Lunch Meeting with Chip and Melissa

I love these two people. I haven't seen an example of two people more committed to their business, and to each other, in forever. They run one of the oldest professional schools.

ed.sc.gov

Well, this past week has been very busy. I think that our guys put in about 3 regular weeks during that one week. We got the new layout up and running at http://ed.sc.gov and we presented on Google stuff at the Webmaster's meeting. (I am sure that link will change soon.. making it irrelevant.) That was fun. I hassled Berry about trying to heckle me during my presentation. We also put in some purchasing stuff and we are working on like 3 or 4 different web applications.

Nursery Road PTA

Well, it looks like I am doing more than just one web site now. I have started working on several different sites. This is not what I expected 3 months ago. I was looking to do less actual work, and more leadership. Maybe that will still come about.

Danger in our schools!

We have a clipping service at our job (I have ranted and railed about RSS, they can't hear me) and these two articles came up this morning, go look, I'll wait.

Greenville Hacker

and

Myrtle Beach Gunman

What I thought that was interesting was that each of these students were handled using the criminal justice system, with apparently different results, one has been charged, and one hasn't, guess which is which. Also, there is a lot of detail about the computer "hacking" student, and almost no information about the gun toter.

Security in schools is very important, and it requires attention. We have to work on physical security of the students and staff, AND we have to work on the security of the data. These should be easy to answer questions, but we aren't getting it done.

I have been thinking about these kinds of things for a long time, and I believe that we need to adjust our perspective about this as we would anything else. It has to be done right, and from the beginning. We are not seeing the leadership from the people involved needed to make a clear impact on kids and parents.

I am not saying I believe in zero-tolerance, but we must make a stand on violence and weapons in schools. If intent and purpose are clear, then students should not be allowed back in.

We also need to make data security a priority. Giving districts the guidance and templates for sound security policy is required of our state.

dotProject

This looks like a great application. I really like all of the features and the fact that it's open source. We don't run PHP in our environment, but I was starting to become willing to do it for this app. After opening up the install file for the RC1 release, I got cold feet. It looks like a lot of configuration is needed, which means time. Which we don't have. Back to the drawing board.

SQL Server 2000 Row Limit?

I didn't know that SQL Server 2000 had a max row data size of something like 8K? How can this be right? Well, after one google search, I have found the answer. The limitation is 8060 Bytes for each insert, but you can update each column separately. Also, if you use a text field or an image field, you are safe. Reference and here too.

Sad Little Blog

I got into a discussion at a meeting last week where the merits of blogging were being debated. The most interesting thing that I heard was that if you don't have any comments, you must be wasting your time, or that you are a sad little person. I think I disagree.