Last week I received the above error while trying to build a project that had been built many times in the past. The error text reads “Unrecoverable Build Error”, your project does not get built, and that's all the information you can expect to get. The Microsoft Support Site saved my life on this one: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/329214/EN-US/ All I needed to do was to re-register Mergemod.dll. I am blogging this because I don't know what may have caused this problem, therefore, it may happen again.

March's Melbourne SQL Server SIG was presented by Greg Linwood, on “Performance Tuning Methodology - SQL Server 2000/2005” (event details can be seen here). The topic was obviously pretty relevant because the room was packed. The slides from Greg's presentation are available from http://www.sqlserver.org.au/resources/ViewResource.aspx?resourceId=33. Greg started by defining “methodology” as a repeatable process, and explained that “performance tuning” had a different meaning for DBAs and developers - he mentioned that DBAs are concerned that the server runs well, while developers are interested in their procedures running fast (since I'm a developer, I see nothing wrong with this!) Greg then went through some of...

Leonid points to a great dev wall chart, “The 5 Stages of Debugging” (well, at least it's hanging on my wall). He he.

Will mentions that he's starting to seek out local (Australian) content in his blog reading. I have experienced this too, and I'm coming to realise that there's a) a great number of Aussie bloggers, and b) some of them are in IT, and most know their stuff. When I first started reading blogs in June of 2003, I looked mainly at the “big guns” of blogging, whether I was interested in what they had to say or not. On those blogs, the quality is often very, very high, but the relevance to me can be quite low (in terms of...

I'm not much of a marketing guy, but I read an article from Wired called “The Long Tail” (thanks Tariq for the link), and it blew me away. Basically the article examines the popular conception that 80% of sales dollars are generated by 20% of products. I've worked in retail, and this is a tried-and-true rule. But the article goes on to explain that some retailers (e.g. Amazon, NetFlix) are catering to the other 80% of products (the “long tail“-end of the market), that aren't in so high demand, and finding a lot more than just 20% dollar sales. Some quotes to give you an...

I'm not much of a gamer, but I am partial to the occasional Pirates! or Patrician II. Before playing those games, I run a Windows batch file that turns off un-needed services and applications so my computer is in top gaming shape. Ideally I'd love to shut down anti-virus checkers, my firewall software, desktop search engines, etc. - all the stuff that runs in the background using CPU cycles or RAM - but the reality is that I need most of those functions of my computer to keep running. I have seen tips (for example, here and there) showing how to use...

I sent the following e-mail to Corneliu, who's organising transport for Code Camp Oz: Hi Corneliu, I'm looking for a place in a car bound for Code Camp Oz. I'm coming from Melbourne and can arrange to meet the potential lift anywhere in Melbourne's suburbs. I travel light, have a reasonable singing voice, am fairly amiable and (of course!) will contribute petrol money. Thanks in advance, Thomas Williams I figure the more people I can ask, the better. If you can & want to help, please get in touch with me through my Contact page.