The Daily Grind 541

I believe I'm going to start a revolutionary movement whose goal is to abolish Mondays.

Software

• VMware Workstation 5 beta - There's a new build out. (via 3Leaf)
• Codus 1.0 Released as Freeware! - Now another ORM/code generator for .NET projects that you can try and use for free.
• SQL Script Recovery - Utility to decrypt encrypted SQL Server stored procedures. Shareware.
• NeoExec - Windows extension to set privileges by application rather than by user: potentially a way to make surfing less dangerous, or to help with "run as non-admin" issues. 25 Euros a pop.
• Reflector.SQL2005Browser - Extension for Lutz Roeder's Reflector to browse .NET assemblies in a SQL Server 2005 database.

Information

• Happy Birthday, Notepad! - Twenty years old and still editing text files.
• Designing .NET Class Libraries - Good: a 15-part series from Microsoft experts with associated chats so you can ask questions. Ungood: Video only, no transcripts or written version. Doubleplusungood: streaming only, no downloads.
• Microsoft Tools for Domain-Specific Languages Walkthroughs - Some guidance on using the latest build of this technology.
• What has the designer done now!? - Detailed suggestions on working around broken designers in Visual Studio .NET.

Rants

• Robert Scoble apparently believes RSS stands for "Really Stealable Syndication". As a result, I've decided that life is too short to bother reading his stuff any longer (and invited him to stop reading mine, too). My position on this is fairly simple: some people may want to use RSS to make their stuff redistributable with or without attribution under all circumstances - but that's not a necessary or required feature of RSS. Indeed, the RSS 2.0 specification explicitly includes a tag for passing copyright information around. To claim that publishing something as RSS magically waives all of your rights is pure nonsense. You may believe that the copyright system is broken (indeed, there are parts of it that I think are broken myself), but using an RSS feed in violation of its copyright terms is just as much of a crime as any other copyright violation. The ease of both breaking the law and ignoring the content creator's wishes are irrelevant when considering the ethics of the matter. As a practical matter, I have in fact asked that my own RSS feed be removed from a page that was republishing everything without regard to what fit into their site. Those who don't like this stance are free to unsubscribe. And I don't, by the way, find it difficult to distinguish between an online aggregator (which I happily allow to serve up my RSS) and a republisher (which I do not care for). Trying to insist that all such services, or such services and desktop aggregators, are the same thing, does not help bring clarity to this debate.

Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.

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