Hi Everyone, Well, it’s nearly the end of the year 2011, and hasn’t it been a doozy? I don’t know about you, but my year has been haywire, to say the least. I started the year living in China, moved back to Australia, set up in Sydney and then finished […]
Yearly Archives: 2011
62 posts
This is almost too cool for school – a Physicist at a university in Denmark has put together a scale replica of a part of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider – the ATLAS detector. Apparently it took him 81 hours to recreate a 1:50 scale model of the detector, using Lego […]
What is FILESTREAM? Much data is unstructured, such as text documents, images, and videos. This unstructured data is often stored outside the database, separate from its structured data. This separation can cause data management complexities. Or, if the data is associated with structured storage, the file streaming capabilities and performance […]
I’m introducing a new category now – “Tech Meme” – which is going to be used more frequently for short, pithy articles usually highlighting something absurd, such as the following: I was trying to install Server Virtualization templates for Visio, when I was prompted for PIA assemblies: In a funny […]
It’s been a tough week for me from a hardware and infrastructure perspective. Late Thursday night, I lost one of the two desktop machines I own which still functioned. It had been on its way out for a while in theory, since somehow the CPU fan docking clamps were broken […]
Hi Everyone, Well, I’ve been waiting three weeks for a DSL connection and it isn’t happening anytime soon. In the interim, I’ve finally had enough of waiting and went and picked up a Telstra 4G modem, and I’m back online. Sorry to those folks who added comment which were awaiting […]
Hi All, A bit of an update: I’ve relocated to the magical capital, Canberra (my home town), as my wife and I are expecting our first child early in 2012. Regular blogging will resume once home Internet is connected! Cheers (and happy holidays), /R
Recently, I decided that I need to begin a new learning exercise. This time around, I’ve chosen Apache Hadoop, partly because of the weird name, and partly because of how it is defined. To add clarity, here’s the official definition from the Apache site: What Is Apache Hadoop? The Apache […]
There are times when you want to get a little creative about your investigative work when it comes to SQL Server. In this case, this is a very short article highlighting some efficiencies in locating information about specific programmatic resources within a database. If you haven’t used the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views […]
Recently I started to use this nifty application called GPS Log on my brand spanking new Apple iPhone 4S. I know what you are thinking: WTF is Rob using an iPhone for? Well, after years and years of failed promises from Microsoft to deliver a stable, functioning mobile phone* I’ve […]
Introduction If you have a copy of Visual Studio 2010 Premium or Ultimate, you’ll likely have a menu in your Integrated Development Environment (IDE) called “Analyze”. Chances are, you might not have investigated the true potential of the profiling tools in VS 2010. This article will demonstrate usage of some […]
Hi All. I’m debating a new article. I’m currently debating whether to spend some time documenting an interesting solution to a fairly esoteric scenario. I’m not sure if it is worth the investment (in my time), so I’m going to throw it open to the community. Give me feedback – […]
Recently I came across this little gem of a registry change – allowing a custom logon screen background, using OEM registry keys. Essentially, you simply have to set a specific key, then create a folder under the Windows directory, and then insert a JPG picture of your choosing. It’s pretty […]
Part 1 Setting up TFS Azure Part 2 Configuring Visual Studio to use TFS Azure Part 3 Registering Team Build controllers for TFS Azure Part 4 Builds in the Cloud Introduction Continuing from Part 2, now that we have the essentials set up, we’ll take a look at how to […]