Somewhat impressed by SQL Express Manager, but not too much

I have problems connecting to local SQL Server 2000 or MSDE 2000 databases because an incorrect parameter in a call to the shared memory provider. Hopefully this will get solved when I upgrade my beta version of SQL Server 2005 to the latest (December) CTP code.

I am delighted to see that the program is really as lightweight as it should be, resource-wise. But I think it still lacks many fundamental productivity features like being able to copy an INSERT, DELETE or UPDATE script to the clipboard on a couple of mouse clicks.

I have had some lucrative datamining jobs in which the main goal was to some straight historical information from multigigabyte, badly normalized, customers billing databases. Lots of addhot queries, views, temp tables, replacements, data validation, interminable scripts, etc. For this kind of job I use a combinaton of Query Analyzer, Enterprise Manager and Access Data Projects, rocks.

Rigth now, I cannot imagine myself completing the same job either with the full fledged SQL Server Management Studio nor with its slim cousin.

I hope Express Manager will improve before version 1, but maybe Microsoft is taking the approach of making it only a toy, so to avoid the free product of competing with Studio Manager.

If this is the case: WRONG, WRONG, WRONG! (sorry, but you have to deal like this with people so smart ;). You are not competing with yourselves, but with the rest of the industry in this case. You want to ship products that are super usable and super functional, so people want to use them like crazy.

Well, maybe they are time constrained. In this case, ok, I understand.

UPDATE: From the SQL Express Manager December CTP Whitepapter:

Note Express Manager December 2004 Community Technology Preview (CTP) is not supported on a local computer that is running SQL Server 2000.

This explains that the shared memory provider is not working with SQL Server 2000. I will see later if this can be "hacked" by disabling this provider.

And yes, the rest of the whitepaper explains very well the situation. It also ask for customer feedback at their blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlexpress. Isn't blog the word of the year?

Microsoft's, Yahoo's and Google's synergism

I found this link today in a MSN Space (darn, I cannot remember whose blog it was, but I recall that it was a guy from Peru). It is an interesting 8 minute flash movie about Google, Amazon, Blogger, and their users debunking the press media by 2014. It is not that I agree with every hypothesis, but it is fun and provoking to see.

This movie helped me glue together some thoughts that I have had lately. So did the launch of MSN Spaces and MSN Messenger 7's reminiscences of Yahoo Messenger 6.

Just for email, currently I have a Hotmail account, a Yahoo Mail account (that I seldom use), also a GMail account, and I also have other two personal email accounts.

Fortunately, right now I can manage all my email in a single place: mostly Microsoft Outlook, or the web browser when my desktop is inaccessible. I keep a couple of MSN Groups and I have visited some Yahoo groups in the past.

I have an account in Orkut, I have been expecting a Wallop invitation from Robert (I have just learned that it was my fault, I didn't give him my email address, shame on me, I am so sorry Robert!).

Google has separate profiles in Blogger and in Orkut. MSN is doing now contact cards and Yahoo has been doing profiles for a while.

All of them are in the search engine business, although, Google is currently dominant by far.

I have only recently experimented the joy of Froogle, and MSN Shopping in the same day.

I think I can see clearly what the name of the game is for these companies, and I certainly can appreciate how huge it is. I am not meaning that I won't be surprised by their next moves.

But I also see some pieces still not there or still not glued enough. Orkut for instance is very experimental, and Wallop very closed. Inside Google properties, only Froogle seems to share authentication with GMail. Yahoo and Microsoft have unified authentication for their properties. Yahoo lacks, to my knowledge pictures uploading and good blogging tools. MSN Spaces lacks collaborative group blogging. Some companies outside this group, like Apple and Amazon, seem to have some pieces that these three companies would like to have. Yahoo and Microsoft seem to have the lead in mobile space. Hopefully one of them will think about buying Plaxo, and the others will clone some of its functionality. I hope Wallop goes public soon.

Google shares earning with you by allowing AdSense in your blog. MSN, on the other hand fills both sides of your blog with their own ads.

Perhaps in a couple of years it will be very difficult to tell one service from the other, and most people will either choose one company or have an account in each of them, as I do right now. I believe each of these companies will provide the frame for a huge amount of commercial transactions. Perhaps the day will come in which we will see the world dominated by Google, MSN and Yahoo branded Visas and MasterCards and micropayment services will flourish (I think right now Yahoo has the lead with PayPal).

It is almost like the Internet bubble, but this time for real and with only a few big players, as it was predictable to happened, actually.

One painful aspect of this is having to keep a different identity for each company. While the Internet is only one, and SMTP is only one, I still need maintain three different profiles, many different email accounts, and start two messengers (so far) if I want to be fully "wired". I hope in the next years this change. If just these companies realize that they have to work some things together and play nice, maybe they will shift their business models a little bit to match "the business model of their users".

I already feel the Internet as the extension of my mind and my life, and here is a guy that belongs to a generation that grew up watching TV (I seldom do nowadays), not surfing the net. So imagine what this will mean for our sons. Some kind of science fiction begins to look not too unreasonable.

I wonder what my universal information management tool will look like. This is the next grail for me. Will everything run inside Outook like NewsGator and Plaxo, or perhaps Omea, the next FireFox with more feed subscription power, or perhaps an Onfolio that doesn't crash when I try to import my "Stuff" folder from My Favorites? Will "Stuff I have Seen" ever see the light? Will A9 evolve to a more usable Web based information management solution? Or perhaps we will see something new and fantastic from Novell/Ximian? Once again, the pieces are scattered there and until they are glued together, there is no synergy.

Right now, the only thing that keeps me off saying that this is fantastic times to live is that tomorrow is not granted. If this nosense, brutal, mediaeval, stupid, tribal, religious violence doesn't stop, we will have nothing.

MSN Spaces Censorship

I am sure it is not the case with my never available MSN Space, but I have had some fun reading this article about how MSN Spaces censors the title of your blog. The funny part is that "Butt Sex is Awesome" got in unnoticed, while "Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov" (perhaps the problem is that Nobokov is misspelled?) was rejected.

I understand the root of the problem is that computers made with current technology lack common sense. Actually, if Marvin Minsky is listening, he could add this new case as a good example of it.

Practically speaking what I think would be a good solution would be to let you mark your space as adult oriented and have some basic mechanism to keep minors out, the same way MSN Groups and Yahoo Groups do, and the same way Yahoo Profiles and MSN Contact Cards do.

By the way, I want to send some warm greetings to my dear and young cousin Vladimir Novikov. I have just remembered you ;) If you look for your name in the Internet anytime soon, I hope you will find this page. And see you on January!

Changed comments system, leaving HaloScan for now

I have been using HaloScan for more than a year, and now they are announcing that they reached 100,000 customers. Congratulations! I am very grateful with you. The fact that I am trying now to live with the less sophisticated Blogger comments system has nothing to do with user dissatisfaction.

The actual cause is I suffer some kind of split personality thing, software-wise. On one hand I can enjoy like crazy while tuning code to make the most of every CPU cycle, or the most of every network round-trip in a distributed application, but regarding other things like blogging, I like just to be a spoiled user, and I don't want to look under the hood for simple tasks. This makes me some hybrid category of developer. Actually, when I develop something, I am not satisfied until everything that can be automated is automated, because as a user, I am so lazy!

This is the reason I have decided to minimize template manteinance. If I had the time and the patience right now to apply many patches to every new template I choose, I would instead build my own blogging engine and solve the problem once and forever!

So, what does HaloScan gives me that Blogger doesn't? I can only think of trackback. I have rarely used trackback, and never that I know has anybody tried to ping me. So, I won't miss it much. And MSN Spaces support trackback, so I guess Blogger will have to do it soon.

On the other hand, Blogger does a more beautiful job placing comments in post pages and showing the post text (for free), in the comments posting form.

The thing that I will resent the most is the collection of old comments itself. This is no art, howoever, loosing them forever feels like forgetting how to play a song I have composed (it has happened to me, too many times, believe me, and it hurts).

So I guess the right thing would be to donate something to HaloScan as a way to say thanks, and at the same time upgrade my free account with them so I can download all my old comments in a file.

By the way, Blogger does not import comments in any format. Shame.

MSN Space still unavailable

I still get the same error. I got an answer from customer support, but the problems are still uncorrected. I am not sure if they got the issue right from my explanation (my English could be even worse than I think). I never got to my space, so I still have no first-hand idea of what is the fun about.

Yeah, I know, I could open a new passport account and try again, but then, it feels like anti-ecological to create a passport account just for that. I am the kind of guy that feels guilty because pictures sent to bloggerbot cannot be deleted. Ok, ok, I will create it, try to do nothing cool with my space, and then I will ditch it so MSN can recycle it all.
The only thing I need now is some spare time this weekend.

Running on Omea Reader now

I tried the beta version of the JetBrain's program a few months ago and I have the perception that performance and resource usage has improved dramatically since then. Version 1.02 has become my main feed aggregator and newsgroups reader. I had been using Sauce Reader for some weeks and I can only now realize how much pain I have been experimenting because of its sluggish startup performance. I am sure that the Australian makers of Sauce Reader will get it right eventually, but the Czech have right now the advantage, and so I am giving them my hard disk space (both readers are free for personal use).

I also downloaded a trial of ReSharper, another interesting product made by JetBrains that adds some refactoring capabilities to Visual Studio 2003. I hope I will have time to test it in the weekend.

MSN Space temporarily unavailable

After a couple of hours, I still cannot reach my MSN Space.

Space not available
This space is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.

Hundreds have already posted to their spaces. I had the idea that I was going to be one of the first. After all, when I first reached the page the "New Spaces" panel was empty. Maybe that is the problem.

UPDATE: Now it is the morning, and seven hours later I still get the same error message all the time. Maybe something went wrong when I created the space. Any way to get somebody at MSN Spaces to clean things up?

Anyway, I agree completely with Scoble says. There are some limitations to Spaces that are big turn offs for advanced users. Actually, even Blogger is a lot more extensible. I would add two items to the list of big limitations:

• No colaborative group blogs.
• No multiple blogs for the same passport account (I am not really sure about this).

UPDATE 2: A few minutes later I filled the feedback form and a message to support-by-mail for Spaces. We will see what happens.

Why we blog

I agree mostly with Dave Winer's answer.

...
Once I started blogging it got addictive. So the most direct answer would be "I blog because I am addicted to blogging."
I also like the idea that I can have a dinner with people I don't know in almost any city in the world.

The dinning part hasn't happened to me yet, though.

Changes to Links on MSN Hotmail

I noticed that since a couple of weeks ago links in Hotmail messages have changed. Now they use a script call but they open the clean original URL in a new window. This should make Peter happy, given he still cares.

More on MSN Messenger and MSN Hotmail

From Dare Obasanjo's main blog, new features for your Passport account:

Get attention. Consumers can reach out to friends and family by sending a "Nudge," an alert that shakes the contact's conversation window with an audible notification, or a "Wink," animated pictures that include sound and that can be virtually "thrown" onto the screen of a contact's Internet message (IM) window. New emoticons, backgrounds and theme packs from Microsoft Corp., including advertiser-sponsored packs such as for "Halo® 2",* round out the experience.

Stay connected. Through integration with MSN Messenger, consumers can automatically let their contacts know that they have updated their MSN Space. The MSN Messenger Contact icon "gleams" when an update is made, notifying others to visit the Space via the Contact Card.

Access the Web anywhere. MSN Web Messenger, shipping in 25 markets and 15 languages, enables consumers to access their MSN Messenger account and contacts from virtually any PC with an Internet connection.

Choose your online status. The beta release of MSN Messenger gives consumers more control over how they're seen online by enabling them to choose their availability status before logging into Messenger.

...

View online status anywhere. Through integration between MSN Hotmail and MSN Web Messenger, in select markets, consumers are able to see Messenger availability status even on PCs that don't have MSN Messenger client software.

Learn more about Contacts. MSN Hotmail consumers who have an MSN Spaces site will have a Contact Card visible in the Hotmail address book, providing friends, family and other online contacts with one-click access to their Spaces site.

Looks to me as if MSN is getting on par with what Yahoo has been offering for a long time already.

UPDATE: Thinking a little bit more about it, MSN Web Messenger is different from anything else I know.

New MSN Spaces and Updated MSN Messenger

I have just received the notification via Scoble's LiveMessage. I cannot believe the ammount of work that Microsoft has been keeping in secret. Actually, we will see how much is it once I get this working. Yes, off course I already created my own space, but it says "Space not available" as of now. And Robert, you are rigth, it's gonna be a bloggy nigth! ;)