Category: Uncategorized

It was a good day down in downtown Denver at the Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta 2.0. I presented a session and moderated another, both of which went well. I have some changes and additions to my “Beginning SQL Server”, but I think it’s close to a great session for non-technical people as an overview.

It was also good to sit and catch up with some friends, and also stop and talk to a few acquaintances that I have seen at other events around town. I had quite a few people also thank me (along with other speakers) for putting on a free day of training. It’s always great to see people benefit and appreciate the efforts of those that volunteer.

After getting up at 5:45 this morning, I’m beat, but I’ll have some notes later on the event.

This is an interesting piece, talking about some of the software issues with Toyota and how that might come to be a big problem in the future with cars. As we include more software in cars, we will have more issues, and I am worried.

I recently had an issue where the battery in the Prius died. The car was in our garage, and without power, you can’t

• open the truck (where the battery is)
• put the car in neutral

In the garage, jumper cables wouldn’t reach. I had only one option, get a portable jumper battery and use that. $40 later, the Prius was running.

I had a similar issue with an old Honda Odyssey as well when the battery died. However by calling the dealer I learned there was a release switch that allowed the car to move into neutral, where it could be pushed out of the garage and jump started.

As we embed more electronics, the reliability of those components becomes an issue. Already I think the lack of a mechanical way to get the Toyota into neutral is an issue. On top of that, having locks die and be locked without power is a possible safety issue. The door locks can be mechanically opened, but I worry that might change. Not being able to open the truck was an issue for me.

Software is even more scary than some of the drive by wire features. Those can be set in EEPROMs that can’t change. Software, however, yikes! Can you imagine some software update that had bugs in it?

I like more electronics and conveniences in our cars, but it’s getting a little scary as manufacturers look to cut costs and get our the “gee-whiz” features quicker into cars.

I got some more feedback from my Connect item on allowing snapshot backups. They took notice, but I heard the “this is hard and it takes away from cool items in the next version” message.

That makes sense, and I understand there needs to be some level of progress. I’m concerned, however, that there’s a lot more of “we need to let halfway done things lie so we can sell more licenses” attitude for the product. It seems there’s a regular push forward for new features, and not enough of a “finish up the old ones” or improve them.

I’m not saying this is something that needs to be done (with only 4 votes), but I hope that there is a decent amount of consideration being given to suggestions that do get votes.

I used to subscribe to Bruce’s monthly Cryp-o-gram and enjoyed it. He’s moved to a blog format, and I think that the content suffers a bit as he pushes things out quicker, but he’s still a great read.

This week at Simple-Talk, he was the geek of the week for an interview. It’s a good read. I especially like his view on identity theft. Don’t keep trying to prevent people from stealing it, since that’s hard. Instead make it harder to use.

I’m up for that. Prevent credit cards without applying in person, say at a bank, make it more of an effort to use the data and it becomes less worth it to steal info.

I do like the idea of two factor auth for my bank. That would make sense for most people, especially if you keep a decent balance.