Paul Mirengoff points out some of the crony capitalism inside Obamacare. Sadly, this is par for the course. When Washington is in charge of buying and selling, politicians and big business will tend to get the better of such arrangements.
For once, I agree with Jamison Hensley, AFC North guy on ESPN
I've taken Hensley to task a few times in the past. But for once, he's dead on with this article. Firing Pat Shurmur made sense; he's not a bad guy, and I'd like to see him succeed elsewhere, but he averaged three wins a season. That's no good. Firing Heckert is a mistake, though. He…
OAuth Providers
Ben Foster has a nice roundup of how to set up OAuth with some of the biggest providers (Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Microsoft).
Security Notes
Brian Krebs notes that bank fraud may be ramping up for the new year. Krebs is also shocked that Adobe sucks at security. Given their miserable history with the subject, I'm not sure why. Don't click things. A directory traversal attack in VMware View. Hail Hydra! There's a new version of Hydra out now.
The Costs Of Bailing Out
Direct costs: north of $10 billion. Indirect costs: much higher. What happens the next time a large firm goes to Washington for a handout? There's plenty of precedent and lots of greased politicians.
Revising President Grant’s Reputation
President Grant was better than many people have learned in history classes. This is yet another Ohio President who has gotten a bad rap unfairly.
Automated Backup Tuning
Nic Cain has an excellent script to automate backup tuning. He published this literally the same day that I had to start tuning a large database's backups, so I was cursing him for not releasing it 24 hours earlier...
Another Round Of Security Notes
Holes in the GPS system. We've known about them for a while, so I'm not sure how catastrophic this latest one is. Don't click stuff, QR code edition. I wonder if anybody actually uses QR codes in practice. Considering that doing this on my phone or tablet would be like blind-clicking random links on the security equivalent…
“Scheduling” An E-Mail For A Long-Running Job
Here's the scenario: you have a SQL Server Agent job which is currently running and you want to know when it completes. You can use Adam Machanic's sp_whoisactive (or a less civilized alternative, but honestly, who wantst that?) and hit F5 like a monkey on crack until you see the SPID running this job ends. Or you could do…
More Microsoft Doom Notes
Windows 8 appears to be a flop in the business world. This makes total sense to me: in my experience so far, Windows 8 has a good feel for a tablet-based system, where you may lack a keyboard or end up doing a lot of work with a touchscreen. But as far as desktop-related work…
36 Chambers - The Legendary Journeys: Execution to the max! 