oneidía

Open Source on Closed Source. Probably a bad idea from the start. Installing Drupal hearkened back to the old days of computing. Way too much jargon and far too little push-a-button-and-it-works. But I'm sold on the Drupal. If I wasn't, I wouldn't have made it through the past two hours trying to install it (I'm tempted to say her here, which suggests a certain love-hate relationship is already evolving). Drupal installations should be straight forward. Lullbot manages the whole install in one five minute video that I would highly recommend. My installation took significantly longer. LESSONS LEARNED GOTCHA #1 MySQL - At least in my instance the directions for setting permissions given in INSTALL.mySQL.txt were not sufficient to allow the database creation scripts to run. Command provided in INSTALL.mysql.txt: GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, LOCK TABLES ON databasename.* TO 'username'@'localh...

Sometimes the old ways were a lot simpler. In DOS and UNIX printing a file directory was as simple as "DIR". And if you wanted to be really fancy you could add a couple characters to switch the listing format. DIR command line switches: /B Uses bare format (no heading information or summary) /L Forces lowercase display of file names /O List by files in sorted order: N by name (alphabetical) S by size (smallest first) E by extension (alphabetical) D by date/time (oldest first) G group directories first - using this prefix reverses the sort order /P Pauses after each screenful of information /S Lists files in the specified directory and all subdirectories /W Uses wide list format /X Displays 8.3 versions of long file names And if you wanted to put this list in a text file to save, copy, paste or print it was as simple as: dir /b /s > DirectoryListing.txt Somewhere in the ease of use of folders and drag and drop what was simple became hard. In DOS and UNIX this was all eas...

It is often convenient to house your master tables in a separate database from application specific databases so that primary keys are copasetic and multiple databases have access to the same lookups. Common examples would include employees, counties, regions and other lookup tables. Once these tables are in a separate database however it is no longer possible to simply drag-and-drop a relationship between them to maintain referential integrity. Here's a Solution For this example we'll use an Observation table, tied to a master list of Sex, that's right, Sex (we could call it Gender to be all PC, but these are animals, not Pat in the Personnel Department.) Step 1: We create a new view called PIC_Sex in our Application Database by querying the table PIC_Sex in our Master Database: CREATE VIEW dbo.PIC_Sex AS SELECT SexID, Sex, Rank FROM Master.dbo.PIC_Sex ORDER BY Rank Yes, that's right, Male and Female! Slugs are awesome . Step 2: We create a new user...

The best illustration of SQL Joins I've stumbled across: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000976.html

ArcGIS supports transparency*. &#42 Some restrictions apply. But if you really want to do anything with transparency you quickly learn that the functionality available is completely inadequate. I work with a number of layers that rather than resembling a stain glass window with neatly segmented regions, come closer to resembling the outcome of tossing said window down a flight of stairs. The smashed bits all laying in a pile overlapping each other sometimes seven or eight layers deep. But how to represent this mess? In ArcGIS you really can't because ArcGIS only draws the top most layer. Take a yellow piece of stained glass and drop it on top of a blue one and in the overlap you don't get green, but blue. Even when you set transparency! The only way to complete our Glad bag analogy is to make two independent layers with transparency applied. Not bad when there's only two. But what if there's 582? That would take a while. And what if the layer with 582 is con...

I abhor Windows Media Player. I've been looking for a solid non-proprietary video player for some time. VLC is good, but could use some work on the user interface. Today I downloaded Democracy Player , a free, open source, and built by a non-profit organization with the goal of keeping internet video from being dominated by any one source. Here's there brief run down of why you should consider Democracy Player : 1. Can't play a video? Try us. Play virtually any video-- Quicktime, WMV, MPEG, AVI, XVID, and more. Browse your collection, make playlists, stay organized. 2. Get Internet TV Shows Subscribe to any video RSS feed, podcast, or video blog. Explore over 1,000 free channels with the built-in Channel Guide. 3. Search YouTube Download and save videos from YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video, and other sites. 4. High Definition and Fullscreen Your computer screen is a high-def display. Watch free HD videos in gorgeous fullscreen. 5. BitTorrent Animal Easily download any ...

In at least some applications I think the answer is yes. The animation control included with the ASP.Net AJAX Control Toolkit is pretty impressive. Animate OnMouseOver, OnMouseOut, OnClick, OnDoubleClick and more. Transition effects, movement, visibility screening and the whole thing is controlled by an XML document. Here's a 20 minute video (unfortunately only available in .wmv) on using the Animation Control packaged with the Toolkit. I'm going to try using it in place of Flash in my next application.