Proclarity visualisations included in AdCenter Analytics

Check out the screenshots here. Anyone who's familiar with Proclarity or PerformancePoint will recognise the Heat map (or "Tree Map" in AdCenter parlance - confusingly, Heat Map seems to refer to something else again).

I understand this particular visualisation won't be in the first release.

Since AdCenter Analytics is free, I trust this means that CALs will no longer be required to view Proclarity visualisations used in PerformancePoint solutions? (Somehow I suspect MS begs to differ on that point).

I'm pretty late to this news, and frankly it's because enterprise and soho/consumer analytics are poles apart. For what it's worth, I couldn't find anyone else out there who has commented on this either.

I considered signing up to the AdCenter Analytics beta but it looks like they'll only invite people with sites that have a bare minimum of 25000 page views a month. I have only had (google) analytics enabled for a week now, but with some optimistic extrapolation I might be racking up a mighty 500 or so...

Use Oracle install defaults if you want a crap character set

My big lesson with Oracle installations:

• Never install a starter database
• Never "next through" the default options when creating a database

This is because the default character set is usually something like WE8MSWIN1252, but a lot of apps require Unicode these days.

These default character sets are never strict subsets of Unicode character sets and consequently require a lengthy migration process to convert to something like AL32UTF8.

Instead use the Database Configuration Assistant to create your database, and make sure you select something suitable on the Character Sets tab.

I'm fully aware that best practice is to work through a 10 page checklist to tick off all the prerequisites, but sometimes life's just too short.

Out of Disk Space with VMWare Player and Virtual Disk Mount

My mounted vmdk file wouldn't accept any more contents - out of disk space. All the instructions I found for increasing the disk space required VMWare Workstation or Server.

I really really really didn't want to install these. Unfortunately I really really really had to.

I followed the instructions as per http://www.leonmeijer.nl/archive/2007/05/07/25.aspx

This type of maintenance is totally unnecessary with Virtual PC. What's worse, VMWare have made it very command-liney to do.

Enabling Shared Folders in VMWare Player

Add this to the .vmx file

sharedFolder0.present = "TRUE"
sharedFolder0.enabled = "TRUE"
sharedFolder0.readAccess = "TRUE"
sharedFolder0.writeAccess = "TRUE"
sharedFolder0.hostPath = "C:\"
sharedFolder0.guestName = "C"
sharedFolder0.expiration = "never"
sharedFolder.maxNum = "1"