With its acquisition of Hot Potato, Facebook Places follows the footsteps of Foursquare, Gowalla, et al. and makes its foray into location-aware social media. 

Since advertising is part of its core business model, adding the ability to make your posts geo-aware gives them a strategic advantage in this realm. 

Let’s say you’re checking out a new restaurant this evening.  If you enjoy the experience, the owners might offer you incentives to return if you checked-in with Facebook places.  Foursquare has already integrated these sort of incentives into its service. 

Foodies will love this.  Some time ago I started sharing photos of interesting meals (hat-tip to Jin Yang for the idea.)  No doubt, conversations sparked by the post have led to additional business for the restaurants whose food photographs well.

Unfortunately, Mark Zuckerburg’s egregious ineptitude with anything privacy related is glaring in the functionality built into Places, specifically its default settings.  While I’m fairly active on social media, some would say that I’m “Tweeting too hard.” Places really miffed me with its roll-out reminiscent of Google Buzz when it invades my private email with public status updates. 

The problem is easy enough to reproduce.

• Update to the latest version of Facebook Mobile on your device du jour.
• Check-in to any place using Facebook Places (a new icon with a map pin)
• Tag any of your friends, regardless of their privacy settings, and immediately, the internet knows exactly where you claim they are.

Why is this a problem?  This person didn’t give you permission to tell the world that they’re playing hooky from work to spend the day at the beach surfing with you.  I had a look on the friend’s settings who I tagged in a location and sure enough – the ability to tag them in Places was NOT enabled.  The circle of friends most people keep on Facebook is often much broader than anyone should feel comfortable sharing their location with on a regular basis.

Is this just a simple oversight?  I think not.  It is a shortcut taken to push the adoption of an add-on to an established service with an established user base at the expense and disregard of privacy of those users.

So I’m keeping my Foursquare account and will continue to share my location with friends I know and have explicitly granted access to my location.  Facebook’s offering needs some work before I’ll take a second look.

Last month, I had the unique experience of driving across the USA from the Three corners of Arizona, California and Mexico to my home town of Greensboro, NC. There were a few interesting stops along the way, but for the most part, it was pedal down, eyes to the East.

Some part of I-40 in the Midwest.  It all starts to look alike after a while.

At an average cruising speed of 520mph, trip out to the Arizona desert was considerably faster than the trip back at 70mph.

Ready for departure from GSO on the way to ATL then PHX

After a quick connection in Atlanta, we were off to Arizona. Flying high with in-flight WiFi.

Photo by atmasphere

Once the rental car was picked up and under way, we stopped for the most delicious fast food burrito I've ever experienced at Pollo Loco.  If you’re ever on the west coast and hunger strikes, this is the place to go.

El Pollo Loco, Yummay!

Halfway to my Brother’s house, we spotted the Space Age Lodge in a little town called Gila Bend, AZ

 

Space Age Lodge, Gila Bend, AZ

So we drove the rental to Yuma, AZ to pack up my Brother’s things and start the journey back to this side of the country.  It’s for sale if anyone is interested in a new home in the desert. Flagstaff was more popular than we had imagined and almost every hotel was booked up for the night by the time we arrived. I've never slept in an ash tray before, but this place was close to it.

 

Consider it a best practice to book a reservation ahead of time when visiting the only major town near the Grand Canyon.

Once loaded up we piled into the moving truck and set course for Flagstaff, AZ.  It was quite late, and unexpectedly cold, when we arrived very early in the morning on Sunday.  When the sun rose, we were greeted to one of the coolest looking towns I’ve seen.  Flagstaff reminded me a bit of Boulder, CO with fewer dirty hippies.

Sunday morning, we got on the road about 9am and all piled into the Xterra to go visit the Grand Canyon.  It was the first time there for each of us, and the experience of being there can’t be put into words.  Just go there, you won’t regret it.

 

Chris at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon

Two hours is not nearly enough time to spend at such a picturesque location, but that is all the time we could stay and still be able to get back to Greensboro by Tuesday.  We turned around and drove back to Flagstaff to pick up our gigantic moving truck.

Further west in Arizona, there’s this gigantic hole in the ground.  We paid our $15 and explored where this big rock had fallen out of the sky.

 

Chris and Jimmy at the Crater

For the next thousand miles or more, there wasn’t much to speak of, except for lots of this.

   

 

In the meantime we crossed some Big River.

 

 

 

By Tennessee, save for this one, we were all were out of new ideas for snacks from the Convenience Stores, but the variety of goods was at an all-time high.

 

We pulled into the driveway at just a few minutes before midnight on Tuesday.  All that in just under 91 hours in planes, no trains, and several automobiles.

View the rest of the pictures from my trip here on Flickr.

When you open a SQL Server database that has Triggers, it is not at all obvious how you might find them and enumerate their contents. The following SQL code will show you all the triggers in your database including which table they are associated with.

SELECT name AS 'Trigger Name', OBJECT_NAME(parent_obj) AS 'Table'
FROM sysobjects
WHERE xtype = 'TR'

The results will be in this format.

 

From here, you can enumerate their contents like this

sp_helptext TriggerName

You can also view all the triggers associated with a particular table with this code.

sp_helptrigger TableName

When the first stone is cast from a glass house, simply return the favor. A great example of effective "no reply in necessary," diplomacy

Letter from Arizona to the City of Los Angeles (PDF)(76.58 KB)

Quiet Cul-du-sac? ... Thanks Bing Maps!

private static void SetListPermissions(SPList list, SPWeb web)
{
    try
    {
        list.BreakRoleInheritance(false);

        SPRoleDefinition readerRole = web.RoleDefinitions.GetByType(SPRoleType.Reader);

        SPUser allUser = web.AllUsers["NT Authority\\Authenticated Users"];

        SPRoleAssignment spRoleAssignment = new SPRoleAssignment(allUser);
        spRoleAssignment.RoleDefinitionBindings.Add(readerRole);

        list.RoleAssignments.Add(spRoleAssignment);
        list.Update();
    }

    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        //Log Exception
        throw;
    }
}

Google announced a new mobile phone today. We have seen a number of announcements for ground-breaking, sexy new mobile devices in recent history

• AT&T/Apple’s iPhone
• Palm/Sprint’s Palm Pre
• Verizon/Motorola’s Droid

Google’s new Nexus One is available exclusively from … wait, it isn’t available exclusively to any mobile phone company or locked to any network. As subtle as this can seem on the surface, it changes the game in a profound way. Customers have been oppressed by artificial limitations placed on their hardware- well, the hardware that they kinda own- for far too long, and this simply needs to stop. It is inherently evil for any company to cripple or severely limits hardware they sell for the sole purpose of competitive advantage and to hold their customers captive. Apple learned this lesson many years ago when it lost market share to the PC. The cell phone companies must adapt or die.

Personally, I have had dozens of phones on every mobile network under the sun, and don’t recall many, if any, particularly good experiences with any of the companies I did business with. At the end of the standard two year contract period, I regularly jumped ship even if I was reasonably happy with my current provider. There was no reason to stay, their only goal was to hook you and forget about you for two years.

We’re reaching a point where it doesn’t really matter who carries your bits from your mobile device to whatever destination you send them to. They’re just bits, 1’s and 0’s whether they represent and email, a photo, a text message, a tweet, or a voice call. So long as they get where they’re going reliably, the pipe they flow across is completely irrelevant. I still use SMS to communicate with my low-tech friends, but have to pay extra for a communication that would be free via email, Twitter, Facebook, et al. Give me a pipe to the Interwebs and get out of my way!

The concept of buying a phone and being able to use it on any network its hardware will allow for is necessary step to repair the reviled mobile phone industry in the US today. It is also time to stop arguing VHS vs. Beta and standardize on GSM like the rest of the world already has done. Concentrate on what customers really care about: a fast network, a reliable network, and their choice of any phone they choose to buy.

With this crucial shift today, the future is bright for the customer to take back what is rightfully theirs – choice.

Chris is a North Carolina native who grew up in Greensboro. He was introduced to his first computer - a Commodore 64 - at age five and has not been able to disconnect since.

He is passionate about crafting better software, improving the user experience and giving back to the programming community.

Prior to joining Microsoft in 2009, he spent 4 years at Volvo IT working on the world's largest implementation of MCMS 2002. Soon after joining Volvo IT he helped lead the conversion of their CMS with 750,000 content articles from MCMS and SharePoint 2003 to a completely new system based on SharePoint 2007 for the company's Intranet, Extranet, and Internet presence.

To decompress, he enjoys hiking, backpacking, travelling, writing software, mountain biking, motorcycling, photography, live music, reading, playing guitar, doodling, and chasing his furry friends Roxy(a Sheltie) and Brasky(a Ninja Kitty).

While still residing part-time in Greensboro with his girlfriend Bridget, he looks forward to becoming a full-time Charlottean in 2010.