My blogless friend Zach shared this great tip with me: if you would like to test ping times to a machine from an outside source, telnet to route-server.ip.att.net. There, you will be presented with a command line which allows you to ping from the AT&T servers.

############## route-server.ip.att.net ############### …

TweakVista.com is one of my favorite Vista sites. Yesterday, they posted something that I had in mind for posting on this blog but now they've saved me the trouble ;) "Extend Activation Period past 180 days" has step-by-step instructions for using Task Scheduler to legally and permanently delay the Activation …

Well, this took awhile to figure out. I wrote a Roman Numeral converter for my Java final and one of the requirements states: Subtract only powers of ten, such as I, X, or C. Writing VL for 45 is not allowed: write XLV instead.

This means I had to see if the number I'm working with was a power of 10. Initially, I did …

As seen on soma.fm

The Copyright Royalty Board has announced new copyright licensing fees for internet radio stations. The new fees are a staggering increase over our previous annual royalty rate of about $22,000 to over $600,000 for 2006. And the fees are even higher in 2007, based on our current listenership, …

Today, as I received an email from CERT, I was reminded of the day in 2004 when it was announced that CERT merged with the US Government. I wondered what would change and even considered the possibility that red tape could turn the highly-respected CERT into something that people just didn't respect anymore.

By the …

I believe I have a pretty high tolerance for inconveniences but I just couldn't take it: running Windows Server 2003 as a primary OS on Macbook blows.

As a fan of Unix, Windows and beautiful UIs, I promised myself I would put down any amount of money for a small Macbook the day it came out and I did just that. Then I …

As a compliment to my MaxMind GeoIP Locator scripts and the parse top-level domain from URL function, I've created another function to parse the search term from an URL.

I've heard that T-SQL is a bit slow with parsing strings and wanted to test this myself so I created this in both C# and T-SQL. The difference is very …

You can now download SQL Server 2005 SP2 on Microsoft's website. Here's hoping that the install issues in SP1 won't plague SP2 as well!

I found this useful security tip on Microsoft.com.

SAFE is the recommended permission setting for assemblies that perform computation and data management tasks without accessing resources outside an instance of SQL Server.

We recommend using EXTERNAL_ACCESS for assemblies that access resources outside of an instance …

Well, 10 steps, give or take. This could have been executed in fewer steps had we not chosen such a useful function as an example . This function, which is only supported in SQL Server 2005 with CLR enabled, esentially performs a reverse IP lookup (nslookup -type=ptr), uses System.Net.Dns.GetHostEntry and thus requires …