How cool is that? A day long SQL Server 2005 lovefest in the Twin Cities! I gotta imagine they'll be doing these in the other districts too, so go check I'm out.
And to my fellow SQL fantantics in the heartland, you'd better show up. Geek Dinner, anybody?
Lots of stuff to talk about from the Blogsphere but just one quick personal thing to talk about first: I had a really good talk with fellow SQL Server Geek and Omahan Luke Schollmeyer today. I had very similar conversation with Janell tonight. Not similar in content, but similar in my response to them: as long as you don't give up, as long as you remain confident that you will succeed and as long as you practice, practice and practice some more, you will succeed. I've long believed that people don't fail at tasks as much as they fail to stay committed to doing them. As Dogen-Zenji teaches: "Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment."
My day started off on a really good note when Hilary Cotter messaged me that he has finally started a blog -- and he comes out swinging for the fences with an amazingly deep and well written dive down into at MSN Search. And just in case you're wondering WTF "hapax legomena" means and why it is important, go here.
Duncan McAlynn (the artist formerly known as Larry Duncan) notes this spiffy little tool for MOM that enables alerting admins about password changes. And you should care why? Think about what happen if somebody decided to hack your domain and start locking the admins out. If somebody changes the password on a service-supporting account and you'll get it.
Mat Stephen from the UK posts about SQL Server having Sudden Death Syndrome on SMP Boxes and the non-obvious reasons it happens. Folks, remember the rule of thumb: one drive spindle minimum per CPU for production SQL Server setups, okay?
Somebody in the SQL Server 2005 newsgroup posted about installing it. Installing it? Humm, guess I never gave that much thought until I went looking around about it. You don't install it at all, apparently, it just works if deploy it as part of your app, according to Frank Prengel.
Last year I had a great time working with Matt Payne getting Axis and ASMX working together securely. My how times have changed since then, at least looking briefly at this demo of soap on TCP raw socket, from Simon Guest.
I am getting way more feedback about "Just Glue It" than I expected, and it seems like I may have hit a few nerves along the way.
Sleep Well.
Since Mike Champion asks what we want to see in future versions of XML, I thought I'd give him my list. It's my opinion that XML's greatest strength -- amazing adaptability -- is also its biggest weakness -- too few rules. Today, we're getting more benefit from XML's minimalism than its costing us to cope with, but I think we're already starting to see it run into some pretty hard to solve limitations because of it.
Continues here...