Sconzo.com

This morning I hopped back into a terminal services session with Win2003. I’ve been doing MOSS development for a project at work for the last few months, so I’m using MS Visual Studio again. For the last four years or so, I’ve done most of my development work in Linux and Solaris. I must say my favorite editor is vi and I try to avoid using my mouse. But now, back in the MS world I must reach my hand over every so often to that little mouse and nudge it a bit and click — it really does slow things down.

So this morning instead of kicking off an ssh session, I click Start->Run, typed mstsc, then logged into my development Win2003 server (since you can’t really do sharepoint development anywhere but where the server is actually running). I switched to the visual studio window I left running and noticed some odd characters in the middle of my code.

I circled the oddly-placed characters in the middle of my code so you can see what I’m talking about. Perhaps you’ve done this before. When I saw the :wq, I knew immediately where they were from and had a sense of calm come over me. I miss my vi.

It seems I’ve come to rely on Quest Toad. Now that I’ve returned to working with Oracle on a regular basis, I have to remind myself how to do things from SQLPLUS when I don’t have TOAD available.

Today I needed to examine the text of a trigger, but I couldn’t remember the view to obtain it from. Here’s the code to spool it to a text file:

-- eliminate row count message
set feedback off
-- eliminate headings from showing
set heading off
-- suppress output
set termout off
-- don't show sql in result set
set echo off
-- keep text body from wrapping
set linesize 1000
-- eliminate trailing blanks
set trimspool on
spool /tmp/trigger.sql
select 'CREATE OR REPLACE ' from dual;
select text from user_source
where name = 'TRIGGERNAME';
select '/' from DUAL;
spool off
set feedback on
set heading on
set termout on
set linesize 100
set echo on

Essential Tools:

Firefox Browser
FireBug Plugin
Tamper Data Plugin
Ethereal Network Protocol Analyzer
Web Developer Toolbar

Popular Sites that update without page refreshes:

Flickr store, search, sort, share photos
del.icio.us collections of web favorites
Google Suggest Search
Google Maps

Sites Closer to Home:

Markets Data Center (MDC)

• minip XML and XSL
• quote updates
• personalization

Gentle Intro to AJAX

• no toolkits for this example
• Retrieve using AJAX:
  http://www.sconzo.com/web2.0/ajaxsimple.txt

Gentle Intro with toolkit

• Prototype JavaScript Framework:
  http://www.prototypejs.org

Another toolkit example

• Prototype Ajax.PeriodicalUpdater

Sample RSS Feed Aggregator

• Google “ajaxfeeds” toolkit:
  http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxfeeds/

Sample XML, Interactive Grid

• Source XML File:
  http://www.sconzo.com/gridexample/activnyse.xml
• JS schema for XML file:
  http://www.sconzo.com/gridexample/xml-grid.js
• ExtJs Toolkit (also uses Yahoo toolkit):
  http://extjs.com

Global Sked

• Uses ajax to check for unique id collisions
• retrieves updates without checking every second (using pub/sub oracle advanced queuing)

I finished a training class today: Postscript Programming for Engineers. John Deubert of Acumen Training taught the one-week class here at Dow Jones and did a great job. He is an excellent instructor.

I attended a great 2-day class on Perl, taught by Randal Schwartz, the author of Learning Perl. The training class was hosted by Dow Jones on March 27th and March 28th. I thought I knew perl pretty well, but Randal showed us some amazing things you can do with perl. His training materials alone are worth their weight in gold. Excellent class!