This past weekend I participated in my first ever Code Retreat in Fort Collins, CO. After all the dust has settled I can look back on the experience with both a good and bad perspective. The way this retreat worked was each of us was paired up with another programmer and we tried to solve… Read More »
My brother recently had his laptop screen go out. So being the friendly family tech support I told him I’d take a look. The big issue was that there were a lot of family photos and videos they needed. One of which was a video of the birth of their son. Utilizing various techniques I… Read More »
As some of you know I kinda blur the lines between DBA and Dev. It kind reminds me of that half-white/half-black painted guy on that old Star Trek episode sometimes. In any case, to satisfy my Developer “dark side” cravings I’ve been reading an excellent book called “Clean Code” by Robert C. Martin. This book… Read More »
Ok, maybe while writing this post I was listening to a little too much Bassnectar (hence the title). However, while planning out a new web app I bumped into this little (~400 lines) chunk of code called Massive by Rob Conery (http://wekeroad.com). The reason it attracted my attention was because I wanted to build an… Read More »
So I recently inherited some additional sites to manage. Unfortunately some of them were running Classic ASP via IIS5 with a back-end Access (aaargh!) database. Still, I really wasn’t too concerned about anything other than the age of the server and software. After searching Secunia there’s only one known vulnerability (hack to bypass logging). But,… Read More »
Over the past couple weeks now I’ve been studying to upgrade my MCITP certification in SQL Server 2005 to 2008. I was surprised to find that there are basically no books/study materials out there for this. Now I know that most DBAs taking this exam live and breathe SQL Server every day and for them… Read More »
We have a vendor right now that periodically requests a backup file FTP’d to their server. Unfortunately we do not run the Enterprise version of SQL Server to be able to compress the backups, and nobody wants to manually take a backup file and compress it on a regular basis. Because of this I created… Read More »
Had an idea the other day that it might be nice to be able to grab tweets based on a keyword and populate a SQL Server table. So I put together the following simple PowerShell script to do just that. First I create “tweet” table under a database called TwitterDB: [sql] CREATE TABLE [dbo].[tweets]( [published]… Read More »
Recently Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) talked about the “Dark Side of Social Networking“. His view is one day people will change their names in order to escape the online persona they have created and he is right except that “one day” is really today. Many companies are now checking Facebook, Twitter, etc. as part… Read More »
As everyone knows the economy has been tough on the I.T. field. Redmond magazine even did a great piece in their June issue called “I.T. Hell: How the Recession Has Affected I.T. Jobs“. More often than not the first thing out the I.T. budget window is training and travel. Since technology changes almost daily an… Read More »
