Mack the # Implement

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

How to generate a connection string

The other day I found myself trying to write my own connection string to a System DSN I had just set up. That was stupid and silly and I know that now. Seriously, who remembers the syntax for creating a connection string? No one. Why? Because we don't need to create these things every day. And also, it is stupid and silly.

So I donned the ceremonial robe and beseeched the great google for help. Of course, I was presented with a mountain of information on connection strings. But then it pulled out a large chest that looked like something right out of a pirate movie. I think this was because it happened to be International Talk Like a Pirate Day. The great google loves this stuff.

It spoke these words to me, "Avast! These examples be good, but ye have the noggin of a bilge rat. Perhaps ye be in need of some voodoo, ...some Windows voodoo." And it pulled a scroll from the chest and handed it to me with a twisted ferret look in its eyes.

Hmmm... voodoo, eh? Sounds iffy. But then again, not all windows voodoo is bad. There have been books dedicated to the subject. And I think we have all been in situations where we would gladly rub our computer monitors down with a fried drumstick from KFC while chanting the names of the 12 dwarves in reverse alphabetical order, if it would just keep IE from spewing random "Operation aborted" errors at our users. But that is another blog post. I wasn't that desperate, yet. I opened up the scroll, read the instructions and said to the great google, "This may be the grog talking, but I like sheh way you sthink." What follows are simple steps to get windows to generate a connection string that even a bilge rat could perform after a couple mugs of grog.

Create a new file, the name doesn't matter, and give it a .udl extension.
Double click on your new file. This will bring up the Data Link Properties dialog
Select the "Use connection string" option and then click the "Build..." button.
Your connection string will show up in the connection string text field. You can also access it by opening up your udl file in a text editor.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Mouseless Firefox

1I just got back from vacation and I guess I left my mind on the beach, because I forgot to pick up my mouse on the way out the door. No biggy, I still have my laptop's touch pad and I don't really use the mouse much anyway. I was even able to pick up a new short cut key, just because I had to.

In Query Analyzer:
Shift+F6 - Switch between panes.

I think this is a good time to talk about some "mouseless" features and extensions that I have found very useful in Firefox. Here are some of my least known/most favorite shortcut keys for Firefox:

F6/Shift+F6 - Cycle through the frames on a page.
F7 - Enable/Disable caret browsing. The caret browsing is great for selecting and copying text.

One of my favorite Firefox add-ons is Mouseless Browsing. It takes some getting used to, but now I don't know what I would do without it. This extension enables browsing in Firefox using only the numpad keys. The extension puts a number next to each control or link on the page. All you have to do is type in the number and hit enter to browse to that link or control. You can even hold down the alt key while entering the number to open the link in a new tab. The numbers do mess with the formatting on the page, but it is really easy to turn them on or off. Just use the period key on the numpad.

Friday, September 08, 2006

Portable Apps are cool!

I'll be going on vacation next week to the beach and then to visit some family. That means I'll probably spend some time on their computer. Now, I like my little utilities that I use from day to day, and I would like to use them but I don't want to take the time to install them. I remembered that Hansleman was looking for a portable browser and it got me searching for other portable applications.

What is a portable application? Here is the definition from the PortableApps web site:

A portable app is a computer program that you can carry around with you on a portable device and use on any Windows computer. When your USB flash drive, portable hard drive, iPod or other portable device is plugged in, you have access to your software and personal data just as you would on your own PC. And when you unplug, none of your personal data is left behind.

So, what kinds of portable applications are out there? About everything you could want and then some.

Luckily for me I had just picked up a shiny new Verbatim 512MB USB Flash Drive. It was just over ten bucks at Office Max. Its light and feels a lot sturdier than my last one. Here is a list of some of the apps that I have installed on my USB drive.

SysInternals:
Go to SysInternals while you still can and at the very least get:
Process Explorer
FileMon
RegMon
Autoruns
TCPView

Internet Stuff:
Browsar - Private browsing in IE.
TorPark - Ultra private browsing in FireFox.
Gaim Portable - IM Client.

File Stuff:
7-Zip Portable - Have you ever been stuck without a way to open up a zip file?
ClamWin Portable - Portable virus scanner.
FileZilla - FTP utility.
Foxit Reader - Smaller and faster than Acrobat reader for pdfs.

Just for fun:
Sudoku Portable

Unclassified but cool:
PStart - PStart can be configured to start up when you plug in your USB drive. I creates an icon in your systray that acts like a start menu for your drive. Giving you quick access to the applications in a menu.

All these utilities only added up to 77MB. I wonder what it would take to get everything that we need to do our jobs as developers onto a 1GB USB drive. We wouldn't have to worry about dragging around laptops as long as we had a clean XP install to plug our drive's into. You wouldn't even require an internet connection for some of the apps.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Decode ViewState with PowerShell

We have been screwing around with ViewState lately, trying to resolve some issues and shrink down the size. In the process, we've downloaded several utilities to decode the viewstate. However, even these were failing to decode if the Viewstate was over a certain size or if it had non-native datatypes. Since we didn't have access to the source code, we couldn't fix the problems with the utilities. So yesterday, at approximately 3:57 pm, I thought to myself, "Gee, how hard could it be to write my own decoder?" But who wants to create a new VS project for a dinky little utility that you may never use again. Time for a PowerShell Script. It's one file with no compiling necessary.

This script reads the contents of a text file containing the viewstate in question. Then it decodes it, replaces the non-printable characters with pipe symbols and writes the results to another text file. You could easily rewrite this to pass in the viewstate string as a parameter to the script, if you wanted to. You're the kind of person who isn't afraid to paste a +50kb string into your command line of choice. Get down with your bad self!

A note on the non-printable characters: As of .NET 2.0, the viewstate is now delimited with non-printable characters. To learn more read Fritz Onion's blog on the subject.

Now, onto the script:


# Get the file from the arguments and read it into the x
$x = Get-Content $Args[0]

# Parse the string into a byte array
$byteArray = [System.Convert]::FromBase64String($x)

# Create a new encoding object
$enc = New-Object System.Text.ASCIIEncoding

# We need a charArray with the same length as the byteArray.  I am having a
# hard time finding out how to create an strongly typed empty array of a given
# length in powershell.  If you know how, please let me know.  For now I just
# make charArray a copy of byteArray that will be overwritten later.
[System.Char[]]$charArray = $byteArray

# Do the decoding.
$enc.GetDecoder().GetChars($byteArray, 0, $byteArray.Length, $charArray, 0)

# Build the result string.
$charArray | ForEach-Object { $result += $_ }

# This is a neat regex to replace all the non-printing characters with something else.
# Then the result is written out to ViewStateDecoded.txt.
$result -replace "[\x01-\x1F]+", "|" | Out-File ViewStateDecoded.txt

I could probably get this down to 5 lines of code or less, but it more readable this way.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Set Window Title in PowerShell

It's been a month since my last post, and I'm sure that you were thinking I was dead. Not quite, just really busy. Here's a little time saving tip that I implemented last week in PowerShell. I was working on several issues and had multiple PowerShell windows open. Its kind of hard to find the instance of PowerShell that you are looking for while alt+tabbing through TaskSwitchXP. TaskSwitch even has a preview window, which helps as long as your window isn't minimized. The problem was that I had 3-4 PowerShell windows all titled "Windows PowerShell".

Wouldn't it be great if I could change the window title to something more meaningful? No sweat, PowerShell gives you access to the window through the $Host variable. The command looks like this "$Host.UI.RawUI.WindowTitle = 'My New Title'". Of course, I'll never be able to remember this and it does seem like a lot of typing. So I added the following function and alias statement to my profile.


function Set-WindowTitle($title)
{
   $Host.UI.RawUI.WindowTitle = $title
}

set-alias swt Set-WindowTitle

Notice that I tried to mimic the verb-noun convention used by the rest of the PowerShell commands. Now, to set the title I can type in "swt 'My New Title'".

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

RDoc Documentation for Watir

In my dealings with Watir, I have been overlooking a very useful reference tool. The kind Watir developers have conveniently compiled class documentation with RDoc. RDoc is the Ruby version of NDoc (R.I.P.) This is great for when you want to see what the IE object really does. You can access this documentation here.

Your Install Dir\Watir\doc\rdoc\index.htm

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Edit IE Address Bar with PowerShell

Lately, I've been doing a lot of testing of our web app. And for the last month or so, its all been on the same page. Being a shortcut key addict, I would type the url to the page in IE's address bar and then use F4 and the arrow keys to call it. As long as I kept going to that page, the url would always be at the top of the list. However, if I started going to other sites, the address bar's list would get long and my test url would get lost somewhere inside. It's a real pain the rump to go searching for it.

So I put together this little PowerShell script. It clears the address list and puts in the test urls that I want.

#1
$regpath = "HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TypedURLs"
$xmlpath = "C:\Allen\PSScripts\AddressBarLinkList.xml"
cd $regpath
#2
(Get-Item . ).GetValueNames() |
Where-Object {$_ -match "^url\d+"} |
ForEach-Object { Remove-ItemProperty . $_ }

#3
$xml = New-Object xml
$xml.Load($xmlpath)

#4
$xml.urls.url |
ForEach-object {
  New-ItemProperty -Path $path -Name $_.name -type string -value $_.link
}
cd c:

Let's look at each step and see what's going on. In step #1, I create 2 variables, $regpath and $xmlpath, and load them with some paths. Note that the regpath uses the registry key HKCU as a drive. In PowerShell the registry keys are treated equivalent to folders in the File System and registry values are treated equivalent to files in the File System. All you have to do is change directory to HK whatever and your in.

In step #2, we see a string of commands piped into each other. First we get the names of all the values in the key. Next we use Where-Object to pull only those values that match a regular expression. Then I delete all the values in the result set.

Step #3 starts with the creation of a new variable, $xml, of type xml (of the .NET xml's). Pretty much, what I'm doing here is creating a new Xml.Document object. On the next line I call the xml object's Load method to load an xml file from a filepath. The xml file contains a list of urls that I want loaded into the address bar. Take a look:

<urls>
  <url>
      <name>url1</name>
      <link>http://localhost/Application/test.aspx?ItemId=70946</link>
  </url>
  <url>
      <name>url2</name>
      <link>http://DevServer/Application/test.aspx?ItemId=70946</link>
  </url>
</urls>

In step #4, I get a list of all the url nodes. What is really interesting is the notation I used to get them, "$xml.urls.url". It reads like an XPath statement, just with dots instead of slashes. Next I use the New-ItemProperty command to create a key value for each of the urls in my xml file.

So this script edits the registry, reads an external file and parses an xml document. That's a lot when you consider that it took what amounts to 6 lines of code. I put in some line breaks and formatting to make it easier to read. Also note, that I didn't use any aliases in the script. It could be rewritten as:

cd HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TypedURLs
(gi . ).GetValueNames() | ? {$_ -match "^url\d+"} | % { rp . $_ }
$xml = New-Object xml
$xml.Load("C:\Allen\PSScripts\AddressBarLinkList.xml")
$xml.urls.url | % { New-ItemProperty -P HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TypedURLs -N $_.name -t string -v $_.link }
cd c:

Friday, July 14, 2006

Access your classes in PowerShell

In this example, we will build a small class library and "shell out" to it in a PowerShell script. I know that it is dinky and lame, but bear with me. We will build on this knowledge in a later post. Here are the steps to reproduce the example.

Fire up your favorite text editor and paste in the following code. I'm using Notepad2 http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html. It has c# syntax highlighting. Save your file as "Person.cs". For me, the full path look like "C:\Allen\Spikes\PSClassAccess\Person.cs".

using System;
using System.Text;

namespace Person
{
 public class Phrases
 {
  public Phrases()
  {
  }
  
  public static string Hello(string Name)
  {
   return "Hello " + Name;
  }
  
  public string GoodBye(string Name)
  {
   return "Goodbye " + Name;
  }
 }
}

Open up an instance of the Visual Studio command prompt. Then browse to your folder and enter the following command. If all goes well, you will now have a Person.dll file.

csc /target:library Person.cs
Open another instance of your text editor and paste in this code.

# This loads the dll into memory
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::loadfrom("C:\Allen\Spikes\PSClassAccess\Person.dll")

# Write a blank line for aesthetic reasons
echo("")

# Here we call the static method directly from the class.
[Person.Phrases]::Hello("Allen")

# Now lets create an instance of the class.
[Person.Phrases] $Greeter = New-Object -TypeName Person.Phrases

# Here we call the non-static method GoodBye.
$Greeter.GoodBye("Max")

Save your file as "HelloGoodbye.ps1". The "PS1" extension is PowerShells default extenstion for scripts. The first thing that we do in the script is load our dll into the shells memory. A couple of lines down we call the static Hello method. Notice that the type is enclosed in square brackets. Next we use the New-Object commandlet to create a new instance fo the Phrases class as $Greeter. In Powershell, all variables begin with the $ character. Finally we use the new object to call the Goodbye method.

So lets see what we get. Open up a PowerShell console and browse to the directory where you saved your script. Run the script by typing "./HelloGoodbye.ps1". Your results should look like the following:

PS> ./HelloGoodbye.ps1

GAC    Version        Location
---    -------        --------
False  v2.0.50727     C:\Allen\Spikes\PSClassAccess\Person.dll

Hello Allen
Goodbye Max

Sweet! The first thing we see is the result from loading the dll. You'll quickly determine that it is not in the gac and was compiled with version 2 of the .NET framework. Then we see the results of our script. Its a beautiful thing.

This really shows the power and versatility of PowerShell. How many uses just popped into your head?

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Just Upgraded StarTeam

I just upgraded to StarTeam 2005 and here are my initial thoughts. The first thing I noticed is that it doesn't look all that different. That's probably smart. No need to burden the users with a learning curve. Aesthetically, they prettied up the icons in the toolbar and sported a new splash screen.

They must have read my earlier blog post, because the All Descendants functionality is now available in the Change Request and File Menus. There still isn't a dedicated shortcut for it, but you access it quickly using "Alt+L, A" when in the file view and "Alt+C, A" when in the Change Request view.

The biggest item on my StarTeam wish list is the ability to easily extend the application. Maybe I'm spoiled from using Visual Studio, where I can assign keyboard mappings and add plugins. One thing that gets me is Borland's willingness to give us access to the SDK, but not let us use it to extend StarTeam directly. I have functionality that is still missing. I can write it, but I can't run it from inside StarTeam.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

List files based on number of lines.

I was working on a javascript error in IE which returned the line number of the error but not the file where the error occured. The page was accessing half a dozen seperate js files. This particular page doesn't do to well in FireFox, so using Venkman was out. However, there was something unusual about the error. The line number was 1202. I thought to myself, "How many js files could we possibly have with more than a thousand lines of code?" It actually isn't that many. But how to find this out? I'll tell you how! Powershell!

I opened up a powershell console, changed the directory to the directory where we keep all the js files, and typed in this little ditty (after several revisions, of course).
ls *.js | where {(gc $_).length -gt 1200}
Which returned:

Mode                LastWriteTime     Length Name
----                -------------     ------ ----
-a---         7/11/2006   2:12 PM      53520 JScript.js
-a---         6/15/2006   1:43 PM      43806 StoryDescription.js
-a---         7/11/2006   2:12 PM      88027 StoryDescriptionEdit.js

Let's look at what just happened here. At first glance, you'll notice that the line is pretty terse. That's because I used predefined aliases for the functions that I called. In PowerShell, every command that you call is actually a small application known as a commandlet. PowerShell also lets you alias these commandlets, in order to save you some time. There are many predefined aliases. To see a list of the aliases, just type "alias" at the prompt. If you pass in an alias then it will limit the results to that alias name. So if you type in "alias ls", you'll see that you're actually calling Get-ChildItem. It has just been aliased to make it easier for Unix/Linux users. It is also aliased as "dir". In fact, the entire line could be rewritten without any aliases as

Get-ChildItem *.js | Where-Object { (Get-Content $_)
    .length -gt 1200 }

So the first little bit of the string returns a list of all the files in the current directory that have a ".js" extension. Then the pipe symbol, "|", passes the results to the next code statement. The where-object commandlet acts like a filter and only returns the items that meet the specified criteria. In this case we're making sure that the number of lines in the file is greater than (-gt) 1200.

We determine the number of lines with the Get-Content commandlet. This commandlet returns an array of all the lines in the file. You can even loop through the array, but that's another blog post. We just need to get the length property off of the array object.

And there you have it. Only three files in the directory have more than 1200 lines of code and my page only uses one of them. Even though I'm just a newbie, I'm loving PowerShell. Unlike most of my peers, I refuse to believe that it is only for system admins.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Random Thoughts

It's been a slow week for blogging. I've been pretty busy with the latest push. Here are few of my random thoughts that occured to me as I worked on StarTeam tickets.

9:05 Apparently, there is no "I" in "StarTeam".
10:38 If I were a pirate, my favorite word to say would be "Scurvy".
11:07 Mmmmm... Rosa's
1:43 The new nickel really creeps me out. Stop staring at me!
2:05 Stupid Farpoint! What would the magic eight skull do?
2:06 Walk the plank? ...riiight.
2:10 I just had a great idea for a blog post.1

Friday, July 07, 2006

Translate Time values with Javascript

11 On my current project, I have a need to convert a string to a valid time format. The user wants to be able to enter time in several formats. For example military time(1400), hour followed by a or p(2p), etc... I had a solution that got the job done, but it was getting long, was covered with bandaids and smelled like spaghetti. So I refactored it and came up with this approach. If you take out the comments, it has less than half the lines of code in the previous version. I use a trim string function to trim the spaces off the front and back of the time string, so I'm including it at the bottom.

Let me know if there is a better way to do this or if this might solve a problem you are having.


  function fixTime(strTime)
  {
      var dayHalf = "a";
      var Hour = "";
      var Minute = "00";
   
      // Drop the case
      strTime = strTime.toLowerCase();
   
      // Trim the spaces from the front and back
// of the string
      strTime = TrimStr(strTime);
   
      // Check for a|am|p|pm.
      var amMatch = /(am|a|pm|p)$/.exec(strTime);
      if(amMatch != null)
      {
         if(/p/.test(amMatch[0]))
              dayHalf = "p";
      }
   
      // Remove a|am|p|pm
      strTime = strTime.replace(/[a|p|m|:|\s]*/g, "");
   
      // Now we should have nothing left but numbers. 
// If the length of the string is 1 or 2,
      // then we are dealing with hours only.
      if(strTime.length < hour =" strTime;" hour =" strTime.slice(0," minute =" strTime.slice(-2);"> 23)
          Hour = Hour % 24;
        
      // Convert the hour and dayhalf.
      if(Hour > 12)
      {
          Hour = Hour - 12;
          dayHalf = "p";
      }
      else if(Hour == 0)
      {
          Hour = 12;
          dayHalf = "a";
      }
   
      // This line ensures that the Hour variable is
// converted to a number type so the result
// won't have any preceding zeros.
      // ex.  "02" would loose the first zero.
      Hour *= 1;
   
      // Build our return string
      strTime = Hour + ":" + Minute + dayHalf;
      return strTime;
  }

  function TrimStr(str)
  {
      var sResult = new String(str);
      var re1 = /(^\s+)/
      var re2 = /(\s+$)/
      sResult = sResult.replace (re1, "");
      sResult = sResult.replace (re2, "");
      return sResult.toString();
  }

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

SQL Tip: Union vs Union All

A co-worker gave me a SQL tip today.

TIP: Whenever possible, use UNION ALL, instead of UNION, because it is faster.

This is a great tip and here's why. UNION eliminates all duplicate rows and sorting results. This requires that it create a temp table, storing all the records and sorting them before generating the result. So its not the most efficient way of doing things. A potential issue with using UNION is the danger of loading the tempdb database with a huge temptable.

UNION ALL, on the other hand, doesn't eliminate duplicates. It just performs the first select and then appends the second select onto the first result set. There is no temp table or sorting involved. This is much more efficient. If you don't expect duplicate data, then this is the way to go.

Friday, June 30, 2006

Coin Shrinker!

Today's totally rad technology is the amazing coin shrinker. That's right, a machine that can actually shrink a quarter down to the size of a dime.

How do they do it? Simple, they just pass about 1 million amps of electrical current through the coin. To put things in perspective, that is enough power to run a large city. The whole process takes approximately 25 millionths of a second. The coin only shrinks in diameter. It gets thicker, so the actual weight of the coin doesn't change. If this thing were a Master Card commercial it would run something like this:

Coin: 25¢
Electricity Bill: $1,000,000*
Ruining a perfectly good quarter just to impress your physicist friends while you hang out in you mom's basement: priceless

* I'm sure its not that high, but anything lower would lessen the comedic effect.

The salivating coolness factor on this is way up there. I don't even know why. My theory is that is a guy thing. Try asking your wife if you can install one in your basement. You should refrain from using phrases like "high-velocity metal forming", and "bullet-proof blast case".
I'm pretty sure the WAF on this is extremely low.

I'm sure that there are millions of industrial uses for this kind of technology. I even believe that we can end world hunger. Follow me here.

You can cook food with electricity. When I was in college I had a physics professor who showed us how to cook a hotdog with nothing more than a 12volt outlet and two pieces of wire. The shrinking process uses electricity and makes things thicker. Therefore we should be able to go from a couple of pieces of steakums to a 1 in. thick steak(medium well) in 25 millionths of a second. Talk about fast food.

Corrolation: There is something to be said about throwing massive amounts of effort to accomplish a goal in a relatively small amount of time. However, the end product isn't necessarily any better because of it.

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

StarTeam Productivity Hints

If you've spent 5 minutes in a room with me, you know that I'm almost fanatical about keyboard shortcuts. Don't get me wrong, I love the mouse. I need it to play UT. However, when it comes to just about everything else, I always feel more productive the less I use the mouse. Micheal Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers and part-time productivity guru, once blogged:

"I have never met anyone really productive who relied on the mouse. It’s just too inefficient. ...few people take the time to really learn the standard operating system shortcuts (Mac or Windows). If you haven’t learned these already, I would urge you to do so. Over time, you will see a major boost in your productivity."

So today I was asked indirectly about how I use StarTeam. I was able to mention a shortcut or two, but there just aren't that many. StarTeam is a great system, but the UI is grotesque and not very customizable. And yet I can get 99% of what I need done accomplished without the mouse. Here is a list of shortcuts that really increase my productivity in StarTeam:

NAVIGATION
Ctrl+F6 - cycle through open projects
Ctrl+Shift+F6 - reverse cycle through open projects
Alt+W, num - Takes you to the project by its number in the Window menu
Tab - cycle through open panes
Shift+Tab - reverse cycle through panes
Ctrl+Tab - cycle through tabs in current pane
Ctrl+Shift+Tab - reverse cycle through tabs in current pane

FILES
Alt + i, i - Add files
Ctrl+g - Check out files
Ctrl+i - Check in files
Ctrl+l - Lock File

When you check in or add a file, StarTeam requires that you fill in a comment on the Check In dialog. I often just use a space. Pressing the Enter key doesn't close the dialog. It acts like a word processor and sends you to the next line. To combat this, I use the following combination of keystrokes. I don't even think about them anymore. Its all muscle memory now.

Ctrl+i, [space], Shift+Tab, Shift+Tab, [space]

One of my biggest problems with the StarTeam UI is that there is a button on the toolbar with no matching menu item or available shortcut. Of course, I'm talking about the "All Descendants" button. It's the only thing I haven't figured out how to do without the mouse. This has disturbed me to the point of insanity. There. I am insane now.

If you know how to accomplish this, please let me know.

Friday, June 23, 2006

Lasik @ Home!

Are you tired of wearing those glasses? Do you think that Lasik surgery is way out of your price range? Well let me introduce you to the Scal-Pal. That's right, for the measely price of $99.95, you too can reap the benefits of expensice Lasik surgery in the privacy and comfort of your home.

The Complete LASIK@Home Kit (patent pending) includes everything you need to complete the procedure.

Scal-Pal™ Hand-Operated Combination Femtosecond/Excimer Laser - A real laser!
Mild sedative (diazepam 4mg) - I'd pay the $99.95 for the sedative alone.
No-Blink™ brand Eye Drops - Don't Blink!!! More on that later.
Detailed Instructions and QuickStart Guide - Just four easy steps.
Protective Post-Op Sleep Mask - You're going to need a lot of sleep after this.

From what I can tell, these guys are serious. However, you won't find me shooting a laser into my own eye. What if I had an itch? As you can see in the below instructions, which are in cartoon form, even blinking can be disastrous. I like how every page has a footnote that reads "*This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA."

The instructions also show the added benefits of diy Lasik. Apparently, the laser shoots past your eye and into your brain. As it etches information into your gray matter, you will be granted enhanced archery, piloting, romantic and artistic skills.

I think my biggest question is, what do you do with the laser after you're done with your self-surgery. I'll bet you can cut stuff with it. That would be cool. Do you have any ideas?

Correlation: When you are trying to implement a process change without the proper support, DON'T BLINK!!!

*This post has not been evaluated by the FDA.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Little known Sql String functions

We are all familiar with SQL string functions like LEFT and SUBSTRING. Here are some of the lesser known Sql string functions:

PATINDEX lets you search a string for the first instance that matches a given pattern. The pattern must begin and end with % signs. So the following code selects all the last names in the table that contain the pattern 'ack'.

SELECT LastName FROM tblPersonnel
WHERE PATINDEX('%ack%', LastName) > 0

STUFF inserts a string into another string. It can delete a specified number of characters from the start position before inserting the string. Here is some code that starts at the second letter in the string, deletes the next two characters and then inserts the phrase 'ack'.

SELECT STUFF(LastName, 2, 2, 'ack') FROM tblPersonnel

SOUNDEX and DIFFERENCE can by used to compare how much two strings sound alike. SOUNDEX takes a string and returns a four-character that can be used by DIFFERENCE to determine if two strings sound alike. Here's and example:

SELECT SOUNDEX('Barnett') --> B653
SELECT LastName FROM tblPersonnel
WHERE DIFFERENCE('Barnett', LastName) < 4

Notice that I didn't have to use the SOUNDEX function in the difference parameters.

Here are two where I can't think of a reason to use:
REPLICATE returns a string that is composed by repeating a string for a set number of iterations. Heres a sample:

SELECT REPLICATE('A', 5) --> 'AAAAA'

REVERSE produces a mirrored image of the string. So if you want to return all the names in the table spelled backwards, you could use:

SELECT REVERSE(LastName) FROM tblPersonnel

Like I said, I can't think of any real world examples where those last two would be useful, but they are cool anyway. If you can come up with an example, let me know.

Monday, June 19, 2006

I pwn'd it!

I stumbled across a highly addictive brain teaser from Cambrian House titled PWNIT. It is aimed at coders and technologists and was a lot of fun. It took me about 4 hours, but I got through it all on my own. Oh, and with a little help from the Great Google. I didn't ask the Great Google for the solution, I just looked up reference materials, like the Hebrew alphabet.

When you complete all the puzzles you get to download this graphic to prove that you solved it. Yay me!

I have to give Cambrian House some credit, this is a pretty cool attention grabbing device. I even like their business plan. I guess a bunch of programmer types got sick of their jobs and decided to start their own software company. But wait, they didn't have any idea what software to create. So here is their scheme. They solicit cool and innovative ideas from you, the web audience. You provide them with a great idea and they will make it happen. And if by some chance your idea actually makes some money, they will give you some of the profits. This is brilliant. I think Microsoft should adopt this model as well. I have some great ideas for them and they owe me a refund for all the zeros that they have sold me anyway.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Rounding in .NET

I was having an issue on at work, where I needed to determine how tall to make a Farpoint Spread row to display some text. I would calculate the size of some text to be entered into a table cell. Then I would take the length of the text, based on the font and divide it by the width of the cell and voila, I should have the number of lines that need to be displayed. However, I was having a problem with some of my tests. About half of the time, I ended up missing a line.

As I looked closer I noticed that all of the variables in my calculation were integers. A ha! .Net was rounding stuff for me, using its default Banker's Rounding system.

If you are unfamiliar with Banker's Rounding, or aren't a banker, then this way of rounding may seem insane to you. Let me explain. In Banker's Rounding everything works just like in regular rounding, except when dealing with halves. So anything less than .5 will always round down and anything greater than .5 will always round up. But when we have exactly .5 then we round to the closest even number. You are probably used to .5 always rounding up. This is a little known, yet extremely important behavior and I hope to have saved you some heartache. Lets see some Bankers Rounding in action:

1.49 ==> 1
1.50 ==> 2
2.50 ==> 2
2.51 ==> 3

Back to my issue. I needed a way to always round up, no matter what the decimal. Enter the Math.Ceiling function. The Math.Ceiling function returns the next whole number greater than the decimal that you started with. Here it is in action:

System.Math.Ceiling(1.0) ==> 1
System.Math.Ceiling(1.3) ==> 2

Alternatively, if you want to always round down, you could use the Math.Floor function. It returns the next lowest whole number from the starting decimal.

System.Math.Floor(2.0) ==> 2
System.Math.Floor(1.9) ==> 1

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Internet Explorer's Progress Bar doesn't stop when the page is finished loading.

I have an asp.net page that is loaded with Farpoint controls and I use Anthem to make callbacks everytime something is changed in any of the cells. So every once and while, I experience an issue where a callback starts up the progress bar. Really, this isn't a problem. The problem is that the progress bar continues to progress slowly, even after the page is complete and ready to use. This gives the users that the page is still doing something and they should wait, a long time, before they start making more edits.

A quick look in google reveiled that the Internet Explorer progress bar was apparently developed by a group of snails, who are not only slow but also of subpar intelligence. At least that's what the community thinks. Google also reveiled this support document. Even Farpoint recognizes this problem and you can read about it here. Here's the gist. When you dynamically insert behaviors in your page, the progress bar gets dazed and confused. If you use the Farpoint spread, you know that this happens a lot. We can set the progress bar back on the right track by writing something to the status bar. I'm guessing that this resets the whole footer in IE.

I am now reseting the status bar on the window.load event and everytime I handle a callback in Anthem. It seems to have corrected my issue.