Saturday, October 25, 2003

Buffy Summers: I went to Angel's last night, and Faith was there. They looked sort of... intimate. Willow Rosenberg: No way. I know what you're thinking, and no way. Buffy Summers: You're right. Faith would never do that. Willow Rosenberg: Faith would *totally* do that. Faith was *built* to do that. She's the *do that* girl. Buffy Summers: Comfort, remember? Comfort here. Willow Rosenberg: I mean, please. Does Angel come up to Faith's standards for a guy? Let's see... is he breathing? Buffy Summers: Actually, no. 8:27:30 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Source: How to Save the World   BusinessWeek TV has an 'Innovation' feature which this week described a futuristic building material called SmartWrap that, inventors say, could replace all existing interior and exterior wall materials, and might have other applications (e.g. 'smart' clothing) as well. A prototype, pictured at right, is apparently on display now in NYC at the Smithsonian's National Design Museum. The ultrathin, ultralight material consists of 6 layers -- an applied layer of carbon nanotubes that gives it rigidity, four 'smart' layers that can actually be 'printed' in rolls, and a PEN/PET substrate that holds them all together and protects them from the elements. The four smart layers are: Organic LED -- that can allow full wall-size display of your TV, computer screen  etc., can be self-illuminating (eliminates need for lighting), and can change the appearance of your house (from inside or outside) when you feel like a change Organic Thin Film Transistor -- the controlling circuitry or 'brain' of SmartWrap Phase Change Material -- for thermal regulation Organic Solar Cell -- to provide environmentally-friendly and inexpensive power to the wall and to the whole building or other application If you know anything about these technologies and want to see specs and production process information, they're in this chart. More details are available here. Announcements like this both excite me and bring out the skeptic in me. The potential technology applications are fascinating: They could: allow you to 'program' and reconfigure your house quickly and inexpensively to suit your changing needs, tastes and fashions, be portable (take your home with you when you move), save enormously on heating/cooling/lighting energy and provide it with renewable solar sources, eliminate the need for environmentally destructive, bulky, building materials, make offices unnecessary The potential applications for clothing and recreation are equally interesting. But this has to be enormously expensive, and the software needed to make it work sounds horrendously complex. And what happens when it 'goes down'? Any engineers, architects or advanced materials experts out there tell me whether this is really possible or just a pipedream? Also, if anyone in NYC has seen this, I'd like to know what you thought. [How to Save the World] 6:32:44 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Source: WebLogs @ SqlJunkies.com The COLLATION of a column defines (among other things) the case sensitivity of search arguments when qualifying rows to be returned from SELECT statements as defined in WHERE clauses. But another important consideration is that a column's collation can also affect the behaviour of a unique / primary key if one exists on a column with collate defined. For example, the following script demonstrates that uniqueness of rows inserted into a key depends on the collation of the key column. Note carefully that the collation is either “_CS_” or “_CI_” - denoting case sensitive or case insensitive. Depending on how ths collation is set, the “duplicate” rows are either allowed or rejected by SQL Server. set nocount on go create table t1 (  col1 varchar (10) collate Latin1_General_CS_AS not null primary key) create table t2 (  col2 varchar (10) collate Latin1_General_CI_AS not null primary key) go insert into t1 (col1) values ('a') go insert into t1 (col1) values ('A') go insert into t2 (col2) values ('a') go insert into t2 (col2) values ('A') go select * from t1 select * from t2 go drop table t1 drop table t2 go Output from this script is: Server: Msg 2627, Level 14, State 1, Line 1 Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint 'PK__t2__2042BE37'. Cannot insert duplicate key in object 't2'. The statement has been terminated. col1       ---------- a A col2       ---------- a The case in point here is simply that the case sensitivity in any given collation does not simply affect row qualification for select statements. It also affects the uniqueness of rows permitted by the column's key (if one exists). In short, take care to get the case sensitivity right (usually case insensitive would be expected) when setting collations on primary keys! Greg Linwood www.bainlinwood.com   [WebLogs @ SqlJunkies.com] 6:30:41 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Source: WebLogs @ SqlJunkies.com Niels says - SQLXML enables XML support  for SQL Server databases (in addition to what FOR XML does natively in SQL 2K) In the SP1 release of SQLXML 3 Microsoft enabled (among other things) SOAP support. You can in other words expose your stored procedures, functions and templates as web services - multo cool! There were however "issues" with this if you ran Win Server 2003, and you had to jump through quite a few hoops to make it work. Today I gave a lecture about SQLXML and I talked about Web Services and stored procs. I had a couple of days ago installed the new version, but not done any work with it, so I thought it'd be fun to check out if Microsoft had done anything to fix the Win 2003 issues. Guess what - I'm happy to report that exposing stored procs as web services now works "out of the box", wahoo!!! The SP2 release also fixes other issues, and if you are using SQLXML this release is a MUST. Get it from here. [WebLogs @ SqlJunkies.com] 2:25:01 PM    trackback []     Articulate []