Caffeinated Wisdom

If you use Cognos ReportServer and have a scheduled report that is sent by email, you may get into a peculiar problem when sending the report to recipients in an Exchange 2007: the attachment will not show if the recipient sees the email in his Outlook client. For some reason it will be displayed in any other email client they might use (smartphone, webmail, etc) but not in the Outlook installed in their desktop. A solution to this problem is to make sure the scheduled report contains text in both the subject and the body of the email being sent. You can do that from the email options in the Cognos when scheduling the report. You need to make sure the subject and the body is populated even if it is just a word. A clue to what causes this problem is found in the following link: http://www.eggheadcafe.com/microsoft/Exchange-Admin/31852947/exchange-2007-hidden-attachments.aspx

My new Windows Phone 7 game, Friends Guess was recently approved in the Zune marketplace. It is now available to Windows Phones. To play Friends Guess you are given the name of one of your Facebook friends and then you have to match the name to one of six profile pictures in the screen. It is a fun way of keeping up to date with your friend’s profile pictures. You will be surprise at the pictures your friends choose for their profiles; I sometimes ask myself, “is that their profile picture now? no way…” when playing the game. The idea of the game came from wife, while we were driving back from our vacation in Virginia. There is a web based version of the game at http://friendsguess.appspot.com if you don’t have a Windows Phone. This web version should work on the iPhone too and possible Android phones (depending on your OS version). The web version has a slightly different scheme for scoring, but the mechanics are as fun as the Windows Phone version. From a programming perspect...

Why do we put in the same jail violent criminals with non-violent criminals? As far as i know (please correct me if i am wrong), the current system sends non-violent offenders to the same place as violent offenders. Would it not be better to put nonviolent criminals to forced labor to repay their debts to society? I am thinking of large working camps, where they would be forced to labor 6 days a week on hard-work or dangerous places where manual labor is hard to find. These working camps would allow them to sleep in tents or some sort of cabins. Security could be minimal since there would be only non-violent offenders. Would any non-violent offender prefer to go to such a “working camp” than to go to a jail full of gangs and murderers? I would think they would love to have that choice. Separating violent from non-violent criminals would allow the Government to make penitentiaries across the nation less “cozy”. Let the violent criminals live in one cell (one per cell) and never allow ...

In .NET, I have found the following method useful when wrapping validation around any CRUD operation: private IEnumerable<ValidationResult> PerformWithModelValidation(object model, Action code_to_execute) { var results = new List<ValidationResult>(); ValidationContext context = new ValidationContext(model, null, null); bool valid = Validator.TryValidateObject(model, context, results, true); if (valid) { code_to_execute(); } return results; } //How to use the method above: PerformWithModelValidation(new_product, () => { MyRepository.Add(new_product); MyRepository.SaveChanges(); } );

The following Powershell script will convert a batch of JPEG files to TIFF format: #This Code is released under MIT license [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Drawing") $files_folder = 'C:\path-where-your-jpg-files-are\' $pdfs = get-childitem $files_folder -recurse | where {$_.Extension -match "jpg"} foreach($pdf in $pdfs) { $picture = [System.Drawing.Bitmap]::FromFile( $pdf.FullName ) $tiff = $pdf.FullName.replace('.PDF','').replace('.pdf','').replace('.jpg','').replace('.JPG','') + '.tiff' $picture.Save($tiff) }

You can use Powershell with WMI to find out the paths where the binary files of SQL instances reside. The following code will display the path to the binaries for each instance installed in a server (replace yourservername with your server name): SQL Server 2005: Get-WmiObject -ComputerName YOURSERVERNAME -namespace 'root\Microsoft\SqlServer\ComputerManagement' -query "SELECT ServiceName, BinaryPath FROM SqlService WHERE SQLServiceType = 1 and ServiceName like '%SQL%'" | ft -property ServiceName, BinaryPath SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 R2 : Get-WmiObject -ComputerName YOURSERVERNAME -namespace 'root\Microsoft\SqlServer\ComputerManagement10' -query "SELECT ServiceName, BinaryPath FROM SqlService WHERE SQLServiceType = 1 and ServiceName like '%SQL%'" | ft -property ServiceName, BinaryPath

The following C# code will parse an X937 file (Image Cash Letter) and get the amounts of each check // BigEndianBitConverter class taken from http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/csharp/miscutil/ // ConvertEBCDICtoASCII method taken from http://kseesharp.blogspot.com/2007/12/convert-ebcdic-to-ascii.html static void Main(string[] args) { var input = new BinaryReader(new FileStream("YourICLFile.icl",FileMode.Open)); byte[] amount_bytes, record_type_bytes; byte[] record_lenght_bytes = input.ReadBytes(4); var converter = new BigEndianBitConverter(); int record_lenght = converter.ToInt32(record_lenght_bytes,0); string record_type, amount_str; //Totals long check_items= 0, total_amount = 0; try { while (true) { //Get record type record_type_bytes = inpu...