Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Smart Gadgets

    I saw this post on what a smartwatch should look like and it got me thinking. I’ve got a Kreyos watch coming (I hope) and it fulfills some of the things I was looking for, and a few that the Pebble didn’t.

    However I wonder where we’ll go with gadgets in the future. My son and I sometimes dream, trying to decide what we’d like to see built in the future. One of the main things we talk about is how we might wear things. A bracelet of some sort seems to be the consensus. Getting something larger that we can see better, but more convenient then a smart phone. Already I think the 5″ ones are a bit large and cumbersome to use. One of my complaints about the Galaxy S4 was that I couldn’t easily use it with one hand.

    Glasses are an interesting idea. Google Glass has some good ideas, though I think the idea of including the camera was one that caused a lot of concern from people, and rightly so. Even though cell phone cameras haven’t caused too much of a problem, there certainly have been privacy incidents. I think I’d like the idea of getting some information in my field of vision, and I’d like to try some “smart glasses” at some point.

    I found this post on gadgets out there, and most of them aren’t revolutionary and a few aren’t interesting. A USB drive in cuff links or a necklace? Doesn’t seem that interesting to me. What I’m looking for is perhaps some type of mix of gadgets that can work together.

    Could I get a phone that connects with various devices that can run for a long time? Perhaps a belt buckle that provides power and also tracks movement like my Fitbit flex? It can connect to my watch as well, providing me with information from a device in a pocket. Ultimately I’m not sure what would be enhance the phone much. Any jewelry might not provide much more than notification of information through vibration, or possible light, and you’d still need a device.

    Ultimately I think I’d like to have more ways to connect devices together. Easily get my phone to project on a larger monitor when it’s available, like in the kitchen or car, perhaps even using a camera there to communicate with others.

    My hope is we’ll get gadgets that communicate, but with the separation of platforms and the reluctance for many to work together on common APIs, I’m not sure we’ll get there.

  • An Open Letter to Brogrammers

    It’s not in the language I would write it in and it’s not necessarily safe for work, but it gets the point across.

    An Open Letter to Brogrammers

    One reason I do support Women in Technology, and other groups opposing discrimination. Apart from it’s poor behavior, it’s often just not even valid.

  • Vote for me at SQLBits

    SQL Bits XII is coming this July to Telford in the UK and voting is underway for sessions. I’ve submitted a few and am hoping to get accepted to go back. You can help.

    You can log into the site and vote for the sessions you’d like to see. I’d prefer you vote for me because I’d like to go see friends and meet new people, but feel free to vote for the sessions you’d like to see.

    The ones I’ve submitted are:

    I’m not sure how long voting lasts, but take a few minutes today and pick your ten favorite sessions.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #53–Why So Serious?

    tsqltuesdayIt’s an interesting topic this month for T-SQL Tuesday #53. When I read Matt Velic’s invitation, I became intrigued. I like jokes. I like messing with people, and I was thinking about the recent April Fool’s jokes I’d written and those in the past that have been fun. I’m going to enjoy this.

    You can participate as well on any month. Just write a blog post and publish it on the second Tuesday of the month, linking back to that month’s invitation. Follow the #tsql2sday tag on Twitter or set a reminder and Google on the first Tuesday of the month.

    If you hurry, you can participate this month.

    Not So Serious

    The number one rule is know your audience. I’d be very careful who I might play this joke on. Note that this is also a bit of a abuse of privileged accounts.

    There are a few utilities from Sysinternals (owned by Microsoft) that are very useful for administrators. However they have also been very handy for practical jokes as well. Specifically I’ve used the PsExec and PSKill to amuse myself.

    I once worked in a group that had four administrators to run our systems. We lost one of our people to a better job and the corporate management decided to "promote" an internal employee to replace him. This new person was a "paper MCSE", who had studied for the exams. He was making an effort to grow his career and that was something to admire.

    However he was a jerk.

    He had the mistaken impression, as many people that have achieved something they set out to do, that they know more than they do. In this case, much of his "book learning" and boot camp work wasn’t appropriate for the real world. What’s more, when we would work with him to teach him how things worked differently for us, or explain why the book recommendation wouldn’t work, he was arrogant and dismissive of us.

    After suffering through a few months of his dismissive attitude and desire to avoid learning more in the real world, we decided to play a few jokes on him. We downloaded the sysinternals tools and also wrote a few scripts to command line launch tools with specific scripts or settings.

    One day when he picked up the phone to work on a call, we watched him start to connect to a server. Using PSList and PSKill, we’d kill his connection. Then we’d quickly use PSExec to launch another connection to a different server. At times we could be creative and redirect him to a development server instead of a production server. He’d swear he was fixing something for a user, but since he was on the wrong server, the user didn’t see the item working correctly.

    We were sporadic in our efforts, only causing issues a few times a day when we felt the problem wasn’t too critical. Eventually my manager realized what a few of us were doing and had us stop.

    It was a bit mean, and not something we should have done maliciously. I was young, and let myself get irritated. In later years, I out grew some of this childishness and limited jokes to people that I genuinely liked, changing settings, altering wall paper, creating aliases that pointed to different systems, and even unplugging people mice and connecting my own in an adjacent cube.

    Joking around at work can be fun, but remember that it shouldn’t be malicious and it can’t prevent people from getting work done. We certainly don’t want to get someone fired, as much as we might like to at times.