November 2008 Entries
I keep walking through the bookshop Waterstones and keep getting my attention distracted by the Sony eBook Reader that they are selling in their stores now. I’m not put off by the £200.00 price tag, although many people will, what I am not understanding is the price of the ebooks. Lets take a look at Richard Bransons new book – Business Stripped Bare. The price of the hardback book is currently £10.00 as it’s on special offer. The price of the ebook - £16! Ok this may be a bad example as the hardback book...
Check out the latest edition of the SharePoint Pod Show. Brett, Rob and I had good fun recording the intro/outro. I wonder if Rob has kept all the funny bits we had to cut out over the various shows - could make a great Christmas out-takes special! So check out the show about SharePoint in the cloud, Azure, and other stuff.
We've just pushed out version 3.0.0.7 of BDC Meta Man. Some improvements for Oracle and ODBC users, full details over at the Lightning Tools Blog
That lovely time of year is with us again where we have to worry about what presents to buy for each other. I thought it might be a good idea to give you a round up of the good gadgets and things I've bought this year that I'd be happy to recommend to you so that you can request it or get it for someone else - and then use it yourself! :-) I've also tagged 5 people at the end as well as I could do with some ideas myself, so if those I've tagged - or anybody...
I’ve been working on my ASP.NET MVC project recently (more about that to come later) and I’ve been having a problem that whenever I added a new table to my Linq to SQL class when I compiled the project the designer.cs file would be deleted and I’d be listed with 100’s of errors. It seems this is a known bug and all you need to do to get around it is go into your cs file where you are added custom business logic and move the using statements to be within your namespace definition. Fixes the problem which means...
Well I got to Thursday morning at 4am and decided to end the sleep experiment of 30 minutes sleep every 4 hours. I would have thought I would have quit due to being tired, but by the third day I was coping very well and was probably at 90% effectiveness while awake. I decided to give up for the following reasons, between 2am – 7am it was hard because: - the missus was asleep so I had to creep around the house quietly - the house was cold! - I was pretty bored! There...
We're growing the team and looking to take on a sales person at www.lightningtools.com. Here's the deal... Lightning Tools are a small, growing and profitable, SharePoint Web Parts and Tools company. We are looking to expand our team and revenues for next year and therefore wish to recruit a technical sales person to build and lead a sales strategy for the company. The role would include: - input in the generation of sales material - contacting potential customers - closing sales and selling support contracts - collecting customer information on new product ideas We're...
5:45 a.m. I am starting to type this on the start of what is the 3rd day, although really Monday wasn't really a proper day of the experiment so this is the start of the second real day. Yesterday I realized quickly that 6 hour periods wouldn't be possible and so have switched to the more standard 4 hour blocks of 3hr30 being awake, 30 min sleep. During the day has been fine, and I've been able to get some sleep at each of the set time periods, but for some reason I haven't been able to sleep...
We've been having some discussions about whether we should change the intro music on the SharePoint PodShow. A survey seemed the most democratic route, so we'd be really interested in your vote! http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=_2bcfGBkLyc17yy8e5vSWdeg_3d_3d ps I want to change the intro music!
I've often thought about trying to cut down on the amount of sleep I have. Generally I need to have about 8 hours a night, or if I have less I take a power nap at some point during the day - the pleasures of working from home. I'd seen about Polyphasic sleep before on the BBC breakfast program when one of the presenters did the experiment. Basically you stay awake for 4-6 hours, then have a nap of about 30-60 mins. There are more details about it here on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep I'd considered giving it a...
Want to know more about the Business Data Catalog and will be around Tampa, Florida on 11th December, then register for the 1 day Business Data Catalog Workshop! https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=133493 It's a nominal $99 to attend but we'll give you this as a discount to BDC Meta Man after the event. Brett is going to be teaching this workshop so you'll certainly be learning a lot in a single day! We're planning on organizing these in other places also. If you'd like to attend one in the UK (probably London) shoot me an email at nick@lightningtools.com
We have two great meetings planned for SharePointers in the UK this month - London and Edinburgh. London - 25th November First session we've got is one that scored very highly in the topic survey we did a number of months ago - seems a lot of people want to know about customizing and deploying search so Ben Robb is going to give us a run through. Second we have Rickard Lofberg speaking on how they have deployed and managed MOSS 2007 in Credit Suisse. It'll be great to hear how they manage data growth, third party...
The second half of the interview with Andrew Connell has been posted over at www.sharepointpodshow.com. Here's a direct link to the page: Interview with AC. We hope you are enjoying listening to the shows - we're having a great time putting them together!
I’m going through the process of moving content from our support wiki over to main content pages on our web site as for some reason the wiki wasn’t getting spidered by Google. We’ve got some great stuff over there and just wanted to pick two particular walk throughs/screen casts out. The first one is ‘How to get Started with the Business Data Catalog’ – a great guide to get you displaying your MS SQL Server content in a matter of minutes. The second screencast shows you can use BDC Meta Man to write back to your data...
The Pod Show server was upgraded last night. Please try downloading a show and let me know if the download speed is better (especially if you are in the US) Here’s a direct link to the latest show: http://www.sharepointpodshow.com/shows/SharePointPodShow_Episode_9.mp3 Thanks!
The SharePoint Pod Show server is being upgraded at 9pm this evening to hopefully fix the download speed some people have been experiencing! Try downloading a show tomorrow and let me know if the speed has improved!
Of course I’ve committed one of the worst blogging sins. Although I’ve not completely changed urls I have swapped out my SharePoint hosted blog for a SubText one. Although a SharePoint champion using the platform for a simple blog is really a bit overkill! Also my installation was a bit broken and I didn’t have the time to fix it!
I had a quick scan through all the old posts and there weren’t too many important things that there – most were meeting notices for suguk, so I decided to just go nuclear and start again! The old blog is...