Manda QoP

www.girlgeekdinners.co.nz has joined the blackout to protest against Section 92. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

I am very concerned about section 92 of the Copyright Amendment Act which comes into force at the end of February in New Zealand. This law assumes guilt upon accusation. No courts or legal system of any kind are involved. Your ISP is expected to act as judge, jury and executioner based upon a copyright infringement notice. For more information about this new law, check out Mauricio's blog as he's written a very good article, or the Creative Freedom Foundation or you could even go and read the law amendment on the NZ Legislation website . How do they prove guilt? That's all the proof they need. A signed notice from the copyright owner. 92D Requirements for notice of infringement A notice referred to in section 92C(3) must— “(a) contain the information prescribed by regulations made under this Act; and “(b) be signed by the copyright owner or the copyright owner's duly authorised agent. Because I am so concerned about this I've done something I would not normally do...

Should be good tonight, we have 35 confirmed attendees and 5 speakers all doing lightning talks on various subjects. :) Bruce - The merge statement Kent - UDFs Bernard - Spatial Dave - SSMS Amanda - start discusson on Cursors (maybe... if time allows today to get some slides up together... gosh work is insane...) Hope to see you there. www.aucklandsql.com for more information...

I'm at the SQL PASS conference in Wellington this weekend and so far it's been very interesting. The Key Note talk was definitely different with an Iron DBA competition - o for awesome - yeah, I know... guess you have to be here for that one to make any sense. Have just watched a very useful DMV talk by Dr Greg Low, has made me think of a t-shirt slogan, sp_who is toast! Too geeky? Maybe I'll just stick with something slightly less geeky, current fave t-shirt slogan is "Come to the dark side, we have cookies." This afternoon I'm presenting on coding standards, the slides are minimal but they're attached on the right. I've also put together a word document of coding standards for T-SQL, these aren't 2008-i-fied yet but I'm working on that. Should still be useful though.

A few people have asked for them, so as requested I've set up some links to download/view my presentations - they're just over there and down a bit on the right hand side of the blog. I'll add some of my whitepapers as well in due course.

Call for Industry Mentors for Imagine Cup 2009 The Imagine Cup 2009 NZ competition is calling for industry mentors to participate. They need industry mentors from the IT community in all major NZ centres to help guide student teams in the software design competition. If your team suceeds and wins the NZ regional finals, you will accompany them to the World Wide Finals in Cairo, Egypt in July 2009. To register your interest to participate, and for more information, please email icnz@microsoft.com . Or you can check out the official website - http://www.imaginecup.co.nz/ - for more information on the role of an industry mentor.

Last night was the first Auckland SQL User Group and it went really well. We've had lots of really useful feedback and I for one am looking forward to the next meeting, hopefully everyone else is as well. One thing that came out of the meeting is making presentations available. I've got a few presentations and white papers that I can upload and I'll sort this out later tonight, starting with the presentation about MS SQL Server 2008 certifications. Last night's presentation will also be available on the www.aucklandsql.com site. We're thinking that January will be a good idea for the next meeting and we're looking for a group of presenters to pick their favourite datatype and drill down into it for 10-15 mins. For example, 15 minutes of "everything you ever wanted to know about datetime2 but were too afraid to ask..." If you're keen to take part in this group presentation, please get in touch - amanda@aucklandsql.com The links I provided last...