Cheryl on the Web

Disclaimer: If you are not familiar with the SQL Server 2005 equivalent of SQL Server 2000 packages - SSIS packages - then you need not read further.

For the rest of you: beware of the limitations you will face when using the Execute Integration Services Package task in SSIS workflow for SQL Server 2005. Under other circumstances, when running such a package as a job or manually, you can pass in configuration settings using XML configuration files or using command line parameters. Unfortunately, when running a package as a nested (”child”) package using this SSIS package task, you can’t pass in any configuration options (more…)

Those were Tim’s somewhat aggravated words to me tonight, as we both sat on the couch and he was surfing the net on the Toshiba Vista laptop - or trying to, until when the Doctor entered the scene. Though the suspect Doctor application turned out to be from Toshiba and not Windows, it is symbolic of the mass of minor annoyances that Vista can cause at first for experienced XP techies. We’ve gotten to the point now with Vista that every new window that pops up brings out a sigh of, “not the User Account Control again” or “what now?”. Of course, there are those rare times when Vista doesn’t say enough: you’d think, for instance, Vista would have said something to me about the wireless network connection being disabled while I was trying for ages to search for available wireless networks?

p.s. Yes, of course I know I can turn off the User Account Control - but in the Business-as-Usual state, that’s a feature I want. It’s just not a practical feature for the first 24 hours of using Vista, when everything you want to configure involves that control feature popping up at least twice in the process.

This morning at breakfast Tim and I tried to watch the latest Dutch news broadcast online. Pretty much all of the stations in Holland put their news broadcasts online after-the-fact and you can just stream the video, it’s great .. in theory.

Both the sites we tried this morning (RTL and NOS) failed to actually play any video when browsed from my Mac, not in Firefox and also not in Safari. *Learn to do your job* I felt like screaming at the people responsible for putting these sites together - not everyone is using Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows XP! In fact, about 35% of people are using something else nowadays. It’s not that hard to make a site that at least works in Firefox for the Mac. I even have a special program on my Mac that lets me view Windows Media Player videos and these 2 news sites still don’t work!

Some sites are going to learn the hard way that if they can’t cater to the browsers used by the web browsing population out there, their Windows-centric websites are going to be left in the dust. Have you got a website to add to my list? Post a comment.

It wasn’t until I moved out of the US that I began slowly to realize the general lack of awareness within America of the challenges developers (should) face and address when building multi-cultural websites or applications. Microsoft writes books on the topic but seemingly few people read them. I sometimes get the impression that, in particular for websites or applications published only in English, American developers tend to think, it’s all the same language, how hard can it be for someone in Europe to use this? “Obvious” differences between cultures like date/time formatting, number formatting, and printer paper size are usually ignored - sometimes because the developers aren’t even aware a difference exists or, even worse, because they consider the difference immaterial.

My grievance today is related to a “cultural oversight” bug in the immensely popular, open-source blogging tool I use, WordPress. (more…)

For those of you office-workers, here’s your tip of the day: Ever get tired of having Microsoft Office documents open in Internet Explorer instead of in the program they belong to, like Word or Excel? After having an Excel document crash my Internet Explorer today for something like the 5th time, I found this article from Microsoft that explains how you can prevent Word/Excel/Powerpoint documents from opening in Internet Explorer:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/162059

Sorry folks, but this is going to be a back-to-back Tech Talk post because it is top on my thought list today. I spent the first hour of my workday today troubleshooting a problem with a web application I was testing. What turned out to be the root cause? Read on at your peril. (more…)

The pocket PC (PDA, handheld, whatever you call it) is generally a status symbol for those in the management echelons of an organisation. Today, I aspired not to those ranks but to the ranks of a geek: I wanted to pretend to have a pocket PC running on my computer so I could test out a few websites.

If you have Windows XP and want to do the same, read on for instructions… (more…)