Kindle Fire Update

Posted on February 6, 2012 by andywarren

We’ve had two of them since right after the launch and overall I’m pleased. They get used quite a bit by everyone, and they are useful at home.

For the kids it’s mostly the games, Amazon offers a good selection of free games and everyday features a ‘not free’ app as free, and those are often small games. The only challenge is getting my almost five year old to stick to ‘free’. Mostly she has done well, but a couple times I’d be working – in the chair across from her – and get an email that a $1.99 purchase had been made. I’d ask, and with a look and voice that only she can do, explains she needed it ‘for the next level’!

I assumed it would be a matter of enabling some controls, but it turns out that there aren’t any. No content filtering and no way to require a password for purchases. Quite a debate online about this, split between those that want the controls and those that insist that those wanting the controls should manage their children. I can live with the odd $1.99 mistake, in many ways it’s good to give them a chance to learn rules, but I don’t want them ordering something bigger – the whole Amazon catalog is one click away! The fix turned out to be pointing the device account at an expired credit card (you could also use a gift card). A hack, but it works,and I get to see when they would have done something wrong.

I wish it was more family friendly. I’d love to be able to give them an allowance and spend against that. I’d like to let them have their own books and applications while still letting us share them across the family. I think Amazon saw this as a one user device and maybe in the long run it will work out that way. Right now we share two devices back and forth interchangeably and it works for us,but the device doesn’t really support that well.

Reading on it is fine. I ordered a book and read the whole thing on the Kindle. I wish it were just a little bit lighter and I wish the texture on the book was just a bit less slick. Funny, I think about how hard it is to get that texture just right. I did the reading with he standard while background and it was no problem.

It’s great to have by the couch for the TV-related look up – who was the actor, what about that new product, that sort of thing. Handy in the kitchen for recipes while cooking too.

I had a friend come back from a recent trip noting that he thought almost every kid on the plane had one. I think Amazon hit the magic point of being just good enough and just cheap enough for people to buy. I still believe the iPad to be better, but kids – and me – don’t need an iPad for a lot of what we do.

On a related note a trend I do see a lot is the iPad/keyboard combo becoming a laptop replacement for executives. I’m not sure why, if its practical (most execs do email and note taking) or just cool. Interesting trend.

Back to the Fire. If you want a basic tablet, buy it. If you want an iPad, buy an iPad, don’t expect the Fire to be a $300 cheaper iPad. It’s been a good buy for me.

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Magazines I Read This Year

Posted on February 3, 2012 by andywarren

In December I went through my current magazine list and made some changes, mostly based on what I had been picking up in airports to read. As you can tell I love magazines, a great way to get a lot of ideas in convenient packaging, and one of the times when I don’t mind the ads. The right ads in context are interesting, often as or more interesting than the content.

The list its not as varied as I think it should be, but it does reflect active interests, just perhaps not all of them.

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SQL Stickers–Someone Should Build It

Posted on February 2, 2012 by andywarren

Here’s a niche idea that someone might have some fun with, build a site where someone can request some or all of the various laptop stickers out there with one request. Capture the request and send it off to the various vendors. A more advanced implementation might be to do the fulfillment.

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Speaking at Space Coast SQL Users Group on Feb 9, 2012

Posted on February 1, 2012 by andywarren

I’ll be visiting the Space Coast group (http://spacecoast.sqlpass.org/) on Feb 9th to do a presentation on Professional Development Plans. I’m looking forward to the visit. Always fun to talk about professional development and some of what I’ll be presenting is ideas for the planned “part two” I hope to finish in the next few months.

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Review: ICE-21 Ice Cream Maker

Posted on January 31, 2012 by andywarren

I’ve had making home made ice cream on my list of things to try for a while, since watching an episode of Good Eats. Just never got to it as kid, seemed like a good thing to do now with my own children. I spent all of 5 minutes browsing Amazon before settling on the Cuisanart ICE 21 ($47). It’s not a complex device. It has an on/off switch on the base, the base turns the frozen canister, and there is a top that holds the scraper still as the canister revolves. More details over on the product page.

So far we’ve made two batches, one vanilla and one chocolate, both from the recipes that came with the machine (free PDF). Neither require any cooking, just mixing a few common ingredients with heavy cream, we substituted 2% milk for whole and it worked fine. Once we experiment some more we’ll try to move away from the heavy cream to reduce the fat.

The flow is get the ingredients together, mix them together reasonably quickly, grab the fully frozen canister and fill it, put on the base and let it run. The last batch I let run for 21 minutes. A minute one way or the other won’t matter,though next time we’ll go 25 to see if changes the consistency some more. At 21 minutes it’s a little firmer than soft serve,they recommend a couple hours in the freezer to fully harden it, but it’s definitely fine to eat at 21 minutes!

I also ordered Jeni”s Splendid Ice Creams at Home ($16), which has a bunch of recipes – most if not all require some cooking – all tested on a consumer grade maker like the ICE 21. Haven’t tried any of them yet, but they look good, going beyond ‘plain’ vanilla and chocolate.

As a family project its not bad at all. Assuming (and making sure!) you have the ingredients on hand ahead of time, it’s no more than 10 minutes to measure and stir the ingredients for the simple recipes and then 20 or so minutes for it to freeze. Kids sitting on the counter beside it watching it spin, sticking their fingers in through the open top to see how its coming along – good family time.

The maker works well, was worth the $50 to me. Extra canisters are $18, but I’m not expecting to need one, at most we’ll use it once or twice a month, no plans to go into production mode.

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The Idera ACE Program, So Far

Posted on January 30, 2012 by andywarren

The Idera ACE program is something I’ve been involved with for over a year now. I’ll share a bit of the back story, and some thoughts on how the idea has grown and morphed since then.

Back in late 2010 I had a couple conversations with David Fargo and Heather Sullivan from Idera, they had been talking about hiring an evangelist to represent them in the community, done some interviews, and just hadn’t found the perfect fit. The community representative is a common model, certainly used with great success by a number of vendors in the SQL Server space, but I think – my words, not theirs – is that they just weren’t quite ready to commit. Hiring someone full time to just do “community stuff” is a leap. Not just the salary, but figuring out what they will do, how they will fit within your organization and add value. That’s the place where the magic has to happen and they didn’t have a handle on what would work for them yet.

As we talked through what they wanted to do it was clear to me that they didn’t want someone that would be part of the sales cycle. The focus was participating more at events, getting more candid feedback from users and non-users of their products, and helping Idera itself change,to become more community focused. It wasn’t one of those meetings where we had three bullet points they had to get accomplished! This is a good time to add that David & Heather aren’t in marketing,or sales – they were (at the time) R&D managers for the SQL Server/Sharepoint/Powershell product lines, David now heads up all community involvement for Idera.

My suggestion was to try something different. Instead of hiring one person and figuring out how to make that work go with what would almost be a part-time model – go out and find some people in the community that were ready to grow and give them some funds to travel with. That would allow Idera to “have someone” at more events, it had more of a community feel to it, and they would benefit from being exposed to a lot more points of view about what SQL community really was. The overall cost would be the same or a bit less than hiring someone full time and would let them evolve something that would work for them.

The program launched last year with a light campaign for candidates, selection, and then a meeting in Houston in July to kick off the program. We had some ideas and dreams, but we knew that we only had the beginnings of that – had to walk through it to find out if it would work and what would need to be tweaked. One of the things we realized even before the meeting is that the effort would need someone pushing it along – managing the logistics as a minimum, so Idera hired James Dodd to do that and it made a big difference.

Looking back now we definitely took longer to get started than we hoped, many of the first ACE’s didn’t get to an event until September or October. That’s one of about 50 lessons learned. That’s a good thing in my view. Start with an idea, work it, evolve it, and find out what works and what doesn’t.  We met for a day in December to assess how things had gone and work on forming the 2012 program. It was good to see it renewed for another year!

The “Class of 2012” will be meeting in Houston in April along with the outgoing Class of 2011, during the week of the Houston SQLSaturday, and I think that going forward this will be the standard transition month for the program – a nice win to bring in a pile of speakers to Houston. Overall there aren’t a lot of changes planned for 2012, minor tweaks, making sure we get the new ACE’s going quickly, let them make the most of the year.

A lot of people ask me “what does Idera get out of it?”. That’s a fair question, and one that is both simple and hard to answer. From the middle ground of not being an outsider and not being an Idera employee I would say it is this:

  • It’s opened lines of communication and made that communication more personal with the SQL community – at a high level it’s network building, or maybe a better phrase would be entering a network. That often means getting candid feedback from someone that before might have not said anything, because they didn’t know who to voice it to.
  • It’s been a vehicle for carrying the feel of the community that you get at a SQLSaturday and other events back to the office via the short trip reports and follow up calls. I can’t explain that well. I guess the best I can do is compare it to thinking about how hard it is to explain to your co-workers that won’t go to a SQLSaturday why they should, why it’s so valuable. Idera has always been great about sponsoring events, but this helped them understand why the events were so popular and what the sponsorship dollars really did for the community.

Doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s enough. Enough for Idera to continue the program, and that means this year and hopefully for years to come six or more lucky people get to travel to some events that wouldn’t have otherwise and once there they get to share ideas with people about SQL, they grow, they take ideas back, and that cross-pollination has a great impact on the community.

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Apply to Be A 2012 Idera ACE!

Posted on January 30, 2012 by andywarren

The call for applications is open today, a chance for six lucky people to do more in the SQL community for a year. Idera will sponsor your travel to a few events in the US, invite you to do webcasts that often have 1000+ attendees, and work with you to raise your profile in the community. The “application” process doesn’t take much time, just reach out to David Fargo (follow the link above) and let him know you’re interested!

Who should apply? I think I’d start by saying that if you’re interested, apply. Don’t filter yourself out because you think you’re not well known (or too well known), because you’re an MVP (or not), or anything else. The focus is on presenting/speaking, so I’d say you either have to be a speaker now, or be prepared to become one. The goal is to select a very diverse group, you might be the one that fits a niche just right.

Apply if you’re interested, and if you know someone in your local group is ready to grow,send the link to them.

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Petitions on Change.org and Thoughts on Changing PASS

Posted on January 28, 2012 by andywarren

I tried this out – Change.org that is – recently as part of a post about PASS and wanted to post a few comments about the experience.

Setting up a petition was very easy and they do a good job of walking you through the process. The total time is maybe 10 minutes to set up, but that’s not counting the time you spend getting the idea into a clearly written state. They offer ideas on publicizing the petition as well. Each day I received an update on how many people had signed, and on days when no one signed I got a reminder to get out there and push. Toward the end of the first week they sent an email showing how many were referred by email, Twitter, etc.  One feature I really liked is that people can enter a reason why they are signing. I think that’s incredibly valuable to someone looking at it trying to decide if they want to sign, or as someone trying to decide if the signers are – for a lack of a better word – credible.

The default goal is 100 and I left it at that, and I didn’t do more than the one blog post – didn’t take their advice on marketing it intentionally. I said bit my bit, offered a solution and a means of supporting it, and let it go – I wanted change, but was wary of being seen as having an axe to grind, and no reason to push, if it had merit,people would find it. The final count was 47 – not as many as I had hoped,but not a failure either.

I don’t know that it is the best way to drive change in all cases. For the example I tried related to an issue regarding appointments the discussion is complex, and the petition doesn’t do discussions – it’s basically only “agree” votes, you can’t see the dissenters and why they don’t agree. It’s a bit of a tactical choice for someone that wants to drive change. If you can state your case/change clearly and think you can get “enough” signatures I think a petition is smart – easy for people to digest and assess. Otherwise I think a discussion and an up/down vote might make more sense. I think the MS Connect model might be a good one for PASS to adopt – make it easy to submit ideas and let the community decide which ones have merit. It wouldn’t be binding, but it would give the Board a single source for ideas for change and a way to understand the level of interest.

The other part of this that was interesting was thinking about how people perceive the ones who sign. I had someone tell me that it would have been more impactful if there were more non-Texas/non-Sri appearing supporters. I get that point of view, I just think it’s not the only way to look at it, for example:

  • Doesn’t it also count that those people know him AND think enough to support the idea?
  • Most people vote on things that impact them directly or can feel the impact in a personal way – someone in Orlando may look at it and not knowing the people, decide that it’s not something they want to engage in. The sample of supporters will always be skewed in scenarios like this.

Not up to me to say that one point of view is more right on this than another, and to be fair, it would have been more impactful to have a wider sample, more votes, or both. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. I don’t envy any leader trying to decide what to make of a petition and which view to adopt.

Finally, as I think about what I want PASS to be, I want to make sure that we the members can drive change and to be candid, that has to be more than just voting on the Board. Something like Connect would be a good start, and I’ll add a tweak – add a rule that any idea that gets more than the number of votes equal to 50% of the max votes cast for the vote getter in the most recent election (or some formula like this) automatically goes on the agenda at the next Board meeting for discussion and a vote. Needs some thought, but it would put all the ideas in one place, would restrict it to members, and would let us see the yes/no votes.

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Link: How USB Charging Works

Posted on January 27, 2012 by andywarren

Good discussion of how USB charging works.

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Windows 8 Easy Refresh?

Posted on January 25, 2012 by andywarren

I saw this write up about the built in ability to both restore to factory settings as well as just refresh (basically a clean install but preserves your data). It’s not a dumb idea, it solves a common problem that has been already a long time. Way way back when I started in IT doing phone support it was very common to have the user reinstall Windows 95 over the existing install, essentially doing the ‘refresh’. The power user trick at the end was to have them search for “*.reg”, select all, then press enter, which would merge 40 or 50 reg files back into the registry and get most apps running again without a reinstall.

That was a long time ago. Windows 95!

So as much as this solves a problem (resetting before donating to charity)(does it really do a good job of wiping your data?), this is still a band aid. We end up reinstalling – I do it myself – because the machine gets so junked up that it takes forever to start. Cleaning that up should be easy, but it’s not. The registry grows and grows as uninstallers do a half way effort, shared dll’s get left behind ‘just in case’,etc,etc.

Enough ranting though. This feature – assuming it survives to RTM – will help a lot of people. My wife was reinstalling Windows on one of the computers we have set out for the kids and it would have been nice to just click ‘reinstall’ and have all the drivers loaded back with it.

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