Zend Framework and the PHP Sqlsrv extension

On the off chance you're intending to do any development with using SqlSrv and ZF, I'd suggest taking a cursory look at ZF-7431 before hand. Equally if you're planning on doing any dev with Sqlsrv and plan to migrate to other SQL platforms later, then it could be just as helpful.

The fact that SqlSrv will return PHP objects is rather nice, unless you already have existing code that assumes strings are returned, like almost all other database extensions available for PHP. The easiest "fix" to allow your code to work across as many systems as possible is to ensure that you pass in ReturnDatesAsStrings as an option.

Vendor documentation scares me most of all

Today I noticed a page appear on technet detailing the use of Windows Home Server in a Small Business Server environment, to backup your desktops. This made me cringe.

In an environment where companies, who are or want to be total or near-total Microsoft setups, are trying to spend less money Microsoft's documentation team are advising the use of a product which many very small customers are looking to as an alternative to SBS. After all why bother with SBS when you can use WHS and Google (or any number of other hosted service providers) for mail/calendaring/sharepoint/wiki services?

For some companies WHS and hosted services might well be a good thing. For the purposes of the rest of my post I'll be ignoring this and assuming the company already has a SBS installation.

The thing that scares me most about this document is the fact that it exists. I really don't see the point of using WHS in a SBS environment. I mean, obviously, you technically can. I just don't see why you would want to. You should be educating your users to never store anything critical in an area that isn't backed up. In combination with redirected folders and/or roaming profiles, and network drives you shouldn't have a problem. By doing this early on you won't need to re-educate your users as you grow. Even if you do have a special desktop that has some magic bit of software, then you should have a special procedure just for that desktop or you should consider replacing it with an alternative item of software/hardware and eliminate the single point of failure. But what about laptops, I hear you cry? That's irrelevant as the laptops still need to be on-site or VPN'ed in to be covered by WHS.

The document strikes me as being aimed at someone who either doesn't know what SBS is capable of underneath the pretty console (in which case should the functionality not be exposed, or explained more clearly?), or as a method of bringing in more revenue.

Perhaps I'm just cynical, but the answer seems to be one of managing documentation. SBS builds on other products and perhaps it could benefit from including or referencing these other product documentation libraries more frequently? Admitedly I don't write documentation for living, but it does still seems logical to me...

HP PSC printers and Terminal Servers

I've written about specifying drivers for redirected printers in the past, but it's not something I've had to do for a few months.

Last week we had to get a 1500 series HP PSC working on a home workers terminal server session, and it turns out that the "proper" driver isn't correct and doesn't install. Luckily it seems that a lot of the HP PSC's use the same internals as the HP Deskjet series. As most of the Deskjet series work with the Deskjet 550C driver we tried the 550C for the HP PSC 1500, and it works like a dream.

Just thought the world might be interesting in knowing.

Linux drivers for HyperV guests

If you've never had to run Linux under HyperV you'll know that it runs, although it could be better. You'll also be aware that Microsoft supply drivers via connect, in a binary state with official support for only a few distros.

So you can imagine how I felt when I saw the announcement on the LKML. Drivers for Linux guests, in the kernel. Ok, so it's not in the mainline yet, but it is the start of good and great things.

To all those involved, I salute you!

My 4 hours of netbook fun, and Sysprep under Safe Mode

I use my work Macbook Pro for personal stuff as well, and quite frankly if you don't want kids in the future, it's the laptop to use on your lap. And deity forbid that you want to use a demanding program; you might as well forget about using your legs for a week afterwards. To combat this I've been toying with getting a netbook for over a year now, and since last week was my birthday, I got myself a Compaq 702EA as a present.

Sadly I wasn't impressed with the 702EA. I knew going into it that it would be low powered. That was what I wanted. Sadly I wasn't prepared for just how poor the performance was of the unit. At minimum I expect a laptop of the current generation, to be able to cope with a "standard" flash banner and scrolling the webpage. Sadly this wasn't the case under XP or any flavour of Linux (current versions of fedora, ubuntu and ubuntu netbook remix) or Solaris (nexenta and opensolaris) that I tried. Having used MBPs for the best part of 2 or so years, I fear that I've become somewhat spoilt.

Having decided to return the device I was faced with the prospect of returning it to factory defaults. Fairly simple with a normal laptop, but as this was a netbook, not so much. In the end I ended up cheating, resizing the partition back, using the XP Home safe mode to remove the users and data I'd added and using sysprep on the provided disk to reseal the Windows installation. Interestingly until now I wasn't aware that sysprep needs to run in Safe Mode with Networking in order to function. If you run without networking it states that the version of sysprep doesn't match the version of Windows.

So will I be joining the netbook revolution again? Given the cost of netbooks, no. The only reason I'd gone for the 702EA was because it was available for £200 from ebuyer. All other netbooks are too near the cost of a regular laptop and I can't jusify it, quite frankly.

The crunchpad still looks interesting though.

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