June 2004

From one of the venture blogs I watch, here’re the pix.

I guess I should’ve been a bit more verbose in my last entry. Microsoft has a whole range of Express products: Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual C#, Visual J#, and Visual Web Dev in addition to SQL. The Express page is here and it’s a jumping-off point to the rest of the products, including links for downloads.

Microsoft’s making SQL Server 2005 Express available here. The web page says it’s a free implementation based on SQL Server 2005 and will run on Windows XP as well as Server 2003.

The Knoppix CD boots on my trusty old Dell C600 laptop. Now, I guess I’ve gotta find a wireless card it recognizes.

Needed a good, low-cost backup program. Good if it backs up to disk and can keep versions. Found the following, with my favorite on top:

SyncBackup
DFIncBackup
SimplySafe Backup

Tried all 3 and eventually settled on the first. They’re all good.

Had a conversation with a friend this week about my disk installation issues. He recommended I take a look at the Linux distributions known as Knoppix. Now, I’m familiar with security tools version called Knoppix-STD and have used it on a couple of occasions but, somehow, I missed the original. Wonderful distro! Detected my USB keyboard and all of my devices including the drive on the IDE RAID *and* mounted all of my partitions including the NTFS ones.

It’s about a 700M ISO image. Boot it and run it from CD.