The September meeting of the Utah County .NET User Group (UCNUG) scheduled for tomorrow is cancelled. We couldn't work out a room with UVSC so we had no place to meet. Our speaker has agreed to come back next month and we will hopefully have a meeting space worked out by then.

Check the UCNUG web site at http://www.ucnug.net for information on our October meeting.

I just got this message in my in-box. It looks like the bad weather has forced the postponement of the Geek Dinner tonight.

Well Everyone,

We’re going to cancel the dinner tonight on account of Rain both now and a good chance of it tonight in the forecast.

We’re currently putting together a plan to do it in 2 weeks – Oct 4th.  I’ll be sending out announcements for that today.

Thanks to all who were planning on coming, hopefully we’ll see even more of you in two weeks!

Phil Burns

I just saw an article that says Toshiba will recall 340,000 laptop batteries made by Sony. It has been a really bad couple of months/years for Sony. They have seen competition that has taken away their market share for the Walkman and PlayStation, there was the whole rootkit debacle, then the exploding laptop batteries, and then today the news that some of their batteries loose power too quickly. The latest recall affects some Dynabook and Satellite models.

The problems with the laptop batteries reminds me of a quote I heard on .NET Rocks! in one of the early shows. I don't remember who the guest was but he said something like "In the future there will be 2 kinds of people. Those who use batteries and those who understand them." I wonder if we are not getting closer to that day...

This morning I got this error trying to open my default home page at http://www.msn.com.

It was a transient error because I was able to get to the home page by clicking refresh after capturing this image. I was at first surprised that there was not a custom error page defined that would give me some marketing pitch like the one that a client of mine used to use. Whenever their site would go down we would redirect to a static page that said something like we were upgrading the site and thanking them for their patience.

What I really like about this error message is that it tells me nothing about what went wrong. I occasionally find error messages with database connection strings or other sensitive informtion being displayed. When I see things like that I just cringe because I know that sooner or later the wrong people will get that information and then the company will have bigger problems.

I got the following message after getting a Critical Error a.k.a. Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) in a Virtual PC. The VPC is running Windows XP SP2 and has been stable since I installed it.

While I am glad that a Microsoft Analyst has reviewed this error report and determined that the problem will be fixed in Vista I would like to know what the problem is and what I can do to avoid it right now. I guess this is one more reason why I should be waiting with baited breath for the release of Vista.

I missed the announcement last week but it looks like Microsoft will be offering paid support for a longer period of time for some products. You can read the announcement at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/aug06/08-28CSAProgramPR.mspx. It is very light on details (such as how much the program will cost and what will be covered) but if you have that one application that will only run on a previous version of the OS it might be woth a look.

Release candidate 1 of IE 7 is available at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx. IE 7 promises to fix some of the ways that the "bad guys" have been able to exploit the browser in past years as well as provide better visual clues to help avoid phishing scams.

Passing along some information on the Utah Code Camp. This is not just for "professional" speakers. If you have done  something interesting, or just well I am sure we would all love to hear about it.

The conference is free please register at www.msutahevents.com . We will have sessions for both Developers and DBA's.

If you would like to speak or are interested in speaking Please email me at pat_wright@sqlpass.org . Or visit www.msutahevents.com for more information. Thank you

It looks like I should have waited a day for my previous post on Windows Vista RC1 and then the press release would have been out. It looks like up to 5 million customers world wide will get a copy of the code. It sounds like there will be some DVDs coming in select magazines and through other chanels including MSDN and TechNet.

The press relases says there is also pricing information at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/editions/default.mspx but I didn't find it right away. I assume it will be like most other products from Microsoft or any other software vendor, the price you pay really depends on how many licenses you are willing to purchase.

I spent some time this weekend downloading RC1 of Windows Vista. I currently have it installed on a second laptop and am trying to put it through its paces. If I find out anything earth shattering (or just something that I am sure I will want to know later) I will post it here.

Oh, how can you get it? Well I got it off of the MSDN Subscriber downloads page. It was listed as one of the new postings so I went ahead and snagged it. I am not sure if they have a pay-to-play program for people who are not MSDN subscribers.

For years I have been using a virtual machine (either VMWare or Virtual PC) for trying out beta software or doing demos. I usually create the VM and add just specific software to it. I then keep it around for a couple of weeks or a month and get rid of it. Recently I had a problem with a smart card and had to reformat my machine a couple of times in the period of about a month. On the second time I decided to try to put my development environment into a VM that I would keep around. I figured that it would allow me to backup the environment and I wouldn't have to worry about the smart card messing up my machine again. By the time I loaded up all of the software I use (and of course my mp3 collection) the VM had grown to over 53 GB. I was worried about the performance. I had heard about software from Invirtus that would let me optimize the VM. I purchased the corporate edition and ran it on the VM. After optimizing the virtual hard disk it had gone from 53 GB to 36 GB and the performance gain is very noticable. I plan on adding Invirtus to my regular maintenance plan for this VM and for all of the other VMs that I keep around for more than a couple of weeks.

If you haven't used a virtual machine you can download free versions of the VMWare Server at http://www.vmware.com/download/server/ and Microsoft Virtual Server at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/software/default.mspx.