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.

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've griped a fair bit. I should explain why.

MSN Spaces and the other Microsoft properties I'm trying out have hit a territory I call "compelling enough to criticise", which tends to trigger heavy ranting in me. I find it really uncomfortable when I try a product significantly better in one or more respects than what I'm using, but which has serious flaws that'd prevent me migrating.

In the best spirit of the "ex girlfriend" analogy Danny Sullivan used to explain the emotional state of people switching search engine from AltaVista to Google on The Chris Pirillo Show recently: it's a little like moving in with your cute new girlfriend only to discover she insists on ordering your CDs and books by the colour of the spine. One could argue that the habit makes sense, and even that it could be lived with, but it nonetheless adds friction to the relationship you could really do without.

I'm one of an estimated two people globally using PyDS as a blogging tool. Both Georg and I have stopped developing it because we'd rather use Django ("The web framework for perfectionists with deadlines"). That does, however, mean developing a great deal of server code to get our web sites up and running. As Juice users have noticed, I don't seem to have much spare coding time going. And so, my main site gathers cobwebs.

Given that context, MSN Spaces has an awful lot going for it. Unfortunately, there are bugs. That wouldn't normally be a problem for me, but unlike either PyDS or something based on Django I don't have access to the source code for MSN Spaces to fix the problem myself. Even if I successfully network, rant, and rave, I still might never get the problem fixed.

So: on one hand, I'd really need to sink a good few solid full time days to upgrade and fix my web site and help my new host to get Django running acceptably under his versions of Python, Apache, and Fedora Core. On the other, I'm already up and running here with functionality I couldn't develop in weeks of coding but I'm having to work around odd gaps I'd never have missed in my own code and which I can't close because it's closed source.

Tantalus never had it this bad.

The MSN Spaces "Save as Draft" button is scaring me to death: the browser POSTs, the screen clears, and I just know I'm going to lose my changes if anything goes wrong. To reduce the discomfort, I don't save drafts as often as I should, with a predictable result: when something else goes wrong, like Firefox often crashing whilst I edit a post, I lose more than I should. Aargh!

Saving drafts asynchronously (and automatically, like GMail) would leave me with my textarea contents reassuringly intact and minimise my data loss from JavaScript-provoked browser crashes.

A mate of mine followed a crumbtrail to my test of MSN Spaces, checked out the photo gallery from the Microsoft event I went to, identified one of the people I couldn't, and sent me a link so I could update the description. Here's the link:

http://spaces.msn.com/garthk/PersonalSpace.aspx?_c11
_PhotoAlbum_spaHandler=TWljcm9zb2Z0LlNwYWNlcy5XZWIuU
GFydHMuUGhvdG9BbGJ1bS5Eb3dubGV2ZWxGdWxsTW9kZUhhbmRsZ
XI%24&_c11_PhotoAlbum_spaFolderID=cns!771726B765B31F
5C!104&_c11_PhotoAlbum_spaNumPhotos=11&_c11_PhotoAlb
um_spaPreviousImageID=cns!771726B765B31F5C!105&_c11_
PhotoAlbum_spaPreviousImageIndex=0&_c11_PhotoAlbum_s
paMoveForward=1&_c11_PhotoAlbum_spaPlayState=0&_c=Ph
otoAlbum

I wish I was making this up: it's more than 400 characters long, and it doesn't even work. When I follow the link, I get:

This space is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.

This error message turns out to be completely bogus, as I can still get to the photo gallery from the front door. A more accurate description of the problem would be:

You tried to follow a link with enough embedded session information to uniquely identify each and every sub-atomic particle in the universe a few hundred billion times over. Unfortunately, our developers couldn't quite squeeze into those 424 characters enough information to figure out which photo gallery your friend was looking at when he clicked on "Slideshow > Full View" and pasted the URL into his email message.

By comparison: Flickr can take me right to a given photo in 42 characters, a set of photos in 46 characters, or a photo in its set context in 57 characters:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dbs/75860833/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dbs/sets/1626983/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dbs/75860833/in/set-1626983/

Compare this to a permalink for a Spaces blog posting:

http://spaces.msn.com/garthk/blog/cns!771726B765B31F
5C!155.entry?_c11_blogpart_blogpart=blogview&_c=
blogpart#permalink

I'm finding it hard to excuse this. Surely, someone clever enough to get all this impressive AJAX stuff working would be clever enough to give me an item permalink I could read over the phone if I needed to? One short enough to paste into an email message without it line-wrapping?

Maybe I'm just marginalizing myself as a standards-obsessed Web 0.1 grey-beard who wants to return to the days when you could keep up with every new web site by reading What's New with NCSA Mosaic every few days, but here goes anyway:

• The P element represents a paragraph.

• DIV and SPAN add structure to documents.

• My blog post is a series of paragraphs, not document sections or divisions. 

• This editor insists on using DIVs when I hit Enter to start a new paragraph.

• That drives me nuts.

If you know who can fix this, please let me know, because at the moment I can best characterise this editor as WYSINWYW: What You See Is Not What You Want. To add absurdity to insult, selecting "Normal" from the "Paragraph" menu gives you a DIV. Aargh!

Does anyone know of a way to order one of these nifty lists? Everything else in MSN Spaces is so AJAX-ey, draggable and droppable, that it chafes when I can't sort or manually re-order my blog, podcast, or productivity tool list.

(I suspect I wouldn't mind if there were third-party widgets I could use, especially if they used the same back-end storage as the rest of my Space, but there aren't. Aah, well.)