Saturday, October 01, 2005 - Posts
I’ve blogged about her before, but the content she’s adding to her blog these days demands another mention. Melanie Spiller is easily the toughest editor I’ve ever faced, and I am a far better writer for it. (Note to critics: I didn’t say a great writer. Or even good writer. Just better.)
She’s had her blog for about a year and half now, with lots of great entries about the craft of writing. She has recently posted two entries (start with this one) about getting into technical writing, with some savvy advice about how to figure out if it’s for you and how to go about it, along with some reality checks. It’s way better than simple advice to not quit your day job yet.
Besides, it’s good to know the enemy. Chances are that if you really take to technical writing you’ll someday get edited by her. Be ready to be humbled and to learn great things.
Bill McCarthy poses an interesting question about software updates and limited users. The gist is, where do you put program files so that you can update them on a machine used by mere users, without exposing them to additional risk. Using a service seems to be the best option, but it sure seems like way too much complexity to throw at it.
I posted a comment, but don’t think that we’re considering all the options. I’ll have to think about this more.
Quick warning, in case you haven’t heard yet. The text, ntext, and image data types are deprecated in SQL Server 2005. That means that they are still there for backward compatibility but that they will disappear in some future version of SQL Server, and are probably not going to get much attention in service packs.
Microsoft commonly leaves deprecated features in two versions of a product, but I get the impression that these data types won’t last that long.
In SQL Server 2005, use varchar(max), nvarchar(max), and varbinary(max). These allow 2^^30 or 2^^31 bytes of data (the smaller is for Unicode text).
If you were in my SQL Server 2005 security session at SQL PASS yesterday, please note that I had a brain lock during my session and called Brian Knight of SQLServerCentral.com “Paul.” I know his name is Brian. He and Bayer White did a great session in the morning, Hacking SQL Server. I referred to the session several times during my session, talking about “Paul and Bayer.”
I blame show time jitters. Or early onset dementia. I forget.
I’ve apologized to Brian. He graciously let me off the hook, telling me it was no big deal and that he and Bayer were chuckling about it during my session.
But I seriously doubt that those are their real names anyway. C’mon, a hacking session at a SQL Server conference by a speaker team you could legitimately refer to as White Knight?
Hmm.