Browsershots

browsershots.org provides a free online service that will display screenshots of a given URL on up to 60 different browsers.

Product Aggregation in SQL Server

Ever wanted to write something like this in SQL Server:

SELECT PRODUCT(MYCOLUMN) FROM MYTABLE

Well, wish no more:

DECLARE @P FLOAT
SET @P = 1
SELECT @P = @P * MYCOLUMN FROM MYTABLE
SELECT @P

... provided you can use the query in a context that permits T-SQL that is (e.g. not in a view or a subquery).  Note that you can perform arbitrary aggregations using this technique (say, summing while respecting null contagion, concatenating strings... the mind boggles).

How Many Agile Product Guys?

I was curious how many of the Agile Manifesto guys had a "product" background.  By that I mean that they have worked in a product shop at least more recently than they got into the "agile" game.  Here is the score:

• Mike Beedle - don't think so, his Agile bio suggests that he has been consulting since the 90's
• Arie van Bennekum - don't think so, from his Agile bio
• Alistair Cockburn - no, according to the bio on his site
• Ward Cunningham - maybe, from his Agile bio -- can't tell from other online sources
• Martin Fowler - no, from the bio on his site
• Jim Highsmith - no, from the bio on his site
• Andrew Hunt - no, from the bio on his site
• Ron Jeffries - no, from the bio on xprogramming.com
• Joe Kern - no, despite the fact that his bio at immuexa talks of Compuware's OptimalJ "product team"
• Brian Marick - maybe (as a tester?), from his bio at exampler
• Robert C. Martin - no, from his bios at Object Mentor and his blog
• Ken Schwaber - no, from his Agile bio
• Jeff Sutherland - yes, from his Agile bio
• Dave Thomas - don't know

So, we have 1 yes, 2 maybe yes, 2 maybe no, 8 no and 1 unknown.  Let's split the difference on the uncertain ones and say 10.5 no to 3.5 yes.

JVM Heap Dump Options

On the Sun JVM, you can tell it to perform a heap dump automatically when an out-of-memory error occurs using these arguments:

-XX:-HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError
-XX:HeapDumpPath=c:\oomdump.hprof

There are many more Java HotSpot VM options.