Somehow one of my users managed to get a vertical tab stuck in a text field (ascii 0x0B) for a CRM Entity. How they did this is quite beyond me. The problem though is that once it made it in it basically made that entity useless. Trying to pull it up causes CRM to puke. Actually, not CRM itself, but the XmlSerializer underneath throws an exception about an invalid character in the XML document.

Tracking this down was a real PITA. Luckily I new the entity was created on a specific day so I was able to narrow things down until I knew precisely which entity had the data. Then I was able to go to the DB and look for it. Now comes the problem:

I have administrator access inside of CRM. But I’m a fairly restricted user on the DB side. If I had Admin access to the DB this wouldn’t even rate a mention. However, I’m not certain of the table name so I can’t just write the query and send it over to the SQL admin to do (He is in another state). Plus he is in an all day meeting. What to do?

The solution isn’t too bad really: write a simple console app that retrieves the entity without any of its properties. Add the property you need to fix (I copy and pasted the value from SQL and replaced the offending character with a space) and then use an UpdateRequest to finish the job.

My bigger concern going forward is how to prevent this in the first place. Do I need to write a plug-in that scans every single entity as it goes in? Or add script to every form to check fields? Either way seems like a ton of work.

Or maybe this will be a one every few months deal, in which case just a quick breakfix job might be good enough.

So start here: Darpa: U.S. Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk

Darpa’s worried that America’s “ability to compete in the increasingly internationalized stage will be hindered without college graduates with the ability to understand and innovate cutting edge technologies in the decades to come…. Finding the right people with increasingly specialized talent is becoming more difficult and will continue to add risk to a wide range of DoD [Department of Defense] systems that include software development.”

If a kid with the brains to be a hot shot software developer is going to take one look at the IT business and say “fuck no!”.  If I was 18 right now and entering college I’d go in to a something besides computer science and engineering.  I’d probably still learn to program some, but I’d focus elsewhere.

Why?  When you sit in a meeting discussing projects with idiots that tell you they can take the project to India and get Indian developers to do the same work for $8/hr you think a few different things.  First is: no, they can’t.  Second: please do so I can come back in 6 months after the project fails and charge you $120/hr to recover the pile shit you just made.  Third is: no fucking wonder everybody else is running for the exits.  Most people aren't as obstinate as I am and won’t stand to fight for their ground.  I could probably make more money by just giving in and moving up stream in to management and leave the program to people that don’t really do it very well.  But I can’t.  And I can absolutely see why other people (Americans) are choosing other professions. 

I hope Darpa is able to find a way to get more American kids to study Math and Science seriously.  I hope some of those kids become software engineers.  But unless the Harvard MBAs wake up to the reality they are setting themselves up for in the future: forget it.

Looks like Microsoft finally got around to launching their market place for WinMo:  http://marketplace.windowsphone.com/Default.aspx.

Better late than never I guess.  I really hope they have a lot of success with it.

My gear head friends have be talking about the iPhone on our forum lately and this link came up: “A not-so-brief chat with Randall Stephenson of AT&T”.  I thought it was really funny, but at the same time toward the end it got all too real.

Seems to be time for the prognosticators to post up there stuff about next year and given my current project I’m paying a little attention.   During the startup weekend I was surprised there were not more ideas around using location aware internet connected devices with cameras to build stuff.

It seems that John Jantsch is of the same mind:  5 Trends That Will Shape Small Business in 2010.

As a consultant I spend all my time building big IT projects with big budgets.  Looking at this stuff really gets me excited and depressed.  Excited because all of these web API are being made available to do cool things and depressed that unless I go off on my own I’ll never get to touch them.

Cool thing for me is that I’ve gotten a team together to build some stuff.  We just have to decide what projects we’ll pursue. 

I’ve wanted to learn how to write desktop gadgets for a while and decided to write my own Flickr slideshow gadget.  Nothing fancy, but it was fun to write.

You can download the results here: GPFlickr gadget (34.9 KB)

After you install it just set the account to yours and change the timeout to what you want.  Right now it only shows the first 100 images.  I’m still learning my way around Flickr’s API.  Figuring out how to get all of my images was a pain.  It took a while before I figured out to just use the search API.

I have submitted the gadget to the live gallery, but as of now it has not shown up.  I need to go back and read the directions and make sure I did all the right stuff.

I’ll probably do another version in a while that will get all of the images associated with a user and put them all in a slide show.  It might also be cool if instead of just showing them in the order returned I could randomly skip around or show them based on when they were uploaded.

Just got invited to Google Wave.  Whatever that is.

I generally hate having my picture taken, but this is an exception to that:

My friend’s wife came out to ECR a few weekend ago and took pictures.  She got on the inside of turn 10 and took this and a bunch of others.

I’m going to see if we can use this for my drivers license and passport.

Few things I need to spend some time learning:

1. Microformats
2. JQuery
3. PHP – ewww
4. Eclipse for Andriod
5. Bitly
6. OpenID

The big things on the list are JQuery, OpenID and Microformats in my opinion.

PHP gets used for cheap trash, ASP.NET is more flexible, but there seems to be a lot of stuff that could be quickly customized to achieve simple goals.  Only problem is that I hate wasting effort on something I’m going to rewrite later.

After startup weekend and looking at shopsavvy, I started thinking about image recognition.  shopsavvy uses a cell phone’s camera to read barcodes.  cool.  There is a lot that could be done with that.  But how about something more useful?

I’d like to take a netbook (like the Asus EEE) and a web-cam (or maybe more than 1) and see what could be done.  For instance: put it in a car.  Have 2 cameras, one facing forward and one facing backward.  What could be done?  Can we grab license plates, recognize the numbers and then get information?  There are already products for this that the police use.  But for private citizens it might not be bad.  For instance a pull from the DMV might tell you the driver has a lot of accidents and DWIs.  Perhaps you should give them some space.

Or privacy: how many cameras are pointed at you right now?  Wear the rig with the cameras facing forward and backward.  As you walk it tells you where the cameras are.  Probably great for bank robbers.  But criminals aren’t the only people that value their privacy.

You also have the simple application of knowing who you are talking to.  If you can recognize a person’s face and know whether or not you’ve encountered this person before would be nice.  Perhaps it’s PRM instead of CRM.  But no more stammering around as you search your memory.

Right now I’m not concerned about the display device.  Just being able to have a single application be able to recognize stuff in real time should be challenging enough.  I won’t even touch on speech and sound recognition.