General

I’ve ended up with a number of Microsoft figurines over the years. It all started with Nine Guy:

Then it went on to the whole Source Force team:

It was interesting to see how they evolved over the years. Here are the SQL Server ones:

SQL Server 2005 had a demure little lady that was all Red. She morphed into an orange version by SQL Server 2008 (shown in the header with me at TechEd USA) in 2008. Later she took on a Neo look from the Matrix. More recently, there was a guy, the Query Controller.

2026-06-17

When you visit websites, you may or may not have noticed the small icons that appear in the title bar areas. These are called Favicons. Here’s an example of one in Chrome:

In browsers, they appear in several places:

    

They are only a small visible aspect of your website but they greatly improve how professional the site looks in a browser. In some browsers, they also appear when you open a new page:

2026-06-11

This is more for my own reference than anything else but I needed to enter a backslash key while using a US keyboard but with UK keyboard settings.

After trying pretty much every key on the keyboard in all combinations, I realised there was no key combination that would do this directly. Curiously it’s a common problem and I found untold blog and forum entries that were not helpful. They basically said to change your input to US when using a US keyboard.

2026-05-30

Why learn ?

I was listening to one of Scott Hanselman’s awesome podcasts with Miguel de Icaza and during the show they discussed things that you really should invest in. One list that came up was a good bed, a good chair, and learning to type. Most of us spend 1/3 of the day in a bed and 1/3 of the day in a chair, so they seem like no-brainers. Typing is an interesting addition to that list.

2026-05-14

On June 15-16, I’ll be participating in @MS Tech Summit 2026! Each year, @MSTechSummit is a great event.

Join me for my session How AI Features Improve Search in SQL Server 2025 , where I’ll be discussing how the addition of AI-based capabilities in SQL Server has changed the game for search.

Use the code MSTS26SP20 to get 20% off Standard or Exec passes.

See you at DSS!

Find more details about the event here: https://ml.dssconf.pl/en/

2026-05-12

I was wondering today how often EULAs (end user license agreements) get tested in courts, and in particular, EULAs that appear in consumer-grade applications.

While most sound quite official, it’s hard to imagine most of them being very enforceable. Does anyone EVER read them?

Fair Cop !

I was amused a few years back when I was installing an application, clicked over the EULA and the application said “how could you possibly have read that in 1.076 seconds?”. Yep, got me there; that’s a fair cop.

2026-05-02

I was doing some varied reading this morning and stumbled across an article by Paul Graham. I want to highlight this passage:

We now have several examples to prove that amateurs can surpass professionals, when they have the right kind of system to channel their efforts. Wikipedia may be the most famous. Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they miss the critical point: it’s good enough. And it’s free, which means people actually read it. On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can’t link to them. They’re not part of the conversation.

2026-04-28

A while back, I wrote about my experiences with trying to see if ChatGPT could answer questions as though it was a baseball umpire. It did quite poorly, and I came to the conclusion that the problem was what it learned from. Curiously, it got hard questions correct and easy questions wrong. It seemed to me that people who knew what they were talking about were the only ones to ever discuss the hard questions, while everyone had an opinion (often wrong) about the easy questions.

2026-04-26

A while back, I managed to catch the tail end of the reptiles series that Sir David Attenborough created. If you have a spare 3 1/2 minutes, take a look at the end of his Life in Cold Blood series episode about crocodiles.

People seem to think crocodiles are cold, unintelligent eating machines. I have a major respect for them. They’ve been around since the time of the dinosaurs, and anything that can do that, is doing something right. In fact, until we arrived with guns, etc. they really didn’t have much to worry about. They were a top-level predator.

2026-04-20

One of my pet dislikes in this industry is the way we handle passwords. I’ve thought that, as a concept, they are completely broken and have been for a long time.

We tell users:

• Pick something really complex
• Don’t write it down
• Change it regularly
• Use a different password for each site, and often for each role that you hold in each site
• Deal with the fact that we apply different rules for passwords on each site

etc, etc.

2026-04-16