Category: Uncategorized

They should have done this on day 1 of the issue: offer users a legitimate copy and move their annotations. I’d like to say this didn’t bother me, but it did, and it definitely made me re-think the complete lockdown Amazon has.

It’s also one reason that I like reading on my iPhone. I can get books from Amazon, B&N, and other sources. I hope publishers will wake up and stop fighting for years as music publishers did. I don’t see the iTunes store losing a ton of sales because of the lack of DRM on their product.

If you offer books from multiple stores, in a format that multiple readers can use, you will speed adoption of the product, and possibly spur sales of books.

Tia and I were moving dirt around the ranch this weekend. It was a chore that needed to be done, and we had some time to do it. Nothing was scheduled, no kid or family commitments, on a Sunday afternoon.

While we were working, a strange car drove up, and a lady got out with a package in her hand. Tia and I looked at each other, and since I was in the tractor, she walked over there to see what was going on. I finished dumping some dirt, and as I was walking back to the house, Tia came up to talk to me.

She showed me this:

The lady apparently takes photos of houses from the air, and then brings them around to sell. I’m not sure if she or her husband does this, but they offer the print for $119 or so, and then $30 for the frame.

Not a big money maker, but it can fund a hobby or some costs, and it’s not a bad model. The power of showing a finished product to a client makes a big impression. While $120 isn’t cheap, it’s a nice photo, and is unique. I wouldn’t, however, contract with them if they came by and said they’d go take a picture and bring it back.

I don’t think that you’d ever earn a living with some hobby like this, but you likely could cover costs, perhaps even the fuel from flying your airplane around. If you had a similar hobby, woodworking, crafts, something where you can produce a customized product easily, making a sale can work well. Photography is easy: I see people taking pictures at theme parks, ski resorts, etc. and then selling prints later. It must bring in enough money to keep offering it year after year.

This is a nice example of funding a hobby by practically producing a product. Shareware people have done this for years, producing something on the side and then giving you something to see before you pay for it.

We’ve had a few articles on how you move databases, but it seems that there are always new people using SQL Server and they end up posting a question because they aren’t sure how to do something.

The other day I ran across someone trying to copy their database to a new server. They’d tried to "Copy Database Wizard" and the Copy Objects" in DTS (SQL 2000), but weren’t getting default. Likely that’s a bug in those processes, which I believe are the same code.

I mentioned detaching and attaching your database, which the poster wasn’t aware of. Surprised me, but I’m sure many people don’t know how. I decide (another) blog on the topic couldn’t hurt with some simple instructions.

1. Detach your db in Enterprise Manager
2. Copy the files (mdf/ldf/ndf) to a new server
3. Attach the db in Enterprise Manager
4. Deal with logins.

Now you have your data moved, all your code, defaults, rules, contraints, etc. Now logins need to be handled. There are a couple ways to do this.

1. If you care about passwords (keeping them the same), use sp_help_revlogin to script out the logins from the old server.

2. run sp_change_users_login to sync up the logins from #1 with your users, or to just create new logins on the new server if you didn’t want to mess with the scripting.

I had a great session for the 24 Hours of PASS on Building a Better Blog. Not sure how well the other sessions went, but I got lots of nice comments via email and Twitter at the end. I don’t know when PASS will get the recordings live on their site, but they did make them.

I made a recording of my test that I’ll try to process and toss up here later if anyone’s interested in how it went down from my side. I won’t put up the 40 minutes, but I’ll slice up a 5 minute segment if I can.

Hot Linking

A few people asked about hot-linking images. I said that you could do it either way, upload a copy or hotlink. Some responded that hot linking is bandwidth theft. I guess that’s one way to look at it, but copying their image can be copyright theft. Courts have found that copying images is copyright theft, but hot linking is not.

The reality is that it’s up to the source to decide what’s right and wrong. If they don’t want you linking, then they’ll usually tell you. If that’s the case, then just take it down, and find another image.