Via Larkware I just noticed this excellent web utility that takes the URL-shortening concept pioneered by TinyURL (among many others) and applies a little Web 2.0 secret sauce to convert your baboon ass-ugly addresses into something more in-step with modern web navigation semantics:

After making it "decent" we get:

As the author notes on his site, the advantage DecentURL provides over TinyURL is twofold:  It provides an URL that is disambiguous, human readable and easily communicated to others, and a clear indication of the website where the link redirects.  Unless you turn on the interstitial page for TinyURL, your users get automatically redirected to the target - this can be unnerving to some users.

Pretty cool service - in the "D'oh! Why didn't I think of it first?" category.

Via Bink.nu, news straight outta Redmond that the hitherto model for distributing WSS (ie. a separate, free download vs. OOTB bundle) is being revived.  The reason?

Starting with RC1 and going forward, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 will have to be downloaded separately. Basically, we made this decision to allow customers to most conveniently obtain the technology while allowing Microsoft to have flexibility in the Windows SharePoint Services development process.

Oookaaaaaay.  I'm not sure how it's going to be more convenient for me to have to download the 70 MB+ install for WSS (excluding SPs, etc.) than have the core version installed by default or at least something that could be configured to install during setup - but that's just me.  Further, WSS was never integrated into the core for Windows Server 2003 - it always was a bolt-on that sat atop the .NET/ASP.NET framework - so, how is this impacting development again?

Maybe recent news on the Windows Server vs. Linux market share front is prompting this decision to encourage even greater penetration - but WSS seems like a no-brainer for the environments that Windows Server will be installed against, especially if you're giving it away and using it as a loss-leader to get MOSS 2007 in the back-door.

In the aftermath of moving my site from webhost4life to Alentus, my original article on my 4-year old .NET chess board control has become lost, in addition to the SharePoint page that I had set up to re-promote it.  So, this post is just a temporary beacon to let any and all interested parties know that I've relocated the source code and demo app to the new space.  You can download them from the following links:

• rnChessBoardControl - FULL Version Source Code
• rnChessBoardControl - Demo Application

While originally written under .NET 1.1, I've tested migrating the control code into .NET 2.0 without any compliation errors whatsoever, so this avenue is available if you want to work with the control straightaway.

In the interim, I'm currently doing some analysis of the code for a future series of articles on improving legacy apps using commonly available third party tools like NDepend, NUnit, Refactor! Pro, etc.  It's rather fascinating and instructive to get right into code I wrote some time ago and view it through the lens of better practices that I've developed since.

As a point of interest (which I've mentioned in posts over the years about the code), rnChessBoardControl employs a time-honoured technique of using long value types (UInt64) to represent the chess board, pieces and legal moves that's known as bitboarding.  Whereas other engines use arrays to do all move validating, bitboards alllow for lightning-fast operations using bitwise arithmetic and logic.  It's an application that has many more potential uses than just chess, and harkens back to a time when programming was more concerned with lower-level truth-table style logic than the higher-level abstractions we commonly use today.

Have fun and let me know if there's any issues with the files.

Update:  If you read my support ticket logs via the link below, it's also instructive to look at Call ID #311256 in the context of what led to my WSS site going to the great digital beyond.

Well, I'm back.  After an ordeal with my previous web provider (webhost4life), I was forced to move my assets to a new home (Alentus) and like moving in the real world, things got broken along the way.  *sigh*

Where it all began:  Webhost4Life

I moved my site to webhost4life about a year ago after reading Bil Simser's positive experiences with them and really reasonable pricing for WSS plans.  This is no slight to Bil, becuase after reading many, many similar disaster stories to my own, it's apparent that their service has been sliding for a long time.

Earlier this month, after seven months of on-again/off-again service my original WSS 3.0 blog that was hosted on my www.chapmanconsulting.ca domain began throwing a SharePoint error page for no apparent reason.

I contacted tech support, and within a week they succeeded in totally destroying it.  Worse:  They then deleted it entirely and were unable to find a backup more recent than July 31/07 (they're supposed to maintain them daily).

In the interim, I set up this blog engine on a sub-domain to fill the gap, and apparently it was good thing I did.  Still, it took me several days to regain about 65% of my original content from an RSS aggregation I've maintained for just such an occasion.

I wrestled with webhost4life supervisors and a manager (who I never actually spoke to because the tech support staff refused to give me their number!) for another week and a half, ultimately getting nothing for my trouble beyond a paltry offer to waive my $20 renewal fee for my WSS plan.  Ouch!

I took the liberty of creating a Google Notebook to document my ordeals with webhost4life's tech support and supervisors as a record and cautionary tale - see Call ID #372534 for the chronology of events around the destruction of my WSS site.  And be sure to read Call ID #314583 where staff tried to convince me that slow response times was due to a Microsoft "design flaw" in the WSS engine.  Another doozey is #319454 which, up until the day I left was ignored and never answered - it was filed in April.

It became obvious that I had to go - I just couldn't trust them anymore.

Back home:  Alentus

So, I've moved everything back to my old, original provider.  And that hasn't been a bowl of cherries, either.  After having a full-featured admin console where I had complete control over my entire site, I now have nothing.  Zero.  Zilch.

Alentus had pretty poor admin tools when I left them almost a year and a half ago;  not much has changed.  You need to run everything through support tickets.  From the mundane like permission changes for network accounts to creating user access accounts.

Can you say "abysmal"? 

But, at least they're stable, in Canada and have generally competent staff with reasonable turnaround.  Nonetheless, I'm keeping my eyes open for a .NET provider who has competent staff and provides me with the tools I need to manage my own site.

Let me know if you see any.

I just stumbled across a great post by Toby Ward on his blog about Avoiding dangerous intranet consultants wherein he relates an article by Paul Chin in Intranet Journal on the Five Deadliest Intranet Consultant Species - which I could not resist comparing to the five members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad from Kill Bill.  I always get a kick out of articles that invent a taxonomy to describe human behaviour types.

The Death List Five (ok, I'll stop with the movie references... soon) are:

1. The Snake Oil Salesperson (aka Elle Driver)  - Modus operandi: Snake oil salespeople push you to choose one solution over another too forcibly and enthusiastically without providing you with any legitimate justification for their suggested solution.
2.   The Lonely Derelict (aka Budd) - Modus operandi: Lonely derelicts don't seem to take their job very seriously, show little enthusiasm for what they do, act as though they don't really want to be there, and only accepts a handful of small jobs a year.
3. The Self-Proclaimed Idol (aka  O-Ren) - Modus operandi: Self-proclaimed idols are condescending, acting as though they know everything and you know nothing.
4. The Doomsdayer (aka Bill) - Modus operandi: Doomsdayers love to expose all the so-called faults with your current IT environment. They're extremely negative and like picking at, and highlighting, all your technological shortcomings.
5. The Slacker (aka Vernita Green) - Modus operandi: Slackers appear for initial requirements gathering meetings and then disappear for days or even weeks at a time.

Of course, professional consultants like ourselves (cough-cough) know that in this analogy, we are The Bride (or Groom... anyway) who has to avenge the wrongs done to us (work with me, here) through lost contracts to each Intranet Assassin by "killing" them (in business) and finally finishing off Bill, the doomsayer, who has tried to convince clients everywhere that you are a fraud and unworthy of carrying the SharePoint Hattori Hanzō katana.

Ok, it's a bit of a stretch but today's Friday - this is what Friday's are for!