Us versus Them

I am troubled by the "us vs. them" attitude that seems to pervade forum discussions about DBA's and application developers. When you get right down to it, if it weren't for app devs, there would be nothing for the DBA's to do. Except perhaps to sit and stare at master, msdb, model and tempdb. On the other hand, without the DBA's even a well-written application will not perform to the customer requirements. And let's not forget about the network engineer - none of this stuff will work without the proper infrastructure.

Where does the end-user fit? They need an efficient application that meets their often-changing business needs. But in the absence of constant communication and cooperation between all of the IT groups, that goal will not be met.

Ham without Spam

I recently removed my public email address from my web site, due to the surge in spam from many sources. But the most annoying of all was the blank messages with no subject and no sender - neither my web host, ISP nor Outlook have any mechanism for flagging those messages as undesirable - without any visible content there's nothing to tell the filters to block. If that makes sense. Still haven't figured out the purpose of sending blank emails.

But the good news is that Microsoft Office Live, even the free version, provides for a web site & one of the pages is a fill-in-the-blanks "contact us" form. So I simply replaced the "mail to" links on my web site with a link to that fill-in form at Office Live. That way, you can still be contacted via the Internet but without exposing your email address to the creepy crawlers who screen-scrape & harvest them.

For the uninitiated, ham is the good email, which is the opposite of spam. Not sure who thought that one up, wasn't me.