tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-174075352011-07-19T16:20:30.834-05:00My experiences with computer programming, using c#, Mono, Ruby, Rails, SQL Server 2000, and MySQL.Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.comBlogger631100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-90960610563300199962009-04-17T10:36:00.004-05:002009-04-17T11:24:07.191-05:00

I am so behind the times ... NHibernate 2.0.1 GA was released last fall and 2.1.0 Alphas are coming out. In the mean time, Hibernate.org has been subsumed by Redhat's JBoss. The url www.hibernate.org doesn't take you anywhere useful, and following the javascript menu to projects / services / hibernate still doesn't get you anywhere - pure garbage. It is clear that JBoss wants to sell you

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-65023862916563077872009-03-18T08:50:00.003-05:002009-03-18T09:00:25.417-05:00

(Yes, We say script now instead of batch ... times are changing).Here is a stupid little batch file that I have written several times. It adds a single argument to the path in your current command-line session (so it is not permanent).@echo offif "%1" == "" goto end_scriptset path=%path%;%1:end_script

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-43325335339462931312009-03-02T11:14:00.003-06:002009-03-02T11:46:15.124-06:00

The "Iron" languages that run on the .NET DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) are making progress. I just noticed that IronRuby has a release on RubyForge.To be honest though, I have moved to Python as my script language of choice, with Perl as the ever-present fallback. Iron Python seems like it is coming along nicely. Iron Python 2 can even host itself. I can't wait for MonoDevelop or

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-23199769212331565922009-02-19T21:03:00.005-06:002009-02-19T21:30:54.244-06:00

I just spotted this on FishEye ... an example native SQL query. You'll need source from SVN or a recent download from the build server - more recent than patch 5551 by mzywitza on 17 February 2009.This is very nice, allowing parameterized SQL without the hacks that I used (you can search here for some of my old blogs on the subject).

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-63463383624335909542009-01-29T10:23:00.003-06:002009-01-29T11:22:57.365-06:00

I usually have to look this up, so I am posting it to my blog.Visual Studio 2005 has a "Regular Expression" option on the "search and replace" dialog. (Previous .Net editions had it as well.) I occasionally want to rewrite several lines of text without writing a macro or wearing out my fingers. Here's what I do ...If I have a file with several lines ofDECLARE R1 = VC WITH CONSTANT("TEST1")

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-49494965483290720682008-11-25T12:10:00.001-06:002008-11-25T12:10:29.044-06:00

I have tried a couple of times over the last 3 months to use PdfPoster on some Erwin documents. Unfortunately, I am using Windows XP on my work PC. It was clearly documented that I needed to install PyPdf 1.11 or higher, so I did easy_setup to install 1.12. Recently, I tried "C:\test>pdfposter -vvv -s 2.0 SCHEDULING.pdf scheduling_2x.pdf" ... and received a nice traceback (see below). This

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-36758204183912620492008-09-25T15:44:00.000-05:002008-09-25T15:44:00.314-05:00

I'm sure most of you have heard of Google's new WebKit based browser "Chrome". Well, a German company has released a more privacy friendly version called "Iron", with the browser usage tracking removed. Their site is written in German, but here is a translation thanks to Google's Language Translation tools.I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but I'm glad someone is taking advantage of the

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-17504904561135460472008-09-02T14:35:00.001-05:002008-09-02T14:35:16.943-05:00

I just discovered the Turtle graphics module for Python 2.5 using the Tk graphics library. It is very "kid friendly", and it sets up a screen when you make your first function call. This was very fun, just like when I first played with LOGO on my Commodore 64!>>> from turtle import *>>> clear()>>> down()>>> goto(66,66)>>> for step in range(24):... right(105)... forward(100)...>>> up()>>

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-26733432793774888992008-08-30T22:59:00.003-05:002008-08-30T23:08:22.363-05:00

I like to play Chess sometimes, and I like the MKGI Chess Club. It is great for guys like me who do not have time to play a complete game in one sitting. The site uses a "postal chess" model, where I can play a move in several games, then wait for my opponent to move, or go on with my day, and check later or the next day.The site has an unfortunate quirk. It allows you to write notes about the

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-64796266013505807132008-06-19T15:05:00.001-05:002008-06-19T15:06:31.772-05:00

Python is sticking pretty close to their release schedule for Python 2.6 and 3.0 as documented in PEP 361. They released Python 2.6 beta 1 and 3.0 beta 1 today. If you&apos're curious about their progress, check the 2.6 release notes.By the way, I noticed that they fixed a problem with one of the rotating log handlers - it was using a simple filename instead of the full file path when deleting

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-90714183240458990182008-03-01T13:02:00.004-06:002008-06-19T13:19:45.619-05:00

Use WMI with Python. Thanks to Tim Golden, Python on Win32 (I use ActiveState Python) can use COM to talk to WMI. WMI allows you to run SQL-like queries to determine available memory, free disk space, database size, transaction log size, transaction log space available, when a database was last backed up, ... all of the good stuff.Any DBA knows that databases need free disk space and frequent

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-66856883412387084292008-01-01T11:37:00.000-06:002008-01-01T11:39:16.945-06:00

Python has some nice basic logging facilities, but I really wanted a rotating logger that would rotate on each execution. I tried the obvious - just specifying class=MyModule.MyClassName, but I received a NameError exception for my trouble.After some hacking on /python25/lib/logging (a big no-no!), I did another google search and discovered that I could just import the class in my application,

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-39502650701071514922007-12-13T14:12:00.003-06:002008-02-19T14:03:02.535-06:00

Recently at work, we have been discussing the question of Perl versus Python for file copy, ftp, email and other daily, weekly or monthly automation / integration tasks. We considered Perl because some existing tasks had already been written in it, and Perl has a reputation as the System Admin's language of choice.I took a task that needed automated and wrote it in Perl 5.8, then refined it

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-2770689035094838952007-11-13T14:14:00.000-06:002007-11-13T14:31:24.602-06:00

NHibernate 2.0 is not even close to release, but it is shaping up nicely. Oren Eini (His blog is called Ayende @ Rahien) has a list of interesting new features.Dario Quintana has something to say as well. He has contributed some code to the uNHAddins for Active Record Detached Query support.The Castle development team is considering pointing to NHibernate Trunk (which will be released as 2.0

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-9924560666496576452007-08-30T13:49:00.000-05:002007-08-30T13:57:12.320-05:00

I follow the Mono Blog aggregator, and Miguel de Icaza mentioned that a user had tested ProMesh.NET on Mono, and it ran without any changes! That in in itself was cool, but when I took a look at ProMesh.Net, it looked like a well designed framework, perhaps comparable to MonoRail. The framework is ORM agnostic, and the biggest weakness might be it's view templates, but they have a great

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-8472844442147419462007-08-28T08:24:00.000-05:002007-08-28T09:32:18.223-05:00

I am a registered user on SQL Server Central, and I read a good article there on "Enums in SQL Server". I thought that I would quickly present my own humble solution to this problem, although I do not mean to imply that my way is better - you can decide for yourself.First, the problem to be solved is to represent a limited set of choices, where new choices would typically require a developer&

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-36071593281271465972007-08-20T08:50:00.000-05:002007-08-20T09:29:33.500-05:00

I do not believe that I have covered this before, but the Active Record Code Generator can also generate audit records for your database tables. The template that I wrote (SqlAuditTrigger.vm) adds records to an AuditChanges table, with a related AuditFields table containing the table and field name. I think that this is a fairly compact solution, but I also added code to the trigger to ignore

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-41022687098262085502007-08-17T15:27:00.000-05:002007-08-17T16:21:40.202-05:00

Today, I needed to send some private data to another company, and I could not get FTP with SSL to authenticate over our firewall, so I had to sent an encrypted file over FTP. The other company has a GPG public key, so I looked around for a bit on the web (yes, I googled c# gpg encrypt open source) and found a message that mentioned Bouncy Castle on the 4th or 5th page (why was it so far down the

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-44282854753081273552007-08-13T16:40:00.000-05:002007-08-18T10:06:44.518-05:00

I was reading a blog on MSDN, with a link to some cool Power Toys for Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals. So today, I had some time to install the VS2005 TE Service Release 1 so I could grab the power toys, but the microsoft link is dead! The developer went on a vacation (literally), so it might be a while until this gets fixed.Oh, by the way, O’Reilly Hacking Visual

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-59610381317821161342007-08-11T12:33:00.000-05:002007-08-11T13:11:17.988-05:00

Friday, I added an NHibernate mapping.hbm.xml template. I mainly wanted to show that the code generator can be used for other purposes than just Castle ActiveRecord, and NHibernate is an easy target. Jim R. has requested that I add HasMany (aka ManyToOne) mapping properties and attributes. I think this is going to push me to refactor the schema extraction code.Some of my future goals for the

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-28835179309601910372007-08-08T16:36:00.001-05:002007-08-08T16:42:18.386-05:00

I have improved the Inequality test in the model template, as requested by JimR. This was another case where it worked well for me, only because I followed the convention that primary keys are named ID, and foreign keys are named SingularOfTable_ID. I know that I should really push the Inequality test into the template, but for now, I have corrected it in the DbFieldInfo class.

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-68540446880503924782007-08-06T09:37:00.000-05:002007-08-06T12:53:07.531-05:00

I just updated my code generator to optionally generate validation attributes. This simple change includes App.config file entries for all check boxes, and a new checkbox for "Validation" - aka validation attibute generation. While I was making this change, I realized that I really need to pass a CodeGenerationContext object to the DbTable, DbField and ModelGenerator classes. The requester can

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-55115294990889743822007-08-02T14:38:00.001-05:002007-08-02T23:06:37.088-05:00

Thanks to some recent interest in the community, I have made a few more changes to ActiveRecord Code Generator. First, I added a browse button and a dialog, using some code supplied by Jim R. I don't care for the folder browser dialog, but it is built in to .Net 2, so I use it. Second, I fixed a few bugs that crop up when a table does not match my arbitrary table and field naming scheme.

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-86837544822028382322007-07-30T13:56:00.000-05:002007-07-30T14:00:21.772-05:00

Today, I updated the ActiveRecord Code Generator a bit. I checked in changes to use primary and foreign key details from INFORMATION_SCHEMA. The original code used naming conventions to decide what various fields were used for - ID = Primary Key, Field_ID = Foreign Key to table Fields. If you want to use naming conventions, let me know and I can add a setting in App.Config to allow this (along

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-75199935021346405092007-07-29T19:58:00.000-05:002007-07-29T20:05:03.883-05:00

Today, I was inspired to hack the context menu in Firefox 2.0, removing "Send To" and "Send Image". I googled for a solution, and found step-by-step directions for Firefox 1.0. So, I started digging, and the over-all instructions were good, but I only needed to comment out the menu options in browser.xul, and not touch the javascript in browser.js. The original instructions were a bit vague,

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-20558924837241768972007-07-28T18:49:00.000-05:002007-07-28T20:52:44.641-05:00

I have finally released my Code Generator to Google Code as Active-Record-Gen. What does it generate? It generates ActiveRecord classes mainly, but I have used it to generate stored procedures and sys-admin scripts as well. This code generator does not (yet) generate a full Windows application project or a Mono-Rail web site, but the generated code could be used in either. In fact, with a few

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-66278609264576156922007-05-17T16:18:00.000-05:002007-05-22T12:35:00.114-05:00

Update 05/22/2007: No response from the community. I think Hammett is working on releasing a new version of Castle (It's much more than just ActiveRecord!), so I have not received any feedback on my patch.I have just posted patch AR-156 to Castle's ActiveRecord project to add support for XML free mapping of insert, update and delete stored procedures to ActiveRecord classes. This requires

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-83296571810891311212007-05-15T12:16:00.000-05:002007-07-28T17:54:00.134-05:00

Update: the latest versions of Reflector and Doubler are working well together.I just noticed that Jay Flowers has released a version of the Doubler Add-In that works with the current Reflector by Lutz Roeder. I tried installing Doubler in a sub-directory under Reflector, but it failed to load, so I had to move it into the Reflector directory. The current version of Doubler generates test

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-88888114685319388762007-05-04T10:38:00.000-05:002007-05-07T13:21:45.488-05:00

NHibernate was released May 3, 2007 and they have a migration guide for those of you who do not follow changes in the svn. This release supports stored procedures, and as you can see in the screen shot above, I am working on adding SQL stored procedure generation to my ActiveRecord Generator. I have templates for INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE now, and I will write a SELECT by primary key today.

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-63552037241507085972007-04-27T13:10:00.000-05:002007-04-27T14:40:14.721-05:00

If you've been reading my blog, you know that I am developing an application using Visual Studio 2005 and Castle's ActiveRecord framework. Recently, I bought Visual Studio 2005 Pro so I could use Crystal Reports. Believe it or not, The user was able to install my application without a working version of .Net 2.0 around. As far as I can tell, they did a Windows Update, and somehow it corrupted

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-26807459183886352872007-04-26T12:55:00.000-05:002007-04-26T12:56:30.427-05:00

I know this entry is off-topic, but yesterday was pretty amazing. A co-worker told me about , and I signed up last month. Blingo is a search engine that uses Google's database for results, but as you search, you have a chance to win something. Blingo has "Thousand Dollar Thursdays" and sometimes they even give away an automobile! So yesterday I was trying to figure out why my ABit A8N SLI

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-79203169942294411982007-04-11T15:38:00.000-05:002007-05-22T12:43:57.176-05:00

[Update 1: finished the entry, and added some compilable code.][Update 2: Updated the compilable code - improved the Property setter code.]Recently, I have been working on a project with Castle's ActiveRecord support. Since I am changing my database schema as I discover new requirements, and adapt to new data sources, I occasionally run into query / model / table mismatches. Now, gross

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-81787714302390226622007-03-23T18:09:00.000-05:002007-03-23T18:34:47.181-05:00

Google has donated Hibernate Shards - a Java 5 add-on to Hibernate that allows application driven data partitioning with your custom or their pre-build configurations. One thing that caught my eye was that when they covered partitioned Native ID generation (aka Identity), they mentioned having Database A use a range 0-200000, Database B use range 200001 - 400000, etc. I know that MySQL cluster

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-87300372900414010882007-03-16T22:48:00.000-05:002007-03-16T14:51:18.107-05:00

As I have said before, I am developing with Visual Studio 2005 on .Net 2.0. This summer, I will be creating an application with integrated html help. Of course, my first inclination is to refresh my knowledge of help systems by acquiring Microsoft's HTML Help SDK. The HTML Help Workshop looks like it will do light project management, and it even has an image cropping and screen capture program

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-12664349149025713422007-03-09T11:56:00.000-06:002007-03-13T17:53:09.187-05:00

I have submitted a patch to add MultiQuery support to ActiveRecord. The link is at http://support.castleproject.org/browse/AR-139. I added ActiveRecordMultiQuery.cs and updated ActiveRecordBaseQuery.cs to allow subclasses to be aggregated (added) to the MultiQuery. I did this to speed up initialization of a form (I know ... premature optimization is the root of all evil). If you like this

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-88744403956478979802007-03-08T16:10:00.000-06:002007-05-22T11:36:27.552-05:00

Update: I have contributed patch AR-156 that allows full integration of Insert, Update and Delete to ActiveRecord models.If you've been reading my blog lately, you know that I have been seriously testing the Castle ActiveRecord framework out. I really love it, but I have an existing Microsoft SQL Server database with many stored procedures in it. I have tested the ActiveRecord model out, and I

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-91234929112242990852007-03-06T15:47:00.000-06:002007-03-08T16:20:52.781-06:00

My current development environment is Visual Studio Express C# Edition (read that as free), Castle ActiveRecord's latest svn trunk(usually within a few days), and NHibernate svn trunk. As of NHibernate version 1.2.0, there is a very cool new class out there ... DetachedCriteria. This class lets you set all of your Castle relational attributes like BelongsTo, HasMany, etc. as lazy fetch, and

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-61650329104933777822007-02-28T16:40:00.000-06:002007-02-28T18:41:41.006-06:00

Lately, it feels like I've been wading through mud. As if the ActiveRecord library has been doing nothing but preventing me from getting my work done. In my dreams, I could call MyEntity.Find() with a list of ICriterion objects, and get back what I want. I was having problems with that, because I want to select several object, left joining to a notes table, and return only the most recent note

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-9917273225870189002007-02-23T14:42:00.000-06:002007-05-25T14:53:53.312-05:00

Update May 25, 2007: ActiveRecord now supports DetachedCriteria, which eliminates the need for the SlicedFindAll that I wrote below. It is nice when a library moves to add support for such commonly needed functions. So in summary, use Detached criteria instead of the code below. It is still a nice example of using NHibernate sessions.I have a history log, where each history record "belongs to"

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1171058782010482702007-02-21T14:14:00.000-06:002007-02-23T13:44:25.965-06:00

While looking for Castle ActiveRecord examples, I found a blog by David Hayden - post 1 (design pattern overview), post 2 (some details on a possible implementation) and post 3 (using the Castle Project). David had a series of articles about Rocky Lhotka's .NET Business Objects (one for each chapter), which I have also read and tried to apply. Don't get me wrong, Rocky's CSLA library works, but

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1170896123272700272007-02-07T18:32:00.000-06:002007-02-23T13:45:11.281-06:00

Since this is my first post on the subject, let me introduce the Castle project - a .Net framework that I have been exploring recently. It has a project that tries to mimic ActiveRecord in Ruby-On-Rails, although the Castle version of ActiveRecord uses NHibernate. The good news is that an ActiveRecord class doesn't require any XML configuration or mapping files. The somewhat bad news is

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1165434792307809542006-12-06T13:50:00.000-06:002007-02-23T14:09:57.029-06:00

I recently added a customer tagging feature to our billing system. Users needed to be able to see a list of associated tags in their reports, so I needed to be able to collect all tags for a customer into a single string. Below is a rough approximation of the table schema. I did some research, and ended up creating a user-defined function (UDF) that returns a TABLE variable. Inside the UFD, I

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1163704223007588382006-11-16T13:00:00.000-06:002006-11-16T13:23:34.543-06:00

There is an excellent article on recommended coding practices "The Rails Way" . The authors are espousing a commonly held coding practice - use base classes or mix-ins (Modules in Ruby) only when code would otherwise be repeated. This reinforces the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) philosophy that Ruby encourages and facilitates.A helpful reader offers further explanation for those Rails

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1150826936927648702006-06-21T12:43:00.000-05:002006-11-09T11:15:10.126-06:00

Note: I wrote this entry while I was still playing Eternal Lands. I have recently stopped playing, but I thought I should share my thoughts anyway.For the past few months, I have been spending time in a free online role playing game - Eternal Lands. The game allows "player kill", but only on certain maps or certain areas, and you receive a warning message before you enter these areas. I

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1138916866395449962006-02-09T12:35:00.000-06:002006-02-09T12:35:28.106-06:00

A fellow IT guy walked past my desk and asked about the 400 MHz Celeron box that I had tied to my switch box. I informed him that this was my Linux test box. He said that we have much better boxes than that in our storage room, and invited me to shop. I pulled out a Dell 4100 - with an Intel 815 chipset and ATI Rage 128 Pro graphics. I plan on installing this one as a true server - Apache,

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1136912779049191732006-01-10T10:23:00.000-06:002007-05-25T13:18:32.189-05:00

I was reminded of a little quirk of SQL recently, and I thought I would share it with my readers. I will be going over the SQL in a manner suitable for beginners, but the quirk that I refer to could catch an intermediate student of SQL. I will use some simple SQL to illustrate my point.-- 1. create temporary tableCREATE TABLE #test1(id int not null ,name varchar(50) not null) ;-- 2. declare

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1135876327112369702005-12-29T11:07:00.000-06:002005-12-29T11:12:07.123-06:00

If you've been thinking about trying out Ruby On Rails, you just have to check out theAppTrain project on Ruby Forge.There is a step-by-step guide to form generation as well. AppTrain is currently an alpha release, but it still looks quite handy. If you want to install it, use the quick-start. The AppTrain Project seems very committed to making it easy to build rails apps. First, they created

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1135036711355581212005-12-19T17:40:00.000-06:002005-12-19T17:58:31.366-06:00

About 2 years ago, I discovered that I could capture the results of an EXEC (@string_variable) statement. We had a server process that logged in as System Admin (SA), so it could perform a directory scan, bulk insert any files it found, and move those files to a "processed" subdirectory.This process can be used to run any DOS command, and inserts each line of text as a record into a table. We

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1134593115361693882005-12-14T14:39:00.000-06:002005-12-14T14:45:15.370-06:00

This may be considered a rant by some, but here goes.XML is a data structure which is easily parsed by 3rd party applications. This does not mean that the data can be easily interpreted as information, that is the responsibility of the XML data designer. Depending on your audience, you may have to spell out units (pounds, kilograms, minutes, seconds, etc.). Also, XML IS NOT FAST. Do not use

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1134497371598395372005-12-13T12:00:00.000-06:002005-12-13T12:09:31.606-06:00

I like Blogger.com, but it has a fair amount of blog-spam. I was searching on the keyword "blacksmith" today, and ran across a number of spammer pages, with javascript that removed the "Flag Content as Objectionable" button. If you are a programmer, you can easily flag these pages anyway, by viewing the HTML source, and searching for "flag". Look forvar ID = 1234567; and surf tohttp://

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1132093113712191042005-11-15T16:16:00.000-06:002005-11-15T16:32:51.970-06:00

Recently, a reader saw my fix for SQL Server booleans, and asked me a followup question: why does Rails display a yes/no selection instead of a checkbox? The short answer is look in {RUBY_HOME} /lib/ruby/gems/1.8 /gems/actionpack-1.10.2 /lib/action_view/helpers, but your path may vary depending on whether you are using gem, "edge rails", etc. Anyway, look in the file "active_record_helper.rb" for

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1129318743703866382005-11-14T18:00:00.000-06:002005-11-15T16:32:05.760-06:00

I finally helped some friends set up a data cube. It mostly involved creating a specialized view that had one numeric field (in our case - a count), a date field, and a number of categorical "dimension" fields. We used Seagate Info, now from Business Objects to actually work with the data. So no, I didn't write my own data cube explorer. The client couldn't afford that, and I didn't really want

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1129576567249140572005-10-17T14:05:00.000-05:002005-10-17T14:16:07.256-05:00

Here's a short story about total system design, and planning for failure.Last friday night, I was filling up my truck with gas, and I did the "pay at the pump" thing, using my credit card. After I filled my tank, the pump's display helpfully asked "Do you want a receipt? Yes / No". I usually say no, but I wanted to remember the price per gallon, so I said "Yes." Within 2 seconds, it said "

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1129314419431040812005-10-14T13:17:00.000-05:002005-10-14T13:26:59.430-05:00

Recently, I added support for SSPI (a connection that uses your local user account to authenticate you on the database server without supplying another password). To use an SSPI connection, do not supply a username or a password. sqlserver_adapter.rb: username = config[:username] ? config[:username].to_s : ''... # Use integrated security if config[:integrated] or (username == '' and

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1129313415748029702005-10-14T12:53:00.000-05:002005-12-08T18:11:53.550-06:00

I tried to use Ruby on Rails with Microsoft SQLServer recently, and I kept having problems with my "bit" fields. Looking on the web, the Rails repository claims to have fixed this, so I downloaded the new adapter from svn. It didn't work for me, so I started hacking. I really need to send this as a diff to the ActiveRecord maintainers, with test code to prove that it works. By the way, I am using

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1129227379377350932005-10-13T12:49:00.000-05:002005-10-13T13:16:19.393-05:00

Today, I tried to use string methods IndexOf and LastIndexOf to parse a directory entry string that I received across an SSH channel. I guess I should have read the method description closer, but I expected LastIndexOf to find the last space character in a string. The signature I wanted to use is:public int LastIndexOf(char, int, int); Reports the index position of the last occurrence of a

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1128776492885583802005-10-08T07:53:00.000-05:002005-10-08T08:11:33.400-05:00

For those of you still running Ubuntu Hoary, I have upgraded 2 computers to Breezy now, and I like the improvements just fine. There is a more up-to-date software selection, including PHP5, Ruby, Rails, Mono 1.8.x and MonoDevelop. If you want to pull from Packages.DotDeb.Org, you can even try out MySQL 5.x. I haven't done that yet, but I have found some instructions on the Ubuntu Forums that I

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1128724291648318942005-10-07T17:09:00.000-05:002005-10-14T15:11:59.700-05:00

Here are some links that I consider essential to working with Ruby on Rails.Ruby On RailsRubyForge.orgRuby Code SnippetsWhat is Ruby on RailsI have Rails running on Win32 and Ubuntu Linux (Breezy) so far, with MS SqlServer and MySQL as back-end databases. I just wish Ruby and Debian developers could come to a conclusion about package management between apt-get and gem. The debian team wants to

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1128639001006852392005-10-06T17:47:00.000-05:002005-10-07T17:43:12.693-05:00

They have an awesome collection of tips at ...BigBold.com SQL SnippetsI check their ruby and rails sections as well.(This page will be updated as I dig through my links.)

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1128380624661461732005-10-03T17:46:00.000-05:002005-10-03T18:03:44.666-05:00

I've used a spreadsheet for data entry on a number of occasions. It is quite handy! All it requires is a string concatenate function, and a bit of cleverness. This is great for "quick-n-dirty" data entry, or for searches. The comma separated list is usually used for "SELECT * FROM TBL WHERE X IN ( ## excel text goes here ## )".# to build a comma separated list=CONCATENATE("'", A2, "',")#

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1128379530829595252005-10-03T17:37:00.000-05:002005-10-03T17:45:30.833-05:00

Here's a handy way to create a comma-separated list from a small lookup table. I put the most interesting statement in bold.-- BEGIN CODE -- silence the "rows affected" message SET NOCOUNT ON ; -- create a temp table CREATE TABLE #temp(id int identity(1,1) not null, state varchar(50) not null); -- insert a few states for our example INSERT INTO #temp(state) values('AK'); INSERT INTO #temp(

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1128377457932549772005-10-03T16:59:00.000-05:002005-10-03T17:36:51.866-05:00

Here is a method of capturing the output of a command executed by the system shell. It is typically called from the SA account, and used to automate maintenance tasks. I do not recommend that you allow other users to send statements to a command shell.--- BEGIN CODEDECLARE @s varchar(255);-- our commandSET @s = 'DIR C:\TEMP\*.EXE' ;-- the temporary tableCREATE TABLE #tCmdOutput( output varchar(

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17407535.post-1128361862151811222005-10-03T12:43:00.000-05:002006-01-25T12:05:36.276-06:00

Hi! I am a computer programmer, working for the last few years with C# and Vb on .Net 1.x and Windows. At prior jobs, I have written Java, FoxPro for Windows, MFC, C, Visual Basic and Fortran. I have more experience with SQLServer 7 and 2000 than with any other database, writing huge stored procedures for invoicing, etc. Recently, I have started looking at Ruby and Rails, and I intend to comment

Roy Tatehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18358836279191006548noreply@blogger.com0