Phil Scott's WebLog

Michael Bush signs with U of L.  I hope this doesn't hurt our chances getting Brohm froooom ... Trinity High School.  The best high school in the world of course.  Tonight the Cards play Cinci.  I fear that this game is going to be pretty rough with the Bearcats hungry for a win.  Either way, the cards will have to win by eleventy billion points to stay ahead of UK in the polls after last nights game.  Holy jeez, I think my little sister could have scored 14 on Florida last night.

You'd be surprised how often people comment that they really like my teaching style, which they say is "not reading to them." I've had people that have been taking technical training for 30-40 years, and they ask me where I learned my teaching techniques. It just seems almost common sense that if you are teaching someone something that you need to be filling in the blanks. There are many different ways to do this, and I've never been able to pinpoint how it happens. Some classes you get everyone on the ball, who really like digging into stuff and playing. Good times. In some classes, the students have been moved from data entry and they need to learn how to maintain a simple VB front end. Sometimes, nothing seems to be going right at all.

I've seen some links floating around to Brian Bischof's Crystal Reports for .NET book.  Brian's a good guy, and also an MCT / MCSD like me.  His error log for course 1016 is a thing of legends.  Here's a course that features NT 4, MTS, MSMQ, SQL Server 6.5 and VB6 and MCT's are still looking for that log for when they teach it in 2003. His The .NET Languages: A Quick Translation Guide book is usually a big hit with all the Visual Basic developers coming into my classes.  They like such a short and to the point book to get them over some hurdles and brain farts between the languages, plus the C# helps them at least read some of the more advanced .NET books like Essential .NET or Applied .NET Framework Programming. 

Importing an OPML file would be handy on the links.  Doing this sucker by hand is a weee bit slow.

Scott, really digging the new interface for editing.  I'll keep playing around today.

A little more information about the worm, from a technical point of view.  Now, from what I understand from Sam is that there is built in protection from these types of attacks.  Anyone running SQL Server (unpatched) out there on Windows 2003 Server that can tell me the results?  I'd give it a whirl myself, but our firewall "unfortunately" prevents me from infecting anything here.

Missed this article in eWeek about the source of the SQL Slammer worm.  Some experts are saying the code signatures point towards it being at least based on code from the Honker Union of China.  They point out their anti-American standings and then go on to talk about how it did the most damage in Asia.  Interesting that most of the unpatched servers where Asian though, I wonder if the wide spread piracy had anything to do with it.  I'm willing to bet there are H0nk3rs all over the place there running copies of SQL Server unpatched because they got it for $5 bucks of the street. 

I'm setting up my SQL Server 2000 course for this week.  12 machines, twelve copies of SP3 that need to be installed.  I'm sure this could be done in some sort of automated fashion, but I've never learned all those methods because AutoIt has been so good to me.  Just throw SP3 on a network share, and run the script from all the machines.  Pretty painless.