David Bickley

I had good luck thrifting today, both of these for under $40.

Oh and Christine got a new dress/costume piece.

As some of you might know I have my TV hooked up to a mac mini. In the past to control my TV I had to use a mouse and large keyboard. Well I finally broke down and ordered a Rii Mini:

Its so tiny and cute! It also has a built in cat toy (a laser).

While researching the last post I came across this staircase. This is why I want to buy a two story house one day.

After a grueling few weeks we are finally moved in to our new place. The new place is huge, 1200 sf, 2 bedrooms, and a formal dinning room. We still have a bunch of stuff to do, but the fun part is about to begin: decorating.

We ordered a new carpet and a lamp already:

We are thinking about building a table for our plants around our bay window. We might even build in some plant lights around the top. This morning we converted a storage bin into a top entrance litter box and we got to use our dermal!

Our plan so far is to have a Victorian/Steampunk room in the formal dinning room. An Asian themed guest bedroom. We are debating between a nautical or science themed bathroom, maybe we will do a combo? The master bedroom and living room will most likely be left as it is with our current furniture.

Our kitchen is also huge, but we there is not much counter space. We are thinking we can take my old workbench/table and tile the top with some found tiles.

Here are some items that we like and might try to figure out how to make ourselves:

I had to send back my last one (over a month ago) due to a hardware issue. Now, finally, my new one has arrived!

From cr-48

From cr-48

I have decided to bite the bullet and finally learn Ruby on Rails. I really should have done it years ago when I first started hearing about it, but I decided to teach myself Java/GWT instead. I still love GWT, but so far Rails looks interesting. When I have my first site built I will post the link!

While researching how to split a delimited text inline I came across two new functions. Here is an excerpt from a developer.com article written by Paul Kimmel.

From the MSDN help “the APPLY operator allows you to invoke a table-valued function for each row returned by an outer table expression of a query. The table-valued function acts as the right input and the outer table acts as the left input.” Hunh?! Technically, I understand table-valued function, left and right input, but this explanation doesn’t really tell me about why I need this or when it’s needed. The help documentation doesn’t tell me what to do with APPLY. So, this article represents me processing and compartmentalizing APPLY, which will help me know when it should be pulled out of my toolbox and used.

http://www.developer.com/db/article.php/3798361/Using-T-SQL-CROSS-APPLY-and-OUTER-APPLY.htm

I was tasked with creating a master report to list all of our subreports. After way too much time experimenting and researching I finally figured it out. Below is the quick and dirty, I apologize for not having enough time to do get into the nitty gritty.

First create a multivalue parameter holding the report names, lets call it @Reports.

Next create a dataset that unions all the names together. Example:

SELECT     reportname
FROM         (
SELECT     'report1' AS reportname
UNION ALL
SELECT     'report2' AS reportname
UNION ALL
SELECT     'report3' AS reportname
) AS sq1
WHERE     (reportname IN (@Reports))

Now we are going to add a table with a parent group and a sub group for each sub report.
Add a table to the report and set the dataset to the dataset you just created.
Then add a parent row group and add another parent row group.
Next add an adjacent group for each subreport and set the group filter to reportname=”yoursubreportname”.
Finally on the main parent group set the page breaks to be “between”.

Hopefully that makes sense.


SELECT split.item
FROM (
SELECT
CAST('' + REPLACE('test1,test2,test3', ',', '') + '' AS XML) ListOfItems
) SubQuery
CROSS APPLY (
SELECT
ListOfItems.item.value('.', 'varchar(10)') item
FROM SubQuery.ListOfItems.nodes('r') AS ListOfItems(item)
) Split