The Blog

Here is a script for configuring WSS 3.0 installation without Active Directory, where SQL Server resides on a separate box:

psconfig -cmd -configdb -create -server DBSERVERNAME -database wss_admin_config -user WSSSERVERAppPoolAccountName -password p@ssword -dbuser SQLDBUSERNAME -dbpassword p@ssword -admincontentdatabase wss_admin_content

Based on the post here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/fooshen/archive/2007/02/01/installing-moss-without-ad.aspx

As much as I hate David Stern and the NBA for moving the Sonics, I still enjoy watching the best players during the playoffs. Since I don’t have cable TV, and am often too busy on weekends to catch the network television games on ABC, the last two years I’ve purchased the playoff games online to watch on my PC. Forget about it this year, as the NBA Download Store is closed for business.

To turn this off is just plain stupid for them. It’s like refusing royalty checks for music or books you’ve created. The last two years, each playoff game was available for download one or two days following the live game. To offer this service for a fee simply extended their revenue generation from each game.

The NBA really does have a flawed business model. I hope David Stern continues to screw it up and run it into the ground so everyone can see what an idiot he truly is.

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Every year but this one, I seem to catch the TV when the movie The Ten Commandments is on, and I’m always reminded how much I like the story of Passover. It’s such a fantastical tale, so far out of reality in so many ways. I always wonder what the hell really happened at that time, because so much of it is over the top.

Lots of questions such as:

  • How could a mass exodus of over 600,000 people not leave a single piece of archaeological evidence?
  • Just where was the Land of Goshen? Nobody knows.
  • Which pharaoh was the oppressive one in Exodus? He is never named, and no one knows for certain. Seems like an important detail.
  • Why would the Jews start worshiping a golden cow (an ancient Egyptian goddess/god, Hathor/Apis)? Weren’t they JEWS?
  • How could slaves, who only knew how to make bricks, immediately begin fighting battles with Semitic tribes in Sinai and win?
  • How did slaves have gold to make a golden calf? The bible also mentions that the slaves had slaves themselves. Huh?

Over the last year I’ve read a few books dealing with Egyptology and links between ancient Egypt and the ancient Hebrews, which have painted a more realistic picture of what might have happened. There are of course some books, such as this one, which try to explain the miracles/plagues in the Exodus with natural causes, but the books below take the bible less literally, and combine to describe a much more plausible scenario.

What I Believe Probably Happened

Based on my readings, I believe a more likely account of what happened is the following:

  • In the 18th Dynasty, Pharaoh Akhenaten (Akhenaton) turns Egypt upside down:
    • He moves the capitol to a brand new city (Akhetaten),
    • disbands the ancient priests,
    • destroys old gods and statues in the ancient temples,
    • creates a new monotheistic religion worshiping the solar disc Aten (Aton),
    • establishes a cult following that flocks from far away lands to live in the new capitol.
  • Akhenaten’s religion is more approachable now that the leadership hierarchy is abandoned, making for more avid followers. Sexuality is not oppressed, animal sacrifice is banned (implying tolerance to living things), art of this time is more emotionally expressive, and individuals can take a more active role in their own spirituality (houses at Akhetaten have been discovered to have prayer niches in entry ways to worship the Aten).
  • Akhenaten’s capitol becomes a multilingual, cosmopolitan hub, attracting people from Persia, Babylon, and more. Everyone wants to see this utopia.
  • With his focus on the new capital and religion, the rest of Egypt is neglected and becomes bitter and estranged. The priests who once had much power are angry.
  • Akhenaten’s right-hand man, the grand vizier Ay (also revered as a god), is placed in charge of the rest of Egypt, travels the country, and gets an earful from the disgruntled Egyptians.
  • Akhenaten dies after a rule of 17 years, and is succeeded by Smenkhkare (possibly his brother) for just a few years before death. Smenkhkare attempts to continue the religion of Aten.
  • Tutankhaten (King Tut) is too young to effectively rule, so vizier Ay acts as the real leader.
  • Ay understands the current state of affairs in Egypt. Much of the population is angry, the border lands are being attacked by invading tribes, and he needs to do something about this strange cult (that still reveres him) occupying this newly built city. The other Egyptians are ready to attack and destroy the heretics and their city, and Ay does not want civil war.
  • His solution is to give the Atenists their own territory, in Canaan, and use them as a proxy army to help reinforce the Northern border that has been under attack.
  • They need to leave quickly, the city is to be abandoned.
  • Possibly under the direction of generals Horemheb and Ramesses (future Pharaohs), the Atenists are led north, across the Red Sea, and into Sinai. They are given military aid, supplies (manna? quail?), and training.
  • While in the desert, some Atenists revolt and desire to return to ancient Egypt (the Golden Calf episode).
  • Tutankhaten changes his name to Tutankhamum, moves the capitol back to Thebes, and abandons the new religion, reinstating the old gods and priests. Ay declares Akhetaten a “cursed city” and it is abandoned (not destroyed), lost and forgotten, much of it buried under sand, until the 1700’s when finally rediscovered again.
  • Time and distance begin to separate the Atenists from their Egyptian past. The strange blend of multinational Atenists evolve their own language based on Egyptian. Lack of knowledge to train scribes in hieroglyphs leads to Hebrew as a shorthand version of Egyptian. Monotheism is continued.
  • More time and distance. The Babylonians destroy the Jewish temple, battle and push into Egypt, and exile the Jews to Persia.
  • Under Babylonian rule, where it is not permissible to speak favorably of their Egyptian past, the Jewish scribes are forced to alter their stories. Figures from Babylon (Abraham) play a more prominent role in history, and Egypt’s role is deprecated and made negative.

Justifications

The justifications for this are numerous. A few are listed here:

  • Tutankhamun’s tomb contained several artifacts similar to Hebrew ones:
    • An ark, with wooden poles, similar to the ark of the covenant. One inner box contained gold foil panels with angelic figures having wings facing each other, similar to the angels on the ark of the covenant.
    • The ark was covered in a fringed shawl, similar to tzitzit.
    • The mummy had a golden skull cap, similar to the Kippah. The mummy also had a headpiece, bracelets on the arm, and rings covering the middle two fingers, similar to Tefillin.
  • Ay and Aten (Aton) are linguistically related to the words for God in Hebrew. Ay is spelled with two reeds in hieroglyphs reeds, similar to the word God spelled in Hebrew with two Yods י י . The yod is the “Y” sound, and so God in Hebrew is essentially unpronounceable (“YY”). In order to make it audible, it is pronounced “Adonai” instead. “Adon” means lord in Hebrew, and is very similar to Aten/Aton. Adon-Ay (Aton-Ay) is a natural fit here (Lord Ay).
  • Many linguistic similarities between Hebrew and Egyptian (e.g. “Ra” the old polytheistic sun god means “Bad/Evil” in Hebrew).
  • Similar mythology (Adam and Eve’s snake (similar to snakes in Ancient Egyptian mythology), the tree of life (lots of references in Egypt to sacred trees, including at Akhetaten), parting of the red sea (parting of the primordial waters myth), Moses and the basket down the Nile (predated by a similar Egyptian tale).
  • The Copper Scroll of Qumran – An account of buried treasure, inscribed on copper, and found with the Dead Sea scrolls, has generally been seen to describe treasure possibly hidden after destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, although no treasures have ever been found where described. Makes more sense if you assume that the treasure came from Akhetaten as the Atenists fled, and was buried while leaving the city.
  • Similarity between the Great Hymn to the Aten and Psalm 109.
  • Similarity between the tablets of the ten commandments and royal cartouches.

 

When you start to follow this line of thinking, it seems that more and more evidence can fall into place and support this.

Ahh, my rant for today.

With the announcement of the name for the next version of SharePoint on the OFFICIAL SharePoint team blog, I am waiting for the inevitable flood of pingbacks, trackbacks, and reposts about this in my RSS reader. This will be similar to the flood of reposts about “SharePoint Designer is now Free!” I got a week ago. Same goes for the endless stream of tweets and retweets.

Is it really necessary to repost items from the official SharePoint team blog? If you are interested in SharePoint, you should be following this blog already, no?

I think much of this is a direct result of the MVP system and its requirements. When considering candidates for MVP, the quantity of blog posts, page hits, and comments are a big factor. I’ve seen some bloggers with high-quality posts get passed on as MVPs due to low numbers in their web stats. Are some bloggers trying to up their post counts? Is anybody monitoring quality as well as quantity?

I just can’t help but feel that this race to MVP status is encouraging this. Same goes for the MSDN SharePoint forums, where people seem to be falling all over themselves to answer questions as quickly as possible, without providing quality answers or even understanding the questions.

I ran into a situation where I created a User Profile Property with the Replicable checkbox set, which had a really long name. There were no errors when saving the profile property, however later on I started receiving errors in the Event Log:

failure trying to synch site [guid] for ContentDB [guid] WebApp [guid].  Exception message was A WSS internal name for profile property ‘ProfilePropertyWithReallyLongName’ could not be found..

Apparently SharePoint has a limit of 32 characters for Internal Field Names. This will also apply to Replicable User Profile Properties since they will get synced down to the WSS Content DB in the UserInfo list.