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Pigs in Socks?

- by MightyZot

My wonderful wife Annie surprised me with a cruise to Cozumel for my fortieth birthday. I love to travel. Every trip is ripe with adventure, crazy things to see and experience. For example, on the way to Mobile Alabama to catch our boat, some dude hauling a mobile home lost a window and we drove through a cloud of busting glass going 80 miles per hour! The night before the cruise, we stayed in the Malaga Inn and I crawled UNDER the hotel to look at an old civil war bunker. WOAH! Then, on the way to and from Cozumel, the boat plowed through two beautiful and slightly violent storms. But, the adventures you have while travelling often pale in comparison to the cult of personalities you meet along the way. :) We met many cool people during our travels and we made some new friends. Todd and Andrea are in the publishing business (www.myneworleans.com) and teaching, respectively. Erika is a teacher too and Matt has a pig on his foot. This story is about the pig. Without that pig on Matt’s foot, we probably would have hit a buoy and drowned. Alright, so…this pig on Matt’s foot…this is no henna tatt, this is a man’s tattoo. Apparently, getting tattoos on your feet is very painful because there is very little muscle and fat and lots of nifty nerves to tell you that you might be doing something stupid. Pig and rooster tattoos carry special meaning for sailors of old. According to some sources, having a tattoo of a pig or rooster on one foot or the other will keep you from drowning. There are many great musings as to why a pig and a rooster might save your life. The most plausible in my opinion is that pigs and roosters were common livestock tagging along with the crew. Since they were shipped in wooden crates, pigs and roosters were often counted amongst the survivors when ships succumbed to Davy Jones’ Locker. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time researching the pig and the rooster, so consider these musings as you would a grain of salt. And, I was not able to find a lot of what you might consider credible history regarding the tradition. What I did find was a comfort, or solace, in the maritime tradition. Seems like raw traditions like the pig and the rooster are in danger of getting lost in a sea of non-permanence. I mean, what traditions are us old programmers and techies leaving behind for future generations? Makes me wonder what Ward Christensen has tattooed on his left foot. I guess my choice would have to be a Commodore 64. (I met Ward, by the way, in an elevator after he received his Dvorak awards in 1992. He was a very non-assuming individual sporting business casual and was very much a “sailor” of an old-school programmer. I can’t remember his exact words, but I think they were essentially that he felt it odd that he was getting an award for just doing his work. I’m sure that Ward doesn’t know this…he couldn’t have set a more positive example for a young 22 year old programmer. Thanks Ward!)

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This Week in Geek History: Gmail Goes Public, Deep Blue Wins at Chess, and the Birth of Thomas Edison

- by Jason Fitzpatrick

Every week we bring you a snapshot of the week in Geek History. This week we’re taking a peek at the public release of Gmail, the first time a computer won against a chess champion, and the birth of prolific inventor Thomas Edison. Gmail Goes Public It’s hard to believe that Gmail has only been around for seven years and that for the first three years of its life it was invite only. In 2007 Gmail dropped the invite only requirement (although they would hold onto the “beta” tag for another two years) and opened its doors for anyone to grab a username @gmail. For what seemed like an entire epoch in internet history Gmail had the slickest web-based email around with constant innovations and features rolling out from Gmail Labs. Only in the last year or so have major overhauls at competitors like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail brought other services up to speed. Can’t stand reading a Week in Geek History entry without a random fact? Here you go: gmail.com was originally owned by the Garfield franchise and ran a service that delivered Garfield comics to your email inbox. No, we’re not kidding. Deep Blue Proves Itself a Chess Master Deep Blue was a super computer constructed by IBM with the sole purpose of winning chess matches. In 2011 with the all seeing eye of Google and the amazing computational abilities of engines like Wolfram Alpha we simply take powerful computers immersed in our daily lives for granted. The 1996 match against reigning world chest champion Garry Kasparov where in Deep Blue held its own, but ultimately lost, in a 4-2 match shook a lot of people up. What did it mean if something that was considered such an elegant and quintessentially human endeavor such as chess was so easy for a machine? A series of upgrades helped Deep Blue outright win a match against Kasparov in 1997 (seen in the photo above). After the win Deep Blue was retired and disassembled. Parts of Deep Blue are housed in the National Museum of History and the Computer History Museum. Birth of Thomas Edison Thomas Alva Edison was one of the most prolific inventors in history and holds an astounding 1,093 US Patents. He is responsible for outright inventing or greatly refining major innovations in the history of world culture including the phonograph, the movie camera, the carbon microphone used in nearly every telephone well into the 1980s, batteries for electric cars (a notion we’d take over a century to take seriously), voting machines, and of course his enormous contribution to electric distribution systems. Despite the role of scientist and inventor being largely unglamorous, Thomas Edison and his tumultuous relationship with fellow inventor Nikola Tesla have been fodder for everything from books, to comics, to movies, and video games. Other Notable Moments from This Week in Geek History Although we only shine the spotlight on three interesting facts a week in our Geek History column, that doesn’t mean we don’t have space to highlight a few more in passing. This week in Geek History: 1971 – Apollo 14 returns to Earth after third Lunar mission. 1974 – Birth of Robot Chicken creator Seth Green. 1986 – Death of Dune creator Frank Herbert. Goodnight Dune. 1997 – Simpsons becomes longest running animated show on television. Have an interesting bit of geek trivia to share? Shoot us an email to [email protected] with “history” in the subject line and we’ll be sure to add it to our list of trivia. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware How to Change the Default Application for Android Tasks Stop Believing TV’s Lies: The Real Truth About "Enhancing" Images The How-To Geek Valentine’s Day Gift Guide Inspire Geek Love with These Hilarious Geek Valentines RGB? CMYK? Alpha? What Are Image Channels and What Do They Mean? Clean Up Google Calendar’s Interface in Chrome and Iron The Rise and Fall of Kramerica? [Seinfeld Video] GNOME Shell 3 Live CDs for OpenSUSE and Fedora Available for Testing Picplz Offers Special FX, Sharing, and Backup of Your Smartphone Pics BUILD! An Epic LEGO Stop Motion Film [VIDEO] The Lingering Glow of Sunset over a Winter Landscape Wallpaper

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Developer Training – Importance and Significance – Part 1

- by pinaldave

Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 Can anyone remember their final day of schooling? This is probably a silly question because – of course you can! Many people mark this as the most exciting, happiest day of their life. It marks the end of testing, the end of following rules set by teachers, and the beginning of finally being able to earn money and work in your chosen field. Beginning in Real World However, many former-students will be disappointed to find out that once they become employees, learning is not over. Many companies are discovering the importance and benefits to training their employees. You can breathe a sigh of relief, though, because much for this kind of training there are not usually tests! We often think that we go to school for our younger years so that we do all our learning all at once, and then for the rest of our lives we use that knowledge. But in so many cases, but especially for developers, the opposite is true. It takes many years of schools to learn the basics of a field, and then our careers are spent learning to become experts. For this, and so many other reasons, training is very important. Example one: developer training leads to better employees. A company is only as good as the people it employs, and one way to ensure that you have employed the right candidate is through training. Training can take a regular “stone” and polish it into a “diamond.” Employees who have been well-trained will be better at their jobs and produce a better product. Most Expensive Resource Did you know that one of the most expensive operating costs for any company is not buying goods, or advertising, but its employees – especially having to hire new employees. Bringing in new people, getting them up to speed, and providing them with perks to attract them to a company is a huge cost for companies. So employee retention – keep the employees you already have, and keeping them happy – is incredibly important from a business aspect. And research shows that a well-trained employee is a happy employee. They feel more confident in their job, happier with their position, and more cared-about – and therefore less likely to leave in search of a better job. Employee training leads to better retention. Good Moral On the subject of keeping employees happy in order to keep them at a company, the complement to that research shows that happier employees are more efficient and overall better at their jobs. You don’t have to be a scientist to figure out why this is true. An employee who feel that his company cares about him and his educational future will work harder for the company. He or she will put in that extra hour during the busy season that makes all the difference in the end. Good morale is good for the company. If good morale is better for the company, you know that it goes hand-in-hand with something even better – better efficiency. An employee who is well trained obviously knows more about their job and all the technical aspects. That means when a problem crops up – and they inevitably do – this employee will be well-equipped to deal with that problem with fewer problems, and no need to go searching for help from higher up. When employees are well trained, companies run more smoothly. A Better Product Of course, all of these “pros” for employee training are leading up to the one thing that companies truly care about – a better product. We have shown that employees who have been trained to be competitive in the market are happier at the company, they are more efficient, and their morale is better. The overall result is that the company’s product – whether it is a database, piece of equipment, or even a physical good – is better. And a better product will always be more competitive on the market. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Developer Training, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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List of blogs - year 2010

- by hajan

This is the last day of year 2010 and I would like to add links to all blogs I have posted in this year. First, I would like to mention that I started blogging in ASP.NET Community in May / June 2010 and have really enjoyed writing for my favorite technologies, such as: ASP.NET, jQuery/JavaScript, C#, LINQ, Web Services etc. I also had great feedback either through comments on my blogs or in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn where I met many new experts just as a result of my blog posts. Thanks to the interesting topics I have in my blog, I became DZone MVB. Here is the list of blogs I made in 2010 in my ASP.NET Community Weblog: (newest to oldest) Great library of ASP.NET videos – Pluralsight! NDepend – Code Query Language (CQL) NDepend tool – Why every developer working with Visual Studio.NET must try it! jQuery Templates in ASP.NET - Blogs Series jQuery Templates - XHTML Validation jQuery Templates with ASP.NET MVC jQuery Templates - {Supported Tags} jQuery Templates – tmpl(), template() and tmplItem() Introduction to jQuery Templates ViewBag dynamic in ASP.NET MVC 3 - RC 2 Today I had a presentation on "Deep Dive into jQuery Templates in ASP.NET" jQuery Data Linking in ASP.NET How do you prefer getting bundles of technologies?? Case-insensitive XPath query search on XML Document in ASP.NET jQuery UI Accordion in ASP.NET MVC - feed with data from database (Part 3) jQuery UI Accordion in ASP.NET WebForms - feed with data from database (Part 2) jQuery UI Accordion in ASP.NET – Client side implementation (Part 1) Using Images embedded in Project’s Assembly Macedonian Code Camp 2010 event has finished successfully Tips and Tricks: Deferred execution using LINQ Using System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch class to measure the elapsed time Speaking at Macedonian Code Camp 2010 URL Routing in ASP.NET 4.0 Web Forms Conflicts between ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanels & jQuery functions Integration of jQuery DatePicker in ASP.NET Website – Localization (part 3) Why not to use HttpResponse.Close and HttpResponse.End Calculate Business Days using LINQ Get Distinct values of an Array using LINQ Using CodeRun browser-based IDE to create ASP.NET Web Applications Using params keyword – Methods with variable number of parameters Working with Code Snippets in VS.NET Working with System.IO.Path static class Calculating GridView total using JavaScript/JQuery The new SortedSet<T> Collection in .NET 4.0 JavaScriptSerializer – Dictionary to JSON Serialization and Deserialization Integration of jQuery DatePicker in ASP.NET Website – JS Validation Script (part 2) Integration of jQuery DatePicker in ASP.NET Website (part 1) Transferring large data when using Web Services Forums dedicated to WebMatrix Microsoft WebMatrix – Short overview & installation Working with embedded resources in Project's assembly Debugging ASP.NET Web Services Save and Display YouTube Videos on ASP.NET Website Hello ASP.NET World... In addition, I would like to mention that I have big list of blog posts in CodeASP.NET Community (total 60 blogs) and the local MKDOT.NET Community (total 61 blogs). You may find most of my weblogs.asp.net/hajan blogs posted there too, but there you can find many others. In my blog on MKDOT.NET Community you can find most of my ASP.NET Weblog posts translated in Macedonian language, some of them posted in English and some other blogs that were posted only there. By reading my blogs, I hope you have learnt something new or at least have confirmed your knowledge. And also, if you haven't, I encourage you to start blogging and share your Microsoft Tech. thoughts with all of us... Sharing and spreading knowledge is definitely one of the noblest things which we can do in our life. "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime" HAPPY NEW 2011 YEAR!!! Best Regards, Hajan

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Apply Skins to Add Some Flair to Windows Media Player 12

- by DigitalGeekery

Tired of the same look and feel of Windows Media Player in Windows 7? We’ll show you how to inject new life into your media experience by applying skins in WMP 12. Adding Skins In Library view, click on View from the Menu and select Skin Chooser. By default, WMP 12 comes with only a couple of modest skins. When you select a skin from the left pane, a preview will be displayed to the right. To apply one of the skins, simply select it from the pane on the left and click Apply Skin. You can also switch to the currently selected skin in the Skin chooser by selecting Skin from the View menu, or by pressing Crtl + 2. Media Player will open in Now Playing mode. Click on the Switch to Library button at the top left to return to Library view. Ok, so the included skins are a little boring. You can find additional skins by selecting Tools > Download > Skins. Or, by clicking on More Skins from within the Skin chooser. You will be taken the the Microsoft website where you can choose from dozens of skins to download and install. Select a skin you’d like to try and click the link to download. If prompted with a warning message about files containing scripts that access your library, click Yes. Note: These warning boxes may look a bit different depending on your browser. We are using Chrome for this example. Click on View Now. Your new skin will be on display. To get back to the Library mode, find and click the Return to Full Mode button. Some skins may launch video in a separate window. If you want to delete one of the skins, select it from the list within the Skin chooser and click the red “X.” You can also press the delete key on your keyboard. Then click Yes to confirm. Conclusion Using skins is a quick and easy way to add some style to Windows Media Player and switching back and forth between skins is a breeze. Regardless of your interests, you are sure to find a skin that fits your tastes. You may find WMP skins on other sites, but sticking with Microsoft’s website will ensure maximum compatibility. Skins for Windows Media Player Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Make VLC Player Look like Windows Media Player 10Make VLC Player Look like Windows Media Player 11Make VLC Player Look like Winamp 5 (Kinda)Fixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add FilesInstall and Use the VLC Media Player on Ubuntu Linux TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Use Flixtime To Create Video Slideshows Creating a Password Reset Disk in Windows Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone MELTUP – "The Beginning Of US Currency Crisis And Hyperinflation" Enable or Disable the Task Manager Using TaskMgrED Explorer++ is a Worthy Windows Explorer Alternative

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You Might Be a DBA

- by BuckWoody

With all apologies to Jeff Foxworthy, I was up late Friday night on a holiday weekend (which translated into T-SQL becomes “Maintenance Window”) and I got bored in between the two or three minutes I had between clicks. So I started a “Twitter” meme – and it just took off. I haven’t cleaned these up much, but here, in author order as of Saturday the 29th of May is the list “You might be a DBA” from around the Twitterverse: buckwoody Your two main enemies are developers and SAN admins #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody People can use Access as a cross or garlic on you #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You always plan an exit strategy, even when entering a McDonald's #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You can't explain to your family what you really do for a living #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You have at least one set of scripts you won't share #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You have an opinion on the best code-beautifier #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You have children older than the rest of your team #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You and the Oracle DBA would kill each other, but you'll happily fight off a developer together first #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You've threatened to quit if they give anyone the sa password on production #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You've sent a vendor suggestions on improving their database design or code (and been ignored) #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You've sent a vendor suggestions on improving their database design or code (and been ignored) #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You have an opinion on the best code-beautifier #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You have at least one set of scripts you won't share #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You refer to co-workers as "carbon-units" #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody Being paranoid is on your resume at the top #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody Everyone comes to your cube to find the MSDN DVD's #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You always plan an exit strategy, even when entering a McDonald's #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You've worn down developers to get your way by explaining normalization levels #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You refer to clothes as "Data Abstractions" #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody Users pester you to be able to put data in a database, then they pester you to take it out and put it in Excel #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody Others try to de-duplicate data, you try to copy it to more than three locations #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You have at least one DLT tape in the trunk of your car #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You use twitter and facebook to talk with colleagues because there's no one else in your company that does what you do #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody Your spouse knows what "ETL" means #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You've referred to yourself as the "Data Janitor" #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You don't have positive connotations of the word "upgrade" #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You get your coffee before you check your servers, because you know you won't get any if you don't #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You always come to work through the back door so no one hijacks you on the way to your cube #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You check your server logs before you check your e-mail in the morning so you can reply "Yeah, I already fixed that." #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You have more conference badges than clean socks #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody Your coffee mug says "It depends" #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You can convince a boss that you need 16GB of RAM in your laptop #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You've used ebay to find production equipment #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You pad all project timelines by 2X, and you still miss them #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You know when your company is acquiring another even before the CFO #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You pad all project timelines by 2X, and you still miss them #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You call aspirin "work vitamins" #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You get the same amount of sleep even after you have a child #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You obsess about performance metrics from over one year ago #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody The first thing you buy after the database software is aftermarket tools to manage the database software #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You've tried to convince someone else to become a DBA #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You use twitter and facebook to talk with colleagues because there's no one else in your company that does what you do #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You only know other DBA's by their Tweet Handle #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You've explained the difference between 32 and 64-bit to more than one manager in terms they can understand, using puppets #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody Your two main enemies are developers and SAN admins #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You've driven to the Datacenter to install SQL Server because "you don't trust those NOC admins" #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You pay more for faster Internet connections than cable at home so you don't have to drive in #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You call texting a "queuing system" #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You know that if someone can read Perl, they manage an Oracle system #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You have an e-mail rule for backup notifications #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody Your food pyramid includes coffee, salt and fat #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You wish everything had a graphical query plan #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You refactor your e-mails #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You've gotten more help from twitter and facebook than all your years in college #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You would pay money for a license plate that has the letters S-Q-L together #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You have actually considered making a RAID array from thumb drives #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody Everything on your laptop is installed from your MSDN subscription #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You've written blog posts on technology you've never actually implemented in production #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody Everything on your laptop is installed from your MSDN subscription #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody @MidnightDBA Click the #youmightbeaDBA tag. I've had WAY too much coffee today. buckwoody There is no other position that is 1-deep except you and the CEO #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody When you watch "The Office" you call it "OJT" #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You would pay money for a license plate that has the letters S-Q-L together #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody Your blog would make a "best practices" or "worst practices" book #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You have actually considered making a RAID array from thumb drives #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody The first thing you install on your netbook is SSMS #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody Everything on your laptop is installed from your MSDN subscription #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody Your watch is set to UTC because it's just easier #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You make plenty of money, but you're excited to get a $2.00 squeeze-ball from Quest and Redgate #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You make plenty of money, but you're excited to get a $2.00 squeeze-ball from Quest and Redgate #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You think data can be represented as something OTHER than XML #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You tell people that you made a database query go faster, and expect them to be happy for you #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You take the word "NoSQL" as a personal attack #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody People can use Access as a cross or garlic on you #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody * == bad #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody * == bad #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody There are just as many females in your technical field as males #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody People can use Access as a cross or garlic on you #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You've gotten more help from twitter and facebook than all your years in college #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You think that something OTHER than the database might be the performance bottleneck #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You refer to time as a "Clustered Index" #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You know why "user" refers to both business people and crack addicts #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You make plenty of money, but you're excited to get a $2.00 squeeze-ball from Quest and Redgate #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You can't explain to your family what you really do for a living #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You tell people that you made a database query go faster, and expect them to be happy for you #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You think a millisecond is a really long time #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You're sitting and typing #youmightbeaDBA when you could be outside #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You can't wait for a technical conference so you can wear a kilt - and you're not Scottish #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You know that "DBA" stands for "Default Blame Acceptor" #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody People can use Access as a cross or garlic on you #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You know what "the truth, thole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me Codd" means #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You've gotten more help from twitter and facebook than all your years in college #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You can't talk fast enough to get a concept out of your head so you tweet it instead #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You cry when someone doesn't use a WHERE clause #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You think data can be represented as something OTHER than XML #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You think "Set theory" is not an verb but a noun #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You try to convince random strangers to vote on your Connect item #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You think 3 hours of contiguous sleep is a good thing #youmightbeaDBA or #youmightbeamother buckwoody You don't like Oracle, and not just because of what she did to Neo #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You know when to say "sequel" and "s-q-l" #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You know where the data is #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You refer to your children as "Fully Redundant Mirrors" #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody Holiday == "Maintenance Window" #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody Your laptop is more powerful than the servers in most companies - including your own #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You capitalize SELECTed words #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You take the word "NoSQL" as a personal attack #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You know why "user" refers to both business people and crack addicts #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You cringe in public when the word "upgrade" is used in a sentence #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody Holiday == "Maintenance Window" #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody All Data Is MetaData means something to you #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You've never seen the driveway to your house in the daylight #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You think that something OTHER than the database might be the performance bottleneck #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody Most of your bloodstream is composed of caffeine #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody Your task list is labeled "CRUD Matrix" #youmightbeaDBA buckwoody You call your wife/husband a "Linked Server" #youmightbeaDBA anonythemouse When someone tells you they are going to take a dump and you wonder of which database then #youmightbeaDBA anonythemouse When it's 11pm on a holiday weekend and you are working #youmightbeaDBA anonythemouse When you sit down at a table and look for it's primary key #youmightbeaDBA anonythemouse When getting milk from the fridge you check the expiry date is > getdate() #youmightbeaDBA blakmk when you wake up dreaming about sql #youmightbeaDBA CharlesGarver You think a @buckwoody bobblehead would be a cool thing to have on the dashboard of your car #youmightbeaDBA CharlesGarver Your friends don't understand why you think there's a difference between single and double quotes #youmightbeaDBA CharlesGarver Even the newest employees know your name from all the downtime notices you've sent out #youmightbeaDBA CharlesGarver You sometimes feel anxious and think "I should test restoring those backups" and then the feeling passes #youmightbeadba CharlesGarver You know what a co-worker means when they ask "how is your squirrel server?" #youmightbeadba CharlesGarver You can't sleep at night and you ponder the logisitcs of collecting every copy of Access for the world's biggest bonfire #youmightbeaDBA CharlesGarver You can't sleep at night and you ponder the logisitcs of collecting every copy of Access for the world's biggest bonfire #youmightbeaDBA CharlesGarver You're willing to move someone's job up in priority for a box of #voodoodonuts #youmightbeaDBA CharlesGarver Each person in your company seems to think you work for THEM #youmightbeaDBA CharlesGarver You have a Love/Hate relationship going on with #Microsoft #youmightbeaDBA CharlesGarver People ask you to troubleshoot their Access program #youmightbeaDBA CharlesGarver The first words you hear in the morning are 'your voicemail box is full' #youmightbeaDBA CharlesGarver The thought of disrupting 500 people's work so you can do something doesn't phase you #youmightbeaDBA CharlesGarver You can't sleep at night and you ponder the logisitcs of collecting every copy of Access for the world's biggest bonfire #youmightbeaDBA CharlesGarver Your home computer is backed up in 3 different places #youmightbeaDBA CharlesGarver Your wardrobe for work includes pajamas #youmightbeaDBA CharlesGarver Someone tells you to look in the INDEX and you look puzzled before finally going to the back of the book. #youmightbeaDBA chuckboycejr If you have ever set up a SQLAgent job to email your mobile phone to serve as an alarm clock #youmightbeaDBA chuckboycejr If you'd rather meet Itzik than Jay Z #youmightbeaDBA chuckboycejr If you'd rather meet Itzik than Jay Z #youmightbeaDBA chuckboycejr If you'd wrestle a SysAdmin to the ground to implement #DPA best practices as per @aspiringgeek #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy I need to be up in 7 hours, so I'm off to bed! I'll have to read the rest of @buckwoody's #youmightbeaDBA posts in the AM. (g'night Buck!) databaseguy When people ask you about your house, the first thing you describe is the network. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy The last thing you say at the office each day is, "is anybody else here? I'm shutting off the lights!" #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy Your blood pressure rises when you read application specs drafted by marketing. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy A good day at work is one when nobody pays you no mind. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy You care about latches and wait states. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy You have worked over 200 hours on a performance tuning project that required no application changes at all. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy The late-night security guard knows the names of your spouse and kids. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy You have had vigorous debates about whether it should be pronounced "sequel" or "ess-queue-ell". #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy You have VPN and RDP software installed on your phone ... just in case. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy You have edited a data file by hand, just to see what would happen. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy You decorate your office walls with database catalog posters. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy You've built programs that access data just to keep other developers from asking you to run queries all the time. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy When you watch movies like The Matrix, you find yourself calculating the fasibility of storing all that data. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy You have tried to convince someone to spend money on an SSD storage array. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy When CPU is spiked on a server, you want to gather forensic evidence. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy You have to remind developers not to push code to production without checking if the database is ready. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy Nobody cares what you wear to work, as long as the thing keeps running. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy Telepathy is a job requirement when working with app dev teams. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy You read database statistics for the educational value. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy And your boss freely admits this to anyone within earshot. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy Your boss cannot explain or understand what you do. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy You envision ERDs when you see a GUI. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy You say things like "applications come and go, but data lasts forever." #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy You have memorized the names of several of the AdventureWorks employees. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy You know what MAXDOP setting you can get away with for a big query based on current server load. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy And you immediately recognize the recursion in my last tweet. #youmightbeaDBA databaseguy You find 50 simultaneous tweets from @buckwoody about #youmightbeaDBA :O) DBAishness You have "funny stories" about the times your developers accidentally deleted the T-log in their test environment. #youmightbeaDBA DBAishness Planning to slice and dice your MDW data with PowerPivot makes you giggle like a schoolgirl. #youmightbeaDBA donalddotfarmer You think @buckwoody lives in the "real world." #youmightbeaDBA jamach09 @buckwoody #youmightbeaDBA Why go outside when you can sit in the nice cool server room? jamach09 If you refer to procreation as "Replication", #youmightbeaDBA. jamach09 If you think ORM is a four-letter word, #youmightbeaDBA JamesMarsh If you have ever preached the value of Source Code Control, #YouMightBeADBA jethrocarr @venzann You store your shopping list in a ACID compliant DB #youmightbeaDBA joe_positive @buckwoody thought it stood for "Don't Bother Asking" #youmightbeaDBA joe_positive when you check your IT Events Calendar before making weekend plans #youmightbeaDBA LadyRuna You cringe whenever someone calls Excel a database #youmightbeaDBA LadyRuna When the waiter says he'll be your server today, you ask how many terabytes he is #youmightbeaDBA LadyRuna you always call the asterisk a "Star" #youmightbeaDBA LadyRuna You walk into a server room, say "Nice RACK!" and everyone there knows you're talking about server rack... #youmightbeaDBA LadyRuna You receive more messages from servers than from friends #youmightbeaDBA LadyRuna hmmm... #youmightbeaDBA if your recipe for gumbo is "SELECT * FROM Refrigerator" markjholmes @SQLSoldier Heh. #youmightbeaDBA if you correct other DBAs' spelling of @PaulRandal markjholmes #youmightbeaDBA if you actually test RAID5 vs RAID10 on your SAN because when it comes to configuration, "it depends." markjholmes #youmightbeaDBA if you have at least 3 definitions of the word "cluster" MarlonRibunal 3 Words: @BrentO, snicker, & Access #youmightbeaDBA MarlonRibunal @onpnt @mikeSQL my appeal was a couple of mins late. Enjoying #youmightbeaDBA MarlonRibunal @mikeSQL @onpnt pls, don't mention bacon #youmightbeaDBA merv @buckwoody You HATE 3-way joins #youmightbeaDBA MidnightDBA If you're up at midnight Tweeting about SQL #youmightbeaDBA MidnightDBA @buckwoody I'd noticed that. :) #youmightbeaDBA mikeSQL when people talk about "their type" you're thinking varchar, bigint, binary, etc #youmightbeadba mikeSQL people ask you to go to lunch , but you can't go because you're attending #SQLlunch #youmightbeadba mikeSQL you laugh for hours at all of the #sqlmoviequotes ....things in which a normal individual would scratch their head at. #youmightbeadba mikeSQL you laugh for hours at all of the #sqlmoviequotes ....things in which a normal individual would scratch their head at. #youmightbeadba mrdenny If you think that @buckwoody's demo using PowerPivot to analyze index usage data from DMVs is awesome then #youmightbeaDBA mrdenny You wish @PaulRandal still worked at Microsoft so that they would make a bobble head of him #youmightbeadba mrdenny When it's 11pm on a holiday weekend, and your posting stupid jokes on Twitter then #youmightbeadba mrdenny If you go out with friends and wonder why no one's wearing a kilt then #YouMightBeADBA mrdenny You can't do basic math, but you know off the top of your head how many CALs $14,412 can buy you. #YoumightbeaDBA mrdenny If you've ever setup a SQL Job to email you to get you out of a regularly scheduled meeting #YouMightBeADBA. mrdenny You throw up in your mouth a little when ever you here the word "Access". Even if it doesn't relate to a MS product. #YouMightBeADBA msdtjones You spend more time listening to @buckwoody than your wife #youmightbeaDBA NFDotCom You perform "hail deltas" on a regular basis. #YouMightBeADBA NoelMcKinney If you tell your wife you want to go to Columbus Ohio for your wedding anniversary so you can attend #sqlsat42 then #youmightbeaDBA NoelMcKinney You read a union is on strike and wonder if it's a UNION ALL #youmightbeaDBA NoelMcKinney You read a union is on strike and wonder if it's a UNION ALL #youmightbeaDBA NoelMcKinney Someone asks you to throw another log on the fire and you tell them not to worry about it because Autogrowth is turned on #youmightbeaDBA Nuurdygirl Even if you have a girlfriend...its possible #youmightbeadba. Yeah-i said its possible! Nuurdygirl When your girlfriend has to lean around the laptop to kiss you goodnight #youmightbeadba Old_Man_Fish If you worry about how big your package is and how long it takes to finish #youmightbeaDBA Old_Man_Fish If you no longer wonder if someone is in trouble or died if you are getting calls at 2AM #youmightbeaDBA Old_Man_Fish If, when you hear the word ACCESS with no connotation you blood pressure jumps 50 points, #youmightbeaDBA onpnt When you hear the word inject you immediately get concerned if your databases are OK #youmightbeaDBA onpnt Your servers haven't been rebooted in a year #youmightbeaDBA onpnt You know why it's funny when @PaulRandal has the word, "Sheep" in a tweet #youmightbeaDBA onpnt You have read BOL without actually having a problem to figure out #youmightbeaDBA onpnt You can type "SELECT columns FROM tables" without typos but tipen ni Banglish ares a messis #youmightbeaDBA onpnt DR strategies doesn't include the word, RAID in them #youmightbeaDBA onpnt you can move a SQL Server instance to a new server without the users ever knowing #youmightbeaDBA onpnt You have made an SSIS package that is more than one step #youmightbeaDBA onpnt You have the balls to say no to your boss when they ask for the sa password #youmightbeaDBA onpnt you google to trouble shoot a problem and end up at your own blog (and it fixes it) #youmightbeaDBA onpnt You talk your wife into moving the family vacation a week earlier so you can attend the areas local SSUG meeting #youmightbeaDBA onpnt you can explain to a nontechnical person what a deadlock is #youmightbeaDBA onpnt You hope a girl asks you what your collation is #youmightbeaDBA onpnt you make jokes that include the words shrink, truncate and 1205. And you are the only one that laughs at them #youmightbeaDBA onpnt You rate your ability to stay awake to work longer on blogs, twitter, forums and your day to day job with the 5 9's goal #youmightbeaDBA onpnt you have major surgery and beg the doctor to release you back to work 5 days later because you miss your servers #youmightbeaDBA #TrueStory onpnt You do have backups and you know how to use them #youmightbeaDBA onpnt It's the network #youmightbeaDBA onpnt When the developers get to work your mood changes rapidly #youmightbeaDBA onpnt When someone says, "PASS", you first think of karaoke #youmightbeaDBA onpnt Recruiters try to get you to call them *just* because they think you'll give them @BrentO contact info #youmightbeaDBA onpnt You chuckle every time you go to grab the "CLR" Calcium, Lime and Rust Remover to clean something #youmightbeaDBA onpnt @MarlonRibunal @mikeSQL Sorry man, it was already in motion ;-) #youmightbeaDBA onpnt When you have an "I love bacon" sticker on your laptop. #youmightbeaDBA http://twitpic.com/1ry671 onpnt You sing SELECT statements in the shower #youmightbeaDBA onpnt When you see a chicken it doesn't remind you of food. It reminds you of a guy named Jorge #youmightbeaDBA onpnt At time, SQL is your mistress #youmightbeaDBA onpnt Your wife wonders if SQL is the code name of your mistress at times #youmightbeaDBA onpnt it's Friday and you are on twitter thinking really hard about what would be funny for hash tag #youmightbeaDBA onpnt You organize your wife's "decorative"pillows on the bed in a B-Tree structure #youmightbeaDBA PaulWhiteNZ If you: SELECT TOP (1) milk FROM fridge WHERE use_by_date >= GET_DATE() ORDER BY use_by_date ASC #YouMightBeaDBA RonDBA #youmightbeaDBA if you read @buckwoody's and @BrentO's blogs. ryaneastabrook @buckwoody omg, you have to stand up a website with these on them, they are awesome #youmightbeaDBA soulvy @StrateSQL @LadyRuna Or a "Splat" #youmightbeaDBA speedracer You can still fall asleep after three cups of coffee #youmightbeaDBA speedracer You retweet @buckwoody on a Friday night #youmightbeaDBA speedracer You can still fall asleep after three cups of coffee #youmightbeaDBA speedracer Developers make you twitch #youmightbeaDBA sqlagentman You know what X/1024*8 is. #YouMightBeADBA SqlAsylum Your still in the office at 5:00 on memorial day weekend. #youmightbeadba :) SQLBob Whenever someone you know gets pregnant you bring up INNER JOINs or SQL Injection attacks... #youmightbeaDBA SQLChicken You know one or more SQL folks in the community with an animal in their username #youmightbeaDBA SQLChicken You've used one or more car analogies to explain how a database works #youmightbeaDBA SQLChicken “@sqljoe: #youmightbeaDBA if you applied to attend #sqlu and requested @SQLChicken to pull strings for you” lmao nice! SQLChicken When talking about SSIS your discussions break down into various jokes about packages #youmightbeaDBA SQLChicken Just SEEING the code for cursors makes you break out in hives #youmightbeaDBA SQLChicken Just SEEING the code for cursors makes you break out in hives #youmightbeaDBA SQLCraftsman You coined the phrase "Magic SAN Dust" because calling a vendor's marketing claims BS is not acceptable in a meeting. #YouMightBeADBA SQLCraftsman If you hear about a new feature with the acronym "DAC" and wonder what disaster of a feature it is attached to this time. #YouMightBeADBA SQLCraftsman You really own a "Stick of Much Developer Whacking" #YouMightBeADBA SQLCraftsman You coined the phrase "Magic SAN Dust" because calling a vendor's marketing claims BS is not acceptable in a meeting. #YouMightBeADBA SQLCraftsman Default Blame Acceptor #YouMightBeADBA SQLCraftsman If you hear about a new feature with the acronym "DAC" and wonder what disaster of a feature it is attached to this time. #YouMightBeADBA SQLCraftsman Default Blame Acceptor #YouMightBeADBA SQLCraftsman If you hear about a new feature with the acronym "DAC" and wonder what disaster of a feature it is attached to this time. #YouMightBeADBA sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you wished your wife knew T-sql. USE ShoppingList SELECT NecessaryItems from Supermarket WHERE Category<> ("junk food") sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if the first thing you kiss when you wake up is your mobile for not waking you up in the middle of the night sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if your wife has a "Do Not Fly" family vacation list of her own including your laptop and mobile sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you have researched for DBA Anonymous groups and attended a #SSUG willing to drop your database (vice) sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if your only maintenance windows are staff meetings sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you think of yourself as "The One" in The Matrix "balancing the equation" from The Architect's (developers) poor coding sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you think @PaulRandal should have played the Oracle in The Matrix sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if home CD & Movie collection is stored in secured containers,in logical order & naming convention,and with a backup copy sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you applied to attend #sqlu and requested @SQLChicken to pull strings for you sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you have tried to TiVo @MidnightDBA broadcasts sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if your #sql user group feels like #AA meetings sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you thought of bringing your #sql books to #sqlsaturday and #sqlpass for autographs sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if #sqlpass feels like the #oscars sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you are proud of your small package SQLLawman #youmightbeaDBA when you hear MDX and Acura is not first thought that comes to mind. sqlrunner If your wife double checks that there isn't a SQLSat within 200 miles of your vacation destination #youmightbeaDBA sqlrunner When you're on a conference call and your wife thinks your speaking in a foreign language #youmightbeaDBA sqlrunner When you're on a conference call and your wife thinks your speaking in a foreign language #youmightbeaDBA sqlrunner You treat the word 'access' as a verb, not a noun #youmightbeaDBA sqlrunner If you are happy with sub-second performance #youmightbeaDBA sqlrunner When you know the names of the NOC people AND their families #youmightbeadba sqlrunner When you know the names of the NOC people AND their families #youmightbeadba sqlrunner Your company set's up international phone coverage for your cruise #youmightbeaDBA sqlsamson @buckwoody if your manager asks you for data and you respond with "there's a script for that" #youmightbeadba sqlsamson @buckwoody If you receive more messages from your server then your spouse #youmightbeadba SQLSoldier You've spent all night Valentines Day upgrading the SQL Servers and forgot to tell your wife you'd be working late. #youmightbeadba SQLSoldier You're flattered when someone calls you a geek. #youmightbeadba SQLSoldier @llangit @mrdenny it's 11pm on a holiday weekend, & your reading stupid jokes on Twitter then #youmightbeadba SQLSoldier Your manager borrows lunch money from you because your salary is 30% higher than his. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You think "intellisense" is a double negative because it's not intelligent nor makes sense. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier 75% of the emails you receive at home have the phrase "now following you on Twitter!" in the subject line. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You petition Ken Burns to remake Office Space because it should have been 18 hours long. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You select a candidate for a Jr DBA position because his resume said he's willing to get your coffee. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier Somebody misquotes @PaulRandall and you call him on your cell to verify. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You wish the elevator in your building was slower because it's the last time you'll be left alone all day. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier The developers sacrifice small animals before giving you their code for review. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier Developers bring you coffee and a BLT when you review their code. #youmightbeaDBA #IWish SQLSoldier You can get out of any family get-together by saying you have to work and nobody questions it. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You've requested a HP Superdome for you "test" box. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier Your leave work early because your internet connection to the data center is better at home #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier The new CEO asks you to justify your salary, so you go on vacation for 2 weeks. And he never questions you again. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You cheer when Milton burns down the company in Office Space #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier A dev. asks if you've heard about some great new feature in SQL and you show the 16 blog posts you wrote on it ... last year #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier Your dev team is still testing SQL 2008 and you're already planning for SQL 11. #youmightbeaDBA #TrueStory SQLSoldier The new CEO asks you to justify your salary, so you go on vacation for 2 weeks. And he never questions you again. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier Your dev team is still testing SQL 2008 and you're already planning for SQL 11. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You use a cell phone service coverage map to plan your next vacation. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You come in to work at 7 AM because it gives you at least 3 hours without any developers around. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You figure out a way to make take your wife on a cruise and deduct it as a business expense. #youmightbeaDBA #sqlcruise SQLSoldier You name your cat SQLDog because the name @SQLCat was already taken. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You rate your blog posts based on the number of retweets you get. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You disable random logins just to mess with people. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You fall for the pickup line, "Hey baby, what's your collation?" #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You can blame an outage on anyone in the company because you're the only one that knows how to find out what really happened #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You can blame an outage on anyone in the company because you're the only one that knows how to find out what really happened #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You cheer when Milton burns down the company in Office Space #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier Your leave work early because your internet connection to the data center is better at home #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You cheer when Milton burns down the company in Office Space #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier Your think the 4 food groups are coffee, bacon, fast food, and Mountain Dew. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You tell someone your job title and they ask "What?" You describe it and they ask "What?". So you say "computer geek". #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier The #1 referrer to your blog is Twitter.com. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier Your idea of a good time on a Saturday involves free training. #youmightbeaDBA #sqlsat43 SQLSoldier You write a book that all of your co-workers have and none have read it. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You write a book that sells a couple thousand copies and is heralded a best seller. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier No matter how sick you are, you go to work if it's time to pass the pager on to the next guy. #youmightbeaDBA #TrueStory SQLSoldier You go out on the town, and strangers walk up to you and say, "Hey you're that SQL guy" #youmightbeaDBA #TrueStory SQLSoldier Your wife asks you to fix something, and you request a downtime window. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier Your wife asks when you'll be home, and you tell her that you wish you knew. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier Your best pickup line, "Hey baby, what's your collation?" #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier Your wife asks when you'll be home, and you tell her that you wish you knew. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You know that @BuckWoody is not someone's porno name. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You list TSQL as your native language on the 2010 census. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier Starbucks' stock price drops every time you go on vacation. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You're happy when the web master says that the website is down. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You know that @BuckWoody is not someone's porno name. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You get mad when someone calls your car a "heap" because you've always considered it to be a "clustered index". #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier Your blog has more hits than your company's website. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You systematically remove the asterisk key from all keyboards in the company except yours. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier When asked if you recycle, you reply that you run sp_cycle_errorlog every night at midnight #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You wouldn't allow someone named @AdamMachanic to work on your car. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You switch offices every 3 days to avoid developers #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier PSS has your number on speed dial. #youmightbeaDBA SQLSoldier You frown when you they tell Neo that he's going to the Oracle #youmightbeaDBA swhaley you regretted saying "This shouldn't effect production" #youmightbeaDBA swhaley you regretted saying "This shouldn't effect production" #youmightbeaDBA Tarwn A pleasurable saturday means spending the day learning more about what you already do the rest of the week #youmightbeaDBA ...oh, wait... thelostforum For great justice; all our base are belong to YOU !! #youmightbeadba thelostforum @SQLSoldier: You need a witness to use a mirror #youmightbeaDBA ;) TimCost you capitalize key words. always. everywhere. you can't help it, usually don't even notice. #youmightbeaDBA Toshana Your the only one in your company not impressed with the developers new application. #youmightbeaDBA venzann Coming soon from a (respected) book publisher - @buckwoody's #youmightbeaDBA venzann He's on a role tonight. @buckwoody is summing up my life with his #youmightbeaDBA tweets... venzann I love the #youmightbeaDBA tag. Found at least 6 new DBAs to follow.. venzann He's on a role tonight. @buckwoody is summing up my life with his #youmightbeaDBA tweets... venzann You use #sqlhelp as a primary resource during troubleshooting #youmightbeaDBA venzann You insist on stricter password security for your sql servers than you implement on your own laptop #youmightbeaDBA WesBrownSQL @buckwoody you are up so late the only tweets you see are from @buckwoody #youmightbeaDBA WesBrownSQL @SQLSoldier you are upgrading all your 2005 prod servers to 2008 R2 on a three day weekend... #youmightbeaDBA zippy1981 #youmightbeaDBA if everytime you do something with #mongodb you think of the Vulcan proverb "only Nixon could go to China." Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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SQL SERVER – Error: Fix – Msg 208 – Invalid object name ‘dbo.backupset’ – Invalid object name ‘dbo.backupfile’

- by pinaldave

Just a day before I got a very interesting email. Here is the email (modified a bit to make it relevant to this blog post). “Pinal, We are facing a very strange issue. One of our query related to backup files and backup set has stopped working suddenly in SSMS. It works fine in application where we have and in the stored procedure but when we have it in our SSMS it gives following error. Msg 208, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Invalid object name ‘dbo.backupfile’. Here are our queries which we are trying to execute. SELECT name, database_name, backup_size, TYPE, compatibility_level, backup_set_id FROM dbo.backupset; SELECT logical_name, backup_size, file_type FROM dbo.backupfile; This query gives us details related to backupset and backup files when the backup was taken.” When I receive this kind of email, usually I have no answers directly. The claim that it works in stored procedure and in application but not in SSMS gives me no real data. I have requested him to very first check following two things: If he is connected to correct server? His answer was yes. If he has enough permissions? His answer was he was logged in as an admin. This means there was something more to it and I requested him to send me a screenshot of the his SSMS. He promptly sends that to me and as soon as I receive the screen shot I knew what was going on. Before I say anything take a look at the screenshot yourself and see if you can figure out why his queries are not working in SSMS. Just to make your life a bit easy, I have already given a hint in the image. The answer is very simple, the context of the database is master database. To execute above two queries the context of the database has to be msdb. Tables backupset and backupfile belong to the database msdb only. Here are two workaround or solution to above problem: 1) Change context to MSDB Above two queries when they will run as following they will not error out and will give the accurate desired result. USE msdb GO SELECT name, database_name, backup_size, TYPE, compatibility_level, backup_set_id FROM dbo.backupset; SELECT logical_name, backup_size, file_type FROM dbo.backupfile; 2) Prefix the query with msdb There are cases above script used in stored procedure or part of big query, it is not possible to change the context of the whole query to any specific database. Use three part naming convention and prefix them with msdb. SELECT name, database_name, backup_size, TYPE, compatibility_level, backup_set_id FROM msdb.dbo.backupset; SELECT logical_name, backup_size, file_type FROM msdb.dbo.backupfile; Very simple solution but sometime keeps people wondering for an answer. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Error Messages, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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Principles of Big Data By Jules J Berman, O’Reilly Media Book Review

- by Compudicted

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Compudicted/archive/2013/11/04/principles-of-big-data-by-jules-j-berman-orsquoreilly-media.aspx A fantastic book! Must be part, if not yet, of the fundamentals of the Big Data as a field of science. Highly recommend to those who are into the Big Data practice. Yet, I confess this book is one of my best reads this year and for a number of reasons: The book is full of wisdom, intimate insight, historical facts and real life examples to how Big Data projects get conceived, operate and sadly, yes, sometimes die. But not only that, the book is most importantly is filled with valuable advice, accurate and even overwhelming amount of reference (from the positive side), and the author does not event stop there: there are numerous technical excerpts, links and examples allowing to quickly accomplish many daunting tasks or make you aware of what one needs to perform as a data practitioner (excuse my use of the word practitioner, I just did not find a better substitute to it to trying to reference all who face Big Data). Be aware that Jules Berman’s background is in medicine, naturally, this book discusses this subject a lot as it is very dear to the author’s heart I believe, this does not make this book any less significant however, quite the opposite, I trust if there is an area in science or practice where the biggest benefits can be ripped from Big Data projects it is indeed the medical science, let’s make Cancer history! On a personal note, for me as a database, BI professional it has helped to understand better the motives behind Big Data initiatives, their underwater rivers and high altitude winds that divert or propel them forward. Additionally, I was impressed by the depth and number of mining algorithms covered in it. I must tell this made me very curious and tempting to find out more about these indispensable attributes of Big Data so sure I will be trying stretching my wallet to acquire several books that go more in depth on several most popular of them. My favorite parts of the book, well, all of them actually, but especially chapter 9: Analysis, it is just very close to my heart. But the real reason is it let me see what I do with data from a different angle. And then the next - “Special Considerations”, they are just two logical parts. The writing language is of this book is very acceptable for all levels, I had no technical problem reading it in ebook format on my 8” tablet or a large screen monitor. If I would be asked to say at least something negative I have to state I had a feeling initially that the book’s first part reads like an academic material relaxing the reader as the book progresses forward. I admit I am impressed with Jules’ abilities to use several programming languages and OSS tools, bravo! And I agree, it is not too, too hard to grasp at least the principals of a modern programming language, which seems becomes a defacto knowledge standard item for any modern human being. So grab a copy of this book, read it end to end and make yourself shielded from making mistakes at any stage of your Big Data initiative, by the way this book also helps build better future Big Data projects. Disclaimer: I received a free electronic copy of this book as part of the O'Reilly Blogger Program.

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How To Clear An Alert - Part 2

- by werner.de.gruyter

There were some interesting comments and remarks on the original posting, so I decided to do a follow-up and address some of the issues that got raised... Handling Metric Errors First of all, there is a significant difference between an 'error' and an 'alert'. An 'alert' is the violation of a condition (a threshold) specified for a given metric. That means that the Agent is collecting and gathering the data for the metric, but there is a situation that requires the attention of an administrator. An 'error' on the other hand however, is a failure to collect metric data: The Agent is throwing the error because it cannot determine the value for the metric Whereas the 'alert' guarantees continuity of the metric data, an 'error' signals a big unknown. And the unknown aspect of all this is what makes an error a lot more serious than a regular alert: If you don't know what the current state of affairs is, there could be some serious issues brewing that nobody is aware of... The life-cycle of a Metric Error Clearing a metric error is pretty much the same workflow as a metric 'alert': The Agent signals the error after it failed to execute the metric The error is uploaded to the OMS/repository, where it becomes visible in the Console The error will remain active until the Agent is able to execute the metric successfully. Even though the metric is still getting scheduled and executed on a regular basis, the error will remain outstanding as long as the Agent is not capable of executing the metric correctly Knowing this, the way to fix the metric error should be obvious: Take the 'problem' away, and as soon as the metric is executed again (based on the frequency of the metric), the error will go away. The same tricks used to clear alerts can be used here too: Wait for the next scheduled execution. For those metrics that are executed regularly (like every 15 minutes or so), it's just a matter of waiting those minutes to see the updates. The 'Reevaluate Alert' button can be used to force a re-execution of the metric. In case a metric is executed once a day, this will be a better way to make sure that the underlying problem has been solved. And if it has been, the metric error will be removed, and the regular data points will be uploaded to the repository. And just in case you have to 'force' the issue a little: If you disable and re-enable a metric, it will get re-scheduled. And that means a new metric execution, and an update of the (hopefully) fixed problem. Database server-generated alerts and problem checkers There are various ways the Agent can collect metric data: Via a script or a SQL statement, reading a log file, getting a value from an SNMP OID or listening for SNMP traps or via the DBMS_SERVER_ALERTS mechanism of an Oracle database. For those alert which are generated by the database (like tablespace metrics for 10g and above databases), the Agent just 'waits' for the database to report any new findings. If the Agent has lost the current state of the server-side metrics (due to an incomplete recovery after a disaster, or after an improper use of the 'emctl clearstate' command), the Agent might be still aware of an alert that the database no longer has (or vice versa). The same goes for 'problem checker' alerts: Those metrics that only report data if there is a problem (like the 'invalid objects' metric) will also have a problem if the Agent state has been tampered with (again, the incomplete recovery, and after improper use of 'emctl clearstate' are the two main causes for this). The best way to deal with these kinds of mismatches, is to simple disable and re-enable the metric again: The disabling will clear the state of the metric, and the re-enabling will force a re-execution of the metric, so the new and updated results can get uploaded to the repository. Starting 10gR5, the Agent performs additional checks and verifications after each restart of the Agent and/or each state change of the database (shutdown/startup or failover in case of DataGuard) to catch these kinds of mismatches.

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Easily Add Facebook Chat to Pidgin

- by Matthew Guay

Want to keep in touch with your Facebook friends throughout the day? Here we’ll show you how to easily add Facebook chat to the popular multi-protocol chat client Pidgin. Facebook has recently added support for XMPP chat, which means you can easily add it to popular chat clients such as Pidgin. Previously you could only add Facebook chat to Pidgin through a plug-in that didn’t always work correctly. Here we’ll walk you through setting up your Facebook account in Pidgin. Getting Started First, make sure you have a username for your Facebook account (link below). This is a relatively new feature for Facebook, so if you’ve had your account for a while you may need to choose one. If you already have one, you should see it listed instead. Now, open Pidgin, and click Manage Accounts. Click Add… Then select XMPP from the Protocol list. Now, enter your Facebook username without the facebook.com part (e.g your.facebook.username, not http://www.facebook.com/your.user.name). Then, enter chat.facebook.com for the Domain, and enter your standard Facebook password. You can check the “Remember password” box if you’d like Pidgin to automatically sign in to Facebook chat. Now, click on the Advanced tab, and uncheck the “Require SSL/TLS” box. Also, make sure the Connect port is 5222. Click Add, and your Facebook account is added to Pidgin. Now Facebook will show up in your list of accounts, with the username [email protected]. Your Facebook friends will show up directly in your Buddy list, complete with their full name and Facebook profile picture. Any users that are not in a group will show under your standard list, while ones in a Facebook group will be shown in a separate group. You can move which groups your Facebook friends show up in, just like you can with other chat contacts. And no matter if your friend is logged in on the standard Facebook website or through another chat application, it will work the same as always. This is a great way to keep in touch with your Facebook friends throughout the day. If you like Facebook chat and already use Pidgin, now you can keep from switching between programs and just chat with all your friends from a central location. Links: Download Pidgin Set your Facebook username Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips The How-To Geek is No Longer on FacebookWin a Free iPod Touch in the How-To Geek Facebook Giveaway!Block Those Irritating Facebook Quiz & Application MessagesPut Your Pidgin Buddy List into the Windows Vista SidebarHow to Lock Down Your Facebook Account TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier Design Your Web Pages Using the Golden Ratio Worldwide Growth of the Internet How to Find Your Mac Address Use My TextTools to Edit and Organize Text

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Friday Fun: The Search For Wondla

- by Asian Angel

The best day of the week is finally here again, so it is time to have some fun while waiting to go home for the weekend. The game we have for you today takes you far into humanity’s future where you journey with Eva Nine in her quest to find other humans. Note: Today’s game comes with a double bonus! First, there is a sequel game that you can move on to once you have completed the first one. Second, there are three wallpapers available in multiple sizes for those who enjoy the characters and artwork presented in the game (see below). The Search For Wondla The object of the game is to find the differences between two similar looking images based on artwork from The Search For Wondla by Tony DiTerlizzi. Are you ready to join Eva Nine in her quest to find other humans in the future? Note: There is a version available for those who would like to play The Search For Wondla on their iPads! The first game has 28 levels of difference finding goodness for you to work through. Each level will list the minimum number of differences that you need to find to progress to the next level. If you need a hint along the way just click on the Shake or Reveal options at the bottom of the game play window. Get a level completed quickly enough and you get bonus points! There will also be differences in the images for individual levels each time you play the game, so have fun! Note: The second game has 12 levels to complete. To give you a good feel for the game we have covered the first six levels here and provided seven clues for each level (you are only required to find a minimum of five). Eva Nine viewing the holographic outdoor projections in the main hub of her living quarters… Eva Nine is in a grumpy mood as Muthr visits her at bedtime… Eva Nine in her secret hideaway visiting old “childhood friends” as she contemplates her recent survival test failure. Eva Nine viewing the entire set of floor plans for the underground sanctuary where she was born and has been growing up. Eva Nine’s escape to the surface as the underground sanctuary is attacked by the bounty hunter creature Besteel. Eva Nine on the surface for the first time in her young life. Will she be successful in her quest? There is only one way to find out! Play The Search For Wondla Part 1 Play The Search For Wondla Part 2 Bonus Content If you have enjoyed this game you can learn more about the book and download the three wallpapers shown here by visiting the link below! Note: The wallpapers come in the following sizes: 1024*768, 1280*800, 1280*1024, 1440*900, iPhone, iPhone4, and iPad (click on the Extras link at the bottom of the page). Visit the Search For Wondla Homepage Do you enjoy playing difference finding games? Then you will definitely want to have a look at another wonderful game that we have covered here: Friday Fun: Isis Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Get the Complete Android Guide eBook for Only 99 Cents [Update: Expired] Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 7: Design and Typography How to Choose What to Back Up on Your Linux Home Server How To Harmonize Your Dual-Boot Setup for Windows and Ubuntu Hang in There Scrat! – Ice Age Wallpaper How Do You Know When You’ve Passed Geek and Headed to Nerd? On The Tip – A Lamborghini Theme for Chrome and Iron What if Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner were Human? [Video] Peaceful Winter Cabin Wallpaper Store Tabs for Later Viewing in Opera with Tab Vault

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SQLAuthority News – The Best Quotes of “Who Wrote This?” Contest

- by pinaldave

I am a frequent reader of Brent Ozar PLF, it is one of my favorite blogs. A recent post announced a “Who Wrote This?” contest to see if readers could tell their three contributors apart based on some writing samples. Here are my favorite lines from the sample paragraphs, from each of the three “mystery authors.” Topic 1: Working with Bad Managers Mystery Author A – “Working with bad managers means working against my own happiness, and I’ve come to learn that there’s no changing bad managers.” I love this line because, as anyone who has had a bad manager knows, often a lot of self-doubt rises up. We all have to remember that sometimes the problem is out of our control. Mystery Author B – “Mentor your manager just like you would mentor a junior DBA.” Having a bad manager can be extremely depressing, and we often feel out of control. But we all need to remember that our work is a two-way street, and that sometimes we can subtly influence those above us. Mystery Author C – “The trick to working for all bad managers is to remember that they aren’t your parent. Take charge of your career.” We all also need to learn not to play the blame game. Would you rather stay in a place where you are unhappy, or would you rather take charge of your life? I hope most people would pick the latter. Topic 2: Working with Remote Teams Mystery Author A – “Like almost anything else the key is to make sure that everyone on the team has an understanding of how and when communication will occur.” Communication is so important. I cannot over emphasize how much. And this one line captures how I feel and even communicates the idea clearly! Mystery Author B – “The key to remote team success is verifiable trust: feeling confident that invisible team members are doing the right amount of the right thing at the right time.” I think this line not only captures the key aspects of remote work – verifiable work and trust – but there were so many lines that followed that I loved and could not fit here. The whole paragraph is a list for successful remote work. Everyone could benefit from reading it. Mystery Author C – “What seems clear, precise, and specific in one time zone comes across as vague, soupy, and just plain weird in another.” You know what? I just love this description. The author is right – sometimes vague e-mails really do seem soupy and weird! Topic 3: Working with Your Nemesis Mystery Author A – “Every job is temporary, but your reputation stays with you.” Everyone needs to remember this. The workplace is meant to be a professional arena, and many people have the opinion that work is temporary and disposable. No one wants to work with co-worker like that. Mystery Author B – “Unhealthy conflict is going to lead to leaving three week old tuna fish sandwiches in someone’s desk drawer.” Sometimes humor really is the best policy! Mystery Author C – “Oh no, it’s that guy.” This might seem like a weird phrase to choose as my favorite from an entire paragraph. But the whole piece was written in the form of a story of co-workers getting drunk and plotting against a nemesis. It was too funny to overlook, but too long to post here. A must read! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 30, 2011

CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 30, 2011Popular ReleasesASP.NET Comet Ajax Library (Reverse Ajax - Server Push): Reverse Ajax Samples v1.53: 16 Comprehensive ASP.NET Ajax / Reverse Ajax / WCF / MVC / Mono samplesReactive Extensions - Extensions (Rxx): Rxx 1.1: What's NewRelated Work Items Please read the latest release notes for details about what's new. About LabsAll "Labs" downloads include the Rxx.dll assembly, so only a single download is required. To start RxxLabs.exe, right-mouse click and select Run as Administrator; otherwise, do not run the Reactive WebClient lab because it will crash the program. RxxLabs.exe requires administrator privileges for the Reactive WebClient lab to register a local HTTP port. To launch the Silverlight labs...CommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET - 0.9.7 Final: A collection of very reusable code and components in C# 4.0 ranging from ActiveRecord, Csv, Command Line Parsing, Configuration, Holiday Calendars, Logging, Authentication, and much more. Samples in <root>\src\Lib\CommonLibrary.NET\Samples CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.7Documentation 6738 6503 New 6535 Enhancements 6759 6748 6583 6737datajs - JavaScript Library for data-centric web applications: datajs version 1.0.0: datajs is a cross-browser and UI agnostic JavaScript library that enables data-centric web applications with the following features: OData client that enables CRUD operations including batching and metadata support using both ATOM and JSON payloads. Single store abstraction that provides a common API on top of HTML5 local storage technologies. Data cache component that allows reading data ranges from a collection and storing them locally to reduce the number of network requests. Changes...Coding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.4.4: Fix for http://coding4fun.codeplex.com/workitem/6869 was incomplete. Back button wouldn't return app bar. Corrected now. High impact bugSiteMap Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: SiteMap Editor (1.0.528.279): Added keyboard shortcuts: - Cut (CTRL+X) - Copy (CTRL+C) - Paste (CTRL+V) - Delete (CTRL+D) - Move up (CTRL+UP ARROW) - Move down (CTRL+DOWN ARROW) Added ability to save/load SiteMap from/to a Xml file on disk Bug fix: - Connect to a server through the status bar was throwing error "Object Reference not set to an instance of an object" - Rename TreeNode.Name after changing TreeNode.TextMicrosoft - Domain Oriented N-Layered .NET 4.0 App Sample: V2.01 ALPHA N-Layered SampleApp .NET 4.0 and EF4.1: V2.0.01 - ALPHARequired Software (Microsoft Base Software needed for Development environment) Visual Studio 2010 RTM & .NET 4.0 RTM (Final Versions) Expression Blend 4 SQL Server 2008 R2 Express/Standard/Enterprise Unity Application Block 2.0 - Published May 5th 2010 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=2D24F179-E0A6-49D7-89C4-5B67D939F91B&displaylang=en http://unity.codeplex.com/releases/view/31277 PEX & MOLES 0.94.51023.0, 29/Oct/2010 - Visual Studio 2010 Power ...Mosaic Project: Mosaic Alpha build 261: - Fixed crash when pinning applications in x64 OS - Added Hub to video widget. It shows videos from Video library (only .wmv and .avi). Can work slow if there are too much files. - Fixed some issues with scrolling - Fixed bug with html widgets - Fixed bug in Gmail widget - Added html today widget missed in previous release - Now Mosaic saves running widgets if you restarting from optionsEnhSim: EnhSim 2.4.9 BETA: 2.4.9 BETAThis release supports WoW patch 4.2 at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Added in some of th....NET Reflector Add-Ins: Reflector V7 Add-Ins: All the add-ins compiled for Reflector V7TerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v4.1 [4.0 Bug Fixes]: Version 4.1 ChangelogChanged how users will Open Player files (This change makes it much easier) This allowed me to remove the "Current player file" labels that were present Changed file control icons Added submit bug button Various Bug Fixes Fixed crashes related to clicking on buffs before a character is loaded Fixed crashes related to selecting "No Buff" when choosing a new buff Fixed crashes related to clicking on a "Max" button on the buff tab before a character is loaded Cor...AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.0 Beta8: ??AcDown???????????????，?????????????????????。????????????????????，??Acfun、Bilibili、???、???、?????，???????????、???????。 AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 AcDown???????C#??，?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDown?????"????????? ??v3.0 Beta8 ?? ??????????????? ???????????????(??????????) ???????...BlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.5: Get DotNetBlogEngine for 3 Months Free! Click Here for More Info 3 Months FREE – BlogEngine.NET Hosting – Click Here! If you want to set up and start using BlogEngine.NET right away, you should download the Web project. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. If you are upgrading from a previous version of BlogEngine.NET, please take a look at the Upgrading to BlogEngine.NET 2.5 instructions. To get started, be sure to check out our installatio...PHP Manager for IIS: PHP Manager 1.2 for IIS 7: This release contains all the functionality available in 62183 plus the following additions: Command Line Support via PowerShell - now it is possible to manage and script PHP installations on IIS by using Windows PowerShell. More information is available at Managing PHP installations with PHP Manager command line. Detection and alert when using local PHP handler - if a web site or a directory has a local copy of PHP handler mapping then the configuration changes made on upper configuration ...MiniTwitter: 1.71: MiniTwitter 1.71 ???? ?? OAuth ???????????? ????????、??????????????????? ???????????????????????SizeOnDisk: 1.0.10.0: Fix: issue 327: size format error when save settings Fix: some UI bindings trouble (sorting, refresh) Fix: user settings file deletion when corrupted Feature: TreeView virtualization (better speed with many folders) Feature: New file type DataGrid column Feature: In KByte view, show size of file < 1024B and > 0 with 3 decimal Feature: New language: Italian Task: Cleanup for speedRawr: Rawr 4.2.0: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr AddonWe now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including bag and bank items) like Char...N2 CMS: 2.2: * Web platform installer support available ** Nuget support available What's newDinamico Templates (beta) - an MVC3 & Razor based template pack using the template-first! development paradigm Boilerplate CSS & HTML5 Advanced theming with css comipilation (concrete, dark, roadwork, terracotta) Template-first! development style Content, news, listing, slider, image sizes, search, sitemap, globalization, youtube, google map Display Tokens - replaces text tokens with rendered content (usag...KinectNUI: Jun 25 Alpha Release: Initial public version. No installer needed, just run the EXE.Terraria World Viewer: Version 1.5: Update June 24th Made compatible with the new tiles found in Terraria 1.0.5New Projects{Adjunct} functionality for the .NET framework: A project to provide Ingots for the .NET framework.3Webee.net: 3Webee.net is the First Navigator dedicated to Web.3.0 by P2P. Developped in C# for DotNet-3.5 or Mono.net, compatible with Linux ready. Website.fr : http://3webee.net/ Download Win32 : http://3webee.net/Download/3Webee.net.beta.0.0.Win32.exe AB Donor Choose Planner: The goal of this doantion planner is to allow you to coordinate the completion of one or more Donors Choose projects. The tool gives you a portfolio view of the donations you would like to invest in by targeting your investments in a location/regional focused manner.appperu1: asdasdsaddas: ColinTestingasdfFindClone: Find clone files, find duplicate files, remove duplicate filesfirstcpapp: This is my appForecast Parser: The NOAA hosts forecast data accessible over the web. These libraries download and parse seven day hourly forecast data and encapsulates the data in an easy to use class.Future Apple Osx: Future Apple Osx, Is a free operating system to use. It was built from the ground up with the help of Cosmos. It is free to use and download. So please check it out today.Glimpse: Glimpse is a web debugger and diagnostics tool for ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC. You can find out more at getGlimpse.comiAdm: ?? iToday ??? wince 6 R2 ?????ImagineCup Worldwide Finals Tracker: An open-source Windows Phone application that is used to track the events going on at the ImagineCup Worldwide Finals.John Owl: John OwlLAM - Local Area Messaging: A VB.NET local area chat application. Finds the lan clients and communicates through the lan with old Ms-Winsock Interop.MessyBrain: Organize your tasks in an efficient way. Assign tasks to members of your team. Create workflows for your team. Written in C# and ASP.NET MVC. Why did I start this project? Making mistakes is part of the learning process. They can be painful especially when they are made at work; there’s a cost attached to it. Why not start a project on my own? Mistakes will be less painful (only my ego will be damaged), I learn something new and there isn’t a cost attached to it. I can share the code ...Navigation Light Toolkit: Navigation Light add support for View Navigation in WPF and SilverlightRight Click Calculator: a mini calculator with numpad that opens in a dialogbox. it can combined with a textbox. bir textbox üzerinde sag tus ile açabileceginiz ufak bir hesap makinesi örnegi.Shaaps & Ladders: It's a modern software implementation of the popular classic board game Snakes & Ladders. The Bengali translation of "Snakes" pronounces "Shaaps" and thus the name of the game is such. The game is being developed on top of the Shaaps & Ladders GDK. Source for both are released.SharePoint PowerShell Scripts: Usefull PowerShell scripts written for SharePoint that helps organizations with governance.Smith Web Tools: Smith Web Tools are some useful controls to help to build web application. They are written in pure JavaScript and CSS without introducing any other JavaScript framework. At present, the Smith Calendar, Smith Editor, and Smith Dialog are available.SSAS Query Log Decoder & Analyzer: The Crisp description for the project will be "CUBE FOR CUBE". This is an end-to-end BI solution for analyzing the Query log created by SSAS Server. The Query Log data is loaded into a dimensional model and a cube is built on top of it for analysis of cube usage.takcandmansys: takcandmansysTestHG1: TestHG1TESTProjHG: TESTProjHGTestTFS1: TestTFS1TESTTFSAAA: TESTTFSAAATower: tower showTransit Feed Generator: Library for help the integration with Google Transit. This library generates the zipped file with data for Google Transit Feed, in the GTFS formatVRE Collaborator Search Kit for SharePoint 2010: VRE Collaborator Search Kit for SharePoint 2010VRE Content Archiving Kit for SharePoint 2010: VRE Content Archiving Kit for SharePoint 2010VRE Document Review Workflow Kit for SharePoint 2010: VRE Document Review Workflow Kit for SharePoint 2010 VRE Literature Review Kit for SharePoint 2010: VRE Literature Review Kit for SharePoint 2010 VRE Researcher and Project Templates for SharePoint 2010: VRE Researcher and Project Templates for SharePoint 2010 VRE RSS Feeds Kit for SharePoint 2010: VRE RSS Feeds Kit for SharePoint 2010 VRE User Administration (FBA) Kit for SharePoint 2010: VRE User Administration (FBA) Kit for SharePoint 2010 WebPart Collapser: WebPart Collapser is a lightweight, customizable jQuery plugin for SharePoint 2007 that allows visitors to expand/collapse WebParts. Through the use of cookies, the collapsed state of any webparts will be saved and collapsed each time a user visits a page. WPF Hex Editor: hex editor which is created with WPF with a xaml designed UI.Xoorscript: A proprietary scripting language created by Jared Thomson for the purpose of script defining an easy to use make system. The plans for this project are minimal for now, but if things go well I may expand it. This is low priority for me.

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Pet Store Loyalty Programs: I'm Not Loyal Yet!

- by ruth.donohue

After two years of constantly being asked (aka "pestered) by my now eight-year-old daughter for a dog (or any pet that is more interactive than a goldfish), I've finally compromised with a hamster purely by chance. Friends of ours had recently brought home a female hamster, and (surprise, surprise) two weeks later, they were looking for homes for 11 baby hamster pups. Since the pups were not yet ready to be weaned from their mother, my daughter and I had several weeks to get ready -- and we spent that extra time visiting a number of local pet stores and purchasing an assortment of hamster books, toys, exercise equipment, food, bedding, and cage -- not cheap! Now, I'm usually an online shopper (i.e. I love reading user reviews and comparing prices), but for kids, there is absolutely no online substitute for actually walking into a store and physically picking out something you want. We have two competing pet shops within close proximity to where we live, and I signed up for their rewards programs to get discounts on select items. I'm sure it takes a while to get my data into the system (after all, I did fill out a form the old-fashioned way), but as it has been more than two weeks for one store and over a week for the other, the window of opportunity is getting smaller as we by now pretty much have most of what we think we need. Everything I've purchased has been purely hamster or small animal related, so in an ideal world, the stores would have me easily figured out as a hamster owner. Here is what I would be expecting of a loyalty rewards program: Point me to some useful links, either information provied by the company or external websites where I can learn more. Any value-add a business can provide to make my life easier makes me a much more loyal customer. What things can I expect as a new pet owner? Any hamster communities? Any hamster-related events? Any vets that specialize in small animals in the vicinity? Send me an email with other related products I may be interested in. Upsell and cross-sell to me. We've go the basics and a couple of luxuries, but at this point, I'm pretty excited (surprisingly) about the hamster, and my daughter is footing the bill with her birthday and Christmas money. She and I would be more than happy to spend her money! Get this information to me faster. As I mentioned, my window of opportunity is getting smaller, as eithe rmy daughter's money will run out on other things or we'll start losing the thrill of buying new hamster toys and treats. I realize this is easier said than done, and undoubtedly, the stores are getting value knowing my basic customer information and purchase history. Buth, they could really benefit by delivering a loyalty program that really earned my loyalty. "Goldeen" needs a new water bottle, yogurt chips, and chew toys as he doesn't seem to like the ones we bought. So for now, I'll just go to whichever store is the most convenient. Oh, and just for fun (not related to this post), here are a couple of videos my daughter really got a kick out of watching: Hamster on a Piano Tic in a Spin-Dryer

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Collaborate10 – THEconference

- by jean-pierre.dijcks

After spending a few days in Mandalay Bay's THEHotel, I guess I now call everything THE... Seriously, they even tag their toilet paper with THEtp... I guess the brand builders in Vegas thought that once you are on to something you keep on doing it, and granted it is a nice hotel with nice rooms. THEanalytics Most of my collab10 experience was in a room called Reef C, where the BIWA bootcamp was held. Two solid days of BI, Warehousing and Analytics organized by the BIWA SIG at IOUG. Didn't get to see all sessions, but what struck me was the high interest in Analytics. Marty Gubar's OLAP session was full and he did some very nice things with the OLAP option. The cool bit was that he actually gets all the advanced calculations in OLAP to show up in OBI EE without any effort. It was nice to see that the idea from OWB where you generate an RPD is now also in AWM. I think it makes life so much simpler to generate these RPD's from your data model. Even if the end RPD needs some tweaking, it is all a lot less effort to get something going. You can see this stuff for yourself in this demo (click here). OBI EE uses just SQL to get to the calculations, and so, if you prefer APEX, you can build you application there and get the same nice calculations in an APEX application. Marty also showed the Simba MDX driver used with Excel. I guess we should call that THEcoolone... and it is very slick and wonderfully useful for all of you who actually know Excel. The nice thing is that you leverage pure Excel for all operations (no plug-ins). That means no new tools to learn, no new controls, all just pure Excel. THEdatabasemachine Got some very good questions in my "what makes Exadata fast" session and overall, the interest in Exadata is overwhelming. One of the things that I did try to do in my session is to get people to think in new patterns rather than in patterns based on Oracle 9i running on some random hardware configuration. We talked a little bit about the often over-indexing and how everyone has to unlearn all of that on Exadata. The main thing however is that everyone needs to get used to the shear size of some of the components in a Database machine V2. 5TB of flash cache is a lot of very fast data storage, half a TB of memory gets quite interesting as well. So what I did there was really focus on some of the content in these earlier posts on Upward ILM and In-Memory processing. In short, I do believe the these newer media point out a trend. In-memory and other fast media will get cheaper and will see more use. Some of that we do automatically by adding new functionality, but in some cases I think the end user of the system needs to start thinking about how to leverage all this new hardware. I think most people got very excited about these new capabilities and opportunities. THEcoolkids One of the cool things about the BIWA track was the hand-on track. Very cool to see big crowds for both OLAP and OWB hands-on. Also quite nice to see that the folks at RittmanMead spent so much time on preparing for that session. While all of them put down cool stuff, none was more cool that seeing Data Mining on an Apple iPAD... it all just looks great on an iPAD! Very disappointing to see that Mark Rittman still wasn't showing OWB on his iPAD ;-) THEend All in all this was a great set of sessions in the BIWA track. Lots of value to our guests (we hope) and we hope they all come again next year!

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Home Energy Management & Automation with Windows Phone 7

A number of people at Clarity are personally interested in home energy conservation and home automation. We feel that a mobile device is a great fit for bringing this idea to fruition. While this project is merely a concept and not directly associated with Microsofts Hohm web service, it provides a great model for communicating the concept. I wanted to take the idea a step further and combine saving energy in your home with the ability to track water usage and control your home devices. I designed an application that focuses on total home control and not just energy usage. Application Overview By monitoring home consumption in real time and with yearly projections users can pinpoint vampire devices, times of high or low consumption, and wasteful patterns of energy use. Energy usage meters indicate total current consumption as well as individual device consumption. Users can then use the information to take action, make adjustments, and change their consumption behaviors. The app can be used to automate certain systems like lighting, temperature, or alarms. Other features can be turned on an off at the touch of a toggle switch on your phone, away from home. Forget to turn off the TV or shut the garage door? No problem, you can do it from your phone. Through settings you can enable and disable features of the phone that apply to your home making it a completely customized and convenient experience. To be clear, this equates to more security, big environmental impact, and even bigger savings. Design and User Interface Since this panorama application is designed for win phone 7 devices, it complies with the UI Design and Interaction Guide for wp7. I developed the frame and page hierarchy from existing examples. The interface takes advantage of the interactive nature of touch screens with slider controls, pivot control views, and toggle switches to turn on and off devices (not shown in mockup). I followed recommendations for text based elements and adapted the tile notifications to display the most recent user activity. For example, the mockup indicates upon launching the app that the last thing you did was program the thermostat. This model is great for quick launching common user actions. One last design feature to point out is the technical reasons for supplying both light and dark themes for the app. Since this application is targeting energy consumption it only makes sense to consider the effect of the apps background color or image on the phones energy use. When displaying darker colors like black the OLED display may use less power, extending battery life. Other Considerations For now I left out options of wind and solar powered energy options because they are not available to everyone. Renewable energy sources and new technologies associated with them are definitely ideas to keep in mind for a next iteration. Another idea to explore for such an application would be to include a savings model similar to mint.com. In addition to general energy-saving recommendations the application could recommend customized ways to save based on your current utility providers and available options in your area. If your television or refrigerator is guilty of sucking a lot of energy then you may see recommendations for energy star products that could save you even more money! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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The dislikes of TDD

- by andrewstopford

I enjoy debates about TDD and Brian Harrys blog post is no exception. Brian sounds out what he likes and dislikes about TDD and it's the dislikes I'll focus on. The idea of having unit tests that cover virtually every line of code that I’ve written that I have to refactor every time I refactor my code makes me shudder. Doing this way makes me take nearly twice as long as it would otherwise take and I don’t feel like I get sufficient benefits from it. Refactoring your tests to match your refactored code sounds like the tests are suffering. Too many hard dependencies with no SOLID concerns are a sure fire reason you would do this. Maybe at the start of a TDD cycle you would need to do this as your design evolves and you remove these dependencies but this should quickly be resolved as you refactor. If you find your self still doing it then stop and look back at your design. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of unit tests. I just prefer to write them after the code has stopped shaking a bit. In fact most of my early testing is “manual”. Either I write a small UI on top of my service that allows me to plug in values and try it or write some quick API tests that I throw away as soon as I have validated them. The problem with this is that a UI can make assumptions on your code that then just unit test around and very quickly the design becomes bad and you technical debt sweeps in. If you want to blackbox test your code with a UI then do so after your TDD cycles not before. This is probably by biggest issue with a literal TDD interpretation. TDD says you never write a line of code without a failing test to show you need it. I find it leads developers down a dangerous path. Without any help from a methodology, I have met way too many developers in my life that “back into a solution”. By this, I mean they write something, it mostly works and they discover a new requirement so they tack it on, and another and another and when they are done, they’ve got a monstrosity of special cases each designed to handle one specific scenario. There’s way more code than there should be and it’s way too complicated to understand. I believe in finding general solutions to problems from which all the special cases naturally derive rather than building a solution of special cases. In my mind, to do this, you have to start by conceptualizing and coding the framework of the general algorithm. For me, that’s a relatively monolithic exercise. TDD is an development pratice not a methodology, the danger is that the solution becomes a mass of different things that violate DRY. TDD won't solve these problems, only good communication and practices like pairing will help. Above all else an assumption that TDD replaces a methodology is a mistake, combine it with what ever works for your team\business but only good communication will help. A good naming scheme\structure for folders, files and tests can help you and your team isolate what tests are for what.

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SWFObject and IE6 causing hair-pulling agony

- by Piet

I recently used SWFObject to display a flash header on a website. I chose SWFObject because: Instead of displaying an annoying ‘Install flash now’ message, it claims to be able to show alternate content. In this case: the original header image. It claims to be compatible with more or less every browser out there. Implementation went fine, until someone tested it on IE6 and got the following error: Internet explorer cannot open the Internet site http://www….. Operation aborted Which basically means that the site just can’t be visited with IE6 (still used a lot in business environments), it even seems as if there’s something wrong with your internet connection. Now, since about 10% of visitors to this site are still using IE6 (why does everyone still use Internet Explorer ???? Do YOU know that these days most people do NOT use Internet Explorer anymore ?) Now after some googling, I found the suggestion to defer loading of the SWFObject.js as follows: <script type="text/javascript" defer=”defer” src=”http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/swfobject/2.2/swfobject.js” </script> <script type=”text/javascript” defer=”defer” swfobject.registerObject(”myId”, “9″, “”); </script> What this does according to W3C: When set, this boolean attribute provides a hint to the user agent that the script is not going to generate any document content (e.g., no “document.write” in javascript) and thus, the user agent can continue parsing and rendering. I don’t know exactly why, but: HURRAY! It works now!!! Only… IE6 and IE7 (didn’t try IE8) now gave the following error: Line: 19 Char: 1 Error: ’swfobject’ is undefined Code: 0 URL: http://www… But the flash was still running fine. Still, such an error isn’t clean, especially since almost half of the site’s visitors are using one of these Internet Explorer versions. Now, wanting a quick fix I decided to do the following: <script type="text/javascript" defer="defer" if (typeof(swfobject) != "undefined") swfobject.registerObject("myId", "9", ""); </script> I admit this is a bit of a weird ‘fix’. You’d suspect the flash to stop working on IE6/IE7, which it doesn’t. Not planning on diving into it’s inner bowels, I regard this a ‘mission accomplished’ until someone somewhere posts a better solution (for which I setup some Google alerts). Do you have a better solution? What would be the impact on the webdev economy (or your life) if all browsers were compatible? Addendum Because the above turned out not to work with the new Firefox 3.5.3 (strangely, was OK with 3.5.2 when I tested it) I decided to cut the crap and use the ‘Dynamic Publishing’ way. Ok, so it won’t work for people who have javascript disabled, but who on earth would have flash installed AND javascript disabled? To avoid the IE6 error with the ‘Dynamic Publishing’ way, I call swfobject.embedSWF right after the div that will be replaced with the flash content. Calling swfobject.embedSWF in the <head> would otherwise give me the above error in IE6 again.

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Drupal Modules for SEO & Content

- by Aditi

When we talk about Drupal SEO, there are two things to consider one is about the relevant SEO practices and about appropriate Drupal Modules available. Optimizing your website for search engines is one of the most important aspect of launching & promoting your website especially if ranking matters to you. Understanding SEO For starters, you have begin with Keyword research and then optimize your content according to your findings by tagging, meta tags etc, Drupal modules once installed help you manage a lot of such parameters. Identifying the target keywords Using the Page Title and Token modules PathAuto configuration <H1> heading tags Optimizing Drupal’s default robots.txt file Etc. While Drupal gives you a lot of ability to make your website content worthy & search engine friendly it is important for you to make sure you are not crossing the line or you could get penalized. Modules Overview Drupal Power is at its best when you have these modules & great brain working together. The basic SEO improvements can be achieved easily with the modules enlisted below, but you can win magical rankings if you use them logically & wisely. Understanding your keyword competition & enhancing your content is the basic key to success and ofcourse the modules: Pathauto Automatically create search enging friendly readable URLS from tokens. A token is a piece of data from content, say the author’s username, or the content’s title. For example mysite.com/an-article, rather than mysite.com/node/114 for every node you make. NodeWords Amazingly useful drupal module that allows you to create custom meta tags and descriptions for your nodes, which gives you the ability to target specific keywords and phrases. Page Title Enables you to set an alternative title for the <title></title> tags and for the <h1></h1> tags on a node. Global Redirect Manage content duplication, 301 redirects, and URL validation with this small, but powerful module. Taxonomy manager Make large additions, or changes to taxonomy very easy. This module provides a powerful interface for managing taxonomies. A vocabulary gets displayed in a dynamic tree view, where parent terms can be expanded to list their nested child terms or can be collapsed. robotstxt A robots.txt file is vital for ensuring that search engine spiders don’t index the unwanted areas of your site. This Drupal module gives you the ability to manage your robots.txt file through the CMS admin. xmlsitemap An XML Sitemap lets the search engines index your website content. This module helps in generating and maintaining a complete sitemap for your website and gives you control over exactly which parts of the site you want to be included in the index. It even gives you the ability to automatically submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com and Windows Live every time you update a node or at specific interval. Node Import This module allows you to import a set of nodes from a Comma Seperated Values (CSV) or Tab Seperated Values (TSV) text file. Makes it easy to import hundreds-thousands of csv rows and you get to tie up these rows to CCK fields (or locations), and it can file it under the right taxonomy hierarchy. This is Super life saver module.

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SQL SERVER – Vacation, Travel and Study – A New Concept

- by pinaldave

Quite often when developers go to training sessions they either find it very boring because of study or great because they treat it as a vacation. There should be a perfect balance between study and extra activities. Studying is Boring Studying is very hard. Nobody likes to study, very few people are going to list “studying” as one of their favorite hobbies. Already my young daughter knows she doesn’t want to study, and I don’t want to either. If you read my blog regularly you know that I am always saying that we need to be students for life. However, all philosophy aside, if you are put in a room with an instructor to study for eight hours a day, you are going to feel bored, uncomfortable, and unhappy. I was a trainer myself, and I understand that all-day study sessions are no fun – even for the trainer. I always tried to be entertaining, but even eight hours of jokes and laughter is tiresome. Eight hours at a comedy club would be boring after a little while – and if we can’t even enjoy fun stuff for eight hours straight, how can we expect to study for eight hours straight? Studying for Career or Certification Even those who have advanced degrees and went to college for years, or even decades, find studying hard. There is a difference between studying for a career and studying for a certification. At least to get a degree there is a variety of subjects, with labs, exams, and practice problems to make things more interesting. You can also choose your major and what you want to spend your time studying. For certification you do not have this luxury. You have to learn and memorize specific parts, and there is no option to change your major if you don’t like it. Your option is to gain your certification, or fail. Many people will find that last option unacceptable. Studying at Vacation We have established: eight hours of uninterrupted study is boring. That is why I am so excited about what my very good friend is doing with Koenig Solutions. His whole goal was to make classes that are intensive but not in a traditional format. He adds in aspects of the vacation. It is true that you will study and sit with instructors for six or eight hours a day, but in the mornings and evenings you can go out and see the sights in exotic locations. He has chosen the locations for his training courses for their proximity to tourist attractions like the Himalayas, the Taj Mahal, and Goa, India’s most popular resort town. Every location has access to great experiences like river rafting, safari tours, or meditation. There are five locations to choose from: Dehli, Dehradun, Shimla (close to the Himalayas), Goa Beach, and Dubai. After a day of classes and hours of sight-seeing, you will be more than ready to return to campus tired and ready to study. This is the kind of study I can do! My friend’s point is that studying and fun can still go hand-in-hand. How many times have we heard a professor say this? But this time it is true. There is great fun in learning in exotic locations. If you want to travel in India and are interested in also taking the opportunity to learn something, let Koenig Solutions know. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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Type Casting variables in PHP: Is there a practical example?

- by Stephen

PHP, as most of us know, has weak typing. For those who don't, PHP.net says: PHP does not require (or support) explicit type definition in variable declaration; a variable's type is determined by the context in which the variable is used. Love it or hate it, PHP re-casts variables on-the-fly. So, the following code is valid: $var = "10"; $value = 10 + $var; var_dump($value); // int(20) PHP also alows you to explicitly cast a variable, like so: $var = "10"; $value = 10 + $var; $value = (string)$value; var_dump($value); // string(2) "20" That's all cool... but, for the life of me, I cannot conceive of a practical reason for doing this. I don't have a problem with strong typing in languages that support it, like Java. That's fine, and I completely understand it. Also, I'm aware of—and fully understand the usefulness of—type hinting in function parameters. The problem I have with type casting is explained by the above quote. If PHP can swap types at-will, it can do so even after you force cast a type; and it can do so on-the-fly when you need a certain type in an operation. That makes the following valid: $var = "10"; $value = (int)$var; $value = $value . ' TaDa!'; var_dump($value); // string(8) "10 TaDa!" So what's the point? Can anyone show me a practical application or example of type casting—one that would fail if type casting were not involved? I ask this here instead of SO because I figure practicality is too subjective. Edit in response to Chris' comment Take this theoretical example of a world where user-defined type casting makes sense in PHP: You force cast variable $foo as int -- (int)$foo. You attempt to store a string value in the variable $foo. PHP throws an exception!! <--- That would make sense. Suddenly the reason for user defined type casting exists! The fact that PHP will switch things around as needed makes the point of user defined type casting vague. For example, the following two code samples are equivalent: // example 1 $foo = 0; $foo = (string)$foo; $foo = '# of Reasons for the programmer to type cast $foo as a string: ' . $foo; // example 2 $foo = 0; $foo = (int)$foo; $foo = '# of Reasons for the programmer to type cast $foo as a string: ' . $foo; UPDATE Guess who found himself using typecasting in a practical environment? Yours Truly. The requirement was to display money values on a website for a restaurant menu. The design of the site required that trailing zeros be trimmed, so that the display looked something like the following: Menu Item 1 .............. $ 4 Menu Item 2 .............. $ 7.5 Menu Item 3 .............. $ 3 The best way I found to do that wast to cast the variable as a float: $price = '7.50'; // a string from the database layer. echo 'Menu Item 2 .............. $ ' . (float)$price; PHP trims the float's trailing zeros, and then recasts the float as a string for concatenation.

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Great Customer Service Example

- by MightyZot

A few days ago I wrote about what I consider a poor customer service interaction with TiVo, a company that I have been faithful to for the past 12 years or so. In that post I talked about how they helped me, but I felt like I was doing something wrong at the end of the call – when in reality I was just following through with an offer that TiVo made possible through my cable company. Today I had a wonderful customer service interaction with American Express, another company that I have been loyal to for many years.(I am a Gold Card member.) I like my Amex card because I can use it for big purchases and it forces me to pay them off at the end of the month. Well, the reality is that I’m not always so good at doing that, so sometimes my payments are over a couple of months. :) A few days ago I received an email from “American Express” fraud detection. The email stated that I should call a toll free number and have the last four digits of my card handy. I grew up during the BBS era with some creative and somewhat mischievous friends. I’ve learned to be extremely cautious with regard to my online life! So, I did what you would expect…I sent them a nice reply that said “Go screw yourself.” For the past couple of days someone has been trying to call me and I assumed it was the same prankster trying to get the last four digits of my card. The last caller left a message indicating that they were from American Express and they wanted to talk to me about my card. After looking up their customer service numbers on the www.americanexpress.com web site, I called and was put through to the fraud detection group. The rep explained that there were some charges on my wife’s card that did not fit our purchase profile. She went through each charge and, for the most part, they looked like charges my wife may have made. My wife had asked to use the card for some Christmas shopping during the same timeframe as the charges. The American Express rep very politely explained that these looked out of character to her. She continued through the charges. She listed a charge for $160 – at this point my adrenaline started kicking in. My wife said she was going to charge about $25 or $30 dollars, not $160. Next, the rep listed a charge for over $1200. Uh oh!! Now I know that my account has been compromised. I informed the rep that we definitely did not make those charges. She replied with, “that’s ok Mr Pope, we declined those charges as well as some others.” We went through the pending charges and there were a couple more that were questionable. The rep very patiently waited while I called my wife on my office phone to verify the charges. Sure enough, my wife had not ordered anything from Netflix or purchased anything with Yahoo Wallet! “No problem Mr Pope, we will remove those charges as well.” “We are going to cancel your wife’s card and send her a new one. She will receive it by 7pm tomorrow via Federal Express. Please watch your statements over the next couple of months. If you notice anything fishy, give us a call and we will take care of it for you.” (Wow, I’m thinking to myself!) “Is there anything else I can help you with Mr Pope?” “Nope, thank you very much for catching this so early and declining those charges!”, I said smiling. Apparently she could hear me smiling on the other end of the phone line because she replied with “keep smiling Mr Pope and have a good rest of your week.” Now THAT’s customer service! Thank you American Express!!! I shall remain an ever faithful customer. Interesting…

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C# 4.0: COM Interop Improvements

- by Paulo Morgado

Dynamic resolution as well as named and optional arguments greatly improve the experience of interoperating with COM APIs such as Office Automation Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs). But, in order to alleviate even more COM Interop development, a few COM-specific features were also added to C# 4.0. Ommiting ref Because of a different programming model, many COM APIs contain a lot of reference parameters. These parameters are typically not meant to mutate a passed-in argument, but are simply another way of passing value parameters. Specifically for COM methods, the compiler allows to declare the method call passing the arguments by value and will automatically generate the necessary temporary variables to hold the values in order to pass them by reference and will discard their values after the call returns. From the point of view of the programmer, the arguments are being passed by value. This method call: object fileName = "Test.docx"; object missing = Missing.Value; document.SaveAs(ref fileName, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing, ref missing); can now be written like this: document.SaveAs("Test.docx", Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value); And because all parameters that are receiving the Missing.Value value have that value as its default value, the declaration of the method call can even be reduced to this: document.SaveAs("Test.docx"); Dynamic Import Many COM methods accept and return variant types, which are represented in the PIAs as object. In the vast majority of cases, a programmer calling these methods already knows the static type of a returned object form the context of the call, but has to explicitly perform a cast on the returned values to make use of that knowledge. These casts are so common that they constitute a major nuisance. To make the developer’s life easier, it is now possible to import the COM APIs in such a way that variants are instead represented using the type dynamic which means that COM signatures have now occurrences of dynamic instead of object. This means that members of a returned object can now be easily accessed or assigned into a strongly typed variable without having to cast. Instead of this code: ((Excel.Range)(excel.Cells[1, 1])).Value2 = "Hello World!"; this code can now be used: excel.Cells[1, 1] = "Hello World!"; And instead of this: Excel.Range range = (Excel.Range)(excel.Cells[1, 1]); this can be used: Excel.Range range = excel.Cells[1, 1]; Indexed And Default Properties A few COM interface features are still not available in C#. On the top of the list are indexed properties and default properties. As mentioned above, these will be possible if the COM interface is accessed dynamically, but will not be recognized by statically typed C# code. No PIAs – Type Equivalence And Type Embedding For assemblies indentified with PrimaryInteropAssemblyAttribute, the compiler will create equivalent types (interfaces, structs, enumerations and delegates) and embed them in the generated assembly. To reduce the final size of the generated assembly, only the used types and their used members will be generated and embedded. Although this makes development and deployment of applications using the COM components easier because there’s no need to deploy the PIAs, COM component developers are still required to build the PIAs.

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Boost Netbook Speed with an SD Card & ReadyBoost

- by Matthew Guay

Looking for a way to increase the performance of your netbook? Here’s how you can use a standard SD memory card or a USB flash drive to boost performance with ReadyBoost. Most netbooks ship with 1Gb of Ram, and many older netbooks shipped with even less. Even if you want to add more ram, often they can only be upgraded to a max of 2GB. With ReadyBoost in Windows 7, it’s easy to boost your system’s performance with flash memory. If your netbook has an SD card slot, you can insert a memory card into it and just leave it there to always boost your netbook’s memory; otherwise, you can use a standard USB flash drive the same way. Also, you can use ReadyBoost on any desktop or laptop; ones with limited memory will see the most performance increase from using it. Please Note: ReadyBoost requires at least 256Mb of free space on your flash drive, and also requires minimum read/write speeds. Most modern memory cards or flash drives meet these requirements, but be aware that an old card may not work with it. Using ReadyBoost Insert an SD card into your card reader, or connect a USB flash drive to a USB port on your computer. Windows will automatically see if your flash memory is ReadyBoost capable, and if so, you can directly choose to speed up your computer with ReadyBoost. The ReadyBoost settings dialog will open when you select this. Choose “Use this device” and choose how much space you want ReadyBoost to use. Click Ok, and Windows will setup ReadyBoost and start using it to speed up your computer. It will automatically use ReadyBoost whenever the card is connected to the computer. When you view your SD card or flash drive in Explorer, you will notice a ReadyBoost file the size you chose before. This will be deleted when you eject your card or flash drive. If you need to remove your drive to use elsewhere, simply eject as normal. Windows will inform you that the drive is currently being used. Make sure you have closed any programs or files you had open from the drive, and then press Continue to stop ReadyBoost and eject your drive. If you remove the drive without ejecting it, the ReadyBoost file may still remain on the drive. You can delete this to save space on the drive, and the cache will be recreated when you use ReadyBoost next time. Conclusion Although ReadyBoost may not make your netbook feel like a Core i7 laptop with 6GB of RAM, it will still help performance and make multitasking even easier. Also, if you have, say, a memory stick and a flash drive, you can use both of them with ReadyBoost for the maximum benefit. We have even noticed better battery life when multitasking with ReadyBoost, as it lets you use your hard drive less. SD cards and thumb drives are relatively cheap today, and many of us have several already, so this is a great way to improve netbook performance cheaply. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Speed up Your Windows Vista Computer with ReadyBoostSet the Speed Dial as the Opera Startup PageAsk the Readers: What are Your Computer’s Hardware Specs?Understanding Windows Vista Aero Glass RequirementsReplace Google Chrome’s New Tab Page with Speed Dial TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Recycle ! Find That Elusive Icon with FindIcons Looking for Good Windows Media Player 12 Plug-ins? Find Out the Celebrity You Resemble With FaceDouble Whoa ! Use Printflush to Solve Printing Problems

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View Mobile Websites in Windows with Safari 4 Developer Tools

- by Matthew Guay

Want to try out mobile websites designed for the iPhone and other mobile devices on your PC? Safari 4 for Windows lets you do this easily with their developer tools. By default, Safari will show standard desktop websites. But by making a simple change, you can switch it to work like Safari Mobile on the iPhone or iPod Touch. Getting Started First make sure you have Safari 4 for Windows installed. You can download Safari directly (link below) and install it as usual. Or if you already have another Apple program installed, such as QuickTime or iTunes, then you can install it from Apple Software update. Simply enter apple software update in the Start menu search box. And then select Safari 4 from the list of new software available. Click Install to automatically download and install Safari. Accept the license Agreement, and then Safari will automatically install. Once this is finished, Safari will be ready to use. View Mobile Sites in Safari First, we need to enable the developer tools. Click the gear icon on the toolbar, and select Preferences. Click the Advanced tab, and then check the box that says “Show Develop menu in menu bar”. Once you’ve closed your settings box, click the page icon, select Develop, then User Agent, and then choose one of the Mobile Safari settings. In our test we chose Mobile Safari 3.1.2 – iPhone. To make your browser emulate a mobile device better, you can hide the bookmarks and tab bar to have a more streamlined interface. Click the Gear icon, and select “Hide Bookmarks Bar”, and then repeat and click “Hide Tab Bar”. You can also shrink your window to be closer to the size of a mobile device screen. Once you’ve done these things, Safari should look similar to this screenshot. Here we have loaded Google.com, and you can see it in its iPhone-style interface. Simply enter any website into the address bar, and it will load in its mobile interface if it has one. Here is Google’s other mobile offerings, right inside Windows. Gmail loads messages with the default iPhone interface. One especially interesting mobile site is Apple’s online iPhone User Guide. When loaded in Safari with the iPhone setting, it loads with a very nice mobile UI that works just like an iPhone app. In fact, you can even click and drag to scroll, just like you would with your finger on an iPhone. Conclusion Even if you do not have a Smartphone, you can still preview what websites will look like on them with this trick. Not all sites will work of course, but it’s fun to play around with different sites that have mobile versions. Links: Safari 4 Download Apple iPhone online user guide Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Make Safari Stop Crashing Every 20 Seconds on Windows VistaCustomize Safari for Windows ToolbarSave Screen Space by Hiding the Bookmarks Toolbar in Safari for WindowsEdit Text in a Webpage with Internet Explorer 8Keep Websites From Using Tiny Fonts in Safari TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Windows Media Player 12: Tweak Video & Sound with Playback Enhancements Own a cell phone, or does a cell phone own you? Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier Design Your Web Pages Using the Golden Ratio Worldwide Growth of the Internet

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