Wondering why your tweets are getting cut off when they’re apparently less than 140 characters? Well read on…

The reason behind it is a purely technical thing – and mainly due to Twitter’s implemetation of their character counting.

A simple explanation is that some characters are actually ‘worth’ more than others. For instance angle brackets (< and >) are worth four characters and ampersands (&) are worth five characters.  It gets worse when people use characters that arn’t normally on a US-English keyboard – For example that little ♥  is worth EIGHT characters. A little love goes a long way, huh?

If you want to understand the reason for this, you need to know a little about how HTML and other markup languages work.

In the Hypertext Markup Language (amongst others), there are several ‘reserved’ characters (entities) – these are ones used to actually write HTML. The most commonly recognised ones are angle brackets.

If you actually want to use an angle bracket in text – you need to encode it. The way that is done is by using ampersands and short codes or numbers, and a semi-colon.

So, “<” becomes “&lt;” (“lt” being short for less-than). “>” becomes “&gt;”. If you want an ampersand? Well, that’s also a reserved entity – given that it’s used to denote the encoding of other entities – so your “&” actually becomes “&amp;”.

Things get even more complicated when we talk about characters that arn’t typically on a US keyboard. 

Twitter could fix this in one of several ways – the easiest for them would be to alter the character count on the website to show the entity-encoded count, which is what the server uses.

I hope this was helpful to all those folks who I see scratching their heads over the suddenly shorter messages!

It seems that there’s a large number of IT/Digital Media Recruitment companies that are getting a presence on social networks. The unfortunate thing is that, of the ones I’ve heard from, almost none of them actually get the point of social networks.

Here’s a big fricken hint for you guys that DONT get it: Plastering everyone in your target audience with invites, friend requests, etc is a quick road to people’s shitlists.

The point of me being on social networks isn’t so that you guys have a convenient way to find and recruit me, it’s so that I can keep in touch with my friends and other folks I know.

Here’s a few indicators that you’re doing it wrong:

#1 – Following way more people than are following you (eg on Twitter)

This fine person is a great example:
# Following 1,690
# Followers 190

#2 – Being anonymous and using a Company alias instead of your real name.

Seriously, use your real name. Use a company profile only for company specific messages.

#3 – Sending Friend Requests to people you have no association with, and no friends in common.

If you open up my Facebook profile and see that we have zero contacts in common, and you’ve never actually contacted me in any other way – then that’s probably a pretty good indication that you should NOT be clicking that ‘Add to Friends’ link.

That’s all I can think of for the moment.

This was my second year at TechEd, and I was really looking forward to it. There were a lot of great sessions from folks I’d heard from last year – Steve Riley, Neil Roodyn, and Joel Pobar, amongst many others.

This year’s event was held at the Darling Harbour Convention Centre – taking up hall 5, plus both the Parkside and Bayside conference centre. A truly huge area with something like fifteen concurrent ‘main-line’ sessions, a big hands-on-labs area that saw heavy use, a well utilised Exhibitor hall with another two smaller presentation areas and another two ‘open area’ chalk and talk short presentation areas.

At times I was torn between two or even three events – and I only got to do one of the ten or so hands-on-labs events that I’d wanted to do.

In terms of technical content, Andrew Coates and the rest of the team that went into organising speakers and the presentations deserve a medal.  Seriously great stuff there.

The only thing that I’d like to see changed in future TechEd events is to have shorter talks – Say 45-50 minutes. The current 1h 15 minute format is incredibly difficult for all but the absolute best speakers to fill in a useful manner. But even still, sitting on those seats for that length of time gets really uncomfortable. 

I’d like to also like to thank Michael Kordahi for restructuring the Ask the Experts night – the public Q&A thing was a good icebreaker.

Unfortunately, a series of things combined to make me really disappointed with the event this year. Whilst they’re not the technical education side of things, they were supporting the event as a whole.

My first gripe is about the absolute outright failure of the internet access for the vast majority of the event. At a major event like TechEd, people have come to expect internet access. It’s not cheap to do this, but when you are sponsored by companies like HP and Cisco – you’d expect them to be showcasing some latest and greatest networking products here.  For some reason something went wrong, and despite having solid wifi signal in most of the conference centre – I just could                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          n’t get a DHCP lease.

Sure, internet access didn’t kill the event – but it meant it was harder to keep in contact with friends and colleagues who were also at the event, and also meant I couldn’t get the information the presenters talked about and begin playing with it immediately.

The second gripe sounds like I’m a spoilt brat, but I’m going to say it anyway: The catering this year left a lot to be desired.  Whilst last year’s gourmet catering was fantastic, this year’s was pretty abysmal. Especially so when you realise it’s about 500 meters from Haymarket/China Town where there’s amazing food for what I’m fairly sure is probably equivalent in cost at commercial scales.

The catering issues extended to having no vegetarian option for all practical purposes, with the exception of lunch on the last day. Drinks were, as far as I know, entirely non-existent on Thursday – with even  the water fountains in some locations going without being refilled (at least part of the day).  Pity those who forgot, or didn’t have a water bottle to fill.

My third, and final gripe is about the Closing Party. At a technical conference, people tend to have backpacks. It’s not unreasonable to expect that they might fill these backpacks with things like laptops and cameras.  You could also read this as ‘thousands of dollars of equipment’.

This is especially true of technical conferences where you happen to be giving everyone at the conference a backpack when signing up.  So when I’m told that I must hand my backpack over to someone, or else I can’t go in – my first reaction is to question the sanity of the person responsible for coming up with that decision.

My second reaction is a well known Cartman saying – Screw you guys, I’m going home. There is no way that I’ll hand over my laptop and camera gear to a bunch of people whom, whilst I’m sure are well meaning and nice people, have all care but no responsibility over what happens to said equipment from that point on.

As for what was on *in* the closing party? I’ve only heard second hand reports from others – so I’ll leave that for them to comment on.

These are just paragraphs selected at random and pasted into google.

Just testing something

(PS: Hi work folks)

As almost anyone who’s watched the news in the last year or so – World Youth Day (which is actually FIVE days. Talk about not being able to count.) is in Sydney this year.

Our fine State Government has decided in all it’s wisdom to implement Extraordinary Powers to Police. These include the authority to arrest and/or fine people for “causing annoyance” to World Youth Day participants.

EXTRAORDINARY new powers will allow police to arrest and fine people for “causing annoyance” to World Youth Day participants and permit partial strip searches at hundreds of Sydney sites, beginning today.

The laws, which operate until the end of July, have the potential to make a crime of wearing a T-shirt with a message on it, undertaking a Chaser-style stunt, handing out condoms at protests, riding a skateboard or even playing music, critics say.

Police and volunteers from the State Emergency Service and Rural Fire Service will be able to direct people to cease engaging in conduct that “causes annoyance or inconvenience to participants in a World Youth Day event”.

People who fail to comply will be subject to a $5500 fine.

– Source: SMH, “Thou shalt not annoy on Youth Day”, July 1 2008. Jano Gibson, Linda Morris and Joel Gibson.

Yep, a $5500 fine for doing anything which might annoy someone (read: Catholic) in various places around Sydney for the whole of July.

I thought we were supposed to have separation of Church and State in this country?

When the Dalai Lama visits, I don’t see any laws banning anything which might cause offence to Bhudists. But, hey, some old guy in long robes, with a pointy hat and a huge amount of money decides to inconvenience a City with throngs of his followers? Hey, lets arrest/fine anyone who says something that might offend them!

I wonder if this extends to also talking about Science in public? I mean, that’s deeply offensive to most religious people – the idea that many of the core concepts of their religion are based on lies.

Well?

With databases in many organisations, there’s a rule that’s carved in stone:

Thou shalt use Stored Procedures for all table access.

Regardless of your position on this, some clients just don’t give us any other option. The application is never given direct table access, and anything that doesn’t go through a stored procedure just generates errors.  This could be because they’re enforcing access control on the data to a finer level than just table level, or because they need to ensure records are kept of all confidential information.

The picture for LINQ to SQL with this situation appears at first to be rather rosy, through two things:

1. You can assign sprocs that handle inserts, updates, and deletes against your tables.
2. You can directly execute sprocs as methods in your application. So, you can select data out of tables via this method.

Both of these things, are true. However, what doesn’t get mentioned is that LINQ to SQL will still perform reads (using dynamic SQL) from your database if you (for example) try to access children of a relationship, or insert/update rows**. That is: You can’t stop additional queries against the database.

So, as far as I can tell – this means LINQ to SQL, as it stands, cannot be used for these situations. Ofcourse, this doesn’t prevent me from using LINQ to XML, LINQ to Entities, etc – it just means that our ways of executing SQL still have not advanced.

There’s a possible way I think this could be fixed, but it really requires a bit of a rethink as to how LINQ to SQL works – perhaps this could be done as a third party LINQ provider, but really it should be done by Microsoft in LINQ to SQL v.Next.

The way I’d like to see it fixed, would be for someone to create an analysis tool that runs at publish time, that generates Stored Procedures for all the LINQ statements in your code, and then forces the compiled LINQ commands to map through these sprocs.

This would have the benefit of rapid prototyping/development, and being able to still enforce access through sprocs. 

* = Well, there might be a way, but I’ve not yet found it.
** = It does select’s to get the updated column values from, for example, computed columns.

Last week I went to Microsoft’s “Heroes Happen {Here} 2008″ launch of the 2008 series of products: Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008.

As part of the ‘goodies bag’ given away, I got a complementary copy of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition. Having read very good things about it, and being rather impressed – I installed it on my work desktop machine. (Rather risky, I know).

I would highly recommend anyone considering this to read Vijayshinva Karnure’s blog post on how to configure it properly. Once done, it looks and “feels” just like Windows Vista. (Only, significantly faster).

However – the first thing I would recommend you do is to turn off the Enhanced Security settings for Internet Explorer. Microsoft have changed the way this is done from Windows Server 2003, so it can take some hunting to find how to change it.

The frustrating thing is that it’s right infront of you. No, really – The Server Manager console that shows on first login has the option right there, but “helpfully” disguises it in acronym form.

Click on that link, and turn off IE ESC for both Admins and Users.