September 2005 - Posts
We are almost on our way to the Drakensberg with some of our friends. They are there already, and as usual we are the ones that have work to finish, Armand is working his arse off to finish something :)
But soon I'll be lying in the sun drinking some [insert any drink here] next to the pool!!! Hmm...
I found a cool site while searching for a bit of not-my-line-of-work stuff... We are in the process of deploying to production, but for some reason the sys admins tells us that we can't use Remote Desktop to connect to the servers. They are moaning about licensing issues, but afaik you have 2 free licenses - that is the way we are connecting to all our other servers? Now we have to connect through DameWare, which I don't know well but have a couple of irritations:
1. It is slow
2. I can't ALT+Tab from it
3. Sometimes it connects, sometimes it doesn't - access denied, or it just hangs.
So I started on a mission to enable Terminal Services again. And for every search I did I hit the following site: MCSEworld by Daniel Petri. Real cool site with a lot of useful info.
Ps: After a lot of searching and trying I found that port 3389 on our servers aren't open, so I tried to change the port Terminal Services listen on to something else and that didn't work. Then I heard about tunneling or port forwarding, but it sounded a bit complicated and didn't have more time to play with it. So at the moment we're still forced to use DameWare :-(
Armand showed me a cool way to format a TimeSpan result:
DateTime start = DateTime.Parse("2005/08/12");
TimeSpan elapsed = DateTime.Now.Subtract (start);
Console.WriteLine("{0:D2}:{1:D2}:{2:D2}:{3:D2}", elapsed.Days, elapsed.Hours, elapsed.Minutes, elapsed.Seconds);
Which will result in this:
41:17:03:01
Instead of this:
41:17:3:1
The Dx determines the amount of zero's.
Armand and I are planning to go to the Van's Warped Tour next year, and today I realized that the dates are very close to PDC!!! So hopefully if everything works out, next year this time we’ll be attending both... :D
I’m already so excited; I just had to share it!
Last week Thursday I attended the launch of a new site especially for the 'female geeks' among us -
Women in IT. It is an initiative by Microsoft and they are promoting the role of women in the SA IT sector. Firstly Astrid Warren, HR Director of Microsoft SA talked to us about how they created forums and support for the women in their company, e.g. Equal opportunities, making sure that men and women are paid the same, etc... Astrid also showed some stats that were no surprise, but she asked the question of why girls don't consider a career in IT. I think a big factor is that at school we aren't really motivated to explore more technical careers. One of their goals are to make girls, age 14/15 more aware of the options they have besides teaching, PR, law, etc.
After that we heard an inspirational talk by Tuli Shezi who was the CIDA student of the year 2003. She comes from Soweto and didn't have money to pay for tuition. I think after 2 years that she had to look after her mother; one of her high school teachers came to her and told her to fill in an application for a bursary CIDA. She was accepted and studied Business Administration and came out top in her class. After this they invited her to study further in the IT field. At first she didn't want to, because her idea of IT was using a screwdriver the whole day to take pc's apart - she was quite funny :) But she gave in, studied further, realized it wasn't all about screws and again, came out top in her class of 170 students.
‘Women in IT’ plans to award 5 bursaries worth R20 000 each every year. So go and join to stay up to date with the activities and help us take over the IT industry!!!! Bhawahahahaha!!! ;-)
I attended a SQL Server 2005 event on Tuesday at Microsoft and after the event the speaker, Gary Hope of
iSolve announced that they are going to relaunch the Sql Server usergroup in September. I know some of you are still following the activities on the SlugZA distribution list, which I think has been going for 6 years now, but apparently it got a bit quiet lately...
Register here to stay informed!!