Chris May

Chances are I will never get time to do this, but still it would be nice.

Very funny:

http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/

"Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?

Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb."

Just a few of them:

Sometimes you might need/want to know what ports on your machine are being used.

If you try to start up a process listening on some port and it reports that the port is alread in use, what do you do?

The answer is to use this command:

netstat -a -n -o

This will show you all port activity including the PID so you can open up task manager and find which process is using which port.

Craigslist is good for laugh every now and then.

Usually it comes in the form of someone looking to hire someone to develop a site "Just like MySpace" with a budget of $500.  Or "I have a great way to run auctions online, a real Ebay killer.  Need you to implement my ideas.  Budget $1000 plus equity in the new company."  LOL.

But you can get a good laugh too by posting your own listing and reading the responses.  For example, I posted recently looking for someone with experience integrating business systems with quickbooks.  I wrote that, initially, I just wanted to sit with the person for a few hours to point me in the right direction, and to talk about some of the best practices for doing tihs type of work, but I might have them do some of the development work.

Here is one of the responses I got:

** CRAIGSLIST ADVISORY --- AVOID SCAMS BY DEALING LOCALLY
** Avoid: wiring money, cross-border deals, work-at-home
** Beware: cashier checks, money orders, escrow, shipping
** More Info: http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams.html

That is a hard program to automate, but I do have some experience with it when I worked for a large union construction company. You are better off not using it, I have some better methods of keeping your affairs in order using Excel. Call me if you want at XXX-XXX-XXXX for any questions. Marty

LOL

I was working on my father-in-laws laptop the other day and noticed that he was using up a lot of drive space.

I started poking around, but things were not adding up.  Of his 80 GB drive, about 30GB was unaccounted for.  I called a buddy of mine who was also running Vista to see if he had the same problem, and as it turned out, he was.

After some more investigation, it looks like this might not be a Vista issue, but is instead caused by IBM/Lenovo's Rescue and Recovery software.

I will have to confirm this later by actually fixing his computer, but I wanted to get this out there in case anyone else has a Lenovo laptop that is missing drive space.

Keywords:

Missing drive space, Missing disk space, Where is my drive space, Lenovo hard drive missing space.

I just noticed this while working on a windows forms .net application.

I made some changes to the underlying business objects that I had bound to a datagridview.  Things looked like they should at runtime, but when I opened up the designer, several of my columns were missing!

After some testing around, I realized that any column that was bound to a property on the object, where I had changed the name of the property, was no longer showing.

I figured it would fail the databind or something, but at least let me change the column details to get things working right!

So I added in fake empty property definitions to the business objects and presto: back come the columns.

After that, I was able to update the databinding field and remove my bogus properties.

What happens if you lose the RDL source file for your SQL Reporting report?  Or more accurately, what if your coworkers never check them into source control?

Well, you can get them out of the web interface of SSRS.

To do this:

1. Login into the /Reports of SSRS
2. Navigate to the report you want
3. Click the Properties tab
4. Then under Report Definition, click "Edit"
5. Save the RDL file to your local machine.