Thursday, February 21, 2013

MS SQL Server connection dialog location

In MS SQL Server 2008, my connection dialog has somehow moved to an inconvenient location. I have a portrait monitor and a landscape monitor. I no longer open SQL Server in the landscape monitor because then the connection dialog opens off screen.

I've tried everything I can think of:
  1. dragging the dialog box to center screen then opening a connection, then closing and reopening SQL Server
  2. dragging the dialog box then canceling the connection
  3. both of the above with SQL Server Maximized as well as Restored.
Somewhere in some config file there must be a setting that says "always open the connection dialog at this location". Where is that setting? Or is there another way to fix this?

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Flash shrinkage in Chrome

Someone saw something weird. On her computer, by going thru a few simple steps in a Flex app, she was able to make some pages look normal whereas others were shrunk teeny tiny.
I wasn't able to reproduce it on my machine.
Same OS.
Same version of Chrome.
Same Flash Player setup.

DIGRESSION
Chrome's use of Flash is special.
If you go to chrome://plugins, you see the two or more versions of Flash that Chrome uses- a Chrome version and your system's version (as well as maybe another- not important to the story).

I tried toggling between using one, then the other, then both.
No difference- everytime unreproducible on my machine; everytime reproducible on hers.
END DIGRESSION

I'd tried everything I could think of.
Then someone else suggested looking at the zoom setting in Chrome.
That was it.

I couldn't find this stupidly easy solution when doing a search for this problem online.
Hopefully this post will prevent others from having this problem.

Monday, November 28, 2011

Before suing / getting sued for libel...

Know this: the day is drawing near when bullies can no longer get away with intimidating scientifically minded truth seekers and skeptical speakers. If you're gonna try to use the courts to push us around, be sure you have the truth on your side, or you're gonna get your ass handed to you in the public forum by a calm, assiduous, and intellectually honest high school kid, rightfully and righteously so.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

How to find broken 2-way relationships

This is not advice on how to interact with people. I'm not the best person to ask for that.
===
I have a table to represent friendships. In this table there must be two rows for each friendship: one for User A->User B, and one for User B->User A.

There are some friendships where the second row is missing.
How do I find them?

Here are the pertinent tables and columns:
Table: User
Columns: userID

Table: UserFriend
Columns: fromUserID, toUserID
===
Solution:

select UF.*
from UserFriend UF with (nolock)
left outer join UserFriend UF2 with (nolock) on
UF.fromUserID = UF2.toUserID and
UF.toUserID = UF2.fromUserID
where UF2.fromUserID is null

Friday, March 11, 2011

ERROR[3332]: Connection to SMTP server test failed.

Going to the web UI for a Sharp3100N printer, Network Settings, Connection test, got this error:
ERROR[3332]: Connection to SMTP server test failed.

Solution:
Change the SMTP server address to
smtp.google.com
Port: 587
SSL: On
Authentication: put in your gmail username and password.

Assuming your printer can find the internet, that should do it.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Today, +/- n days

Searching on google and stackoverflow wasn't much help; also, "man date", "man cal", "man calendar", "man time", etc are limited in there accuracy; so here:

What is today's date plus n days, let's say 61 days*?:
date -v+61d
Answer:
2011-02-18
Calendar marked.

*: This is the question that came into my head after reading this.

While I applaud them for making a testable claim, I doubt this. The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones. But who knows, this time may different. Maybe some of us will have to start carrying around unmemorizable IPv6 addresses. Maybe we'll find a way to memorize them. Maybe IPv4 really was a gross underestimation of our capacity for connectedness (and maybe IPv6 isn't). We shall see; and thankfully soon.