Category: Uncategorized

I haven’t been great about spending time at ask.sqlservercentral.com. It wasn’t my idea to set it up, and while I think it works, and it has some questions that fit it, I prefer our traditional forums and the discussions that ensue.

My plan this year was to ask a question over there every day to help build the site and answer a couple as well. However I have gone weeks without visiting the site, not the best plan for the editor of this domain.

Lately I’ve been making an effort to get over there and keep an eye on how things are working, vote for some answers, and add  my own when I see something missing.

Warning: Rant coming

Every once in awhile I get a note from someone, usually a somewhat nasty one, that complaints about registration for SQLServerCentral. I saw a note on Twitter recently where some jackass said that he registered on the site for something that wasn’t our content and then needed to shower.

Ha ha, funny guy. Registering on a site that might mail you requires showering? This from a programmer that knows of our site, in the business?

I say jackass, but I’d really love to use a few four letter words instead. It’s insulting, and it really tourques me sometimes. I know that there are sites that abuse your email, and that lots of people want the hippie mentality of “everything’s free on the Internet”, and it shouldn’t bother me.

But it does.

I’ve worked hard, as have my co-founders, to steer a straight moral compass in running our business. Even now when I don’t have control of things, I argue, and usually successfully for doing business in a way that fits my code. Treat others as you’d like to be treated.

Having someone insult the site really bugs me. That’s the guy that likely would complain when I closed the site because I couldn’t afford it. Or would start his own site and then quit because it’s not worth it to him. Why wouldn’t it be worth it?

Because he wouldn’t be getting paid.

Unlike his day job, in which he would expect to get paid, he likely thinks that everyone ought to just put stuff on the Internet for free. It doesn’t work, and isn’t something that is likely sustainable.

I appreciate that Blogger hosts my blog, and that there are free things out there on the Internet, but I also don’t quite understand how it works. Sure hosting a blog is fairly low cost, but hosting 10,000 isn’t. I’m assuming somehow Google sees this as a loss leader, but I don’t see an association there. The fact that it works leads me to believe that Google is making too much money and doesn’t know what to do with it.

Rant over, apologies for interrupting the blog.

  The SQLServerCentral servers are in the UK, and installed by UK personnel at Rackspace. We recently switched servers to Rackspace, off of the old servers that were installed by Red Gate IT, but they used the US settings, to exactly match the servers that used to be in CO. Even down to the time zone, which was nice for me. Made it easy for me to work on the servers, check jobs, etc.
Over the years I’ve done less management on the servers to the point where I now do almost none. That’s fine with me, but I do occasionally need to fix something that’s broken and for which I don’t have a web interface. Like today when I was trying to merge two accounts for a user. I’m sure I’ve done this today, but I had to search for someone by email to fix things.

That’s a US keyboard above, and it’s what I use. I was born and have lived in the US for all but about 7 months of my life. I buy US equipment, and that’s what I’m used to.
Today I went to type in code like this:
WHERE EmailAddress like ‘sjones@mydomain.com’
That’s not really the email, but instead, when I hit “Execute” and got no rows, I looked at my code and saw this:
WHERE EmailAddress like ‘sjones”mydomain.com’
???What?
Apparently the UK has a different keyboard. I was on VPN, and it’s a pain to disconnect and reconnect, and the web doesn’t work for me, so I asked my wife to Google while I tried SHIFT+1, SHIFT+3, SHIFT+4, etc.
Eventually it occurred to me to try SHIFT+double quotes and that worked. However when I googled UK keyboard, I found this as the top result:

That one shows the @ symbol in the upper left. This is actually the layout that my server has.

Working with international equipment or users always brings its own challenges. I follow the Sorting It All Out blog by Michael Kaplan, and I’m amazed by all the differences he finds with different languages. That guy writes more than me, and it’s the best resource if you are worried about how different languages might affect your application. Or you’re just interested in the world languages.
Lesson learned, albeit annoyingly. At least now I know how to type with a UK keyboard.

I am on this week’s CSTechCast podcast, which you can check out below:

http://www.mevio.com/widgets/mwm/MevioWM.swf?r=32393

I talk about free IT training options and some of the specific ways that you an improve you skills.