Download em all

I've been a big user of Firefox for several years now. I know, there's been big news lately that it's got the most security holes of any browser. Well, that is really because the Firefox people actually post every threat and security hole that they have. Think of it this way, if you were to buy a safe, would you buy the one that is constantly updating their "safe technology" every time they find something that someone could curcomvent? Now, I'm not saying that other browsers don't plug security holes, but they also don't publish every single one that they find.

But that's the long way of getting to this topic. I found my self in the past few weeks wanting to learn some more about programming and I found an awesome website "learncpp.com." It's basically the C++ learning books (and then some) that cost 49.95 online for free. I love it but didn't want to log onto the internet everytime I wanted to read something from it. Plus, we never know how long these sites are going to last for anyway.

Along comes the "Download em all" add in for firefox. The thing is great. I can download everyting from the site with just a click of a couple buttons. The site was set up in main chapters and sub-sections. Each time you wanted to view another subsection, you would click on "next" and it brings you to the next page.

Well, download em all is able to download all those "next" pages into saved html pages on your computer. Really cool.

If you ever find yourself needing to download a bunch of stuff from the same site, you should check it out.

Notepad++

I was looking the other day for a good free program that I could use for program code editing and I found a real gem. Notepad ++ is a really great program if you like doing any type of programming from HTML to C++. I've used many programs in the past. I love Microsoft Visual Studio, but am not willing to shell out the $1,200 (or some rediculous amount of money) for the program. That's what brought me to see if there was a program out there that at least highlighted stuff for me. It doesn't have "predictive text," but with the huge number of add-ons that someone has probably done that.

Anyway, last week, I was troubleshooting a report at work. The report was based in SQL language and had over 22,000 lines of code. Last year the report worked great, this year it kept crashing and actually bringing down the entire server sometimes. I was told that "nothing had changed" on the database side between last year and this year and it must be a probelm with the report. Well, the report hadn't changed either so I went to the SQL to investigate. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to manually check 22,000 lines of SQL. So along comes Notepad ++ with it's compare add-in. It is awesome. The compare add in compares two files together, so I saved down the last years report SQL and this years report SQL to text files and compared them.

The add-in analyzes each line of the text file and shows the files side by side. Any line that is completely different on one side or the other gets highlighted and a line gets inserted in the other file to allow you to keep the matching lines side by side. Any lines that look almost the same get highlighted in a different color with the differences highlighted in a darker shade. All lines that match 100% don't get highlighted. With 22,000 lines of code, after running this add-in it took me about 2 minutes to find the problem. Turns out that "nothing has changed" was not quite 100% accurate. There is a setting called "Full Outer Join" that isn't a good setting to set as a default for the entire database, that somehow changed from last year to this year.

If you are looking for Windows notepad on super steroids, give notepad++ a try.

New sayings

Each day as I interact with Kristen, Alanna, and Annabelle, I keep thinking that I should turn this blog into a "saying of the day" blog.  I'll tag them all with "dialog" and you can choose dialog in my cool new "tag cloud" (see to the right)...

I'll do it as much as I can think of it from now on.

Saying of today.

Me to Alanna (as she's in the tub) - do you want 5 or 10 more minutes?

Alanna (in the tub):  Dad, I'd like more than 10 minutes.

Me:  Well, you can have 10.

Alanna:  Dad, would you like to do something on the computer for 10 minutes while I spend my 10 minutes in the tub?

So, I am.  But am watching the clock very closely cause we both know that 10 minutes can turn into more than 10 minutes when I'm on the computer :)