The Value of a Good DBA

A great database guy is a boon for a development team. Don't take one for granted. When he is gone, you will feel the pain. I've worked on big projects with a good one and with lackluster talent. Let me tell you, developer productivity goes down hill fast in the latter situation.

I suspect it is a matter of specialization. There isn't much a DBA can do that I can't do; however, there is very little a DBA does that I want todo. And it is a total break in mindset to go from solving problems via Object Oriented constructs to solving them with set theory and the less then impressive tools available for integrating with transactional databases.

Outlook sucks. Gmail is better!

Gmail has completely spoiled me.

Being forced to use Outlook at work is like a punch in the nuts. I need to find an email from November but the insane archiving system in Outlook is making this seem impossible. I have these backups of the Outlook Archive file (.pst) but it appears to be empty. What the hell was the point of archiving! Why don't I have everything available to me? I have a 300 GB harddrive, why is anything gone?

VMWare Fusion 3.0

I recently upgraded from a Mac Mini to a MacBook Pro. On the Mini, I was doing some .Net development with VMWare Fusion 2.4. It was an excellent setup. Running XP within OSX was the best of the both worlds: XP for running Visual Studio (C# Express was adequate for my purposes) and OSX for everything else. Also, nice to play for Chrome in XP since Google has yet to release a Mac version.

One thing on the Mini, Fusion 2.x didn't run well in Unity mode. Unity removes you from the XP desktop opting instead to make each Windows application appear to be a Mac application. Each app minimizes to the Mac program bar appearing to you as a native OSX program. But they didn't play well with Spaces. I use Spaces with the 4 desktop setting. Apps in Unity mode just appeared as grey blobs on the screen, like Unity couldn't tell they were individual programs.

After migrating the Mini to my shiny new MacBook then upgrading to Fusion 3, I was eager to see if this is fixed. I am happy to say, so far so good. This isn't a thorough test, but it certianly looks nice:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

More to come as I do some actual .Net hacking on my Mac. Take that Uncle Bill.