A good question to ask in any interview with one of the high and mighty in IT is ‘What is the biggest mistake you ever made’. Few of us will have made a mistake as easy to sympathise with, but with such far-reaching consequences as the one Gary Kildall made. It is a reminder of … Read more
Came across an interesting thing to do with static constructors in the course of the development of ANTS Profiler 3. We got around to talking about static constructors across multiple files and wondering what would happen if you attempted to create a circular reference of static initialisers. In the result you can see that the … Read more
We’re very pleased to be able to announce the release of SQL Prompt 3. Get it here: http://www.red-gate.com/products/SQL_Prompt/index.htm We’ve fixed quite a number of bugs since the final beta. Most notably the popup behaviour is significantly improved. We’ve also added support for SQL Server 7. We hope you enjoy using it!… Read more
During the last dotcom boom, I had a most agreeable job advising investment bankers on the value of some of the propositions that were put to them for funding. It was part of my role in a company, an ‘Internet Incubator’, which specialised in getting viable internet-based enterprises off the ground. City Investors were approached … Read more
1050 – or thereabouts. OK I must admit that’s not entirely the question, but it is however the answer. As some of you out there know I’m working on the new version of ANTS Profiler (gratuitous link to product, marketing would be so proud) and in the course of my explorations I have of course … Read more
Well there I was trying to think of an idea for a blog (u_u) when it suddenly occurred to me (*_*) that I should do a nice little SQL function on Emoticons. It was a happy thought (^_^) which made me smile (n_n). I was amazed (^.^) and astonished (*^*) sometimes incredulous (o_O) at the … Read more
When I was a kid my dad told me “nope, no TV when I was a boy, crystal radio. We just had our friends from college here for New Year’s with their kids….Among the 8 of us (the four kids were 17, 15, 11 and 10), we had 7 digital cameras (if you count phones)), … Read more
The following message was posted to my web log on O’Reilly… Learning new tech. is fun – However, we have to learn things very well and make a living out of it. I guess MS does not really care about the developer who had to run after each so called inovative idea along their way … Read more
Self promotion warning I’ve just posted a 15 minute quick video on AJAX technology. Now, to be up front, the point of the video is to interest potential readers in my up coming books, but that said, the video may be of interest to some folks here, so I thought I’d mention it. You can … Read more
My annual new-year’s present to the SQL Server community is the Philip Factor Almanac of Prophesies for the coming year. Along with this blog will be an article which explains how it all came about, but here I’ll explain a bit about the technical side. Firstly, here is your Almanac, or Horoscope for this coming year … Read more
As a developer, I’ve had to endure my fair share of designers lecturing on the virtues of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and maintaining a strict divide between content elements and their visual layout. It’s a noble pursuit, but for a developer with little design experience the task of getting a page to look just the … Read more
Telerik makes UI controls for ASP.NET (and they are getting in Windows Forms controls too apparently) and they’ve done a great job. But, everything has it’s little quirks. I was working with the RadSplitter, a control that allows you to make collapsable / resizable panels on your webpage, when I ran across a little problem: persisting the … Read more
It’s amazing just how easy programming is nowadays. For the past 2 years-ish I’ve been working almost exclusively in C# and I forgot quite how much of a pain it can be when you have to code in C++ for a while. You have to remember all these little things like include paths, linking options, … Read more
For reasons too personal to be interesting, Christmas brings out the worst in me. My happiest Christmas was spent covering for a DBA colleague. I was on double time, and sitting in a nice quiet spot in the Server Room where only swipe-card holders could enter. (We somehow neglected to issue swipe-cards to the management. … Read more
One of the best ways to test the knowledge of a database programmer is to ask very simple questions. I was reminded of this the other day whilst trying to put an explanation of a Relational Database into language which the proverbial Man in the Pub could understand. There is always a temptation to scurry … Read more
I’ve seen many cases where business people and technical people collide. Part of building an effective business requires understanding and respecting the various departments in an organization and their individual areas of expertise. But too often, cross-departmental decisions are driven by the wrong people. The results are less than spectacular, though not unexpected considering the … Read more
A number of years ago, I entertained the idea of dictating my articles and or books. Dragon NaturallySpeaking seemed to be the most popular and perhaps most effective software at that time. I foundthat the accuracy was shockingly high. But what was most interesting was that even with such high accuracy, it was almost unreadable. This … Read more
For quite a while after I moved into the world of .NET I was slightly bugged by event registration in that I had this nagging suspicion that one day it would all go horribly wrong and blow up in my face because I have this incredibly nasty habit of using background threads for long-running, or … Read more
Obviously, of all the technology that has come along in my lifetime (and there is an awful lot of it) the one that has had the biggest impact on my day to day life is the personal computer and all that goes with it. The crusher, of course, is the web. While PCs changed my … Read more
“Too many developers run their lives as though there was a celestial ‘Undo’ button.” “The IT Manager’s job is to produce long words to cover up the mistakes of his staff” “Developers have knowledge but can’t express it, whereas trainers have none, but can’t stop.” “DBAs do not die, they are just dropped by The … Read more
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