Python
Lately I've been reading more about Ruby on Rails -- actually it has been rather entertaining, colorful, testy, and somewhat enlightening. One important aspect of programming is the ability to analyze, understand, and adapt. I have been using more Python lately in work as well as JavaScript and it has been enjoyable although I still like and prefer C#. Sometimes I wonder how many programmers get fixated on specific language features that in turn becomes a "must have" or requirement for any language he or she uses. That isn't to say the feature is not important but rather usually the...
I really like Subtext, but unfortunately I haven't had too much time to try to configure my blog. I've looked through the wiki, but haven't seen enough information to emulate the configuration of Subtext founder Phil Haack. For example, the FeedBurner plugin which lists the number of subscribers and links to get the RSS and even email feeds -- how exactly is that configured? I suppose I should RTFM but I'm having trouble finding it at the moment (not to mention I have way too much to do right now with work!). It seems the Subtext Wiki is describing plug-in...
I was working on a project last week where I needed to update the columns and data types in tables in SQL Server. It is pretty quick to do this manually such as:ALTER TABLE orders
ALTER COLUMN orderid varchar(36) NOT NULL
I prefer this compared to the code SQL Server generates in the change script which typically renames the existing table, creates a new table, copies the data from the previous table to the new table, and then restores indices and keys. While that is appropriate for dramatic changes, it is overkill for something of this nature.
Since I love...
During a database schema upgrade yesterday, I had to create a new primary key field for a table and then generate the new primary key values. At the moment this key value is a custom generated value by a Python class, but it will eventually use an RFC 4122 or ISO/IEC 9834-8 compliant algorithm (see Wikipedia for more information). I had to decide how to generate this value and I ended up using a combination of Python, gawk, and T-SQL. I suppose I could have left out the gawk, but it would have taken almost the same amount of time...