Knows they are musicians and software developers, that is. The new features for the 2007 Outback are interfaces for music devices and a driving feature called S#. (Background: Microsoft first used the “sharp” symbol outside of a musical notation, naming their flagship programming language “C#”.)

We finally stopped into New England Mobile Book fair this past weekend. (Perhaps motivated by a comment I made about independent bookstores recently on another blog). I can’t believe I’ve never been in there before! (Admittedly, we just moved to the neighborhood.) It’s a typical old Boston sort of place: one part erudite, one part improvised, making you feel like you’re in college regardless of your age. Just stacks and stacks of unfinished wood shelves in which some sense of order had evolved, but not from any sort of master plan-o-gram.

I bought Jeff Nathan’s Family Suppers cookbook. I’m especially excited to try his recipe for cooking kielbasa and sauerkraut; hopefully it will be a good kosher way to keep alive the Polish-Catholic part of my heritage. I was also looking for Beyond Fear by Bruce Schneier, but couldn’t find it—they have a lot of books but not necessarily easy to find just one.

(You know what? I’m not going to link the above titles to Amazon.com pages or anywhere else. I gave you the author and title. That used to be enough—you can look it up yourself! Maybe even at the library.)

Anyways I wonder if these independent bookstores are doing themselves in. Most books here are 20% off. How do they handle that? By scanning the books and having the discount price display automatically? By have a “20% off” button on the register? No…the cashier has to look up the price for each book on a tiny little card that translates list prices to discount prices.

I still wonder if the store has anything to do with those mobile book fairs that would come to the school cafeteria a couple times a year when I was a kid.

Universal Hub points out some frustration about the credit-card devices at Shaws.

I remember that one day at the Allston store (I’m a software developer so I remember this stuff :)), everything was chaos because they weren’t taking debit cards, and taking credit cards required manual approval by swiping a special “magic” card after swiping your card (and they only had a couple such “magic” cards on the premises so managers were running from register to register to approve each transaction). Next time I shopped there, they had the new machines with the Yes/Enter button issues. I figure either their old vendor for some reason dropped them without notice, and they went with the first replacement they could find; or else this was a planned transition gone badly.

This issue, really, I think is not one of software but hardware (or the hardware/software relationship). Theoretically you can touch “Yes” on the touchscreen–I’ve actually gotten this to work before they started with the tape and notes–but the touchscreens are so flighty that it hardly ever reads your response (or reads it as “No”), so the only reliable way to complete the transaction is to use the Enter button.

Stop & Shop is hardly better; while at least the button labels match the prompts, their units have a row of “soft keys” below the display and the prompt is formatted as if it’s asking you to touch the soft key below “Yes” rather than the “Yes” button on the bottom row of the keypad.

For the past year or so I’ve been looking for a way to keep files on the family desktop in sync with the family laptop. (Have you ever noticed that everyone says “laptop,” but the manufacturers insist on calling them “notebooks”? But I digress…) I’ve tried a few solutions and I think the winner is SyncBackSE which I just downloaded tonight.

So far I’ve managed to sync all of our pictures…megabytes and megabytes of them, in a few minutes. (Fast enough that I didn’t get frustrated waiting, more significantly.) Syncing other documents and settings is next. But first, the reviews of the runners-up:

• SyncToy: This was a free download from Microsoft. It was slow, and I’m not convinced it was perfectly reliable.
• FolderShare: Seems to be quite popular, but it didn’t make sense for me. Why do I need to connect to the Internet to sync two computers in my house? The Web sharing feature might have some applications, but it’s a read-only, un-encrypted web access system so not really useful. (I’m still looking for a secure way to access my home computer files from work.)
• SmartSync: Read about this in an article by Walter Mossberg. Similar to SyncBack, but more confusing and locked up the computer for hours until I had to kill it. (To be fair, it may have been doing some detailed comparison over the network that I asked for, but not very user friendly.)

So, what do I like better about SyncBack?

• The “simulated” feature so that paranoid me can see exactly which files will change.
• FTP features - haven’t tried but might be useful for backing up my website, etc.
• Great help files and clear labels of things on screen (e.g., that hashing is a more accurate but slower comparison method).
• Pre-programmed to ignore a lot of typical temporary files, including the thumbs.db files that Windows peppers throughout folders of pictures.

As to theory, I notice all these programs except FolderShare - basically run on one computer and sync to a network share. Ideally a true peer-to-peer program could perform better; for example, by doing compression or hashing on each end. I suppose one way to approach this would be to keep everything in Subversion, but that’s a lot more overhead, and as long as I can sync fast enough, I’m content.

Every morning in my email I get a couple unit test reports generated by MbUnit during our daily (actually nightly) build process. Many of our tests output a lot of logging information, so reading the report takes a lot of scrolling and there’s no way to see at a glance what’s failed.
I realized that MbUnit’s HTML reports are just an MbUnit XML report with an XSL transform. By downloading the MbUnit source code, I was able to get the XSL, modify it with some JavaScript, and do my own transform. Specifically, I added +/- buttons to expand and collapse the details of each test, and Expand All and Collapse All buttons at the top of the page. By collapsing the details, I get a nice summary of what’s passed and failed and I can then drill in to see just the errors I’m concerned about.

Before the change I can’t see more than a couple results without scrolling:

After I can collapse the the results and see them many at a glance:

Download the XSL file here.

As if my last post wasn’t enough: Several months ago I whipped up a little utility to backup and restore databases for times when I needed to load a particular customer’s database to look at an issue. Recently some of my colleagues have started to use it as well, and as such it’s been dubbed by some the “Stober Tool.” And it turns out, one of my more, um, fun-loving colleagues has even hacked the tool to add sound effects (exhibit). I’m not sure whether this is a good thing or not, but I’ll leave it to my Internet audience (which I think consists mainly of my mother-in-law) to decide.

Our VP of sales introduced me yesterday to a new hire as a “legendary” software developer. Of course it’s his job to talk up our work…still it was a nice ego boost.

I finally got dual monitors at work. I’m enjoying it already! One to code in, one to read and write blog entries check official work-related email in. You’d think it would be information overload but actually it’s much less stress than alt-tabbing all day to keep up with what you’re doing.

Had to change the address on my Gap Card account (which I think might be some financial services part of GE, who in a reassuringly scary way seems the be the underlying creditor behind everything…but I digress).

Anyhow, the whole conversation involved talking to a computer. Surprisingly, it was more accurate at recognizing my address than some human reps I’ve gotten (and only got confused once by the toddler in the background).

But it would have been a lot faster if I could have just typed it on their web site–where I went first but didn’t find a change of address form.

When restoring a database to an SQL Server 2005 Express server, where that server had been upgraded from MSDE, we get errors like the following:

Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Line 2
Invalid column name 'mirror_count'.
Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Line 2
Invalid column name 'is_password_protected'.
...
Could not insert a backup or restore history/detail record in the msdb database. This may indicate a problem with the msdb database. The backup/restore operation was still successful.
RESTORE DATABASE successfully processed 8081 pages in 10.138 seconds (6.529 MB/sec).

This is running the RESTORE command through SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), or through our own utility, which is where we found the problem. We don’t get the error doing a restore through SSMS, but there’s no record of the restore in the MSDB restore history table so it’s probably just ignoring the error; in either case the database actually is restored.

Googling the error returned only this thread but a little more searching found this thread and Knowledge Base article called Changes to the readme file for SQL Server 2005 says that “During upgrade from MSDE to SQL Server Express, the msdb database is not upgraded.” This explains the problem but isn’t a solution. Apparently there’s a file called instmsdb.sql that will rebuild your msdb database, or we could just ignore the error, but neither seems like a foolproof solution. Interesting the master database is still version 80 in the upgraded-from-MSDE server. It’s not fixed in SP1 but we can hope for SP2.