I couldn’t find any sites which cataloged IT project failures, so I took it upon myself to build one. I present to you a rather macabre site titled:
I.T. Project Failures
I’m hoping to manage this as a group blog, please contact me if you would like to contribute.

Register Herald has a Zope favicon. Incidentally, the story’s pretty interesting too. (via Digg)

SORUA - Simple Online Remote User Authentication aims to make it unnecessary to log on to various blogs separately.
Question: why was it necessary to log on in the first place?
Answer: comment spam
Question: So will SORUA make it easier to comment spam
Answer: Create one account and you can spam all blogging services. Yippee.
Where is Reputation 2.0?

I’m sure every Pythonista feels this way sometimes too about Python. Ed Burnette is happy with Java the way it is and rants about the pace of Java’s changes.
Although most of the article’s a big whinge, he is correct in arguing that libraries written using the latest language features aren’t that useful to everybody [...]

Deployment notes: Deploying an MDF file to an installation using SQL Server Express 2005 or SQL Server 2005. (The following is useful if you require ODBC)

Note down the path to the MDF file, e.g. C:\zope261\3.03.05\DW30305DEMO.mdf
Win+Run odbccp32.cpl
Assign default database name and database filename to the same one as in step 1 (see picture)

Symptoms:
Error 3007 The backup of the file or filegroup “sysft_Search” is not permitted because it is not online.
Reason: Imported database from SQL Server 2000 may have reference to full text index, which is not supported by SQL Server Express 2005.
I just arrived at a solution through experimentation. Use at your own risk!

sp_help_fulltext_catalogs
… Gets you the [...]

Anil Dash had just complained that FTP is a lousy interface for web services.
I’m curious why he thought so, as I think FTP is a great interface for a REST-based web service, since the PUT, DELETE and GET are already supported, and addressing of a resource is … dead easy.
With GoogleBase’s [...]

I’m publishing this intact in case the page ever disappears from the internet. A classic from Sean D’Souza on something close to everyone’s hearts - business cards. “Dogs have a longer life than most business cards. A mangy street dog can live seven years or more. A four-colour, embossed, laminated business card would consider itself a veteran if it survived till next spring.”

I was using one database (DB1) and wished to refer to a table in another database on the same server (DB2).
This is accomplished without resorting to sp_addlinkedserver.

USE DB1
GO
SELECT TOP 20 * FROM DB2..TABLE1

Observe that there are two periods between DB2 and TABLE1. This is not a typo.

One of Alan Cooper’s joke goes like this:
What do you get when you cross a camera with a computer?
Answer: A computer
A corrollary is this:
What do you get when you cross a music company with a software company?
Answer: A software company
Proof: within days of Mark Russinovich announcing the presence of Sony’s DRM rootkit on his [...]

Patrick Logan alerts us to SAP’s Shai Agassi on OSS, who claimed that "Open source … is more likely to break applications".
Platform brittleness, which determines whether applications are going to break or not, is dependent on the success of a platform, not whether the platform is open-source or not. Windows, by virtue of its [...]

Randfish over at SEOmoz.org blogs on the beginnings of a technique to work out how much a site relies on comments for their inbound links.

Run a linkdomain command at Yahoo! with the following syntax; “linkdomain:url.com -site:url.com”, and record the # of results (sample for SEOmoz - 7810)
Run a linkdomain command at Yahoo! with [...]

Alan Kay wrote “The only way to predict the future is to invent it”.
Robert Cringley’s analysis on why Google is buying dark fiber - namely to provide better response times for AJAX-style applications, and to enable broadcasting of video through free traffic peered with ISPs, is a clear demonstration of Alan’s statement. [...]

How to Get Big Companies to Call, Buy and Beg for Your Products and Services. With a title like that, why wouldn’t one want to read David Frey’s free article.
Too many people are afraid of selling to big companies because they think that can’t get to the “big guys”. That’s simply not true.
David definitely walks [...]

If you purchased a CD from Sony, should you be concerned about this so-called “Rootkit” that comes with the CD?
Answer: Depends: If you play the CD only on CD-players, you are not affected. If you play the CD on Windows computers, you are affected. If you play the CD on other kinds of computers, like [...]

For all the disses Sony BMG has been getting about XCP and the rootkit, Sony’s naivette is bewildering.
What is too good to be true usually isn’t. Reasonable people wouldn’t:

Buy shares that were pimped by spammers
Reply to emails promising riches by deposed dictators

Copy protection without a trusted computing platform is snake oil, and Sony [...]

Sidnei wrote:
The Five project was a dream given form
Thank goodness we aren’t selling soap powder here. <wink>

Google is now offering Urchin analytics free for all, regardless of whether you use Adwords or not. Now that the feature-set is wide open, does anyone want to clone a Free version?

Plone can make your Word documents searchable, like a shared network folder on steroids
When documents are uploaded, Plone will extract all the words from the file and create a full-text index of the document. Colleagues and especially new employees will never have to master arcane corporate folder heirarchies.
Plone is an outstanding tool for tracking [...]

While decomposing problems into their constituents sound like a great idea in OOP, Graham Hamilton illustrates why it is often helpful to recompose the constituents so that they fit the most common use case.
#1: Opening a Text File
In JDK 1.1 to 1.4, in order to open a simple text output file you needed to [...]