Here are some stuff I want for my trip to Brazil…

Camera - Canon PowerShot A720 IS

MP3 Player - Creative Zen (16GB)

2nd Laptop / Toy - Asus Eee PC 8G

Want!

I have been thinking of creating an AJAX book reading application - mostly to teach myself some good AJAX design principles. These are some of the requirements I want for this project:

• It should even work when JavaScript is turned off. This is mostly for search engines. Search engines can’t index a site when the content is delivered via JavaScript. Also, Firefox + NoScript is getting very popular nowadays. Lots of people turn JavaScript off, either because they don’t trust it or they just don’t like it. I would like to cater for these people too.
• If a user copies and pastes the URL and sends it to his friend, that friend must see exactly the same as what the first user saw. This shouldn’t be a problem if I implement my first design requirement, above, correctly.
• The browser’s back button must work. Example: When a user turns a page in the book and then clicks on the browser’s back button, they must return to the page they were just reading.
• The AJAX engine must handle multiple AJAX requests with ease. I will probably get an AJAX toolkit for this. No need to reinvent the wheel.
• It must work on all major browsers - Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE.

I’m sure there are other requirements, but those are the only ones I can think of at the moment.

I’ve got some research to do. I’ll be sure to post my findings.

It took me the whole day to troubleshoot the error in the heading.

A client contacted me, yesterday, complaining that he can’t connect remotely to SQL Server 2005 Integration Services. The important word being remotely. When he tries to connect to Integration Services locally, it works. He had this problem with all remote servers.

I thought there was something wrong with his access privileges, so I followed the steps in this article: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa337083.aspx. Nope. Still didn’t work.

So I followed the steps in this article: http://mohansmindstorms.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!69AE1BEA50F1D0E7!213.entry?action=post&wa=wsignin1.0. Nope.

By now I was pretty sure that there was some setting wrong on the client’s PC. The fact that I also could not connect remotely to Integration Services from his PC (even though I could from my PC) supported this claim.

So, using all the knowledge I’ve gained through the day from the hundreds of googles I did, I started comparing settings on my PC with the client’s PC. The problem? One little tick box that wasn’t ticked:

The screen, above, can be found here: Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Component Services -> Expand Component Services -> Expand Computers -> Right Click on My Computer -> Properties -> Default Properties.

After ticking the ‘Enable Distributed COM on this computer’ tick box, click ‘OK’ and restart the computer.

And so, after a whole day of googling, it was only one tick box that needed a tick. 7 hours of my life wasted.

The wait is over!

I’ve found out today that I am officially going to São Paulo, Brazil. Although this wasn’t my first choice of places where I would like to have gone, I am actually getting quite excited. There is just something exotic about Brazil. I think it’s going to be a blast!

Now all I have to do is learn to speak Portuguese.

I’ll only be able to watch the first 3 games Hopefully, if I go to London, I’ll be able to watch the other games on the television there. No hope of that happening if I go to Hong Kong or São Paulo, though.

Go Lions!

As you might or might not have known, I will be leaving the country for 3 months, soon. My company has decided to send me to one of three places. I will either be going to rainy London, sunny São Paulo or I-don’t-really-know-what-the-weather-is-like Hong Kong.

One of those three… I don’t know which one… And it’s all pretty much out of my hands…

The suspense is killing me! Just tell me already!

As promised a few days back, here it is!

I have started work on my old site, www.ninty.co.za, again. It used to be a blog about Nintendo and the South African Nintendo community. But it died, because:

1. I started working and didn’t have time to look for Nintendo news every day; and
2. I decided to move web hosts

Well, it’s back! Well, almost… And it’s not a blog any more. It’s now just a forum, because it seems the SA gaming community love their forums Also, a forum is good, ’cause then I don’t need to update it every single day to keep everyone happy.

You will also notice the new section in the sidebar called ‘My Websites’. Currently, it only has ninty.co.za listed there, but I want to expand that. With my new web host I have lots of hard drive space and lots of monthly bandwidth to use! Stay tuned!

Here’s a poem I wrote in school. I wrote quite a few. I will post the others at a later stage.

E=mc²-volution

Like savage animals they were: impure.
Hairy hunters that strived to survive.
Minds darkenened by the thought to endure,
until one day a flame sparked it alive -
shadows shifted…

Like scared children some were: immature.
Fear faltered thinking - the world was flat;
sailors scared stiff of some sea creature;
where only unwise were scared of the cat.
sands slipped…

Like active ants people were: acceleration.
Electricity, out of nowhere, ignited a fuse -
chained cataclysms caused creation,
which opened the way for abuse…
clocks counted…

Like savage animals we are: destruction.
Wars across the earth - millions of lives wasted.
Typhoons of total termination, radiation.
What’s the next phase of evolution… getting cremated?
countdown commencing

I needed to construct a dynamic HTML document using Transact-SQL the other day. I googled a bit and found that the easiest way to write to a text file in Transact-SQL is to call the command prompt echo command. The problem, though, was that it’s not possible to echo the ‘<’ and ‘>’ characters with the echo command. Well, that’s not 100% true. To be more precise, it’s not possible to do something like the following:

echo <b>Hello World</b> > hello.html

Command prompt doesn’t like you using the ‘<’ and ‘>’ characters, because it uses these characters to redirect the standard input and output to other sources (like our hello.html file in the example, above).

This is how to make it work:

echo ^<b^>Hello World^</b^> > hello.html

Wasn’t that easy? Just use the ‘^’ escape character in front of the ‘<’ and ‘>’ characters when echoing in the command prompt. Obviously, we don’t want to escape the last ‘>’ character, because we want to send our string, outputted by echo, to hello.html.

And this is how it’ll look in Transact-SQL:

exec master..xp_cmdshell 'echo ^<b^>Hello World^</b^> > hello.html'

Easy.

As a final note, the ‘^’ escape character only works in the command prompt of the Windows NT family of operating systems.