Viewing by month: April 2008

Install a new SQL Server Instance from Command Prompt

I was having some issues doing a standard install of SQL Server 2005 SP2 (Standard). No matter what I did, the install complained about versioning issues. I knew you could blindly run a full install from command promt but I had never needed/wanted to. Out of desperation I decided to give the install a try from command the prompt and had great succcess.

setup.exe /qb INSTANCENAME=EGPS ADDLOCAL=SQL_Engine SAPWD=***** AGTACCOUNT=ComputerName\Services AGTPASSWORD=***** SQLACCOUNT=ComputerName\Services SQLPASSWORD=***** SQLAUTOSTART=1 SECURITYMODE=SQL

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0 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 11:55 PM - Categories: SQL | Windows XP | Development

Review: 199 Lives (The Travis Pastrana Movie)

Last night my girlfriend and I jumped on the ZX10 to see the one and only local theater showing of the movie: 199 Lives. The movie is really more like an extended version of Nitro Circus with more commentary and story line. It did a fantastic job of telling a story about a kid who has persevered through a lot, from injuries (100's) to night terrors. Melissa, who knew nothing about him, said that it "did a great job of telling her his story and [the movie] really showed a lot of emotion".

Even though I thought I knew a lot about PT already being a huge fan of the young phenom myself, I learned even more. Lots of the footage was stuff I had seen in the past, but I still say it was worth the $20 bucks for a night out. My only big complaint was some of the footage quality. I'm sure most people will see this on their home TV in which case it will look fantastic, but on a movie theater screen it was definetly pushing the limit of acceptabe for a full prive movie entry.

"If you take Evel Knievel's life and multiply it by 10, you'll get Travis Pastrana's" -La Times

Read more to view the trailer

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0 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 11:55 PM - Categories: Motorcycles | Racing | Reviews

How to find a table based on a column name

I've been asked how to do this about a dozen times by developers who were not very entrenched with SQL and I've had to do it my self a handful of times.

I know the column name (or at least part of it) but I have no idea what table in this massive DB it lives in; how do I find it?

A simple query will net you the results you need:

SELECT
    so.name AS [Table], sc.name AS [Column],
    so.xType AS [Table Type], st.name AS [Data Type]
FROM dbo.syscolumns AS sc
    LEFT JOIN dbo.sysobjects AS so
        ON so.id = sc.id
    LEFT JOIN dbo.systypes AS st
        ON st.xtype = sc.xType
WHERE sc.name LIKE '%Partial Column Name Here%'
ORDER BY so.xType, so.name, sc.name

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0 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 11:31 AM - Categories: Debugging | SQL | Development

ColdFusion to Confluence Gateway/API

I needed to write some import scripts to move data from a dozen or so seperate simple apps into a  Confluence Site [Atlassian]. The Confluence SOAP API is actualy very nice. My only major complaint so far is that there is no way to find out what the current version of a file is, aside from looping from version 1 - * until you get an error.

I wanted to write a single wrapper that would maintain my connection and handle some translation into some more friendly functions, so I wrote this API Interface. I didn't include a lot of commentary, although in a future release I will make sure to add more. That said, it should all be fairly self explanatory.

Download ColdFusion to Confluence Gateway/API

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0 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 11:07 AM - Categories: ColdFusion | Confluence | Development

Javascript Date Picker using YUI

In a recent project I had the need to have multiple objects tied a single date picker pop-up. What I was really going for was a DIV field to show the date so it was true read only and to stuff the value into a hidden text field as well.

I needed to use it in multiple places and it needed to be flexible for future uses, so I came up with this quick package YAHOO.EGPS.Utils.DatePicker. It allows you to choose multiple targets (for the resulted value) and multipletriggers that will make the date-picker "pop-up".

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0 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 6:18 AM - Categories: Development | YUI | JavaScript

Now Mango Powered

Following in the footsteps and recomendation of Andrew Powell I've started to use Mango Blog (I even stole the title from his blog). Months ago I started having some odd issues with my HostMySite account and MachBlog. It worked fine until they upgraded my server and then all of a sudden nothing using ColdSpring would init correctly. I don't really have a good reason for not trying MachBlog again other than for the reason that I get bored and like to try new things a lot.

But now I'm back blogging and slowly [manually] migrating over old posts, but unfortunetly I've lost almost all my relevent ColdFusion/Flex/AJAX content.

I have run into multiple NULL Pointer errors with Mango Blog so far, and will in the future start to document them but usualy a reload of the page clears the problem right up. The interface is certainly nice and clean and looks more polished than my previous experiences with other CF blog packages; so KUDOS to the developer(s).

2 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 7:15 AM - Categories: Development | General News | Mango Blog

Colin Powell: Not Sure Who To Vote For?

I don't care what your political affiliation is. How can any person who is informed and considers themselves principled not know who to vote for in a race that has 3 very different candidates.

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0 comments - Posted by Russell Brown at 6:51 AM - Categories: Politics