Misc
I was tagged by Denis Gobo in the latest blog meme: What was your first computer and games you’ve played?
Well mine was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
I got it when i was 9 years old and I only used it to play games. No programming for this kid just yet. That came a lot later.
This baby had a tape drive whose sound I really enjoyed imitating to annoy my mom :)
So what were some of the games? These are the four I remember:
Grand Prix Circuit
This was my first intro into the world of F1. I can still remember the...
For all enthusiasts out there this is how software development cycle works no matter what the project is:
Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.
Product is tested. 20 bugs are found.
Programmer fixes 10 of the bugs and explains to the testing department that the other 10 aren't really bugs.
Testing department finds that five of the fixes didn't work and discovers 15 new bugs.
Repeat three times steps 3 and 4.
Due to marketing pressure...
I can't stress this enough:
Never ever call me on my work phone as a form of the first contact!
Unless I know you and have given you permission to call me, don't. Send me an email instead.
I don't have anything against recruiters, I think their jobs are very important in the greater scheme of things.
I also never give my work phone number away, and if I have to I give my mobile phone number to people.
So it's beyond me how do recruiters think it's actually OK to call me at work. It shows disrespect to me and to the company...
Just as the title says :)
You can read the article here.
Thanx to Kevin Kline for publishing it!
We all heard about the Chuck Norris Facts, right?
Well if you're a fan of security you have to be familiar with Bruce Schneier and his excellent blog.
What I didn't know is that he also has a collection of facts!
Just how cool is that???
Here are some I found funny:
- For Bruce Schneier, SHA-1 is merely a compression algorithm.
- Bruce Schneier once compressed a single bit of information to half its size.
- Bruce Schneier doesn't need backups because his hard drive knows that failure is not an option.
- Bruce Schneier shaves with Occam's razor.
- Bruce Schneier knows the last digit of...
This is a very "serious" talk presented by legendary Israeli investor and community-builder Yossi Vardi. It talks about the dangers of blogging especially for males. Direct video link here. Worth the watch!
We're having a contest over at SqlTeam.com. Go take a look it might be worth your while.
All you have to do is have a post in the forums.
The more posts you have the better the chance you have of winning.
What can you win?
Well the title says it all. See what that is on the ApexSQL Developer studio page. It's a whole lot of goodies!
Read contest details here.
Yes, me too. :)
I was tagged with this by Denis who has liven (is that even a word?) up to his nick "The SQL Meance". Bad Dennins, bad!
As lame as this thing might be and it does reminds us of the dreaded chain letters (anyone remeber getting those by normal mail. you know the one where people acctually deliver it... by vans even...can you believe it???), it's quite a nice excercise when you think about it. It kind of clears your path career wise.
So I have to find a few things, huh? Here goes:
1. Spending more time looking at art works.
Why? Because paintings, besides...
So as of today i'm a proud member of the MCP club :)
The exam wasn't that hard. I had 35 "Pick a correct answer" questions and 15 simulations.
The simulations threw me off a bit because i didn't expect them.
So you have to be comfortable with T-SQL syntax and Management Studio alike.
Knowing what all of the little buttons and options do helps :)
The tools i used for learning are SQL Server Books Online and
EXAM CRAM: MCTS 70-431: Implementing and Maintaining Microsoft® SQL Server 2005
I've read some more books but they were really not needed to pass this exam.
I'll post my reviews...
We had an interesting discussion here about Katmai (the next SQL Server version)
Of course it was discussed in the latest MVP summit, but noone can say anything because it's all under NDA.
So i'm wondering why.... WHY is it under NDA? Is there some very special reason for that?
Nigel responded to my question with this:
I think it's more to do with managing expectations.
A lot of things talked about are under development and may be dropped from the product if they look like they might impact the release date.
They want an opinion on the usability of proposed functionality from a closed community before a...
I use Yahoo's mail service since 1996. But today i doscovered a new thing that made me laugh for half an hour.
You have to use their ajax-ifed beta version. Click Compose and start clicking on the subject button.
It auto generates the subject line.
Here are some examples:
- LipSmack heartAttack girlie girl in a pink sleep sack
- How to Comb Your Curly Hair
- Is your coffee table decaff?
- Your earrings would make a great fishing lure!
- Quote me as saying I was misquoted.
- RE: four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie
- Thank god and Greyhound she's gone
- Scratch golfer finds ball...
A derivative is walking down the street and sees a hot function.
So he grabs her, takes her into the bushes and differentiates her once.
Little later he sees another function and differentiates her twice.
He goes on an sees this super hot function. really sexy.
So he grabs her and differentiates her once and nothing, differentiates her second time, still nothing.
After 10 unsuccessfull differentiations he gets tired and asks the function:
"How come i can't differentiate you???!???"
And the function answers:
"HA!! That because i'm ex !!!"
and beats the crap out the derivative.
This document is a must read for any serious network admin and i do dare to say also for a DBA.
.Net developers are welcome to read it since it is usefull.
A few excerpts:
(1) It Has To Work.
(3) With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it
could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead.
(4) Some things in life can never be fully appreciated nor understood unless experienced firsthand. Some things in networking can never be fully...
A coworker found this in code generated by Visual Studio 2005:
this.sqlSelectCommand2.CommandText = "SELECT columnName1, columnName2, columnName3, columnN" + "ame4, columnName5, columnName6 FROM MyViewFromMa" + "nyTables"
Searching for...
I've come accross a video recently that was tagged with VeoTAG.
I must say that IT IS AWSOME!
I can already see the uses in presentation videos.
No more searching for that 47th minute minute where there's something that you like...
or was that 34th minute?
maybe 58th minute?
74th?
ARGGGHHH....!!!!
Just click on a comment and you're there.
This is a very cool idea.
Since this blog is hosted i don't have access to it's source code. That means that i can't play with the source, can't add counters,
can't have anykind of statistics etc... All i can do is post a formatted post or article and have galleries.
Subtext colleccts statistics by showing you numbers for aggregated views and web views and it also has a refferals page that you can see who clicked you.
And I really wanted to have some statistics. I've looked into Google analytics when it came out and I still think it's awsome.
So i wondered how to put it in my blog....
I usually don't do these kind of posts but for this i'll make an exception :)
This is such an awsome tool for me for one reason only: SQL Formatting
It takes you query and formats it with the template that you can also change yourself.
you can download it here.
support forum is here.
It will also come in a bundle with SQL Prompt 3.0.
If all that that was a woman i'd make sweet love to it. that's how much addiction this caused me. :))
SIMPLY AWSOME!
I came across this "little" tool today via Mike Gunderloy's The Daily Grind.
Tried it out. LOVE IT.
My JavaScript development from now one is only in Aptana IDE.
And the coolest first observation you see is an IE and/or Firefox icon near the Javascript function you want to use that tells you if it's compatible with the browser and DOM 1 and/or DOM 2.
Homepage here.
I've come across Tod Hiliton's blog via Jason Haley's Interesting finds and there i found this great little add-in for VS2005.
The add-in was created by J.T.Leigh, i've installed it and I must say it works beutifully. I'm already using it.
It's a must have for blog posts containing code.
More info and CSAH download here.
I came accross this site and i must admit i've become an instant fan :))
It's Roller has the most amazing collection of sql blogs i've found so far.
It's created by Peter DeBetta and Adam Machanic as far as i can tell.
More good stuff at SqlBlog.com
This is a good explanation on how to acctually bill a customer for your service over a credit card in your web application.
More here.
As i saw this word being used with blittable and non-blittable datatype
i couldn't help but laugh... who comes up with this stuff??
Blittable types are datatypes that don't require conversion when passed between managed and unmanaged code while
non-blittable datatypes are represented differently in managed and unmanaged code.
Complete explanation here
you paste the code you want to display on the page and it creates the color coded html. preety cool...
http://www.manoli.net/csharpformat/
there's even a source of the app that does the convert that you can view.
If you do a lot of managed/unmanaged code interaction with COM objects
then this is a page you must bookmark.
http://www.pinvoke.net/
Well we decided we should do some unit testing on our asp.net project. We used NUnit.Asp. i must say the thing works realy great. the whole thing is based on xml document model of the page. so accesing tags and their attribs is preety simple. the only "drawback" i could think of is that every tag you want to get has to have an id. all in all i must say the thing is quite usefull. i build some wrapper classes that we needed and we could test anything you can think of, except javascripts that executed on the client...
well at one point in time we all went through the unwelcomed experience of removing spyware from our computers...
usually i use SpyBot or Spy Sweeper. But i got a nasty bug neither of them would remove. The pesky bug is called SearchAssistant and it's a toolbar that gets stuck in IE. So i serached the net and found that there is one little program that can get get rid of it. It's called HijackThis.exe. It's a bit hard to use it as when its ran it gives back some sort of listwith stuff you can delete. The only problem is there are...
hello all.
my very first blog post. UAU!! i'm so proud of my self :) well thanx to graz for setting it up.
i'm going to post something constructive in few days... i hope... :)
everybody have FUN!!!