That's Cool!

Red Gate SQL Dependency Tracker 2

David Totzke — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:52:34 GMT

In a word – wonderful.

I’m doing some work on a project where somebody had a bit of a fetish for nested views. I’m not talking about one view inside another. I’m talking about one view that joins a couple of other views that each join to other views as well.

I needed to add a value to the output of the outer-most view and before I added ~another~ join I wanted to know if the table in question was already joined in one of the nested views. Drilling down into them would have taken time. I remembered that I had SQL Dependency Tracker installed on my machine so I loaded up the database.

It was very fast. In just a few seconds the entire database was mapped and I was looking at the view in question. There is a great panel (Dependencies) that shows what the selected object uses as well as what it is used by in a tree view. I just drilled down into the ~uses~ tree and in seconds I had my answer. The table was already joined so all I had to do was bubble up the column that I needed at the top.

The various views of your database objects and how they relate to each other are very cool as well. There are five different layouts available:

Balloon Tree groups objects together in balloon-like clusters
This is a fast layout, which is good for grouping related objects together. It is suitable for diagrams that contain a large number of objects.
Hierarchic organizes the objects in a hierarchical structure, from top to bottom
Orthogonal places objects so that the connections between the objects are straight lines that are as close to vertical and horizontal as possible
The objects form small clusters. This is ideal for diagrams that contain a small number of objects.
Smart Organic links objects into sets of clouds or lattices
This layout is good for grouping related objects together.
Circular lays the objects out to form the boundaries of circles, with connections that cross the centre of the circle

I have a suspicion that this is done in WPF as the animation of the layouts is very fast and smooth. Zooming is also very smooth and it’s obvious that the display is vector based as everything looks great at any zoom level.

All in all, this saved me a bunch of time and hassle and allowed me to accomplish my task in a minimal amount of time.

Dave
Just because I can…

Technorati Tags: SQL Server,Red Gate,SQL Dependency Tracker

Change Around The World – Stand By Me

David Totzke — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:40:10 GMT

You know what? There just might be hope for us yet.

Playing For Change | Song Around The World "Stand By Me" from Concord Music Group on Vimeo

Simply perfect.

Dave
Just because I can…

(h/t Kung Fu Monkey)

Windows Live Writer

David Totzke — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 06:27:14 GMT

Ok, now that's cool.

I've been meaning to try out Windows Live Writer for making blog posts because one of the things that stops me from posting very much is that it's a bit of a pain. The editors that are embedded in blog software such as Subtext, a fork of the popular .Text software, are surprisingly good but can only take you so far. Things like inserting a picture can be a real pain and I always find myself switching to the source view to tweak things here and there.

I fired up the program after installing it and a wizard started up. I picked the option for an existing blog, gave it the URL of my blog, my username, and my password and then it did everything else all by itself! You mileage may vary depending on whether or not you blogging platform supports the APIs for which Live Writer is looking. (or Live Writer supports your blogging platform of choice - I'm not certain as to which way around this works)

Like I said, that's frickin' cool.

I think that the most attractive feature for me is the ability to save a draft of the post and come back to it later. I know that with Subtext I can save a post as unpublished and come back to it but that still requires me to be online. For me, the experience of a rich desktop program is just far superior to a similar experience that is web-based.

Raise your hand if you do this:

Write your post
Copy the text (if I can, I copy the actual HTML Source, just in case)
Paste it into Notepad or other suitable program
Submit your post

And why do we do this? Because we've all been burned when something goes wrong with the post and hitting the back button returns us to a blank form. Here in Live Writer I simply hit the Save Draft button and I have a nice safe local copy.

Often times when composing a post you want to be sure that it's going to render properly and Subtext doesn't have the facility to preview a post. (at least not that I can find) You can save it unpublished so that the public can't see it but that means that neither can you. All that remains is to publish your post unfinished and then have a look at it and then Shower, Rinse, Repeat. Annoying. You favourite (OMG it knows I'm Canadian!) Blog aggregator will likely detect these multiple edits and do something weird as well. This is where I discover the View menu.

In addition to the HTML Code view there is also a Web Layout view and a Web Preview. Web Preview shows me my post as it would appear on the actual site! That is super cool.

The final feature that is immediately noticeable is the [Set categories] area at the bottom of the UI just above the status bar. Clicking here shows me a list of the blog categories that it has pulled down from my blog. They're my categories. Let's see, there's "Ravings of a Lunatic". Definitely need to check that one.

Now, all of this assumes that when I finally get around to hitting the Publish button that the post actually makes it unscathed onto my blog. Given how smooth the experience has been thus far, confidence is high.

Time to Point Your Toes; We're Going In Deep.

Dave
Just because I can...

[UPDATE: Holy Crap It Worked!!]

D-Series Laser 917 Replica

David Totzke — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 03:43:36 GMT

This is crazy cool. Of course, the WAF on this is certainly approaching zero but if you're looking for a sports car to facilitate your mid-life crisis this may be just the ticket.

Dave
Just because I can...

Segway Centaur - Ummm...two please.

David Totzke — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 12:37:00 GMT

While Dean Kamen's Segway didn't come close to living up to the hype that was generated prior to its release, the design engineers over there may be onto something with the Centaur. The Segway balancing technology allows you to “pop a wheelie“ for as long as the batteries hold out and you can even steer while doing it.

The biggest advantage IMHO? You won't look stupid riding it. This one might actually sell.

Check out this article over on Popular Science for the details. Tres cool. N'es pas?

Dave
Just because I can...