October 2006 Entries
As much a reminder to myself as aid for anyone with a similar problem. I've been doing some client-side scripting, using the HTML DOM and hit a problem when accessing the attributes of an element, specifically the style attribute. IE returns this as an object, while other browsers (well, Firefox) return it as a string, in accordance with the W3C specs. In IE to get access to the string of defined values you have to use node.style.cssText. It's taken me several hours of trial an error and searching to find this - most of my search results had plenty to say...
Don't tell me this hasn't happened to you and you haven't felt the same.
Yet another software complaint. Ignoring all the direness that is the SQL Reporting Services Designer, which I really don't think is as easy to use as the one that Access has had for 10 years, I have the install / configuration issue. SSRS wasn't working so I had to manually configure; there's a nice tool provided, but that still led to permissions problems on a config file. So I tried the trusted route of uninstalling and re-installing the reporting services and I find the reason for it not being configured; when installing you get a selection of "Install the default...
My great weekend started on Friday when I went to a gig with Jon. In itself this isn't an unusual event, as we go to a fair number of gigs. But this was special. Jon and I are both fans (devotees? Addicts?) of Bob Harris, who recently had a Chris Rea competition; Jon won tickets to to a session Chris was recording for Bob's Saturday show. As Lou isn't the biggest Chris Rea fan (her own words) she offered me the chance to go instead, which I jumped at. So we pitch up at the BBC Maida Vale studios, along...
So patch Tuesday rolls by and my laptop installs the bundle of patches. On Thursday. Today the patches arrive on my main machine, so at 9:30am I start intalling them. It's just finished. The time? 15:48. What the heck was it doing? Listening to Requiem by Verdi from the album Requiem Disc 1
I have decided that, as great and powerful as it is, SSIS sucks (but only a little). There are way too many little things that make working with it frustrating: Why did they feel the need to invent a new type of drop down list, one that shows a modal form? When selecting input and output data sources, you are shown a drop down list of data source and clicking the arrow doesn't display what you normally get from this type of list, but a modal form shown the entries alongside tick boxes; the form also has a Cancel...
I've seen the Red Gate SQL Tools used in the past, but not tried them myself until today, when I ventured into SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare. My word, these are good. Really, really good. Not only do they do their job well, but they are exceedingly simple to use; easy wizards and simple screens showing you what is to be compared and trasnferred. I can't believe I've never had these before. Shame on me. And shame on you if you haven't looked at them. Go on, do it now. You won't regret it.
October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so ipona has gone pink for October.