I really liked reading this post by Jason Calacanis (Twitter @Jason). A number of people I know have quit Facebook recently over privacy concerns and I’m probably next in line. One thing that FB still has going for it though is it sucks you in like World of Warcraft. When all your friends are playing, it’s hard to quit, even if you don’t like the game much anymore. Your there because you feel obligated or you think you be out of the circle if you leave. Companies with blatant disregard for their users information are going to loose the game.

Decided to give the app a go. It’s very easy to use. Just feed it the URL, Username, and Password of your blog and it’s ready.  It can also support multiple WordPress blogs which is nice if you manage more than one. Clicking on the blog name will give you three tabs. One for comments, another for posts, and one for pages. Clicking on a comment will take you to a sub-screen that will let you mark the comment as spam or approve it. The posts will allow you to view all your current posts as well as make new ones. The posting mechanism is pretty simple. If your using an advanced theme none of your custom title’s or metadata will be accessible, but it does allow you to add a picture, a tag, and a category. You can either upload the post as a draft or straight to published.

Typing a long post on your phone is probably not the best choice. I would use it for quick ideas or drafts notes, but I can’t imagine doing something large on it. Still it’s a nice concept. I can see it’s usefulness for comment control and uploading a picture from the phone. For those functions I’ll probably keep it around.

One of today’s top items on Digg.com was a post from the Kindle Nation Daily talking about the iPad is the next Kindle. The author makes a number of arguments about what impact the iPad is going to have on the tech market. Since I’m sort of in the market for an eReader I figured I would take his arguments and offer up my own views.

1) The iPad will kill the Netbook. &  2) The iPad will not kill the laptop dead, but will seriously wound it’s mass appeal.
This is a pipe dream. I won’t be typing a term paper on it.  Sure there are external Bluetooth keyboards for it, but they run on batteries, and there not attached to the device. I’m kind of screwed if the battery goes out or I forget it at home because it’s charging on a wall plug somewhere. Apple has a full sized keyboard if you can find a place to lug something that annoyingly large around. Touch typing long docs is not an ideal option. The device will not even edit Word docs. Say what you want about Microsoft, but most colleges and business run on MS Office. Not every location is WiFi enabled and 3G is a battery drain even on smartphones. Some people would argue these WiFi-less places are lame and they wouldn’t be there anyway, but having an Ethernet port is infinitely more useful. The hard drive is also pretty small for the price tag. What about my boss wanting that presentation to be projected? External video outputs? Nope. It’s not a business tool. It’s not and educational tool. It’s an entertainment device.

3) The iPad will also kill or seriously cannibalize sales of the iPod Touch.
Agreed to some extent. I can’t really take it jogging with me like the Nano, the Touch, or the Zune for that matter. I wouldn’t take it on a backpacking trip either, so for people in those demographics the choice is clear: No way.  But, if your looking for an MP3 player with more bells and whistles, then yes I can see this as a solution.

4) The iPad could even cut into iPhone, BlackBerry, and Droid sales.
It’s not like you can fit it in your back pocket. I’d be interested in seeing someone comparing battery life on a Droid to an iPad using Skype to make calls, but really Installing Skype is not a big enough selling point. Most Droid apps are free and the BlackBerry is the de facto business phone. I just don’t see it.

5) Will the iPad be a Kindle Killer.
Maybe, but is that a really a bad thing? Profit margins are extremely low on the actual Kindle device. The real money is in content sales. It’s not a huge financial hit to miss out those unit sales. The PS3 would be profitable if they could sell some decent games. As long as Amazon can sell books via an application the device does not matter.

I found myself reading a lot lately. Last month I read The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, Rework by Jason Fried & David Hansson of 37Signals, and Tribes by Seth Godin. It’s an odd combination of books for sure, especially if you compare Dan Brown’s writing style to Jason and David’s, which you really can’t, but humor me anyway. Jason & David, write to get to the point quickly, while Dan is extremely descriptive. The point is I’d be bored without variety.

I really love Dan Brown’s work. If nothing else, his books inspire me to think and do some research. I ended up reading with the laptop up so I could Google pictures of locations and scans of paintings.

Rework, makes a number of good points. After reading thought it, I was happy to see that they shared some of my own personal views on business. I’m not crazy after all apparently. Out of all the chapters, the one most near and dear to my heart is Meetings are Toxic. Nothing ever really gets done and some douchebag ends up eating everyone’s time or derailing the thing entirely.

Seth Godin writes mostly about raising an army of minions to carry out your will…. Cleverly under the guise of empowering groups with solid leadership in order to make a change. The basic premise is there are people out there who want the same things as you do, they just need leadership to unite them and blaze the path.  Now I just need to find some minions.

All this recent book reading has got be back on the eReader kick, except this time the market has more to offer than just the Kindle. I’ve pretty much decided the Sony is not even in the running. The Kindle 2 looks pretty slick, but I haven’t played with it. I have played with a Nook though, and it was pretty nice. The selling point for the Kindle would probably be the web browser. I considered the iPad, but really it’s overpriced for what you get, the battery life is abysmal compared to the Kindle and the Nook, and it weighs more. So it looks like if I do get something it’s going to be either a Kindle or the Nook.

So version 1.1 of MS Debug Diagnostics is currently the latest version of the debugger, however on Win 2008 x64 the only thing you can do with it directly is use the Analysis portion. It will not allow you to create dumps, so we will have to create one manually.

To capture a dump of an Application Pool we need to use adplus which is part of the debugging tools.  Adplus can be targeted at either a process name (w3wp.exe) or a PID.

To determine which PID belongs to our application pool we can use the native IIS tools:

H:\>%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd list wp
WP “4072″ (applicationPool:RDWebAccess)

Then we can target that PID with adplus like this:

adplus –quiet –crash –p 4072 –o PATH_TO_DUMPFILE

Here is a query that works with SQL 2005 to pull the top 100 slowest queries of a database:

SELECT TOP 100

[Object_Name] = object_name(st.objectid),

creation_time,

last_execution_time,

total_cpu_time = total_worker_time / 1000,

avg_cpu_time = (total_worker_time / execution_count) / 1000,

min_cpu_time = min_worker_time / 1000,

max_cpu_time = max_worker_time / 1000,

last_cpu_time = last_worker_time / 1000,

total_time_elapsed = total_elapsed_time / 1000 ,

avg_time_elapsed = (total_elapsed_time / execution_count) / 1000,

min_time_elapsed = min_elapsed_time / 1000,

max_time_elapsed = max_elapsed_time / 1000,

avg_physical_reads = total_physical_reads / execution_count,

avg_logical_reads = total_logical_reads / execution_count,

execution_count,

SUBSTRING(st.text, (qs.statement_start_offset/2) + 1,

(

(

CASE statement_end_offset

WHEN -1 THEN DATALENGTH(st.text)

ELSE qs.statement_end_offset

END

- qs.statement_start_offset

) /2

) + 1

) as statement_text

FROM

sys.dm_exec_query_stats qs

CROSS APPLY

sys.dm_exec_sql_text(qs.sql_handle) st

ORDER BY

total_worker_time / execution_count DESC

Occasionally Urchin 5.x.x will stop processing data. If one looks in the scheduler section the parse will be labeled as running and typically only at 0%. In this situation, one needs to use the Urchin utils command line to reset some flags in the database so Urchin can run the report again. Typically the utils folder is located at C:\Program Files\Urchin5\utils>

Type all the commands in order substituting MyProfile for the name of the profile that is stuck.

uconf-driver action=set_parameter table=task name=”MyProfile” cr_runnow=0

uconf-driver action=set_parameter table=task name=”MyProfile” ct_runstatus=2

uconf-driver action=set_parameter table=task name=”MyProfile” ct_completed=0

uconf-driver action=set_parameter table=task name=”MyProfile” ct_status=1

uconf-driver action=set_parameter table=task name=”MyProfile” ct_lockid=0

Sometimes you need to know each time a user did something like logged in during a time period. Since the logs can be quite large, I’ve used this method to get results pretty fast. You will need Microsoft’s Log Parser 2.2 installed to use this query. In this case I have it set to look for the name Jeff, but that can be changed to any name.

logparser “SELECT TimeGenerated, SID, Message FROM Security, Application, System WHERE Message like ‘%jeff%’” -i:EVT -resolveSIDs ON > c:\logresult.txt

First a couple of notes. Cdonts.dll is not installed by default on Windows 2003. Typically you can grab it from an old Windows 2000 install CD. Upload it to %windir%\system32 directory.

The DLL needs to be registered once it’s uploaded. As long as it’s in the system32 directory, just go to Start -> Run.. and type:

regsvr32 cdonts.dll

<p style="margin: 0in; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;"><!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>Test CDONTS asp Page</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000033">
<div align="center">
<basefont face="ariallana" color="Black">
<b><font size="+1"><%= error%></font></b>
<%
message = message &amp;amp; "==========Test==============" &amp;amp; chr(13)
message = message &amp;amp; "If you received this message, the CDONTS is working properly on your server" &amp;amp; chr(13) &amp;amp; chr(13)
message = message &amp;amp; "Feel Free to modify this script to your needs to get your scripts working properly" &amp;amp; chr(13) &amp;amp; chr(13)
' Replace the email address below with your email address to test.'
MailTo = "youremailaddress@yourdomain.com"
MailFrom = "CDO-Test@domain.com"
if message <> "" then
set objNewMail = CreateObject("CDONTS.NewMail")
objNewMail.From = MailFrom
objNewMail.To = MailTo
objNewMail.Subject = "CDO Test Mail"
objNewMail.Body = message
objNewMail.BodyFormat = 0
objNewMail.MailFormat = 1
objNewMail.Importance = 1
objNewMail.Send
set objNewMail = Nothing
end if
%>
Thank you for testing the CDONTS on this server.<br>
Please check the email for <%= MailTo %> to verify it was successful
</body>
</html>
<p style="margin: 0in; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;"></p>
<p style="margin: 0in; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt;">

Sometimes you just need a specific sized file for something. For instance testing FTP transfers. This handy command line tool will create a file of any size for you. Just open a command prompt and type the following:

fsutil file creatnew myfile.txt <size>

You can replace myfile.txt with any file name and extension. Size will need to be a number in bytes. So for a 1GB file you can use 1073741824.

fsutil file createnew myfile.txt 1073741824