Original and Most Foul

A friend asked me where he could find that board game where you have tiles of letters and you spell words. Without thinking, I directed him to this:

An amusing misunderstanding, to be sure. But, really, who buys this pink loaf called Scrapple?  It’s made from scraps, just like it says! Ewww.

Why am I so disgusted by the thought? Truth told, ingredient-wise, it’s probably akin to pepperoni or bratwurst. Love ‘em both. There’s a lot to be said for marketing.  I can’t get over the name of the product. Own your message, Scrapple peddlers.

Returning to college

I’m taking a class at Stanford! It’s CS139P, iPhone Application Development.

Okay, I’m auditing it. Remotely. Through iTunes. Does that take away the coolness? Nope. It doesn’t come with any of the prestige of physically attending Stanford, but it’s the same premium content.

Standford is one of many universities making their classes available for free through iTunes U. Well produced videos of lectures, plus class slides, are made available days after the class meets. The value here is tremendous.

Not only are the lectures provided, but there is a mailing list and a web site devoted to auditors like myself. They provide the community aspect of learning, allowing students to help one another and share ideas about class projects. This aspect, plus the fact that I’m getting videos so soon after the class meets, gives the class a near real-time factor that makes it seem more relevant.

iTunes U isn’t just for geeks, either. Courses on Literature, Language and History are plentiful. I’m eying one on C.S. Lewis for later in the year.

What a world we live in.

Deleting a project in TFS

Did you right-click on the project name in Team Explorer and select Delete?

Nice try.  Didn’t work for me either.

There’s a command-line utility called tfsdeleteproject.exe that is sure to do the trick.  

Start–>All Programs–>Microsoft Visual Studio 2008–>Visual Studio Tools–>Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt

type tfsdeleteproject /server:http://SERVER:8080 PROJECTNAME

Getting TFS30063: You are not authorized to access SERVER?  Make sure you are using http in the server parameter and have the correct port number for your installation.  Also, make sure you are running this from an account with Admin rights to TFS, SQL Reporting Services and Windows SharePoint Services.

MSTest can’t find a dll?

So, I’m putting an existing project into our Continuous Integration process.  

• All unit tests pass in Visual Studio, natch.  
• Most tests fail when running MSTest from the command line.

The recurring error is:  

Could not load file or assembly ‘SQLServiceProvider’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. 

Insert your own dll here, it doesn’t matter.  The dll was in the test project, but it was one of few that wasn’t getting copied to the TestResult\Out folder.  Why does MSTest bring over most, but not all, of the libraries needed to run the tests?  I don’t know.  But I did find the solution.

Specify the dll explicitly as a Deployment Item in your localtestrun.testrunconfig file.  

In Visual Studio, click Test –> Edit Test Run Configurations –> Local Test Run.  Select Deployments.  Add the needed library.  

MSTest is happy, the build succeeds.  Juchuu!

Who took my gigabytes?

It’s been clear problem for 10 years.

When looking a folder structure in Windows Explorer, those with a few small text files look exactly the same as the one with 16 GB of logs.  Why doesn’t Windows color code them, make them sized in proportion to their contents, or otherwise help a dude out by telling us why our disk is full???

Yes, there are many third party tools for doing just this.  Too bad you can’t install them on a full disk.  

To make it more complex, I’m chasing this on a remote server.  I’ve got a tool that will do this locally, but can’t scan a mapped drive.  I’ve deleted some large files, only to find that space instantly reclaimed by the heinous application.  

I bet SQL Server is behind this.  Curse you, SQL Server.  Curse you.