I so want this for Christmas! As a thesis project a doctorate student has written a robot command where you can control your army of bots with Microsoft’s Surface.
Add Recycle Bin to My Computer in Windows 7
Windows 7 doesn’t have a Recycle Bin in My computer and if you like to keep you desktop clean (and fail) by removing it from as a desktop icon, it can be hard to get to the bin altogether.
A small registry hack can solve this.
Create a new Key with {645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E} as its name under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MyComputer\NameSpace.
Refresh and voila, a recycle bin under My Computer.
[From: HowToGeek]
Concatenate multiple rows into single string
The problem was the following.
I’m creating a report in SSRS (Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services). In this report I need to display a table with assets. These assets have an N-N relationship with another table, through a link-table. This creates a 3 dimensional table, but I can only display 2 dimensions on paper of course.
As a result the 3rd dimension has to be reduces to a column of the assets table.
Here is the resulting query:
SELECT DISTINCT assets.assetid, assets.name, REPLACE(temp.CProcedures, ',', Char(10)+Char(13))
FROM Filtered_asset AS assets
LEFT OUTER JOIN (
SELECT Linker.assetid, Left(Linker.CProcedures, Len(Linker.CProcedures)-1) AS CProcedures
FROM (
SELECT distinct ST2.assetid,
(SELECT ST1.name + ',' AS [text()]
FROM (
SELECT Filtered_calibrationprocedure.name, Filtered_asset_calibrationprocedure.assetid
FROM Filtered_asset_calibrationprocedure
LEFT OUTER JOIN Filteredcalibrationprocedure ON Filtered_asset_calibrationprocedure.calibrationprocedureid = Filtered_calibrationprocedure.calibrationprocedureid) ST1
WHERE ST1.assetid = ST2.assetid
for XML PATH ('')) [CProcedures]
FROM (
SELECT Filtered_calibrationprocedure.name, Filtered_asset_calibrationprocedure.assetid
FROM Filtered_asset_calibrationprocedure
LEFT OUTER JOIN Filtered_calibrationprocedure ON Filtered_asset_calibrationprocedure.calibrationprocedureid = Filtered_calibrationprocedure.calibrationprocedureid) ST2
) AS Linker) AS temp on temp.assetid = assets.assetid
We truely live in the digital age now.
One of the oldest professions has been on the internet since it was first made public.
Now it looks like one of the oldest crimes (since there was currency & banks) is competing online with it’s offline counterpart. In 2009 it seems, there were almost the same amount online thefts than there were bank robberies.
Expect online theft to take the upper hand in a year or two.
But of course there are stupid people online as well that forget that threatening with spam for money is still extortion.
On the iPad
Leading up to the announcement of the iPad, I was looking very much forward to a new device from Apple. It would no doubt be revolutionary, breathtakingly beautiful, very usable and loaded with the latest tech and goodies.
Once I saw the keynote, I was disappointed. Apple had let me down. They had the potential to make a great product, but instead they made a tables that doesn’t support multitasking (which is a step back of about 15 years), no USB or other external storage capability, locked in applications only served by Apple’s approved AppStore, …
Now almost 2 weeks after the announcement and reading other people’s thoughts too, I’ve come to a conclusion. I was looking at the iPad from my perspective, with my wishes for a tables in mind. With that view, the iPad has failed. However this is not its target audience. The iPad is more for the casual computer user that uses it for e-mail, surfing, facebook, …
For those the iPad is perfect! Now I only hope they make a similar device (the form factor that is) for power users/developers as well.
Some extra reading:
http://northtemple.com/2010/02/01/on-ipads-grandmas-and-gam
http://www.macworld.com/article/146040/2010/02/ipad.html?lsrc=twt_macworld
http://stevenf.tumblr.com/post/359224392/i-need-to-talk-to-you-about-computers-ive-been
http://www.macworld.com/article/146040/2010/02/ipad.html?lsrc=twt_macworld
http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/01/the-ipad-is-the-iprius-your-co.html
http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2010012703135NWRLAP
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2010/01/29/tinkerers-sunset
http://speirs.org/blog/2010/1/29/future-shock.html
http://flyosity.com/ipad/the-ipad-is-for-everyone-but-us.php
Read/Write action vs ReadAll/WriteAll
Recently I needed to go over a lot of files located inside a directory and its subfolders. This is a fairly easy something to implement and without much thinking I wrote some code to loop through the directory, compare the files found with a criteria and if it matched, copy the file.
Afterwards I was wondering if there maybe was a faster way of doing this Read/Write action I was doing.
Another option was loop through the folders comparing and remembering the files I needed to copy. Then at the end loop through the matching files and copy them.
What the test showed was a ReadAll / WriteAll action is notably faster, especially if the number if matches is low.
Read the rest of "Read/Write action vs ReadAll/WriteAll" »
The Flash vs HTML 5 video discussion
With the launch of the Apple iPad and its lack of Adobe’s Flash support, a heated discussion has started online about what to use to display videos. Either use a Flash video player of the newly HTML 5 video tag.
Most of them agree that eventually plugins for browsers will disappear in favor of standard based implementations. But the lack of codec support and the disagreement of the major browsers is still an issue in favor of Flash even though there are HTML 5 video players available.
Nuclear fusion by the end of 2010?
If the information in this recent announcement on BBC website is correct, there can be a nuclear fusion ignition by the end of 2010.
This means one step closer to truely clean energy.
The end of Flash?
With the arrival of the iPad and the lack of Flash support also on this device, I’m wondering what the future will be for Adobe’s Flash.
Now that HTML 5 is better supported by newer browsers, proprietary technologies like Flash and Silverlight will become obsolete in favor of standards complient ones. Not to forget that firstmentioned products are both browser plugins, which a technology that causes most of the crashes and security breaches. (You can also thank Adobe Reader for this one).
Interesting times ahead.
