Good grief, Samsung—this TV has power and Wi-Fi 24/7, but you have to wait to install updates when I want to watch something? Why?!?!?
This morning’s silly dad song: 🎶 “Banana ooo na na, half of my breakfast is banana ooo na na…” 🎶
Bunny Friend
Our bunny friend came out to play.
iOS 11.3 Beta 2 says battery capacity is at 87%, but it has shut down due to insufficient juice and is being throttled. So what—I’m just stuck? Even if I’d gladly pay $29 for a replacement? D’oh!
Did they just say “Azire Solution Showcase?” In an industry obsessed with TLAs, that was probably a VBI.
I just figured out that the Scroll Lock key actually does something on Windows! Made me want to scream and burn Excel to the ground, but hey—I learned something new today!
Why We Encrypt
Every time you use encryption, you’re protecting someone who needs to use it to stay alive.
This is the clearest statement I’ve seen of the case for ubiquitous, on-by-default encryption.
UK government quietly rewrites hacking laws to give GCHQ immunity
The UK government has quietly passed new legislation that exempts GCHQ, police, and other intelligence officers from prosecution for hacking into computers and mobile phones.
I’m Terrified Right Now
“I want this horrible, sick feeling because it means I care about what I’m doing. It means I understand that I can really screw this up, and I really don’t want to. It means I care enough to make sure I have every detail right… This gut-wrenching sick feeling that I have right now, means I am growing in some new way and doing something new and potentially amazing … and potentially terrifying and horrible, too.”
You do not need permission
You do not need permission to do the right thing. No one can give you permission to do the wrong thing.
The Reward For Good Work
For me, my work and my reputation are tied together. I’m not known for social graces, being easy to work with, or having the best bed-side manner when helping others. But I am known for quality work, for pushing others to do better, and for clearing a path on which others can travel. Sometimes my technical ability makes up for my lack of empathy.
My experience exactly. I would add that as my reputation grows, I find that I get more interesting work.
SSIS – Global replace for all columns using a script component
This saved me a bunch of time—thanks, Waheed!
Sometimes while in the data flow you need to apply the same function on all the columns in the data flow or all columns have a specific data type, for example:
- Remove all commas and new lines from text columns before exporting them to a CSV file.
- Replace text “Null” with Null value when loading data from an excel file that has nulls as text in it.
- Check for each column if has a null value and replace it with a default value based on the data type.
- Convert all strings to upper or lower case. etc…
The easiest way to do this is to add a script component then use the approach below, here i’m converting all strings to upper case.
few notes about the code above:
- i’m skipping all columns with name ends with “_isnull” as these columns just to indicate if the original column has a null…
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How a Microwave Should Work
I have strong opinions about the proper UI design for a microwave oven:
The number buttons should just be numbers. Pressing the 2 button should not immediately start cooking for 2 minutes. If I want 2 minutes, I’ll hit 2-0-0-Start. I should not have to find a Time Cook button, or anything like that, before I can heat my food. Continue reading “How a Microwave Should Work”
One in a million is next Tuesday
What I Want From Tech Support
I’ve been working with a software vendor on the same support case for 15 days now, and it’s driving me crazy. It would be unprofessional to rag on the vendor here, but I will share a few thoughts on what I want from tech support that I consistently don’t get. Continue reading “What I Want From Tech Support”
Markdown Test
I just had a terrible thought: what if WordPress lets you post in Markdown but converts it immediately to HTML and doesn’t preserve the original Markdown source. That would be a terrible shame. I’ll find out in a minute…
Oh, good—it does preserve the Markdown source. What a relief!
Write (More) Effortlessly With Markdown
I’m so happy they finally added Markdown to wordpress.com!!! Now we need it (natively) in the self-hosted (.org) version…
Markdown has arrived on WordPress.com! Some of you may respond with “Finally!” Others might be asking, “what’s that?” Markdown is a quick way to add formatted text without writing out any HTML.
Let’s take a closer look. Here is an example of how Markdown looks while editing a post:
This is how that same example looks in the Reddle theme after it’s converted to HTML:
Writing with Markdown
Markdown lets you compose links, lists, and other styles using regular characters and punctuation marks. If you want a quick, easy way to write and edit rich text without having to take your hands off the keyboard or learn a lot of complicated codes and shortcuts, then Markdown might be right for you.
For example, to emphasize a word, you just wrap it with an asterisk on both ends, like this: *emphasized*. When your writing is published, it will instead look like this:
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Windows Batch Gotcha: Use REM Inside IF Blocks
Normally I comment out lines in a Windows batch script by prefixing them with “::”—it just looks better to me than “REM”. But today I found out the hard way (of course) that you can’t do that inside an IF block, or the script dies with…
The syntax of the command is incorrect.
SSIS Conditional Expressions (Lightbulb:On)
I’ve often been confused and frustrated by conditionals ( … ? … : … ) in SSIS expressions. The concept is straightforward enough, but the syntax made it really hard for me to keep track in nontrivial cases. Then yesterday I had an epiphany: it’s much easier to keep them straight if you write them on multiple lines. Continue reading “SSIS Conditional Expressions (Lightbulb:On)”
