Phil Scott's WebLog

One of the best parts of my job as an MCT is when people come in with problems that have been tying them up for weeks (or even months), and you are able to get them a solution and make sure they understand why it works.  The worst part of being an MCT?  When a client comes in, tells you about some software they purchased for $300,000 and they can't figure out how to audit the updates as required by the government.  And you have to tell them that $300,000 piece of software that they purchased was written by idiots.

As an MCT for a CTEC, I'll get some pretty insane questions from sales people looking to help out local companies to help drum up business.  One of the all time greats was a company that wasn't sure that ASP and SQL Server could meet their needs for a “high demand” website because they were experiencing extreme slowdowns.  In fact, things were so bad that they would stop taking orders for hours at a time to let ASP “catch up.”  The high demand site?  They were taking ticket orders online for a play.  They had a total of 30,000 total tickets to sell and they were selling about 100 an hour.  Ok, so something is seriously wrong with their code I figure.  What someone could possibly do to drive SQL Server and ASP to below 2 requests per second I had no idea.  So the sales guy goes and visits the center to talk about me coming in and doing some ASP training for these people.

Hmmm, Rory and his ghetto hosting provider seem to have gotten all choked up.  Why Rory didn't think to check for the “minimum query memory is not available“ exception is beyond me (I mean, come on).  I'm actually hosted by the same people as Rory at my site, and I'm not having any problems at all.  Interesting.

Can someone @ MSDN throw a padding: 0 into the CSS for the MSDN homepage for ordered and unordered list? I don't know why, but this drives me insane. I of course can live with it if the CSS head haunchos don't want CSS to that takes into account browsers besides IE, but it seems like a doable request.

The BBC is running an article about why the release of the Windows source code is bad for Microsoft.  One of the problems is that it is “littered with profanity.”  Judging by some of Raymond's posts, I'm not surprised.

Found a pretty cool site called Mix Master.  It takes the layout from one site, the content from a second site and mixes them together.  The obvious thing to do is take infamous Microsoft whore and baby seal clubber Rory, and mix his site with Slashdot giving us SlashRory.org. 

Someone sent me this link today regarding the “latest security update to IE.” 

I ran across a cool quote by William Goldman (he wrote the Princess Bride) in his book Which Lie Did I Tell?: