The Police are coming back through the US and will be stopping in Phoenix again.  [This is, my friends, a small miracle.  Despite Phoenix being the 5th most populous city in the US, many great acts refuse to make a stop here.  I digress...]  In an amazing lineup, Elvis Costello is "opening" for them, despite Elvis calling The Police "bloody dreadful."

Today, I purchased my tickets for the show through Ticketmaster.  The process is not the quickest, but that I can live with.  I start to get really steamed when I calculate that for every dollar I spent, Ticketmaster, the venue and/or the promoter made an additional $0.47 above and beyond the cost of my ticktes.  So here I sit, $80 worth of tickets costing me $115.25.

But here's what really chaps my hide: of the methods available to get your tickets, Ticketmaster charges $2.50 to deliver your tickets via email. 

For those of you not-so-technically-inclined, let me explain this to you.  It costs Ticketmaster first class postage to mail your tickets to you.  Today, that's $0.41.  They do not charge you a dime for that service.  Email, if you don't remember, is free.  The tools they use to make the tickets were long-ago paid for.  (Software to create bar codes and PDFs are relatively inexpensive; ~$1000 one time charge.)  So, can you tell me why they charge $2.50 for something that is essentially free?!

This, my dear friends, is highway robbery and just another reason why the music industry is collapsing under it's own weight.  Hangers-on and companies with nominal value-add are squeezing every last dime out of the consumer.  And they wonder why music is being pirated?

My mother is the official photographer at all events.  She takes out her (not-so) trusty $50 point-and-shoot and snaps off a few shots whenever more than one of us are together at any given event.  I love my mom, but it's a running joke with my siblings that none of us have ever seen any of those photos. 

If you're in a similar situation, I urge you to take time at least once a year to have a sitting with a professional photographer.  There's no cutting corners on this one.  Because my wife is a wedding florist, we have the opportunity to virtually interview dozens of photographers a year.  Many are Johnny-come-latelies who never amount to much, but some are very talented artists who rise above and shine brightly.

If you're in the Phoenix area, I strongly urge you to contact Melissa Jill for a sitting.  If you're planning a special event, she should be on your short list of photographers.  She has a great eye and uses her tools very effectively to get the most out of the time and place.  My wife, my son and I spent an hour with her the other day and I couldn't be happier, even though I haven't yet seen all of the results.

Bravo, Melissa.  You've got talent.

http://www.MelissaJill.com
http://www.MelissaJill.net

There's much rumbling going on in the internets this morning due to the story about the MacBook Air being the computer to be compromised (hacked) during the PWN2OWN contest being held at the CanSecWest conference this week. 

The rules were fairly simple; the first to hack a machine would win the hacked computer and $20,000 if done via a network, $10,000 if done via the internet (via a browser), or $5,000 if accomplished via an installed program.  The interesting sub-topic of this is that Vista's IE7 was not the first of the three machines being bombarded.  The third computer is running Ubuntu.

I expect Vista's IE7 to fall soon, but the fact that Safari was the first, and possibly the easiest gateway to gain access has caused much gnashing of teeth and redirection of the facts of the case.  In my reading, Apple lost this round; plain and simple.  Have no fear, Vista will get it's share sooner or later.

What's interesting is the reaction from the pro-Apple crowd.  The fanboys are not used to this kind of disappointment:

"...but has anyone even bothered to try the other two computers... [or] are the two other computers Dells and nobody wants them?"

"Big deal."

"...if the same interest and effort are put to exploit Vista... that would have already happened."

"Let's face it: if the prize is the laptop you hack then everyone would be trying to hack the Mac: who the [expletive] wants the shame of walking away with a Dell under their arm?"

Everyone needs to calm down and recognize what happened today:  Holding all other things equal, modern operating systems are pretty secure (borne out by the fact that nobody took home the $20,000 prize) and on any day you can be hacked if you're not careful, regardless of your computer and operating system.  In short, be careful on the internet.  There are people who pay money to gain ownership of computers, and yours can be owned unless you take care, patch often, and keep anti-virus programs up to date.

More reading:

• http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/03/28/macbook-air-compromised-in-2-minutes-for-10000
• http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/28/0126221
• http://security.itworld.com/5013/mac-hacked-first-in-contest-080327/page_1.html

Nightly care and feeding of your Visual SourceSafe database is a must.  If you are working with a project or multiple projects of any size, this is an important task.  The challenge is that Microsoft makes it a little difficult to find the right tools to help you keep your database tuned.

The process I created and describe below has worked for me for years.  It is a bit of overkill, but has produced a stable database night after night, and has continued to work through 3 VSS version updates.

The process is a 3 step batch file:

1. Run a base Analyze to identify any bad data, backup
2. Rerun using -F switch (fix), backup
3. Rerun using -C switch (compress), backup

Steps 2 and 3 are a bit redundant as they both use the fix (-f) switch.  You may chose not to use that switch both times.

Batch file code:

   1: cd c:\

   2: cd program files\microsoft visual sourcesafe

   3:  

   4: REM *** Set the base variables for directory names

   5: for /F "tokens=2,3,4 delims=/ " %%i in ('date/t') do set d=%%k%%i%%j

   6: for /F "tokens=1,2,3 delims=:. " %%i in ('time/t') do set t=%%i%%j%%k

   7: set B=e:\Backups\VSS\Analyze

   8: set C=%B%\Current

   9: set S=%B%/%d%-%t%

  10: set A=C:/public/VSS/data

  11:  

  12: ANALYZE -V4 -I- -B"%C%" "%A%"

  13: for /F "tokens=2,3,4 delims=/ " %%i in ('date/t') do set d=%%k%%i%%j

  14: for /F "tokens=1,2,3 delims=:. " %%i in ('time/t') do set t=%%i%%j%%k

  15: REN %C% %d%-%t%A

  16: MKDIR %C%

  17: ANALYZE -F -I- -V4 -B"%C%" "%A%"

  18: for /F "tokens=2,3,4 delims=/ " %%i in ('date/t') do set d=%%k%%i%%j

  19: for /F "tokens=1,2,3 delims=:. " %%i in ('time/t') do set t=%%i%%j%%k

  20: REN %C% %d%-%t%B

  21: MKDIR %C%

  22: ANALYZE -F -I- -C -V4 -B"%C%" "%A%"

  23: for /F "tokens=2,3,4 delims=/ " %%i in ('date/t') do set d=%%k%%i%%j

  24: for /F "tokens=1,2,3 delims=:. " %%i in ('time/t') do set t=%%i%%j%%k

  25: REN %C% %d%-%t%C

  26: MKDIR %C%

  27:  

The batch file has some DOS trickery to tease out the current date and time.  This allows me to rename (REN) the "\vss\Analyze\Current" directory to the time the step completed.

The result is a the following file structure in my e:\ drive:
e:\Backups\vss\Analyze\[yyyy][mm][dd]-[hh][mm][am/pm][a/b/c]
e.g.
e:\Backups\vss\Analyze\20080319-0144AMC

This structure allows me to run the backup a weekend evening and if the database goes haywire, I can get any one of the last "good" databases for recovery, even if one of the last good backups was in the middle of this batch script.  It also allows me to delete "old" backups as I see fit.  Of other note, a log file (analyze.log) is placed in the root of each backup directory, in case you want to see exactly what went down during the process.

For the record, my VSS database contains over 55k files, occupies 1.35GB on the hard drive, and this process takes ~2.5 hours to run.  If you run this during the work week (or your dev team has no life), you need to log in to the VSS database and lock it using the Administration tool, then log out.  The FIX (-F) switch will not work if any users are actively logged in to the database.  Sadly, there is no command line to lock the database.

I installed Vista SP1 last night and the install was unremarkable, which is a good thing.  I did not have any issues with any of my development tasks today, and the OS seemed to simply get out of my way.  That's exactly what it should do.  Now that I know SP1 is baked in without issue my next task will be to perform an annual spring cleaning and rebuild this machine.  However...

As has been discussed ad nauseam, many bits of functionality were discussed long ago when Microsoft was hatching Vista.  Some came to fruition, some were abandoned early, and some just disappeared into the ether.  One item that seemed to live into the release of Vista was the idea of "offline updating" or slipstreaming Service Packs into existing disk images (a.k.a. ISOs).  The idea is that when a service pack comes along, you simply unpack it, and copy all of the files into the UPDATE folder in the ISO.  Boom.  Done.  Err... not so fast.  Seems that Microsoft had "ran into some unexpected issues with the servicing stack" for SP1 so no soup for you, system admins; well, unless you consider getting a new ISO from Microsoft a solution.

___________________________________________________________________

I'll admit that the following may not be an SP1 related note, but I only noticed it post install.

At some point along the line, Microsoft changed their warning windows to a layout that looks suspiciously like another application that strikes fear in my heart.  I can't be the only person to notice this?