August 2007 - Posts

Windows Forced Restarts
12 August 07 11:44 PM | russnem | 11 comment(s)
Recently I came in to work to find that my computer had restarted some time during the night. I thought there was a power outage, but that wasn't the case. Apparently an automatic update was installed, which forced a restart of the computer.

How can Microsoft allow this? How can they simply restart the computer no matter what the user might have open or what long-running jobs happen to be executing? There was no warning whatsoever.

If you ask me, this kind of crap is absolutely unacceptable. I asked around and others agree - they said they've lost work because Microsoft forced their computer to reboot. My opinion is that Microsoft needs to release a hotfix that prevents this from happening. I don't mind restarting Windows (when I have to use Windows), but it should happen when it's convenient for ME, not for Microsoft.

There are people who will tell me that there are frequent security updates to Windows that, if not activated by restarting, put the whole network at risk. Well that's fine. Just disable the network and don't let me reconnect to it until I've restarted. But shutting down the whole computer? Come on. Is this still the 90's and no one told me?
MySpace & Me
08 August 07 09:31 PM | russnem | 4 comment(s)
I'm very excited to announce that Monday I joined MySpace as a Software Architect. This is a site that has 200,000,000 members and something like four billion page views a week. I can't back this up with paperwork, but I'm fairly sure this is one of (if not THE) most visited site on the entire internet. They don't have hundreds of servers, they have thousands. I'm very much looking forward to learning a lot here and offering whatever I can to the team. MySpace uses ASP.NET and SQL Server - quite the interesting case study for these technologies. We use Team Foundation Server for source code control. Each contributor uses Visual Studio 2005, and many projects follow an agile methodology called Scrum. Anyone who is a member and has ideas for new features or functionality is welcome to email me at rnemhauser (myspace.com is the domain). PLEASE do not email me with errors or problems. Tom, the first friend any new member has, receives these messages and they ARE read. I'm interested in new, out-of-the-box ideas, no matter how crazy. Check out my MySpace profile at http://www.myspace.com/russnem
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