StreamJockey

Search for SQL in your databases with Red Gate SQL Search

Find fragments of SQL text within stored procedures, functions, views and moreQuickly navigate to objects wherever they happen to be on your serversFind all references to an object Integrates with SSMS

via www.red-gate.com

We have been very satisfied users of the RedGate SQL Toolbelt for years. Every few months a need to search the entire database comes up but until now we have not had a good tool to use.

Windows 7 Snipping Tool

Snipping Tool captures an image of anything on your desktop, like a photo or a section of webpage. Snipping Tool is available only in the Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate editions of Windows 7 (although versions of it were avaialble in Vista and XP add-ons). The about box lists it as version 6.1.7600.

 

Features 

• Capture a screen shot, or snip as it is called, of any object on your screen
• • Whole Window
  • Rectangular section of the screen
  • Draw a freehand outline using your mouse
• Save the snip image in the following formats
• • Portable Network Graphic (PNG)  
  • GIF  
  • JPEG  
  • Single File HTML (MHT)  
• Annotate the snip
• • Using pens which can be customized (color, thickness, tip)  
  • Highlighter  
  • Eraser  
• Share the snip via e-mail with the image inline or as an attachment

Summary - Recommended

While it does not have as many features as other programs, such as FastStone Capture ($19.95), it does work well and of course it does a much better job than the old print-screen then edit in Notepad routine.

Printing from the Snipping Tool is not supported, so you must save your snip and open with another program to print.

Safari 4.0.4 Update for Windows and Mac Addresses Security

Three of the seven vulnerabilities are in the WebKit open source web browser engine used in Safari, Google Chrome, and the browser in Google's Android.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

This update is recommended for all Safari users and includes improvements to performance, stability, and security including:

• Improved JavaScript performance
• Improved Full History Search performance for users with a large number of history items
• Stability improvements for 3rd-party plug-ins, the search field and Yahoo! Mail

For detailed information on the security content of this update, please visit this site:http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222.

Applications, Services, and Hardware We Use (May 2011 Update)

These are applications, services, and devices we use every day and/or for specific projects. For example, while we currently are not using CacheFly, we have made use of the service for particular projects. We expect this post to be updated routinely.

Offsite and Cloud Providers

Amazon Web Services

Apple MobileMe

Google Apps

Rackspace cloudservers^TM and cloudfiles^TM

Backpack and Basecamp from 37signals. And by the way they use Amazon Web Services for storage.

Domain names, hosting, virtual and dedicated servers we use our WebServicesRock.US! affiliate.

Salesforce Cloud.com

Operating Systems

Apple OS X Snow Leopard

Most of our regular use and development is on Windows 7.

Windows 2008 Server, Web and Standard Editions

Ubuntu Desktop and Server often as a virtual machine on the Mac.

Application Software

Multiple OSes

TrueCrypt Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux. We use it on the Mac.

Cloud Storage
We recommend you create accounts with a couple of vendors in the event you are at a location that is blocking a particular vendor/URL. And yes this has happened to us on multiple occasions and going to plan B saved the day!

Box.net provides 5GB for free. They have excellent support for the applications such as LinkedIn and Salesforce and there iPad app is very good.

Dropbox works with Windows, Mac, Linux, iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry.

SpiderOak SpiderOak provides an easy, secure and consolidated free online backup, sync, sharing, access & storage solution for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux open-source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux. We use it on Windows, Mac, and iPhones.

OS X

Apple iLife '11 has web, music, and photo tools that work great together. We have never had to load a driver to communicate with any cameras we own - they just work.

Apple iWork '09 and iWork.com word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software. We also use the iPhone app that both controls the slide show and displays presenter notes.

We use Screenflow for desktop recording on our Mac and also to record Windows when running on under a VM on the Mac. The new version added some nice features including easy publishing to YouTube.

Microsoft Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 continues to be one of the best Mac applications.

Growl Growl lets Mac OS X applications unintrusively tell you when things happen. Small popups occur such as when GMail or Skype users login or leave or Xcode compiles are complete.

VMware Fusion 3

Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac

Intuit QuickBooks for Mac. QuickBooks for Mac allows encrypted backups to your MobileMe iDisk. 

OmniFocus is GTD® style task management for Mac OS X and iPhone. The software has good syncing functionality.

OmniGraffle Professional a drawing program - similar to Visio but for the Mac.

OmniPlan a project planning tool we occasionally use.

iStat pro is a free widget that lets you monitor your Mac, including CPU, memory, disks, network, battery, temperatures, fans, load & uptime and processes.

SuperDuper! is the wildly acclaimed program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless. And it complements Time Machine.

Development

Apple xCode development environment for Mac OS X.

TextMate TextMate brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors.

Aptana Studio

Panic Software Transmit ftp client that works with ftp, MobileMe iDisk, Amazon S3, WebDav and more.

Panic Software Coda one-window web development

Kaleidoscope is a Mac program used to spot the differences in text and image files. Review changes in seconds with the world's most advanced file comparison application.

Version Control Systems
While our consulting work requires us to use various version control products, including the trash Visual SourceSafe, for our development we most often use Mercurial and Git. We had used Subversion for years but once we switched to a DVCS product there was no going back.

Git and github (git hosting) and Mercurial integrated with Kiln.

Versions Mac Subversion Client (version control system client)

Development Portals
We include here systems that combine some or all of the following features: bug, issue, and project tracking for software development; version control along with code review.

Fog Creek Software's FogBugz and Kiln hosted on a VM at WebServicesRock.US!

Atlassian's Jira which also provides hosted as well as downloaded solutions.

iPhone Applications:

Analytics from AnalyticsApp.com

iStat Shows iPhone stats, monitors remote Mac, Linux & Solaris, CPU, memory, disks, temps, fans, and more. And it has some basic network tools.

OmniFocus Winner of the 2008 Apple Design Award for Best iPhone Productivity Application. We really like this program. It has multiple ways to sync but we use our MobileMe account here too.

Remotely lock your iPhone with Find My iPhone which requires a MobileMe account.

Windows

IIS Internet Information Server - web services. Much of our development targets IIS with ASP.NET.

FileZilla Client free open-source ftp client that runs on many operating systems. We only run it on Windows. There is a server now too that only runs on WIndows. 

Development

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 The Microsoft Store is offering 12 free hours of training with your purchase now. There are numerous free and low-cost add-ins to Visual Studio. We'll show some that we use.

Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is a great valued, full-featured UML diagramming program. We use it instead of the much more expensive Rational tools. 

Processes

We expect to write about some processes that we routinely use in the future.

Devices We Use

Apple MacBook Air 2nd Generation

Apple 20" iMac 

Apple Magic Mouse 

Blue Pen, Mechanical Pencil, pape, and iPhone Application Sketch Pad

The mStand Laptop Stand By Rain Design is a nicely designed stand for desktop we use regularly when working in bed or on the couch. It keeps the laptop at a good angle and most importantly keeps the ventilation at the back hinge clear from blankets etc.

Why I don't run Adobe (Acrobat) Reader on my Macs (And why it is a bad experience on Windows)

I just downloaded Adobe (Acrobat) Reader 9 for Windows from Adobe's website. After the installation completed, I launched Adobe Reader, then I clicked check for updates and low-and-behold there is an update. Guys how about having me install that one right from the start?

And no, I do not want to install your download manager just to download Adobe Reader.

And no, I do not want to install Google Toolbar, McAfee Security Scan, or anything else! How about unchecking them by default so I don't dislike the initial experience with your products so much?

And while you're at it can you fix it so when I install a new version, i.e. 8 to 9, I don't get the Terms & Conditions page hidden behind other windows when I next go to read a PDF file?

I never install any Adobe Reader products on my Macs. Ever. Mac OS X Snow Leopard (and at least Leopard before that) has built-in support for the PDF format. As a result you can view or create PDFs from almost any application in the system.

Configuring and Using GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) - Part 1

This post will discuss configuring and using the open-source software, GNU Privacy Guard or GnuPG as it is frequently listed. All other applications and plug-ins referenced require GNU Privacy Guard. I have listed some applications and plug-ins that are available including those that I use. There are GUI as well as command-line based applications available.

GNU Privacy Guard

GnuPG comes in two flavors: 1.4.9 is the well known and portable standalone version, whereas 2.0.12 is the enhanced and somewhat harder to build version. 

On the Mac I am running 2.0.12 since there was a binary available.  I am running 1.4.9 on Windows since I did not see a 2.0.12 binary available, but 1.4.9 meets my needs.

Email Clients

Apple Mail

Use Sen:te GPGMail which is GPGMail is a plug-in for Apple's Mail, providing a front-end to GnuPG for some operations. It allows you to read/write encrypted messages, as well as electronically signed messages. A quote from the site "GPGMail is a complete hack, relying on Mail's private internal API." So with major updates to OS X/Mail you may need a new version of GPGMail.

GPGMail is released under the BSD License. The author, Stephane Corthesy has asked that if you enjoy the product you send him a postcard!

Thunderbird

Thunderbird open source Email client

Enigmail is a security extension to Mozilla Thunderbird and Seamonkey. It integrates the renowned OpenPGP standard provided by GnuPG.

Set owner trust after import otherwise it may not work.

Outlook and Outlook Express

Since Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express do not allow third party software access to the raw MIME headers, they do not work well with PGP/MIME mail. They do work fine with GnuPG when receiving message that use inline encoding i.e. no attachments. But for the love of God ditch Outlook!

WinPT is a graphical user front-end for the free OpenPGP implementation GnuPG.

Some Settings I Used

2048 bit key

wwwkeys.pgp.net key server. I had used ldap://keyserver.pgp.com at first but my test client on Windows could not locate me! So after some trials I switched to using wwwkeys.pgp.net and it came right up.

Folks that want to encrypt something they are sending to you need your public key. So your public key is used to encrypt their email to you. If you get confused as to what key to share remember this phrase from object-oriented software engineering: Friends don't show their friends their private parts :-)

Visual Studio 2008 Project Templates Missing

Somehow my Visual Studio 2008 Project Template's for my Oak Leaf Mere Mortals .NET were missing. (So when I went to add a new project or website the MM .NET entries were not listed.)

I had tried a few suggestions such as running DEVENV /SETUP and DEVENV /INSTALLVSTEMPLATES. I did not run DEVENV /RESETSETTINGS which has fixed menu item issues in the past. Finally I tracked it down to the user item templates location. It was set to C:\Users\Administrators\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Templates... I had to set it to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common\IDE\ItemTemplates and they now appeared again! 

I'm still not sure how they got changed.

Make a Virtual Machine (VM) from a Physical Machine

One of the great tools from VM software companies allows you to make a VM from a physical machine. This has saved me many times. One memorable occasion came when I had a system with a failing hard disk. Not only was the hard disk failing - there was no way I could get the software installed and configured again! This was because many of the installation media were no longer around or available and the configuration settings were not all documented.

To the rescue came VMWare Converter and Parallels Transporter Both of these products are stand-alone applications that create a VM for their respective VM software. I created a VM successfully using each product.

Now once you have created a VM and you first start that VM several steps may occur. New hardware will most likely be detected, since the VM will not always have the exact virtual hardware that existed on the physical system. But there is almost always an equivalent - for example the graphics or network card may be different but a suitable virtual driver will be presented. This step usually requires a reboot.

Next, depending upon the OS, you may have your OS present an activation window. In my case I was creating a VM from a physical Windows 2003 Standard Server. I then entered my activation code that was originally used to activate that software. (And the physical server would be wiped-clean and scavenged for parts once the VM was up OK.)

Click the link to purchase a downloadable copy of Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac or Parallels Desktop for Mac Premium Edition

If you were to copy the VM to another computer and attempt to start it up there, you would be presented with a dialog to select whether you moved or copied the VM. If you select move the VM will keep all of its settings - such as computer name, MAC, and it would usually not require an OS reactivation and other software should be OK too. If you select copy your VM would end up with a new MAC, you should change the computer name, and you may have to reactivate the OS and possibly other software.