Here's one more to crowdsourcing.....Fixya Raises $6 Million B Round for Crowdsourced Tech-Support

Companies hate providing good tech support for their products because it is expensive. And consumers hate calling up tech support when they can’t get a gadget to work properly because they usually get the run-around. The idea for Fixya is quite simple: Let consumers help fix each other’s gadgets.

MSDN SQL 2005 Setup Failure - Fixes

Fixes to couple of issues i faced while re-installing SQL 2005 on my dev box

If you get 'the system administrator has set policies to prevent this installation' issue then

1. Open regedit.exe
2. Find the registry path 'HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\'
3. Delete all the subkeys that are empty
4. Run msxml6.msi again

If you get 'higher version of MSXML6' issue then

1. Open regedit.exe
2. Find a folder similar to Hkey_local_machine\software\classes\installer\products\ check the keys inside it to confirm it is the MSXML6 parser key
3. Delete this key
4. Run msxml6.msi again

Few tips for 'Plugging holes in your app'

These are few mistakes we've come across while working on performance enhancement for an app.

If you are kind of guy who stores GUID in char(36) (weird), use Unique Identifier please, GUID requires 36 bytes of data but if you use UniqueIdentifier type, then we require only 16 bytes of data.

Also, also the N '' prefix, while encoding your Unicode data (to aviod SQL injection etc), if the fields are char or varchar type (check link for the comparison sheet) it will prove costly too.

And its easy to replicate this black hole which leaks your app,

With a test table containing 100,000 rows with a char(36) field containing guids,
The following SQL took 56 ms to run:
SELECT * FROM testtable WHERE guid = N'00008999-A3B3-41FE-BF23-40465CF14147'

Where as the following sql:
SELECT * FROM testtable WHERE guid = '00008999-A3B3-41FE-BF23-40465CF14147'
took 0 ms (less than 1).

I am feeling.....

I came across this site quite accidently and 'i feel' this one is really cool, not because of a great UI or features, but appreciate the brains behind this idea.

To know more about what i am talking, land in http://www.wefeelfine.org URL, by the time you are reading this, wefeelfine.org would have sucked this blog's header and made a particle out of it and someone might be reading :)