement for a fully rounded life.

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

It’s been a quiet couple of days on the blog as I have been trying to get back to a normal sleep pattern after my visit to Hong Kong.  I’ve generally been falling asleep as soon as I get home from work, which means I haven’t been able to get anything done after hours.  Oh well, the trip was fun and I think I’m back to Eastern Standard Time now.

Yesterday, Brendon and his wife Heidi invited myself and Kim to meet them at their vacation house on the north shore of Lake Lanier.  Ok, so it’s really Heidi’s parents house, but even so…  We took the pontoon boat out for a few hours, enjoying lunch in a relatively quite cove, plenty of slow drifting and conversation, and some inner tubing.  If you’re not familiar with inner tubing, it’s loads of fun.  You attach an inner tube to the back of the boat by a long rope and drag it (with someone in it) at 30 miles per hour across the water.  The poor schmuck inside (usually me in this case) tries to hang on for dear life while the cruel boat driver (usually Heidi) tries their best to dump you out with whip-like turns and ramming you over the wakes of other boats.  I think I rode the inner tube ten times!  It’s exhausting, trying to hang on so hard.  Actually, getting back on the inner tube once you’ve been dumped off is the most exhausting thing.

The lake was great, and I’m hopeful that Kim and I get invited back, but I’ve learned my lesson.  The sun-block I used clearly was not as waterproof as it’s label suggested, and I look like I’ve been boiled!  While I was at the lake, everyone was commenting on how red I was, but I didn’t feel bad at all.  By the time we got near the house, I was forced to stop at CVS to get some aloe vera gel.  Kim and I both got burned, but I’m worse off by far!  Maybe it was all the dragging?  Kim only volunteered to be dragged once.  Anyway, we slathered ourselves with aloe vera and sat around trying not to touch anything for a while before falling asleep from sheer exhaustion.

Good times at the lake.  I’m sorry that the other people who were invited couldn’t make it out.  We spent hours drifting around talking, and Brendon and I only talked about our computers and the .Net community activities for an hour or so of the time.  We did get made fun of by the girls when I opened Brendon’s water bottle for him, but I don’t understand why…?  It’s not like we’re a married couple or anything…

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

It is funny how you stumble onto one thing, by looking for something else.  I was looking something up on the web for a friend and ran across a blog, guess who it was.  It was our old friend Rusty.  I don’t know how long he has been blogging here, but check his blog out. http://vitaminzrecords.com/blog/default.aspx.  I am glad I found his blog again.

—Brendon Schwartz

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If you are looking for components and want help selecting one, check out this site for How to select guides.  This is for .NET applications and the first article is on PDF components.  There should be more  coming soon.

— Brendon Schwartz

Posted with BlogJet

The Hong Kong Octopus Card is a wonderful kind of smart card where you can put money on the card (and the money is stored on the card itself, not on some central server) and use it like a debit card.  The nice thing about the card it that it works via radio signals or something, similar to the security systems in lots of corporate buildings where you hold a card up to a plate to get through a door.  So you don’t even have to take it out of your wallet or purse.  This payment system is the de facto method of paying for the subway system here, but tons of merchants accept it too.  There are even vending machines that accept it!  All I have to do is press my butt up against the vending machine and I get a soda!  Pretty darn cool!

I know that this kind of thing exists in other places, but I doubt it is as well integrated into the culture as the Octopus Card is integrated into Hong Kong.  The thing is pretty much everywhere, and I love it.  I see that in the US some of the movie theaters are starting this up with a MasterCard type of smart card.  I’ve seen them at Regal Cinemas.  The problem is, in Atlanta, I don’t know where to buy a card and recharge it.  However, it is a great way to give money to someone (I’m thinking of children here) and them not being able to use it for anything other than what you intend them to do with it.  I’m hopeful that this takes off in the US as it’s really really convenient.

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

Works over for me out here and I’ve got three days of vacation.  I spent one of them yesterday wandering around Hong Kong on my own.  I’m going to compare my visit to Hong Kong to the time I wandered the streets of New York City.

First of all, Hong Kong is actually made up of two islands and part of mainland China.  My hotel and the place I’ve been working are both on the mainland, which they call the New Territories.  The hotel is nice, but it’s way out in the suburbs.  I took a shuttle from the hotel to the edge of the mainland, a place called Tsim Sau Tsui or TST for people who can’t say Chinese words.  Wandering around here was a lot of fun.  I’d compare this to the Times Square area of NY.  Lots of neon signs pointing your way into electronics shops, lots of music blaring from the various CD and movie shops, and lots of little restaurants.  I ate dinner in one of the restaurants here.  You know how they say back in the States that if Chinese people are eating in a Chinese restaurant, it must be good?  Well, that’s harder to decide in China, but I picked on where the Chinese people were forming a line or a queue (crazy Brits and their crazy words) outside waiting to get in.  It was worth it.  I’m not sure I can tell you exactly what it was I ate, but there was chicken, beef, and rice.  I picked it from a picture.  I also got a “special drink” which translated into a kumquat smoothie.  Tasty!  I think I spend a total of 5 or 6 hours walking around TST looking in the electronics shops and the various curio shops (I wish I thought to bring my pedometer – I’m sure I went 5 miles).  I didn’t buy anything, but I did notice that prices vary wildly from shop to shop.  I found that I could save nearly $120 US just by looking in each store.  Of course, that was on the really fancy new cellphone I lust after but won’t allow myself to buy.  Back at TechEd, Glen Gordon showed the i-mate JAM off to me and told me it ran at nearly $650 in the States – I found it for around $520 here.  Le sigh. 

The other thing I noticed while wandering around TST was that I got hit up by street vendors for nearly everything – especially what they call copy watches and massages.  I’ll get into the copy products in a moment, but let’s focus on the massages.  There’s a huge cottage industry built up around reflexology and foot massages here.  I couldn’t walk a single block without being asked at least twice if I wanted a foot massage.  Of course, I also got offers to massage pretty much all the other various bits of my body – including the kind of “massage” where I’d be concerned that I might catch leprosy and have the various “bits” fall off. 

The people I call the “copy people” were very intent – they want to sell me a fake Rolex or something really really badly.  There’s a guy on the street and he’ll show you his watch and ask if you want one by reciting a litany of watch brand names.  I didn’t even recognize all of them.  Should I have said I was interested, they would have taken me to show me their wares somewhere.  Apparently they have rooms inside the tall buildings somewhere.  I didn’t go with anyone to find out.

The only people more intense than both the massage people and the copy people were the tailors.  There’s at least one guy pimping for a tailor shop on every major street, and these guys follow you around trying to talk you into buying a custom made suit or something.  They’re doggedly persistent and they’ll follow for half a block or more calling me “boss”.  Avoiding these guys was half the fun of walking around TST.

I noticed the copy people and the tailors ignored the locals, but the massage people were equal opportunity panderers.  Men got way more focus than women and Caucasian men got the most focus of them all.

After getting tired of TST, I jumped on a train which went under the water to Hong Kong Island and dropped me off in a place called Central.  This is the heart of downtown Hong Kong and was kind of like being in the really nice area of Manhattan.  I wandered into a really large, really nice mall (looking for both A/C and a restroom) and actually got lost on a single floor trying to find the right exit.  Way bigger than Lenox mall back in Atlanta, it also had nicer shops.  It was kind of like the Forums in Caesar’s Palace back in Las Vegas (which I saw when Kim took me to meet her family in Las Vegas), only larger.  There were four floors in this mall, and I only went on one of them.

Central was mostly a high end shopping district and way out of my budget, so I wandered uphill to an area called Soho.  Soho in Hong Kong is exactly like Soho in New York – lots of nice little restaurants and bars.  They close down some of the streets at night for people to walk around on, and I’m sure this is a happening party district.  The problem with Soho in Hong Kong is that it’s built on the side of a mountain.  One lap around this place and I was ready to call it quits.  Those hills were intense!  They actually have built escalators which will take you to the top of Soho so you can wander in a downhill fashion.  I didn’t find them until the end, so I was really done.  I walked back to the MTR train station and headed back to the hotel where I passed out at 9:30 from sheer exhaustion.

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

How many times do you sit down at your computer and think about patches and security updates on your own PC?  Probably not all that often.  Well, make today patch and security update day!

• Go to Windows Update and makes sure you have all the latest critical patches installed.  If you are running without some publicly available security fixes, you DESERVE to have someone take over your machine via a security flaw
• Update your Anti-Virus.  Even if you use an automatic updater, make sure it’s been connecting and getting the latest and greatest stuff.  I personally use AVG AntiVirus – the Free Edition.  Works great!
• Update your Anti-Spyware program.  I personally like Spyware Blaster because it doesn’t run all the time, taking up system resources.
• Download Microsoft’s Baseline Security Analyzer and scan your system.  This great little tool will scan Windows 2000, XP, and 2003 machines looking for configuration problems and missing patches in IIS, SQL Server, IE, Office, Windows Media Player, Exchange Server, Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC), MSXML, Microsoft Virtual Machine, Commerce Server, Content Management Server, BizTalk Server, Host Integration Server.  Using this I found that I was missing 4 critical Office security updates and that I had too many admin accounts on the box.  I had unnecessary services installed and WAY too many file shares open.  I hadn’t run IIS Lockdown and my SQL Server 2005 Express product wasn’t configured correctly for security.  Lots of holes!
• Check your Windows Security Center to make sure your three critical services are up and running – AutoUpdate, Firewall, and AntiVirus.  If these aren’t set to ON, fix it now.  If you can’t find your Security Center under Start/Program Files/Accessories/System Tools, install XP SP2 (not sure which 2000 or 2003 patches get you this)

Doing all of these things will help make your computer part of the solution to rampant computer viruses and spam instead of part of the problem.  If you administer more than one machine, do these things on EVERY machine you own.  Security is your responsibility and affects many people beyond yourself.

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

I am not sure if every noticed that we have a geek dinner tonight!  I just wanted to remind everyone and make sure everyone knows they are invited.  All you other Atlanta bloggers make sure you inform the community too.  Here is where we are going to meet.

http://nerddinner.com/blogs/atlanta/

Sage Woodfire Tavern

11405 Haynes Bridge Rd
Alpharetta, GA 30004  
(770) 569-9199

Also make sure you let Shawn know if you are going to make it so we have enough room for everyone. Email Shawn

— Brendon Schwartz

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Delta Airlines – “Please be careful when opening overhead bins as the contents may have shifted during flight”
Korean Airlines – “Please be careful opening overhead bins as contents may fall out”

I’ve been in New York’s subways and Hong Kong’s subways.  The crush of people are about the same.  In the middle of New York and the middle of Hong Kong, the cleanliness is about the same.  You hear the same mix of languages.  Some slight differences in the food vendors in the stations – I found a Mrs Fields Cookies in Hong Kong…

The cabbies in Hong Kong are even ruder than the ones in New York.  I swear people walking (ok, jay walking, but there are no crosswalks) across the streets have to literally JUMP out of the way.  In NY they’ll stop and swear at you, but at least they stop.  Not here in Hong Kong!

I can’t comment much about the food.  I live in Chamblee, Georgia (that’s Chambodia – Atlanta’s Chinatown, for the non-locals) so I’m not seeing anything unusual.  The people I hang out with have gone out for Mediterranean two nights in a row now, so I can’t say whether or not the Chinese food is good in China.  I have seen from the signs that the stuff that looks authentic in Chambodia is probably authentic.

The people here are all super friendly and all speak English.  This is not true back in the States.  However, English is no longer considered a top priority for foreign languages in schools here.  With the huge Chinese market opening up right next door, Mandarin is becoming the most important language.  This info comes from the mothers of children enrolled in Hong Kong schools.

Most of the people here have picked Western style names so they can better interact with the British and Americans.  I personally know an Alex, Susan, Raymond, Marcy, Vivienne, and Ben.  However, they apparently pick the names out in elementary school.  I also know a Kitty, Pinkie, Fanny, Lit, Bong, Candy, Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury.  Lots of fun, Western style!

 I know that there is more stuff I want to say in this category, but I’ve not yet fixed my sleep cycle so I’m about to fall over.  I’ll post more fun Hong Kong facts when I have a clearer head.

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

SQL Integration Services
The night started off with Douglas McDowell telling me there were between 80-90 people signed up for the session!  Wow that is a lot of people to sign up for one user group.  Luckily we had a great sponsor who bought enough pizza for all of us.  I think there was only part of a veggie pizza left at the end.  We had to get creative with how to set up the seats because the room is getting close to capacity with the number of people getting interested in the new features of SQL Server.

Leslie Sistla, one of Microsoft’s Senior Database Technology Specialist, gave the AtlantaMDF group an introduction to the new SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).  She also showed mentioned the entire SQL platform with SSIS, SSAS, and SSRS.  It appears that they have created these products as solutions to common problems in the industry to make their database a more powerful tool.  She briefly touched on the new features of each of the three products such as there are 5 new algorithms for data mining and there is infinite drill down for Reporting Services.

You may be asking what SSIS solves in the new version.  One of the key points that SSIS tries to solve is to be fastest for greater volumes of data.  If you haven’t seen a demonstration yet on how much data SSIS can process on a laptop, ask a Microsoft person or one of the SQL UG leaders to show you.  SSIS can now process a ton of data in no time at all.  Another problem that SSIS tries to solve is to collect data from diverse data sources.  You may have many different locations and types of databases that your data comes from and you want to be able to still have access to those sources.  The last key problem is today there are more diverse destinations people are trying to send the data to.  SSIS tries to make data available to more people and with more destinations.  Performance was one of the primary goals and the way the get the performance is that everything is now in a pipeline.  She said that the processing is more ELT, but that it is still called ETL (extract, transform and load).  She also said SQL Server is driven for performance. 

We went on to see some demos and everyone enjoyed seeing the new BI Studio tool.  This is a one stop shop for creating, deploying, and maintaining your application during development.  Now if there is more than one window you would need to look at for a task there are multiple tabs for those windows.  The main tabs used for SSIS are workflow and dataflow.  Most of the talk was on workflow vs dataflow and there were many definitions that she covered.  We saw many demos and how to create a new project.  One of the demos was even put together during the meeting, the example only took about 10 minutes total to put together even while she was talking.  There were a ton of controls, but if you need to you can still extend the ones that are there.  The event handlers have been tremendously improved and all of the projects are now stored in XML so you can store them in Source control.  At the end she showed us how to deploy the project and how easy it is to create a deployment package.

--Brendon Schwartz