the frig blig

As this article in The Register reports today.

Posted my first app for Mac OS X on the Bamboo utilities page — a simple stopwatch. It was good practice learning the Mac software development tools: xcode, objective C, and the NS API. Once I discovered there was no built-in stopwatch applet, it was a natural. [I won’t be surprised if there’s a similar sample project in some tutorial somewhere. But I did this one all by myself — the best way to learn.]

I added a link to josekipedia on the blig’s go links page. I discovered this site a few months ago and promptly forgot about it. Very cool wiki for josekis — not only are variations numbered but they’re also color-coded (green=good, red=bad) and displayed on a nice interactive goban. And since it’s a wiki, you can make it better and more comprehensive — hooray!

I needed to pass yesterday’s date to a Windows program from the command line in a scheduled job, so I wrote yesterday to generate yesterday’s date and output it to the command line. I call it from a .cmd script which sticks it into an environment variable which I then pass to the app. Simple, straightforward, slightly stupid, sweet.

I was down to only 5G freespace on my 80G iPod Video (confession: I’m a hopeless music addict). Google regaled me with visions of a 240G replacement drive and half a dozen websites with transplant instructions. I bit and ordered one. It was delivered in a little over a week. Surgery was performed on my kitchen table. 1. Prep
2. Opening the case
3. An accident about to happen (see the brown clip?)
4. Oh, that’s how they cram it in there
5. Preparing to remove the old drive
6. But they look the same size!

The transplant was a success, but not without a few touchy moments… the first was during reassembly when I couldn’t secure the battery cable in its socket…and noticed the retainer clip was missing…luckily I found it on the floor and got it back on with tweezers!

The second was after installing the Rockbox bootloader when the iPod crashed at boot. Every time. It turns out the default maximum sector size is hardcoded in the Rockbox bootloader at 1024 bytes. The replacement drive uses 4096-byte sectors. I ended up downloading the Rockbox source, modifying the max sector size, rebuilding it and reinstalling it. Hey, now iPod boots again!

And now I have three times the storage capacity as before — sweet!

New Scientist posts First black hole for light created on Earth but if you read the article you learn that the black hole built by Tie Jun Cui and Qiang Cheng at Southeast University in Nanjing works on microwaves, not light waves. “I expect that our demonstration of the optical black hole will be available by the end of 2009,” Cui is quoted as saying in the article.

Based on research published earlier this year by Evgenii Narimanov and Alexander Kildishev of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, this is a fascinating development of unexpected new technology. Who knew you don’t need massive gravitational fields to create black holes?

It’s logical: examine the security vulnerabilities of household robots. That’s what these University of Washington computer science and engineering students did: Household Robot Security FAQ.

Brings a whole new meaning to ‘bot nets’…

This tip is for Windoze notepad users — clearly it’s trivial to replace spaces with tabs using sed or perl in linux. But notepad — one of the simplest and most useful Windows utilities from day one — does not understand regular expressions. And typing the tab key moves the cursor to the next dialog control, rather than entering a tab character at the cursor position. Sad!

The solution is to download notepadre by Ben Hanson. This is a nifty notepad clone with a few extra goodies, the main one being support for regular expressions (’re’). So not only can you replace spaces with tabs, but you can perform all sorts of amazing feats of pattern replacement limited only by your imagination.

I put a one-line batch file called np.cmd in my PC’s PATH which starts notepadre with the (optionally) specified filename:

start "" notepadre %1 %2

And he gives you the source code for free — thanks Ben!

Hello fellow sqlserver admins!

My question for today is: which is the better method for copying a simple table from one database to another on another server — an SSIS package or a stored procedure?

Please discuss the pros and cons.

My first impression is that SSIS is overkill for this task but I’m having a hard time deciding.

open myFolder

Honestly, what could be easier?

I’ve been searching for this command — the equivalent of Windoze “explorer /e,myFolder” ever since I got a Mac. I just figured it had to be some undocumented arg you passed to Finder. Wrong!

Looking forward to a great night’s sleep.