Hagrin.com

Today, Google announced the public release of Google Apps. Google Apps now offers a "Premier Edition" which is a subscription based online Office suite. At a cost of $50 per user per year, Google Apps Premier Edition offers users Google Calendar, Gmail (with 10GBs of storage), extended business hours tech support, VoIP through Google Talk, web page creation through Page Creator, Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets. This cost per user greatly undercuts the licensing fees required to own and utilize Microsoft Office so this marks one of the biggest efforts by a Google to capture a piece of Microsoft's market share. Several large companies have already signed on to use Google Apps Premier in attempts to lower their IT infrastructure costs. It will be interesting to hear any case studies that emerge from these larger companies over the next few years in terms of productivity, data security, downtime, technical support and user satisfaction.

Anyone who has used Google Apps (Gmail, Calendar, GTalk, etc.) usually ends up loving the applications built by Google. However, the prevailing industry opinion was exactly how "online Office applications" would function in the real-world corporate environment. The obvious risk is downtime where your workers will generally be unproductive - even in a usable offline mode. A second efficiency factor stems from all your files now being "remote shares". Although you will most likely be saving your files on a remote file server, those file servers usually sit somewhere on your LAN as opposed to sitting on a WAN where connection speeds are generally slower. This causes a major concern especially when dealing with larger files because downloading and accessing large amounts of data over a WAN pipe could end up being very inefficient. Only time will tell if online office applications will succeed in the corporate environment.

Today, I encountered an error that I wasn't immediately sure how to fix while creating a new web part. After uploading the .DWP file to the web part gallery, I attempted to add the web part to a recently created web part page. Even though I had a Try/Catch/Finally wrapper around my code, I received a browser alert that had the following error:

After a very quick search for that error on Google's main search index and Google Groups, I found zero results. Then, I remembered that I didn't make the necessary corrections to the .DWP file - in particular, I left the Assembly field blank. After adding the correct assembly name, I saved the file, deleted the previously uploaded DWP file, re-uploaded the new DWP file and was able to successfuly add the web part. Success!

IBM has created yet another great tutorial this time covering how to read files using PHP. This tutorial covers such functions as fopen, fclose, feof, fgets, fread, readfile, fgetss fpassthru, fseek and fscanf. IBM masterfully breaks down each function and gives the reader a good idea what the best practice is in using each of the functions.

Hynek wrote a great article on MySQL replication and exactly how easy replication is to setup. I definitely enjoyed this article as I was only familiar with replication in MS SQL Server 2000 and 2005 and this article solves one more problem for database admins. Now, with stored procedures and replication introduced to MySQL, MySQL provides another database option for the corporate environment and for IT managers to avoid high priced licensing agreements.

In a quick bit of site news, I finally completed my migration to Drupal 5. Not only did I have to update my old 4.x installation, but I also had to get rid of the old Hagrin.com pages that existed on the "fugly" black and orange template. While all the content has been transferred over, many items remain in terms of enhancing the user experience at Hagrin.com. It's been a 4 year process in the making and I'm still nowhere near done as I'm constantly brainstorming new ideas, taking on outside projects and getting wrapped up in my full-time job. However, with this migration finally complete, I do see bigger and better things coming from this domain.

So, if you have any suggestions for what you would like to see added or improved, leave me a comment and let me know.

"Whoever dies with the most money, wins" - Danny Devito in Other People's Money

I'll admit it - I want to have as much money as possible and I am always looking to make more money, save more money, work smarter, research the latest "get rich scheme" and put in the work to try and make those things happen. However, a lot of "let's make a lot of money" plans don't give entrepreneurs a virtual world to test their knowledge, strategies and "reaction" times. However, one popular method of investing money would be playing the stock market and the Virtual Stock Exchange allows beginning investors to practice their researching and pricing techniques.

Recently, a few friends have created portfolios and have been able to use this virtual world to evaluate exactly how accurate our research is and whether or not our instincts are correct. In addition, VSE teaches investors the patience needed to deal with a volatile market and to not overreact to poor stock performance. VSE allows users to create a group that your friends and you can use to create a competition based on each other's portfolios. VSE provides extensive trading options including long and short positions, limit and stop trading, margin accounts and commisison/interest calculations. If you're looking for a group to join, the group name is "Hagrin.com" so create your portfolio today and let's make this money!

Anyone who has worked with SharePoint extensively knows that when troubleshooting SharePoint errors you will be confornted with some of the most meaningless, generic error messages of any major application around. However, thanks to articles like this (which is where I first read this tip), SharePoint developers and administrators can turn on more descriptive, "friendly" error messages by making two changes to your web applications web.config file -

1. Set customErrors=off
2. Set CallStack="true"

Making these two changes in your development environment will really help your SharePoint developers and admins troubleshoot technical issues.

UPDATE: 2009 June 17th - Please see the comment by David in the comments section. His fix is the best fix I have seen for this problem.

If you see any improvements that I can make, let me know by leaving me a comment. Hope this helps someone.

Versioning

1. Version 1.2 - (2009 June 17) - Much better solution posted in comments by user David.
2. Version 1.1 - (2007 May 2) - Bug fixes which include:
   • Applying Quick Launch logic that is used in the SharePoint WSS 40 Free Application templates.
   • Wrapping data retreived from the database and other sources in System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlPathEncode() to prepare for URL formation and usage.
   • Colorized the comments (I'm looking for a Drupal module to automatically do this for me)
3. Version 1.0 - (2007 Feb 7) - Original Article on recreating the SharePoint v3 Quick Launch through a Web Part

Microsoft announced their Live Search SOAP API 1.0 is out of beta and has been rebranded to reflect the name of their search engine. The Live Search SOAP API excites programmers like me because, while Google has removed any future access to their SOAP API, Microsoft is enhancing theirs and providing more power to the programmers of the world. A quick comparison of the Google SOAP API and the Live Search SOAP API shows the following:

• The Live Search SOAP API is still being actively developed by Microsoft while Google has stopped releasing SOAP API keys and support to the servers handling the API requests.
• The Google SOAP API allows for 1,000 queries per day where the Live Search SOAP API allows for up to 10,000 queries per day. The higher number of maximum daily queries would allow for companies to more accurately track their performance and track more keywords and phrases.
• The Google SOAP API allows you to only pull the first 100 results for a particular search phrase while the Live Search SOAP API can return up to the first 1,000 results for a term.

In addition to the comparison with Google, the Live Search SOAP API has added features such as additional language support, enhancing search tag results, improving local search, phone book results and improved their documentation with additional code samples. Remember, you will Visual Studio 2005 and the .Net 2.0 Framework to utilize this API.

The only problem I see with the new Live Search SOAP API? It can't query the Google index.

Many of my close personal friends know that when Google came out and then again shortly after (my ex will testify that when it was at the 150 range that I said in the car to her that she should buy it because it would go to 400), I told everyone that this was the can't miss stock of our time. I, and many others, was proven right.

Now, I will give you the next big stock to invest in and hold onto for about 5-10 years: SHLD.

Sears Holdings Corporation, led by Chairman Edward S. Lampert, is described as a "broadline retailer", but many investors will call SHLD a "virtual hedge fund". To understand why this is important, we need a quick history lesson. For ease, I will quote this MarketWatch story:

So, he has the track record, the experience and the price is affordable to the common man. However, at around 175-180 dollars a share, isn't it priced out already? Not so if you believe Lampert who describes SHLD as a "$55 billion startup." How many startups do you know that have 55 billion dollars in assets to play with at its "inception"? In addition, the options market is generally a "big money" game led by those with the most to win and lose. When looking at option pricing, you can see that the 1 year and 2 year pricing targets are in the 200+ dollar range meaning at least a 10% increase in the next year or two. That's a pretty good ROI with a stock that has a Beta value of -0.13.

SHLD marks the first entry into the Hagrin.com Virtual Stock Picks tracker. I locked in my pick at the beginning of the day at 178 so we have -

We'll track the performance of my picks over time and see if we can make some people some money. And yes, I do plan on investing my own real money in my picks so my money does back these wild speculations.