Whilst adding the last entry, Spaces told me:

This entry contains language that is prohibited. Please delete the prohibited language from the entry.

After much experimentation, I discovered that the prohibited language was a word in the title. It consisted of the word "crash" with "age" appended to it.

What on earth is wrong with "crashage"? Surely, not letters two through five? And why is it OK in the body but not the title?

Update: Dr Neil can't post about pr0n filters, either...

MSIE crashed whilst I was trying to add a hyperlink to that last entry. I had to repeat work. It's happened to me before. There's no way I can recommend Spaces to my team members and friends with this kind of thing happening.

Windows Live Messenger is out of beta! Unfortunately, even after upgrading I've still got the old and new product fighting for control of my session. Windows Live Messenger will complain that I've logged in somewhere else, then up'll pop Windows Messenger with something. D'oh!

Both msmsgs.exe and msnmsgr.exe are running, the latter of which is Windows Live Messenger.

Some quick searching reveals a solution from users at Annoyances.org:

RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %windir%\INF\msmsgs.inf,BLC.Remove

According to The Register, there's also a handy PreventRun registry value I can add just in case some future hotfix re-installs Messenger.

Further to my last post about Microsoft's beta process being a little buggy, itself, it seems that I'm not alone: Rob la Gesse also says it's hard to be a Microsoft beta tester. He should know: he's beta-testing at least 13 Microsoft products, and each seemingly is inventing its own beta testing management framework from scratch. Different download processes, different polling methods, different feedback collection...

... so I'm hardly surprised that I'm having trouble leaving feedback for Live or Messenger. Maybe they haven't invented that bit yet.

Looks like Windows Live Messenger isn't the only beta I'm running: the beta test itself seems a little broken.

When Messenger told me I had a pending request but clicking on the link popped up a window with no requests that also ignored the close button, I thought I'd let Microsoft know. Help > Send Feedback, though, led me to a page titled "Feedback Form Unavailable".

So, we're in a beta programme where the vendor can't accept our feedback about broken features because the feedback form is broken. Oops.

Update: When Kate tries it, she gets the right feedback form. So, I've left feedback about not being able to leave feedback. Oh, and the pending request thang.

I just had a quick chat with Dr Neil. He's in a plane some 40,000 feet over Pakistan at the moment, but he's well able to literally write at me from six and a half thousand miles away thanks to his slate, Messenger, and Singapore Airlines' IP connectivity. Welcome to the new world!

(As I griped about earlier, it's not easy to link to photos in MSN Spaces. Having claimed that there were no permalinks at all, I now suspect that I can link to the album or directly to the picture if I rip the URLs out of the RSS feed. Easy, huh? If the links turn out to break over time, of course, just do whatever seems natural on the Photos page of my space.)

I've been trying Google Alerts for a little while, punching in the usual set of vanity searches and the names of some friends just for the fun of it. Every day, Google sends me mail letting me know about new matching search results. I'm finding it quite a lot of fun, despite the extra load on the ol' inbox.

MSN Alerts, on the other hand, tell you what's going on with your eBay account, MSN Calendar, and a few commercial services I find quite bizarre but which I'm sure will be greatly appreciated by their respective target markets (e.g. "Juicy celeb gossip").

I think Microsoft could have a lot of fun, here, with almost no effort: just let us subscribe to Live search results via RSS (not just put them on our Live home page), let MSN Alerts subscribe to arbitrary RSS feeds and let us know of new items via Messenger (in real-time) and mail (daily or weekly), and also add some hook-up to optimise direct alerting of new search matches. Let a thousand mashups bloom!