I continue to listen to Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point", a book which on the whole I find very interesting and thought provoking. "Mavens" are experts in a subject and are willing and eager to share their knowledge. "Connectors" are people who effortlessly and intuitively bring people together, and "Salesmen" are folks who can translate difficult subjects in a way that "sticks".

Along with sharepoint services, Windows 2003 server also includes Windows Media Services. Media Services provides for streaming audio and video over an intranet and is handy when there are large videos which you would like to make available (such as a speech by the company president, or training videos). More information about the various flavors of Windows Media Services and the version of Windows Server required is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/server/version.aspx.

I was able to install Windows Media Server on my sharepoint server with little difficulty. I created a separate "web" for it as a virtual directory with a different port (I used port 90).

Windows Media Server calls for a file extension of "ASF" but I've found that (so far) I can rename WMV video files to ASF and they will work.

Microsoft provides a variety of free utilities for working with and converting video files on their windows media site, here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/utilities.aspx. There are also some good free utilities including this one: http://www.any-video-converter.com/.

Any file located in the directory pointed to by the media web site will stream. All you need to do is reference it using "mms://" instead of "http://". This example will bring up the Microsoft Media Player on the client and play streamed video from the server: mms://entweb2:90/welcome_speech.asf.

If you would rather have the video window appear in the contents of a web page, then you need to use the media player active X control. This is not difficult. Following is an ASP test page that I placed in a folder in my sharepoint IIS folder that plays the same file in a media window which has been embedded in an html table:

<table>

<tr>
 <td>Welcome to the Media Page</td>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td>Welcome Speech</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td>

<OBJECT ID="MediaPlayer1" WIDTH=320 HEIGHT=240
CLASSID="CLSID:22D6f312-B0F6-11D0-94AB-0080C74C7E95"
CODEBASE="http://activex.microsoft.com/activex/controls/mplayer/en/
nsmp2inf.cab#Version=5,1,52,701"
standby="Loading Microsoft Windows Media Player components..."
type="application/x-oleobject">
<Param Name="FileName" Value="mms://entweb2:90/welcome_speech.asf">
</OBJECT>

</td>
</tr>

</table>

This ASP causes an embedded video window to appear in an internet explorer web browser. As you can see, the page can also include HTML elements. I'm thinking that this might be an ideal candidate for a web part.

I've just finished the rereading Larry Nivin's entire ringworld series, starting with Ringworld, followed by The Ringworld Engineers, The Ringworld Throne, Ringworld's Children and finishing up with Protector. I did not read Fleet of Worlds or any of the other Niven "Known Space" books.

What a trip! This is something like 45 hours of Ringworld. I came out of it wishing that there were a Ringworld movie, that there were more artist renderings of the Ringworld and of the various alien species. There is Halo, I suppose, but it would be nice if there were a Ringworld movie using contemporary special effects.

I'm now reading an interesting book by Malcolm Gladwell called The Tipping Point. The book is an interesting and thought-provoking analysis of social trends and reminds me a lot of Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.

On the subject of economics, I've been predicting that any new president would see an enconomy bounce as investor uncertainty over the presidential election dissipated and as foreign investors, their trust in the US renewed by the departure of Bush and their interest piqued by firesale prices begin to take a closer look at US equities.

Now that we have President Obama, I'll get a chance to see if I'm right.

I've been fiddling with Sharepoint Services 2003 for a couple of days with the intention of moving our company intranet from its current proprietary format to Sharepoint. I set up a virtual machine as test environment and installed sharepoint using the add/remove programs wizard.

This installs Sharepoint v2.0, and Windows update then delivers v3.0. However, at no point in the installation did I notice a prompt for which database server I would like to use for the Sharepoint databases. Perhaps I pushed the wrong buttons or overlooked something?

By default, Sharepoint installs MSDE locally on the sharepoint server. Since it uses BLOBs as storage for its rudimentary documents and because I wanted to use SQLExpress for data storage, I decided to move the sharepoint databases.

This turned out to be more of a puzzle than I had anticipated.

Here are the steps that I took to move the sharepoint databases from myserver\sharepoint to myserver\sqlexpress.

1) I installed SQLExpress.

2) Using Management Studio, I connected to myserver\sharepoint and made backups of the configuration (sts_config) database and my content database (which I had called sps_intranet).

3) I used the stsadm utility to move the configuration database to myserver\sqlexpress. This command creates an empty configuration database. STSADM is located in the c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\60\bin folder. To move a database, use the setconfigdb command as follows:
stsadm -o -setconfigdb -databaseserver myserver\sqlexpress.

4) On the myserver\sqlexpress server, I created a new database called sps_intranet and restored my backup into it. I also restored the backup of sts_config into the new sts_config database.

5) I updated the [instance] column in the [services] table in the [sts_config] database to the name of the new server instance. (It was "sharepoint" -- I updated it to "sqlexpress").

6) Finally, I made sure that the user account under which I had set Sharepoint to run was dbo for the two databases.

7) I restarted the sharepoint server and voila! I was able to access my sharepoint sites using the new database server.