Check this out, it’s hilarious and illustrates why site owners need to make the user experience a little more streamlined.

I got the usability book “Don’t make me think” pretty much when it came out and think it’s a great read for any application developer that acts as a user interface.

Today I found out something that I found out years ago, if you like me need to use multiple SQL servers but can’t remember things by IP address or would prefer not having to type login information every time you want to connect then use registered servers.

Registered servers allow you to easily check if a server is running, create groups of servers, use user-friendly names for your servers, and import/export your registered server groups.

To view and add a registered server, start up SQL Server Management Studio go to View > Registered Servers. Then in the Registered Servers pane, right-click Local Server Groups and click New Server Registration. Alternatively if you already have them open right now you can just right click the instance and select register then enter your friendly name… super easy!

Then just enter the server name, select the authentication, key in the User name and Password if necessary, and check Remember password.

Now each time you start up SQL Server Management Studio, your registered servers will be viewable in the Registered Servers pane. Simply double-click the server you wish to navigate and that server will be opened within the Object Explorer.

Now I need to find out how to make this the default view when opening SSMS..

Last week I resigned from a job I have had for the past 9.5 years, today is my final day there, I have two weeks with my lovely family then I start a new job with an exciting company and one of my good friends who played a major part in me getting hired.

I started my day coming across this speech that Steve Jobs gave at a Stanford graduation ceremony and you found the three stories he tells to be particularly moving. If you have a spare 15 minutes then listen to the stories for yourself, you can even put it on in the background.

The part of the guathon presentation I went to a couple of months ago in Leicester square that went right over my head was one by Steve Sanderson on a JavaScript framework called Knockout, it’s obviously a presentation he has delivered many times as I have seen from one of the mix recorded presentations you can check it out and see how much you can absorb at the initial speed.

I emailed Steve to get the presentation slides afterwards which he kindly sent over, however he just took time out one weekend to publish a really nice tutorial section at learn.knockoutjs.com if you want to get your head around a framework that can observably bind text and form elements to update in real time on the client without AJAX then have a look at the tutorials which make far more sense than the super fast presentation!.

I need to update my AutoHotKey library now to get some of these useful snippets in there (text expanders are a bit lazy but so much more efficient than remembering everything and repetitive typing)

Since having our son Theo 2 years ago I have rediscovered the fun of going down slides, imagine this at your tube/train station, would you use it? – of course you would :), some lucky people can already use this at a tube station somewhere in Holland.