Ever rebuilt a VB dll and find that it would no longer act as a drop-in replacement for an existing dll that has been released?

VB hides a lot of the complexity of COM implementation, and it can be rather difficult to track down how far back when binary compatibility was broken.

One way to tackle this is to use the OLE View utility, going through old DLLs build by build, and importing their Type Libraries, and Exporting the IDL files.

Then, use a diff utility to see which build has the version number was incremented, and the uuid altered.

(I’ll post some screenshots when I work out

Interesting study commisioned by Google on SMB buying behaviours for IT products. In order of importance:

Reliable 73%
Integrates easily with existing systems
Service/support
Appropriate for a company of my size
Flexible  44%
Inexpensive to service/ maintain
Lower cost 37%
Requires minimal training/ education
Company is a well-known, established brand
Scalable
Includes comprehensive training/education
Discounts/promotions
Have purchased from company in the past 27 %

I have been trying to reduce memory usage on our application server, and experimented with using __slots__ to reduce memory usage.
The memory overhead of using __dict__ vs __slots__ turned out to be 147 bytes per object.
Here are my results

Test
Total Memory
Bytes per object

slots
40880K
41

dicts
183840K
188

Using the following test script

class C(object):
#__slots__ = ('abc', 'defg')
pass

a = []
for i in xrange(1000000):
c [...]

Sometimes winning projects can make one forget to gather competitive intelligence. Here is a list of questions one should ask the clients during a de-briefing:

Customer Details

Organisation name
Name, title

Opportunity Details

Products
Deal Value (License fee, Annual License fee, Consulting)
Main decision-makers (Name, title, role)
Main competitors (Organisation, products)
Main reason for win/loss

Process

Engagement – when first engaged
What did customer know about us [...]

There has been a lot of commentary written about News Corp playing with the idea of exiting Google’s search index. Cringely said that News Corp would be denying themselves valuable traffic, handing them to competitors. Mark Cuban, on the other wrote that Twitter is heading to be THE news search site, leaving Google News has [...]

Once in a while, one comes across a problem that is so totally perplexing, and people have various success with different approaches that it makes me think of the tale of the blind men and the elephant.
Recently, in a production environment, we are seeing errors in our SQL Server clients: reporting
TCP Provider, error: 0 – [...]

Brad Wilson has a nice long post about the use of model metadata in ASP.NET MVC.
While most of these do not deal with database operations, they have a certain place in database modelling. The following are must haves:

Short Display Names – a sane toString() for tabular listings
Simple Display Text – a sane toString() for summarizing [...]

It used to be that one could simply rename a Word Template .dot file to .doc. However, Microsoft has made it somewhat harder today.
One way to do this is through using Word Automation. However, another way is to do some XML manipulation, given that .dotx and .dotcx files are actually zip archives.

import xml.dom.minidom
import zipfile

def dotx2docx(src, [...]

I don’t know if you recall this article from the New Scientist discussing whether obesity is spreading through social norms.
However, there may be another pathway.
A 2007 Scientific American article mentions that bacteria can cause subjects to gain weight faster.
For one thing, bacteria produce chemicals that help us harness energy and nutrients from our food, Huffnagle [...]

Over the term 3 school holidays, we (my family) spent 11 days travelling in Japan, and I’d like to share some observations.

Osteoporosis is common among the elderly, far more prevalent than Australia for example. Despite the (relatively) higher consumption of soy products in Japan, this comes across as a little surprising
People are generally taller in [...]

According to The Register article here:
[Special Operations contractor] will, at a minimum, develop Internet-based marketing procedures such as use of Google AdWords and Search Engine Optimization to prioritize search result listing of the applicable websites
What next? Affiliate programs? Cost per action? I know! email submits. Any creatives with landing page ideas?
Here’s a visualization of what [...]

Came across this site Allergy Translation Cards. They do a supreme good.

The information is supplied here: http://dotgov.gov/help_qualify.aspx
Good luck!

I have this problem when driving my wife’s car: Why Do Cars Have Fuel Doors on Different Sides
But here’s the kicker. Commenter spewlman advised:
Want to avoid the frustration of not knowing what side your gas tank is on? Car manufacturers actually solve this mystery for you. On your dash is a picture of a fuel [...]

Mary Garden writes about her thirst for transcendence, but instead finds mystics and charlatans, who make ordinary human beings look like saints. Serpent Rising 2nd Ed

It is now thirty years since I first set foot in India and felt at last I had come home. From time to time in my now busy life, I [...]

I don’t know what it is about xml configuration files that simply turn me off learning a particular library or framework. For example, here is a Hibernate XML monstrosity.
I realize it all makes sense, but there is something terribly off-putting about xml. To me it’s a sign that the host language is not sufficiently dynamic [...]

I just tried to “go back” to the previous page, but still want to retain the current page I’m reading. Middle click on the back arrow did the trick, and opened the previous page on a new tab.
Sweet.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of JDBC connection URLs for various databases. Corrections welcome!
Microsoft SQL Server JDBC connection URL
jdbc:microsoft:sqlserver://localhost:1433;DatabaseName=northwind
com.microsoft.jdbc.sqlserver.SQLServerDriver
msbase.jar;mssqlserver.jar;msutil.jar
downloadl
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 JDBC connection URL
jdbc:sqlserver://serverName\instance:port[;user=value][;password=value][;property=value]
com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver
sqljdbc.jar
download SQL Server 2005 driver
Microsoft SQL Server (JTurbo) JDBC connection URL
jdbc:JTurbo://<HOST>:<PORT>/<DB>
com.ashna.jturbo.driver.Driver
Microsoft SQL Server (Sprinta) JDBC connection URL
jdbc:inetdae7:<HOST>:<PORT>?database=<DB>
com.inet.tds.TdsDrive
download

Alfresco uses JNI on Netbios to serve files over CIFS on windows servers,
http://www.codase.com search for win32netbios.c
Uses a combination of

[NetBIOS]-> NCBADDNAME
[NetBIOS]-> NCBLISTEN
[NetBIOS]-> NCBRECV

Also see their JLAN product.
Unfortunately, this is apparently not supported on Vista, Windows Server 2008. Source: MSDN
There seems to be some workarounds documented on the Alfresco wiki Vista And Windows 2008 through firewalling [...]

Using a combination of floor, mod and div, we can implement bitwise tests in XSLT. I happened to need to do that today. Thanks to the power of Google, and the Mulberry XSLT forums, the following snippet implements XSLT test for 000010

<xsl:comment>
Bitwise test for 00010
</xsl:comment>
<xsl:if [...]