Code-Fly

Shrinking SQL Server logs

mike — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:55:20 +0000

Here is a great little script that comes in handy when you need to shrink your transaction logs.Not really meant for production systems though!

USE MyDatabase GO Backup Log MyDatabase WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY GO DBCC SHRINKFILE (MyDatabase_Log, 1) GO

Making the switch to Dvorak

mike — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:40:57 +0000

I recently decided to switch over to the Dvorak keyboard layout. For those of you not familiar with it, this is an alternative to the standard qwerty layout which was designed for efficiency and ease of use. This is my second day, so this is short and sweet. I’ll keep you updated…

IE making server requests when changing cursor styles

mike — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 12:06:38 +0000

I found a really interesting (annoying) behavior the other day with the way internet explorer handles cursor styles.

We had just launched the website for a major metropolitan airport, and noticed an astonishing number of 404 requests to a non existent page entitled /somepath/normal .

Searching the code for “normal” only returned a couple of css hits… As it turns out, we had a table with the following code:

onmouseout="this.cursor.style='normal'" >
The first thing you may notice about the code above is that there is no css cursor style called ‘normal’, it should be ‘default’ or simply ”.

How would this result in a wackload of webhits you ask? It turns out that when Internet Explorer does not recognize the style name of a cursor style, it assumes that you are providing a url to an image to use.

Therefore, whenever a user waved their mouse over their flight search results on our search page, we had multiple requests sent to the server… one for each row in the table. You can imagine what this would mean for a busy site…

Cron on Windows using Cygwin

mike — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 16:43:23 +0000

One of the things I hate about Windows is their crappy Schedules Tasks utililty. It is really quite akward to set up a recurring task that runs more often than every day. Also, if you are in a corporate environment that makes you change your password monthly, all your schedules tasks stop working… Crap!What to do? Cygwin to the rescue!For those of you not familiar with Cygwin, it is a unix like environment for Windows which provides most of the GNU utilities running from a familiar bash shell (Familiar to *nix fans anyway).To set up Cron as a windows nt service, you need to have a cygwin installation with cron and cygrunsrv installed.

To install as a service:

cygrunsrv -I cron -p /usr/sbin/cron -a -D

To start the service:

net start cron

You may then edit your crontab with:

crontab -e

Happy Cronning!

New Site

mike — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 00:42:10 +0000

I'm creating a new site for my sister BuyBuyBonnies.com. She is opening a Gift Basket business in Bolton, Ontario. Go check it out.

Radiant

mike — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 11:00:28 +0000

I discovered a new rails based content management system today called Radiant.
It is a simple cms with basic features and a nice simple and elegant admin interface. I'm thinking of moving this site over to Radiant since I think it would be much more fun to hack around on that.
Also, in my search for an e-commerce platform… I am leaning towards rolling my own. Winter is coming on, so I will be spending more time indoors (read: more time to hack) and I would much prefer to hack on rails than php.

Zen Cart!

mike — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 09:50:51 +0000

I'm on the lookout for an e-commerce platform. This site is build upon Drupal, which has some nice e-commerce plugins and I have just created a test installation of Zen Cart to test that out.
My first impression of Zen Cart is that there are far too many options. The configuration page is a little intimidating, even for a techie such as myself. I think a non-technical person would be lost in the page.
I think I will keep looking, perhaps investigate drupal some more…

Creating a website

mike — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 02:14:43 +0000

I create websites for a living, yet I don't have a personal website of my own. So this site is here to remedy that.

I'm also evaluating a framework for developing websites which I may find more use for in the future. Its called Drupal http://drupal.org, a content management system written in php. I'm sure I will have more to say about it in the near future.