Among the things I’m experimenting with this quarter is changing my book reviews to include an affiliate link to Amazon. I did a couple manually (there are a couple in the pipeline for the next few weeks done that way), but it’s also one extra thing to do, so thought I’d look at plugins. First one I saw had a single review (bad), then found Amazon Book Linker v1.3 and it works pretty well. I’ll show you some of what it does below.

One you download and install, close and reopen Live Writer, and then click Settings, put in your own affiliate code. Funny that we get in the habit of blanking out info when posting on the web, but in this case if you’re inclined to use my code so that I can accrue cash, I guess that’s ok!

Then enter a search and click ‘search’, find your book, click Insert.

This is shown with the medium size image, the one flaw I’ve seen so far is that it defaults to small and doesn’t seem to save changes. I’m going to try the large image on my reviews and see what everyone thinks.

The HTML it generates is customizable, just click modify template (shown next). I need to tweak the layout a little, and I wish it supported pulling in some other data points like price, popularity, and a link for the author, but at least it can be tweaked some.

All in all a useful tool. Now it remains to be see if using it is worthwhile!

Way back on May 19 I wrote about my search for a new laptop bag to replace my somewhat tattered Targus bag. I had a few good comments on the blog, even some comments on LinkedIn, and was interesting to have people ask about it when they saw me in person. My favorite suggestion was Saddleback Leather, has the whole Indiana Jones look to it but wasn’t sure I wanted to spend $500 on a bag. Actually I did want to spend the $500, but common sense held me back! Terrific marketing stuff on the site, including “they’ll fight over it when you’re dead!’.

As I looked at my original options and some new ones, it was interesting to compare it to my existing bag. Nothing wrong with the bag design, didn’t like the strap and the fabric wasn’t holding up too well, but it had a good useable assortment of pockets. Some of the ones I looked at I hated to buy because I couldn’t tell much from the web site. For example, Duluth Trading has the Rough Rider and the Fully Evolved Briefcase, both looked interesting, but I was really wanting to see more.

I read one post where a guy tried eight bags before settling on one, seems overkill but I can see it happening. This is one of the times when online shopping was a poor second to visiting a store, but the local stores have limited selection (Officemax was best, followed by Compusa).

The winner, for now anyway? Bought the Maxpedition bag in black in no small part due to an endorsement of the company from Grant Fritchey. I’ve had it about a week now. Solidly built, smaller than the one I had before (old was sized for 17” laptop, this one for 15.4”). Shoulder strap is good, like that it has water bottle holder. Would rather have snaps or zippers on the small front pockets instead of velcro, but we’ll see. Didn’t see dedicated pen slots, seems like something they should have, but there are pockets inside to clip them to. Has a 2 part handle, and I wish it was a single handle. Not heavy at all. Still room for a couple books in the middle pocket with the laptop on the other side of the pocket divider (which has one side lined with velcro). Doesn’t have one of the straps on the bag for making it ride on a handled luggage bag.

I like it because it’s unusual, serves the purpose ok. They make two other bags, one smaller and one larger, if you carry a lot of stuff you might get that one even if you have a 15” laptop. Runs about $130 online from various sellers. I’ll use it for a while and it will either become annoying  or fade into the background as good tools should!

A little further off topic than usual, but this is one of the few tools that I've purchased that I just find to be superb, the Bosch PS-40 10.8 Volt Impact Driver. They sell a couple different versions, I got the 10v one for around $120, lists for $140 on Amazon right now. If you've ever seen a mechanic change a tire with an impact wrench this is the same idea, downsized for the home shop and using a Lithium Ion battery. It's a little louder than the average drill or driver, but it drives screws with a lot less hassle. It starts turning normally, as soon as the resistance hits it starts the impact operation and just steadily drives it home. Note that there is no clutch on this, you control it with the trigger only, but it works out really well. I drive 3" screws into 2x4 lumber with no problem at all, and the battery life is very good. Comes with a spare battery and charger, recharges in about 30 minutes. The size is kinda hard to tell from the picture, but it's about half the size of the average drill, though not quite half the weight - solidly built. The big win is rarely stripping the heads on screws, and a smaller win is you don't get as tired - less strain on arms and wrist.

A few weeks back I wrote about trying out the LinkedIn Add-in and time has reinforced for me that it's not something I'll use often, whether due to my habits or it's design. About the same time I also loaded the Xobni add-in. Overall it comes across as much more polished and fits nicely into the Outlook UI. When you first install it Xobni spends a few minutes (or more) indexing your Outlook data and you can see the search box at the top of the form - very very fast search. The MS search you can install is also fast, but I'd give this the edge by a small margin and very easy to use, just type and instant results. Interesting if not compelling.

The screen shot below is marked up some for privacy, but you can get a feel for what it displays (and this can collapse down to a slender vertical bar). Contact information at the top is pulled from LinkedIn, Facebook, and native Outlook data. There is a little chart icon at the bottom of that box and if you click it, you get an interesting bit of data intelligence - how often and at what time of day you exchange email (see "Emails from Steve by hour" below.

Below that is information about their network, again pulled from the sources above including everyone that was included on an email to or from them, which is an interesting way to discover associations. Below that is conversations which is a summary of all recent email, and below that a list of files exchanged.

You get to see all of that instantly when you click on an email in your inbox. All of the little boxes can be expanded for more detail, and if you click a contact, it then changes to show that contact info. They also provide some interesting if not hugely useful statistics related to email; # sent, frequency by domain/sender, etc. One nice marketing touch is the ability to generate "fun facts" to send to those you frequently touch. During the install it suggests a few and you can go back and ask for more later (note that this is the one area where it takes a few seconds to compile the answer).

I can't say enough it's very fast and hasn't changed Outlook performance at all that I can see on a 1GB+ PST. For now it stays loaded because it does come in handy at times. I'd like to see a deeper integration with LinkedIn - especially the ability to generate a list of people that I correspond with and that aren't in my network and to show more of the information from their LI profile.

For the past few years I've been using Frontpage 2003 for basic HTML work, usually to write content for SQLServerCentral. Let's me use a decent UI for most of the stuff, it it looks wrong I can easily switch and tweak the HTML. Not recommending it for advanced design work, just saying for vanilla HTML it works pretty well and the big advantage is the HTML is clean. I'd rather just use Word, but I've never been able to learn whatever magic is needed to get Word to save plain, ordinary HTML.

Steve Jones recommended EditPlus, but I found it pretty sparse. Just because I know the basic HTML tags doesn't mean I want to type them (reminds me of WordPerfect users). I've tried a few and so far NVU has been the best of the bunch, but still feels not quite right. Visual Studio actually has a very nice HTML editor complete with intellisense for styles, but I don't really want to load VS on my laptop just to use it for an editor! Turns out that even with the bare bones VS IDE that gets installed with SQL 2005 you can use it to create and edit basic HTML, minus the intellisense and it's clunky when it comes to hyperlinking text. I definitely don't need the power of Expression or similar.

Why give up on Frontpage? It doesn't cost me anything, falling within our licenses, just felt like with a new laptop maybe time to stop using a tool with "2003" in it's name, meaning it was written some time prior to that. It's just an exercise, but a frustrating one! Maybe I'm just not looking in the right place, or so used to the Frontpage tools I can't get comfortable elsewhere? Fixing Word to save clean HTML seems optimal, anyone figure it out? I'd rather not code it.

I've used Quicken for a long time now and it's the center of how I manage finances at home. There are similar packages on market from other vendors (MS Money, etc) which probably offer similar features, but I've always liked that Intuit stays focused on their market and I love the way they drive revenue (Quicken 2004, 2005, etc, etc). In my view there's a single trick to making Quicken work for you and that's to use financial institutions that support a direct connection to Quicken. Every couple days I'll hit the update button, download my latest transactions from checking, savings, credit cards, 401k, and stock account, and then spend 5-10 minutes categorizing them and clicking ok. It's a lot faster than typing in all the transactions from receipts and in many cases will set the category for you automatically.

There are some really nice benefits to this. One is that you're looking at your accounts every couple days to once a week depending on your schedule and that lets you instantly spot signs of fraud or identity theft. Another is that you can easily reconcile right then to your online balance. When my monthly statement comes in I file it, never needing to do the old fashioned and often painful work of reconciling.

Because getting the data in and maintaining it is about as easy as it can get, it's not a big step to run a report or two to look at spending patterns, figure out much you've spent on pet food, or build a budget and compare actual to forecast. I know there are many ways to manage money, but this has worked for me and it's one of those patterns I depend on.

I'm probably in the minority, but I use an offline reader for consuming feeds. Nothing wrong with browser based readers other than that require you to be online, not always possible - airline flights for example. I looked at a few and finally settled on Snarfer. Easy enough to add feeds (RSS or ATOM) and it has a configurable polling interval for the refresh. It also lets you run searches across multiples search engines and continually check for new results (though I primarily rely on a Google Alert to monitor my name/blog url). One feature I like is that it has a button to email a post and it includes the URL to the feed as well as the actual post.

The only downside I've seen is that there's no social aspect compared to online readers, where if care/dare you can share your feeds with friends. Not sure how much I'm missing (or that others are) since I don't have the feature. I tend to discover new feeds either because someone posted about something that links to a new feed, or because they send me a link directly. 

Maybe I haven't looked at the right products, but two years ago when we needed a VPN solution there wasn't much that was either reasonably low cost or reasonably easy to administer. We needed something that would allow a handful of users remote access to our network. The so called SOHO solutions are basically a VPN on time of the the standard wireless router, but we tried a couple without much success.  We had just started to look into reflashing one of those routers with a third party VPN solution when we ran across Hamachi.

Hamachi is different from what you might expect. It's software only, and runs as a peer to peer VPN. Download and set up is easily under 10 minutes. You can have multiple VPN's, share files across (or not) and control who joins the network. When you start up the client it connects to a 'mediation server' that in turn figures out what other clients on your network are available and then sets up encrypted tunnels between peers. Your data doesn't go across the Hamachi servers and the VPN continue to work if they have an outage.

It's free for personal use, $40/year per server so that it can run as a service. Details at https://secure.logmein.com/products/hamachi/vpn.asp?lang=en, This is also my first entrie on my long overdue tools page.

Not all of us work at companies big enough to justify the expense/time it takes to implement something like MS Mom, Altiris, etc. For years I've recommended Servers Alive as a reasonably priced (about $200) solution that lets you do basic fault monitoring. It can alert on low disk space, check that a web page is running, login to a SQL Server (which isn't the same as saying the service is running!), and notify you via email, pager, or instant message when a problem is detected. You can monitor up to 10 items for free, after that you have to pay. Most of us in the DBA world use SQL Agent to do a lot of our monitoring/alerting, but on rare occasion SQL Agent can fail. It's nice to have a secondary level of monitoring running from a different machine.

There are probably similar products out there, it's one of those "I could write that!" type apps, and I stopped looking when I found something that met my needs.

It's downright common these days to download programs as ISO images, but XP doesn't have a native viewer for them. The Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel is an easy way to create a virtual drive letter, point it at the ISO, and then it 'mounts' the drive so that it looks like you have the files on CD. As far as I know it doesn't support DVD images. It's free and easy to use.

For longer than I care to count I've used the Alt-Tab Powertoy from MS to get a nicer view of running applications, alt-tab being one of those things that is hard wired into my brain at this point. It works, but occasionally it's flaky, doesn't want to change to a window unless you change to a different window first. For the last year or so I've switched to TaskSwitchXP, which does the same thing except better! One very nice feature is that you can alt-tab to bring up the app list, you get a preview window of the selected app, and you can actually just scroll/click to the app you need, you don't have to alt-tab 17 times to get there. This is for XP of course, if you're a Vista user you get similar functionality out of the box.

I haven't seen the first glitch and the price is still right; free!

I think we all struggle to keep up with various credentials needed to live our internet lives (single sign on still a dream!) and too often fall back on using the same password over and over again. A few years ago Steve Jones introduced me to Password Safe when he used it to manage credentials we might need across the business (SA, Dell account, etc). It was originally spawned by Bruce Schneier and is now open source. It's a small download, unobstrusive, and has worked for me for quite a while. The only downside I've seen is that it occasionally doesn't get it right when it plugs your credentials into a form (seems to just do username, tab, password) and I've never bothered to try to fix in the cases it fails, just doing 'copy password', pasting, and moving on. It definitely makes it easy/less painful to user stronger/different passwords. The price is right: free!

Lately I've been looking at RoboForm as a possible replacement. It's about $30 and seems to offer a richer experience, but I haven't used enough to know if richer = better.

MS Word 2007 (and probably earlier versions) have the ability to do a basic document compare, useful if you're at a location that doesn't have more advanced comparison tools for TSQL. Just load your scripts into separate Word documents, click on the View ribbon, then click on View Side by Side. I know there are a lot of tools (free) that will do text file comparisons which accomplish the same or better, but that requires internet access, file download and perhaps getting by domain security, etc. Maybe one day it will help you when you're in a hurry.

Recently I had the chance to help a student debug a problem on a production server. It appeared to be failing because duplicate uniqueidentifiers were being created. Thinking that unlikely because the G in GUID stands for global, we dug in but found the code painfully hard to follow due to poor formatting, mainly the indents. She didn't own one of those 'prettifier' tools, so we used my old standby Instant SQL Formatter, an online formatter that does a reasonable job of formatting TSQL at a great price - free! Note: I have no ownership or other interest in the site. Many scoff at making code pretty, but especially with a tool to do it for you it can really make life easier for the next person.

And the answer to the problem? The GUIDS were fine, there was a fall through case that had an incorrect error message, and that in turn was being caused by a data problem.

Saw a mention of this in the latest MSDN Magazine, you can download Reflector.SQL2005Browser and install it as an add-in for the well know Reflector tool (both are free). Point it at a server, pick a database, and you can browse through the deployed CLR objects. From there you can pick a function and disassemble to the code of your choice. Defaults to C#, but does VB.Net as well. Probably not something we DBA's will use every day, but nice to have available when you do need it.