Outlook 2007 Search and RDS Ctrl-Alt-End

I don't know why this is so hard for me to remember, but maybe blogging about it will help.

Searching a date range in Outlook 2007 can be accomplished with the following syntax:
received d:(>=08/01/2008) received:(<=08/31/2008)

Sending a ctrl-alt-delete key combination to the machine you are remoting into is accomplished by pressing ctrl-alt-end.

Quiz me later!

Vista WS4 Bug

I ran into a bug in Vista this weekend. This is really the first major bug I've seen (if you don't count the EXTREME slowness in IE 8b with the Google toolbar loaded) and after hours of troubleshooting I was tempted to go buy another license of XP. The problem was only cropping up when I tried to create a folder, move a file or delete a file. Only. In any of those instances, the Explorer window involved would hang. The file operation would complete, but the prompt or window would stay unusable. If I killed the Explorer process and ran a new instance, then the computer ran just fine until the next rename, move or delete. Then I'd have to kill Explorer and kick off a new process. In short...this really stunk up a weekend where I had several hours of development that needed to be done.

I spent several hours revering to various restore points, but the problem always remained. It wasn't until early this morning that I found a forum post that indicated that Window Search might be the problem. In the case of the forum poster it was an upgrade that solved his problem. For me, I downgraded by uninstalling Windows Search 4. My initial test delete worked like a champ so I went to bed. I really hope that fixed the problem and I can get back to work this evening.

SQL: Replace strings for TEXT datatype

There might be a simpler way to do a replace of all occurences of a string in a SQL TEXT field, but this is the solution I came up with way back when. I needed it again tonight so I figured I might as well pin it to the interwebs.

-- UPDATE [TableToUpdate]
-- SET [Column] = cast(replace(cast([Column] as varchar(max)),'[StringToReplace]','[ReplacementText]') as text)
-- WHERE [Column] like '%[StringToReplace]%'


Google Chrome

Downloading and installing Google's new web browser, Chrome.

http://www.google.com/chrome/

Prius crisis averted. It's too much money and the Element looks brand new (to me) again after a weekend of cleaning.

I need an intervention, otherwise I might start payments on a Prius this weekend...

The New Doh!lar

Wouldn't it be cool if our money looked like this? When your currency looks this cool and can be modded in such a way, it's just all the more reason to support the switch to the Euro...
http://ping.fm/346rX

Fast Food Internet

Sitting in McD's doing client work instead of blinding people on the beach with my no-tan tan. Doh!!!

And now the explanation:

Well, long story very short (edited: not really)... I was waiting approval for a change on Friday, but it didn't come until after we were already on the road to OC. So... we were looking for open wireless connections on the way over but the lag on the iPhone's wireless selection screen was a bit too much for the speed I was driving. It was already after midnight by the time we arrived and my client's contract with another company bound them to posting content by midnight on the West coast.

So, I had to buy the wireless that OC provided to the condo and it was absolutely terrible. I actually had to leave the condo and sit on the front steps at 1:30 AM all the while watching my ever-draining battery indicator slip down to below 30%. My connection was so bad that I wasn't able to fully test the work on the production server before the laptop died and I had to crash.

The next morning I got up early and went in search of a better internet connection near an outlet and the waiter from breakfast said that McDonald's internet was the best on the 100+ side of OC. From my experience, I'd have to say he was correct. Also, since my client asked me to post a 20+ MB quicktime file to their homepage and I wasn't able to test the site under so poor conditions that I realized I needed to looking into some sort of streaming host. After a little research I discovered that for $30+ I could use QuickTime Pro to create a reference movie that allows QuickTime players to begin playing without having to download the entire .mov file. That's pretty much the definition of streaming. Another bonus of purchasing QTP was that I could finally resize the movie to make it fit on their home page properly.

Ping.fm is now pwning my blogs. We're officially one step closer to SkyNet.

My MySQL Experience

I've been doing a bit of development with MySQL for a client and I've had to do a bit of work under the hood since the original developer had made quite a mess of the database. One of the biggest issues/roadblocks I had to deal with was the fact that two database were using two different collations and were therefore not available for table joins. Not only that, but they were duplicating effort of managing two sets of records between the two databases. One table contained an important id value while the other didn't.

I don't have time now, but I will blog the solution that I had to implement in order to configure both databases (and their columns) to use the same collation. Perhaps someone who manages to find that post can direct me towards a better solution in the future as the one I came up with is slightly less than ideal due to the need to manually run each MySQL MODIFY statement. I know that there is a better solution.