The Charlotte SQL Server User Group meeting will be held online on August 20th at 12 Noon (EDT). They'll have as the speaker SQL Server MVP Brad McGehee. From the front page:

Don't miss our August 20th online meeting with renowned SQL Server MVP, Brad McGehee. Brad is an…

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Like a lot of folks my age (in their 30s), I grew up on comics, both comic strips in the newspaper and comic book magazines. Here are the "geek" comics I follow nowadays on-line:

• UserFriendly.org
• xkcd
• Dork Tower

I used to follow the Heroes Happen Here {Comic Series}, but… Read more

The following events are for August 21, 2008, in downtown Columbia, SC.

• Morning - Momentum: IT Execs
• Morning - TechNet: Vista, PowerShell, Group Policy
• Afternoon - MSDN: WPF, Vista (for Developers), Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
• Afternoon - TS2: Partners

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As has widely been announced in the SQL Server community, SQL Server 2008 has RTM'ed. It's now available for download from MSDN and TechNet. Here are some readings from around the community:

• Buck Woody: On-Demand webcast for installation and upgrade to SQL Server 2008
• Aaron Bertrand: What version…

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I had to redo SPNs today because we swapped out service accounts on some of our non-production SQL Servers. I wanted to verify that connections in bound were being made with Kerberos. If you've ever dealt with this, if the SPNs are wrong you usually get an SSPI error, but… Read more

A little while ago Paul Nielsen tweeted about having free Euro-style SQL stickers. All one had to do was email him with your snail mail address and he'd send him your way. He's still offering to send out free stickers. If you are interested, you can see what one looks… Read more

The SANS Internet Storm Center has a great handler post about working at the Abuse department for an ISP:

Securing a Network - Lessons Learned

The handler, Deborah Hale goes into detail about some of the issues faced. Things like end users not having up-to-date antivirus, mail servers getting blacklisted and… Read more

In the current issue of Redmond magazine there's an interesting story in the Never Again column. It's titled:

Listen to the People You Hire

The situation is one that's familiar to a lot of IT folks, there's a problem, they've got a reasonable solution, but management feels that an outside… Read more

The network scanner Nmap has a new version out, 4.68. The GUI interface (Zenmap) which comes with the Windows installer version is pretty sharp. A lot of changes in this version.

 I just did a test run and it correctly identified OS and services on the boxes I just hit against.… Read more