Have Photoshop and want to make an .ico icon file? Well, you can’t! At least, not out of the box. Thankfully, there’s some nice people on the web =). You can get a free PS plugin to save files as .ico!
If you’re making Favicons (which is why i stumbled across this thing), here’s a great tutorial:
How to make a Favicon in photoshop
Enjoy!
A while ago I migrated everything from mssql 2000 sp4 to mssql 2005. For the most part, everything went ok. Then it hit me, my site halted because my alloted space for my transaction logs was reached! to make things worse, the way to fix this in sql2k didn’t exist in 2k5. So, it was on to Google. After hours of research and testing, more testing, and then more testing, here’s a solution that I got to work.
1. Open MS SQL Server Management Studio
2. Expand Management > Maintenance Plans
3. Create a new plan called ‘Shrink Logs’
4. Create a new Subplan that occurs every day that Executes a T-SQL Statement task.
5. Enter in the following:
USE [DATABASENAME] GO DBCC SHRINKFILE (’LOGFILENAME’ , 0) GO
That’ll wipe out your transaction logs every night.
If you don’t want to wipe out your logs, DO NOT RUN THIS. You’ll have to figure something else out =)
Hope this saves you some time!
Talk about an ambiguous error…
I just got this is .NET for what appears to be no reason at all. Turns out that this is an issue with .NET when it doesn’t fully compile the page. The only way that I’ve found to resolve this issue is to delete the temp files under:
<rant>
.net is cool and all, but seriously. I’ve encountered a lot of ‘bugs’ while working with it. WTF? Classic ASP never any any issues like this in the 7+ years that I’ve been using it…. ARG!
</rant>
Make sure SQLGrinder App is not open when you do this.
1. Download the Microsoft JDBC Driver
Go to the Microsoft JDBC Driver download page:
Follow the link at the bottom of the page to download the Unix version of the JDBC driver (.tar.gz file).
2. Extract the downloaded Archive
You can safely extract the downloaded file with StuffIt Expander. The extracted files are in the folder “sqljdbc_1.0″.
3. Install the JDBC Driver
To install the Microsoft JDBC Driver you have to copy the actual driver file (sqljdbc.jar) from the sqljdbc_1.0/enu folder to your Java classpath (/Library/Java/Extensions).
Don’t create sub-directories in /Library/Java/Extensions (like lib/). The .jar file has to be in the /Library/Java/Extensions folder.
4. Open SQLGrinder
You will now have a Drive labeled ‘MS SQL Server 2005′.
You’re done!
I’m not going to go into the details, but today sucked ass. I guess I need to be reminded every once in a while who i can and can’t trust. John, Joe (aka. The Man), Nicole, Rue, and Marke, you rock =) Everyone else that I was supposed to count on, kiss my ass.
1. Data Detectors in Mail - These things are freaking amazing! It recognizes patterns in human speech (text really) that correlate to dates and when you hover over them, it asks you if you want to create the event in iCal. It also recognizes phone numbers, addresses, and more for inputs into Address Book.
2. Instant Preview - Not sure what it’s really called, but when you’re browsing the file system (Finder) in any view mode, you can click on a file and just hit the space bar to preview the file. It doesn’t actually open the application. It just loads it into this nice floating window and lets you browse through the pages of a doc, view a movie, listen to an mp3, etc. Awesome!
3. Spotlight is usable now. A.K.A., I don’t need quicksilver any more. I do miss the quicksilver plugins, but spotlight is nice. Who needs 2 indexers running anyway.
4. The Dock is pretty. And you can change it too.
5. The menu bar is subtly transparent and sleek. Nice =)
6. Mail now has RSS feeds support. This is nice in that it streamlines all my newsfeeds / mail reading into a single app. When you view a feed in Safari, there’s a link on the right side to click and save into Mail.
7. Finder now has support for “Search For” folders and Shared devices (networked computers with open shares). the Search For folders and items are basically Smart Folders
8. Finally(!) there’s a Path Bar in finder to show your full path. To turn it on go to View > Show Path Bar
9. Transparent menu drop-downs are a nice touch and they’ve rounded the corners as well. Overall a nice visual piece.
10. Time Machine rocks! Best / Easiest backup method out there for any OS! It’s been well advertised, so you know the gist of it, but here’s two things you may not have known: Time Machine will work with a partition on your current drive, and it also can go back in time to restore (certain) application states. So, if you have a laptop (like me), you can’t really rely on an external drive for your backup needs. So I partitioned off a 20gb chunk and dedicated it to Time Machine backups. Then I just excluded the backup of everything but the places that I need backed up =). The only applications that I’ve seen this work for so far are Address Book and Mail.
11. iCal has been improved, and finally displays the correct date on the dock icon even when the app is closed. WTF took so long on that one?! (The little blue dots under an app signify that it’s launched. See the mail app below)
12. iChat has been upgraded a lot and is a satisfactory replacement for Adium if you don’t mind no skinning. The Video Chat thing with the Chroma Key-esque background thing doesn’t really work too well (see below). But it’s fun to play around with.
13. Spaces. I laughed my ass off when I heard Jobs pitch Spaces as this revolutionary thing that linux has been doing for about 10+ years. But it’s implemented very well, helps out a lot, and has that nice Apple functionality that you’d expect. Definitely a plus, and helps out a lot.
14. Web Clips are neat. When you’re browsing safari, you can take little clips of a webpage that you’re looking at and turn it into a dashboard widget. The part that I like is that the selector tool is smart. It will snap to elements of the webpage. Check out the widget I made below of the newest forum topics on BodyMod.org:
15. The Dictionary App is pretty useful now. It has an nifty autocomplete feature, and it lets you query Apple tech terms and Wikipedia.
16. The Preview app is a lot cooler now too. It will let you do some basic image editing (Resize, crop, etc) and save to various formats. Great when you need to to some quick edits to an image to post to a blog =)
17. A lot of the Utilities have been updated with some new features and icons. Some that I’ve noticed are Activity Monitor, Airport Utility, Boot Camp Assistant (now not beta), Directory (new), Network Utility, ODBC Administrator Utility, Podcast Capture, and Terminal (quite a few updates in this one, including “Themes”)
18. The coverflow view in Finder is pretty cool. For things like documents, movies, and web pages, it’ll actually show the contents rendered on the icon.
19. The Network Preference Pane in System Configuration is a lot nicer. Makes working with your settings a lot more manageable.
20. The spring loaded dock icon thingies are pretty cool. The fan view is neat, but not as helpful as the grid view (shown below). You can choose which one you want it to show as. To add new ones, you just drag a folder onto the dock. I also like that it shows thumbnails of everything in the grid view. Even documents and web pages. What I don’t like about it is that the icon on top (on the dock) for each item is the last thing that was put in it. So it makes it a little difficult to distinguish which folder is for what.
Well, those are my 20 favorite things about OS X 10.5 Leopard. I really don’t see how anyone can use a PC anymore (this coming from a guys who’s been a pc fanatic since he was 8). This just blows all other operating systems out of the water. Vista is such a joke (a bad one at that) compared to this. If you’re a mac user, you need this update. It’s so worth it and will make you all giddy inside playing with it =)
Another OSX app that I like a lot. Mail is a great email client, but if you’re like me, you’ll have a lot of different folders and rules that filter your mail from different accounts into different folders. The problem with Mail’s notification is that it only monitors the Inbox and shows the red star with the amount of new messages for that folder only. Dockstar let’s you have multiple notification stars that you can assign to all kinds of stuff.
This is a little program that prevents call-homes (outbound connections) from your mac. It monitors all programs trying to make a connection from your computer and alerts you to see if you want to allow it or not. It’s all rule based and works perfectly. Recently, they’ve release the beta version (2.0) and I just installed it. Great improvement. I also like the notification windows:
just found out that you can change the look and feel of the dock in OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Here’s what it looks like out of the box:
I do like it, but I’m also a little attached to this “other” version:
Just nice to know that you have an option =)
To change the doc to the other version, open up Terminal (Applications > Utilities) and type in these commands:
To change it back to the shelf one, just change the YES to NO:
‘killall Dock’ resets the dock.
If you’re doing a clean install from Tiger to Leopard on OS X, obviously make a backup of your current system. There’s a gotcha though. Your Address Book and iCal data have to be backed up separately! For address book, open up the app and then do an Export of all the data. For iCal, DO NOT BACKUP DATABASE! You have to individually select each category in your iCal and do an EXPORT of them to an ICS file one at a time.
Found this out the hard way… thankfully I had another mac to import my old data and export it for me. For some reason, iCal and Address Book in Leopard don’t read / can’t import the Tiger files.