The announcement that IE and Firefox will use the same icon for RSS feeds can only be a good thing for consumers, great news!
Surprise, surprise it's orange:
Whilst on the subject of RSS, I'll plug my blog reader of choice, JetBrains Omea Reader.
It's great seeing a more open Office development team talking about the next version and UI decisions.
We have Jensen Harris showing us the user interface, including Word 1.0 to Word 12 and changing the worst Powerpoint design ever.
Also David Gainer on Excel 12 changes.
If your company is going to use Office '12' without the server-side SharePoint functionality you'll really be missing out.
UK SQL Server community site SqlServerFAQ has a slidedesk from one of Itzik Ben-Gan of SolidQualityLearning presentations available here.
Sometimes query optimisation can be a bit of a black art, but he shows us show to use set-based thinking to optimise an sql query to reduce time and I/O.
This is example query:
"Given an Employees table with 9 employees and an Orders table with 1,660,000 orders, return active employees (those who made orders) who did not make any orders after April 1998"
So he starts off with a cursor-based solution:
(Source: Solid Quality Learning presentation by Itzik Ben-Gan)
Quite a big difference in performance!
Another good source on tuning is the seven showplan red flags article which describes potential issues to watch out for in Sql Server Query Analyzer when looking at the query plan. Also worth a read is Ken England's Microsoft Sql Server 2000 Performance Optimization and Tuning Handbook.