1. For the alphabet because without it, this just wouldn't make sense.
2. For my wife for all the right reasons, and some of the wrong ;)
3. For beer... no explanation needed.
4. For the internet and Al Gore for inventing it.
5. For beer... yeah, it's THAT good.
6. For my wife... yeah, she's THAT good.
7. For the numbers 56, 37, -123 & 4, because being random is sooo much fun.
8. For not getting rid of Little, he's a pain but he's been thru so much, he deserves a break (my wife will understand).
9. For loops (programmers will understand).
10. For everything in my life RIGHT NOW... and what's yet to come.

Somebody recently asked me this question and I thought that a some others out there might not know this little trick; SQL gurus please ignore:

When editing data in a table view from within SQL Enterprise Manager (2000 or 2005) you can NULL the field by hitting Ctrl+0 when the cell has focus.  Deleting the data completely does not do it.  Typing in "NULL" does not do it either.

While working an ASP.NET 2.0 project today I ran across a problem with the OnClientClick event within the Button WebControl.  The problem is that .NET renders this button:


as


So when I click on the button, my JavaScript fires correctly but the page then submits -not what I want it to do.  Thinking fast, I added a snippet to return false after my client-script ran, like so:


This however, does not work; the page still submits.  After looking at the rendered HTML I can see the problem right away -the button type is submit.  What I need is for it to be a type of button.  

An input control of type button, will not automatically submit the form.  But how do I get .NET to render one?

What I do not want to to is capture it just before it renders and change it there.  And I also do not want to try to manipulate the type attribute after it's already been rendered.  The solution I found; .NET has a added an attribute (boolean) to the Button WebControl called UseSubmitBehavior.  By setting it to false in the WebControl, like so:


Renders the input control like I want it to, as a button:


Notice that I still need to stop the execution of the JavaScript by returning false because .NET added  __doPostBack('btnAddChoice','') to the onclick event.  

But the main difference is that by returning false the page DOES NOT submit.  Now, I can go back to writing my client-script to manipulate the page and capture those changes when the real submit button is clicked and the server code takes over.

Finally, the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft) have come to an agreenment on indexing sites; sitemaps.  The sitemap protocol is located at sitemaps.org and is already being used by Google Sitemaps. 

Luckily, the engine that powers my site (dasBlog v1.9) has the site map functionality built in.  You can see my current map here.

Without getting into much detail (read the TechCrunch article for more information), the main benefit is that my site will now be indexed uniformly by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.  The result; more traffic.  Keep'em coming guys.

First Holiday Starbucks of the season.

Recently, when ever I opened any Office 2003 application (Outlook, Word, Excel, etc.) I got the following message “Microsoft Office Outlook can’t load Speech Recognition files.  This feature is not currently installed.  Would you like to install it now? [Yes] [No]”.  Of course, I repeatedly clicked “No”.  I didn’t want or need speech recognition.



After a quick Google I found that I had to remove the speech recognition from the computers regional settings.

First and foremost, close all Office applications currently running.

Once all Office applications have been shut down, go to Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options -> Languages tab.

Click “Details” in the “Text services and input languages” group box.



Select “Speech recognition” in the list box within the “Installed services” group box then click “Remove”.



Verify that “Speech recognition” has been removed from the list box.



Click “OK” to close “Text Services and Input Languages” dialog window.

Click “OK” to close the “Regional and Language Options” dialog window.

Open any Office application.  Office should no longer prompt you to install Speech Recognition files.

Starting this week, I began a new job. Along with paper work and the normal beginning-a-new-job routine, came my new computer setup. For the most part, everything went fine and it was more a matter of locating and trying to remember all the little programs I use and installing them. That’s the easy part. The thing that always manages to trip me up is the settings I like for each program. Even that went well until I came to Outlook.

I’m sure everyone knows and loves Outlook’s many options and the many places they hide. Most settings are at least 2-3 clicks deep in pop-ups. What I wanted to change was no different but finding it turned out to be a pain.

All I wanted to do was change the setting so that each time I clicked on an email, it gets marked it as “Read” right away. Seems simple enough, right? Well, I clicked on almost every combination before I found the winner:

"Tools" menu option -> "Options..." -> "Other" tab -> "Reading Pane" button

Simply select "Mark items as read when viewed in the Reading Pane" and insert 0 into the "seconds before marking item as read" box. Click "OK" and you’re done.

What my wife and I were for Halloween.

I've updated the image to include my name... Rupert.

Yes I would like to save this file!  If you're gonna ask, at least let me say "Yes".