Tuesday, March 11, 2008

BlueDragon goes Open Source

Yesterday, Vince from New Atlanta announced on his blog that they are releasing BlueDragon/J2EE as open source. You can read more details from the faq but the gist of it is that it's a fully functional CFML engine that you can use for commercial situations for free (with limitations as far as distribution). This is great news for the CF community. Maybe this will breathe new life into CFEverywhere type applications.

Monday, November 05, 2007

It's just like being there

If you are at all computer savvy, you are probably often asked by those not so savvy to help out with their computer problems. It can be quite frustrating trying to troubleshoot someone's system over the phone. Trying to have them navigate the start menu is hard enough. If you need them to open a command window, fuggetabowtit! It's a lot easier if you can just remotely access their computer to figure out what's going on and show them how to fix it.

I recently came across a very nice/easy-to-use screen sharing application called CrossLoop. No registration required. The party that needs help runs the program and gets a connection code. They give that to the helper and he uses that code to join their session and that's it. No muss no fuss. The best this is that it's free. I'll definitely be using this again.

Some other options to consider:
* Yugma.com - looks similar to WebEx but free.

* Copilot.com - similar to CrossLoop but not free. Also developed by Joel so you know it's very robust.

* Logmein.com - this is good when you need to access a system without someone on the other end, i.e. you want to access your home computer when you are not home. They offer free as well as paid services.

* DimDim.com - supposedly the next WebEx killer. Still in beta but looks very promising.

Friday, June 23, 2006

Deploy multiple db scripts to multiple servers

After doing some code cleanup on some stored procedures, I needed a efficient way to deploy the scripts to multiple servers/databases. I had 20 different scripts and though that is not a huge amount I still wasn't looking forward to opening each file in Query Analyzer and executing for each server. Google saves the day again and led me to a DOS command that fit the bill perfectly. (Note that if you run the command from within a .bat file you should specify %%variable instead of %variable)

Monday, June 05, 2006

Great (free) backup service

PC Magazine just featured this new backup service. They give you 2GB of backup for free. The interface is clean and simple and there are no ads or popups. If you're looking for a backup solution you should definately check out Mozy backup.

Sunday, June 04, 2006

Free data models! Get yer free data models here!

This resource was mentioned the other day on the CFCDev list. It may come in handy some day so I'm posting here for future reference. Check out the Free Library of Data Models.

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

More Intelligent Backup and Restore for SQL Server 2005

Backing up and restoring databases is easy enough using Enterprise Manager or Management Studio, but sometimes you need to script these kinds of jobs. A while back I came across a More Intelligent Backup and Restore and it made life a lot easier. Unfortunately, the scripts aren't compatible on SQL Server 2005 due to some changes to schemas and a couple of system stored procedures. It wasn't difficult to modify the scripts to work on SQL Server 2005 so here you go.
Download the files here.

Friday, March 10, 2006

Save Stored Procedures to Text Files

The other day I was looking for a way to save all the stored procedures in a database to text files. This would allow me to check in the SPs to source control as well as compare differences of the SPs from different database enviroments. I found some VBScript code that does the job at SQL Server Central.