... until the collector arrives ...

This "blog" is really just a scratchpad of mine. There is not much of general interest here. Most of the content is scribbled down "live" as I discover things I want to remember. I rarely go back to correct mistakes in older entries. You have been warned :)

2009-10-30

gRaphaël

gRaphaël is a JavaScript charting library.

2009-10-27

RAP and qooxdoo

RAP (Rich Ajax Platform) is Eclipse's GWT-like entry into the rich web application space. It uses qooxdoo on the client-side. Qooxdoo itself uses Python in its native tool chain. There is also a user-contributed GWT-alike called QWT (qooxdoo Web Toolkit).

2009-10-24

JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit

The JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit provides some nice web client-side hierarchy visualizations.

2009-10-22

Jitterbit

Jitterbit is an open source integration tool in the tradition of Kettle or QueryJoiner.

2009-10-21

SQL Server vs. Schemas

SQL Server added schema support in SQL Server 2005, but there are still some issues. There appears to be no direct way to set the implicit schema for a session. It would be nice to have something like:

USE database.schema

Alas, no such functionality exists (yet). Someone has sent Microsoft a suggestion along these lines.

There are a couple of workarounds. First, you can change the default schema for a user in a particular database using the User Mapping page in Management Studio. Equivalently, you could issue commands like:

USE myDatabase
ALTER USER myUserId WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA = mySchema

To change the default schema for a particular session, you could try:

EXECUTE AS USER = 'mySchemaUser'

where mySchemaUser is a user who is already mapped to the desired schema. Since this approach uses impersonation, you might run into a rights issue. A common case is to target the dbo schema (through the dbo user). The exhibited command works when the original user has the db_owner role.

2009-10-16

Open Source IntelliJ

Jetbrains has created an open source community edition of IntelliJ IDEA.

2009-10-10

Head in the Cloud

I migrated my technical diary blog onto Blogger, mainly so that I can edit it from multiple locations.

A lot of older material has not been migrated since I've only been separating the generic technical content from proprietary and personal stuff in the last couple of years. Many links are broken, especially to supporting content generated by me. I'll figure out what to do about this later.

Oh... and should you happen to be editing a Blogger export XML file with OxygenXML, and Oxygen offers to reformat the file, the correct answer is "no". (Although I'm sure that tweaking options like Preserve text as it is would do the trick.)

2009-10-07

Git SVN versus Empty Directories

Git only tracks files. SVN also tracks directories. So if you are using git svn to interoperate between the two, there can be problems. If you delete a bunch of directories in a git commit and then dcommit that change up to SVN, the directories themselves will not be deleted from the SVN repository.

You can work around this problem by including the --rmdir switch on dcommit. This will delete any empty directories upon commit. If you do not care about empty directories, this works fine. But if you do care about empty directories (maybe a build script depends upon their existence), there does not appear to be a satisfactory prepackaged solution.

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