The Braun Blog

Modifying pre-existing WordPress themes…  That’s my extent of PHP programming.  I got to thinking that it would be cool to turn my weather site into a regular WordPress blog and somehow incorporate the data that I currently have into some sort of theme.  All of my historical data is stored in a SQL Server database, while forecast and current conditions data is stored in XML.

I did some searching on PHP with SQL Server and came across the blog for the Microsoft SQL Server Driver for PHP Team.  Who knew such a team existed?  From there I found a link to an article on MSDN, “Accessing SQL Server Databases with PHP“.  Exactly what I was looking for.

So, in the coming days I plan to explore PHP territory.  I’ve used .NET for all of my web programming.  We’ll see what kind of learning curve I run into.

What is your favorite language for the web?

Jim Souhan did a nice article on Dick Jonckowski in today’s Star Tribune. Dick has been a figure in Minnesota sports for some time including the Vikings, Gopher Baseball and Gopher Basketball. He’s only the 2nd announcer to ever take the mike at Williams Arena.

For those of you that don’t know Dick, he’s got a great radio voice and unique personality. He’s the current PA announcer for Gopher Basketball and Baseball. He’s also got a lot of passion for the games he calls and has shown up over the last several years for his reading of “The Night Before Christmas” as part of my niece’s Christmas dance recital.

I had the opportunity to coach against him in American Legion baseball several years ago when he assisted his son, Jeff, in running the Shakopee ballclub and I was coaching Prior Lake. Always joking around and had plenty of stories. He’s a class act.

You can also see some of Dick’s favorite memories here.

My MacBook Pro

I use my MacBook Pro for both business and personal. At home, I try to use the Mac side as much as possible while still running a Windows Vista virtual machine at the same time for development stuff. When I’m at work, all I run is Vista from my virtual machine on the MacBook and then iTunes in the background from the Mac side.I was getting ready for a conference call last Thursday. I closed my MacBook and with that in tow, I headed for one of the conference rooms. When I got to the room, I opened my lid and to my surprise my screen didn’t come right back on like it usually does. I power cycled it … still no screen. After my call I went back to my desk and plugged into my external LCD display … nothing.

Granted my Time Machine backup was current, so that wasn’t a concern, but what is wrong and how am I going to fix it?

My buddy Jim at work, who is a Mac guru tried all the secret keyboard handshakes as I watched in disbelief, still trying to figure out how this was going to get fixed. Whatever Jim did, the screen came back and worked for the rest of the day.

But then came Friday morning.

I hit the power button as I arrived at work. Again, no display. I reached into my desk drawer and pulled out my Dell laptop, what I consider to be my reserve… The “break glass in case of emergency” laptop. This and webmail would have to get me through the day.

I did some quick searching and discovered a tech article from Apple on display distortion and video card problems relating to a malfunctioning NVIDIA video card.

The real problem here was my MacBook was 14 months old. Essentially past the one year warranty period. Others who had video problems mentioned a $310 minimum charge.

I went to the Apple Store at Southdale. They put it through a few tests and figured out it was related to the graphics card and that had to be replaced. The good news … It was covered under their “Quality Service” program. Even though I was out of the warranty period, I was still going to get my repair at no charge. They told me it would take 1-2 days. No big deal. It was the weekend. I’d have it before today.

At 5 PM Friday, the Apple Store called me and said it was fixed and ready to be picked up. What service. I can honestly say that my experiences with Apple have been nothing but positive.

The moral of the story? AppleCare, Apple’s warranty program covers a product for a total of 3 years (1 year included with the product, AppleCare extends that an additional 2 years). It costs you about $300 for that warranty on the MacBook Pro and has to be purchased before the end of the first year. I didn’t do that.

The guy at the Apple Store told me that same repair when not under warranty is $310. If you have it done in-store, it is closer to $600. Ouch.

$300 seems like a lot up front, but this case alone has convinced me that next time I will purchase the AppleCare. You may never need it, but it takes one repair like this to make it all worthwhile.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a story about virtualized performance where I did a comparison between VMware Fusion and Sun’s VirtualBox.

I wanted to update that story to include some details on Windows performance when Parallels is added to the mix.

Interestingly enough, Parallels really isn’t that much further behind Fusion in terms of average boot time. To be precise, the difference is about .8 seconds between the two. Probably not that noticeable to the average user.

It comes down to features in that case. I also think there is a lot to be said about the stability of Fusion given VMware’s years of experience and product maturity.

This will be a very important year in the Parallels development cycle. We’ll see what they have up their sleeves.

In my previous post, I talked about the difficulty keeping all your social networking sites up to date. When I was trying out Blogo tonight, I came across Ping.fm.

The premise of Ping.fm is that “Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.”

Exactly what I need. Once you create your free account at Ping.fm, the dashboard allows you to add a number of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Flickr, and lots more. That means that you update from one spot, and the update gets pushed to the rest of those services automatically. Pretty neat stuff.

Although primarily I’m a PC, I do like to see what options are available outside my virtualized environment and available on the Mac.

Mac has a whole array of blogging applications available with a variety of features, but I’ve never been a fan of any of them. I’ve stayed pretty close to Windows Live Writer and have done most of my blogging from that platform.

That being said, it’s been a couple of months and I thought I’d do a another search for some good blogging tools for the Mac. I came across two of them tonight, one of which I am using for this entry.

First of all is ScribeFire. This is a nice little blogging tool that integrates directly into the Firefox browser. No separate application installation required, just a small plug-in for the browser. Full editor with a lot of the features that most bloggers would be looking for and some pretty darn good user reviews. I used it for a previous post I did on virtualizing Exchange and it worked just fine.

I am kind of the opinion that browser plug-ins can be pretty limited and their stability questionable at times because of dependencies on the browser itself, but ScribeFire seems pretty solid.

Secondly was Blogo. This is a full-blown Mac application with a pretty fantastic GUI; maybe a little overdone. The cool part about this application is it’s ability to microblog, that is, post mini-entries to Twitter. Not only can I do that, but if I create a regular blog posting for my website, it will automatically post a link to my Twitter account so you’re really getting some nice cross-platform interaction.

Part of the problem with the social networking era is that there are a handful of sites that are expecting you to update your “status”, but who really does that? A tool that can do it all at once, whether it be just your blog, or your blog…plus Twitter…plus Facebook. Pretty powerful.

ScribeFire is free which is always nice. Blogo will cost you $25 after the 21-day trial. I’ll let you know how it goes.

What’s your favorite blogging tool?

Lots of folks are trying to save money in their data centers by optimizing their infrastructure usage with virtualization.

Interestingly enough, with the release of Hyper-V and Microsoft’s program for hardware virtualization vendors, the support policy for Exchange and other applications has changed.

A couple of weeks ago, a post appeared on the Exchange Team Blog asking the question, “Should you virtualize your Exchange 2007 environment?” They lay out several scenarios where virtualizing at least some of the Exchange infrastructure might make sense.

Take a look here.