Category: Geeky/Programming

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Online Radio (Pandora) does make you buy music: The Generators

When I am not listening to my music collection, I usually listen to Pandora, using Open Pandora. Now, I know, no ad’s, how does Pandora make money? Well, I would gladly pay 30 bucks a year for this service, the Open Pandora app should be eaten up by Pandora.

Anyway’s, I kept hearing this song by “The Generators” – Roll Out The Red Carpet. And the lead singer sounds so much like Alkaline Trio, that I was like, yeah, this is good, so I went and bought it online, at Audio Lunchbox – 10 bucks, no DRM, mp3 format.

So, the theory that online radio doesn’t server its purpose is bunk, and that no DRM music is going to cause piracy is bunk, its just all bunk. It is just music. If people want it, they will get it. And I would rather buy it for cheap with no DRM than with DRM any day.

And with tomorrow being Online Radio Day of Silence, this is a fitting post, I suppose 🙂

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Geeky/Programming

Microsoft Popfly: Is This The Future of Application Development?

popfly_app

This is a screenshot of a mashup I created today using Microsoft Popfly. Is this the future of application development? Well, short answer, maybe.

It has a long way to go, that is for sure. First off, only services that have “blocks” available are able to be used. There are many services that don’t have blocks, or if they do, they don’t expose their whole API, just a subset. I would like to make a mashup to take my Flickr pictures and put them into Facebook. Yet the Facebook block only has “get” commands.

The application above, I took 3 sources of videos, and filtered their results to “Video Games”, combined the outputs, and then fed it into a video player. Took about 5 minutes. There are probably tons of uses for things like this, but as far as a full fledged application, I don’t think so. One big reason is you are too dependant on other services. There is also the 3rd party blocks that people have created, but you don’t really know what they are doing, once again dependant.

I really like the graphical part of it, it seems cool, makes it easy to get your API keys and such, but I think I would rather stick to coding this myself and knowing what is going on then doing it all graphically.

Here is the final video player

popfly_app_1

I think that if more and more sites expose API’s, and not just crap API’s, but good API’s then we might see this take off, since it is really easy to make a mashup. For now, it is a good Saturday afternoon goof around 🙂

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Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

HowTo: Edit .MOV QuickTime Files

Well, I did a little research, and probably the best bet (sadly) is Quicktime Pro. So I put out the 30 bucks and got it. Was able to crop my video, and compress it (from 250 MB to 9 MB!!)

Quick how to crop a mov in Quicktime pro

1) open Quicktime and the movie
2) Window->show Movie Properties
3) highlight the “Video Track”
4) click on Visual Settings tab
5) make black square with white border gif in paint (white will be deleted when masked)
6) “choose” button, find gif and load to that square, extract and your movie should be cropped
7) extract audio and video tracks

Quick how to compress a video in Quicktime pro

1) File->Extract
2) choose a compression
3) export

It seems to be Apple just doesn’t make it very intuitive to use Quicktime Pro, I just hate the interface. Oh well, it worked.

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Business Intelligence Geeky/Programming SQLServerPedia Syndication

SSAS: AverageOfChildern and Semi-additive measure requires a time dimension

In SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Services), if you have a measure group, with some measures as AggregateFunction of Sum and some of AverageOfChildern, you will see a red squiggly line on the measure group and if you highlight it (or build the cube), you will get this error:

Semi-additive measure requires a time dimension.

The problem starts with the AggregateFunction property of your measures, where some are Additive, some are Semi-Additive. You can see which are which by looking at MSDN here. What I found will get rid of the error, but still might not help you is this: if you go to the properties of your Time dimension, and check its type. By default dimensions are created with type “Regular”. If you change your Time dim to type “Time”, then rebuild, you won’t get any errors, and you can deploy.

Now, this might be all good, but in the case I ran into, it still didn’t work for me. AverageOfChildern only applies to the Time dim. Not what you would expect from looking at it. Say you have a measure, that you want the Average (AVG) instead of Sum, you would think that picking AverageOfChildren as a AggregateFunction property would do the trick, well it doesn’t. If you do this, deploy, and browse your cube, you will still see that the values are Sum. WTF right? Well like it sparsely says in the docs, it only applies to the Time dim.

In order to get the Average of a measure, here is the best way to go about it that I have found.

1) Create a Measure from the field for Sum
2) Create a Measure from the field for Count
3) Create a Calculated Member (Measure) for the field, taking Sum/Count from step 1 and 2.
3a) you can check for 0’s in the count by using IIF()
3b) for best performance, check your NON_EMPTY_BEHAVIOR and if it applies to you, it should speed up your results tremendously. Usually you can just choose the fields you are using in your calculation and it should be fine from what I have seen (I am no expert though)
4) make sure to hide your Sum and Count measures if you don’t want your clients to use them by setting the Visible property to false.
5) Build, Deploy, Process, Report

 

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Geeky/Programming

Video Editing Software – MOV Cropping and Compression

My digital camera takes some sweet video. It comes back in .MOV QuickTime format. Thing is, a 3 minute video is like 300 MB.

What I want is the ability to compress the video so I can upload to YouTube. Another cool thing would be a feature to “crop” the video. There is a lot of dead space around the edges of the video, kind of like a picture. I would like to crop it (then it would zoom in on the actual content).

I look online and they are all crappy/don’t work, or have some catch where you need to install a bundle to install it, etc.

I would even pay 50$ or so for something that actually worked.

Does anyone know of any good video editing software that handles QuickTime and isn’t a piece of crap?

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So You Want To Be A Hax0r – Step 1

So you want to be a hax0r? l33t even? Your first step is to find a cool handle.

Looks like Aaron figured out how to do it (but he still hasn’t figured out how to set up permalinks in WordPress yet). What’s your handle? And don’t say Neo, or Trinity, or Morpheus. Don’t even think of “Zero Cool” or “Crash Override”. You can only use “Acid Burn” if you are as hot as Angelina.

I took a “hacking” course from SANS a few years ago and we had to come up with handles. I took my name and figured out that an anagram for it is ScaleOvenStove – dorky but not too dorky,

Ok l33t hax0r – pick your handle. Next time we will jump into the world of “phreaking” (and if you don’t know what phreaking is, you shouldn’t even be reading this far)

 

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Business Intelligence Geeky/Programming SQLServerPedia Syndication

SSRS Exporting Report to Excel – Keep Formatting on Export

When creating Reporting Services (SSRS) reports, I usually use FormatCurrency() and FormatPercent() around values to make the report look good. Today I found out that when you use those, and export to Excel, you lose the ability to sum the values, because everything is exported as text.

The right way (or at least the way that I have found that works) is this. Remove all the FormatCurrency() and FormatPercent() functions. On all your currency fields, highlight them, then in the properties area, there is a “Format” property. I set that to C2 (C for Currency, 2 for the number of digits after the decimal, so if you wanted zero, it would be C0). Again for Percentages, same thing, highlight all the fields, and set “Format” to P2 (P for Percentage, 2 for the number of digits after the decimal).

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Geeky/Programming Product Reviews

Data Recovery – Where Did My Files Go?

Right before I left for Portland, I was moving some files around on my USB hard drive, and I noticed something was wacked, like 100 GB was in use, but I couldn’t see any files! They had disappeared.

Well today I finally got around to recovering the files. I tried 3-4 different products at first. All of them let you download a demo and see what you can recover. The one I have used before – OnTrack – doesn’t even work on Vista, so that was out the window.

I finally came across one called GetDataBack. It showed EVERYTHING that I was missing. The others showed partials or not even some folders I had, just weird. GetDataBack is nice too, once you do a scan and it finds everything, you can save that recovery session, close the program, and come back, and you don’t have to rescan everything again. My scan took 3.5 hours to complete, so this was a nice feature.

The hardest part about everything is just moving data around, I didn’t have enough free space on my main drive to restore everything at once, so I had to restore some, and then move it over the network to my other machine, then go back and restore more, rinse, repeat.

GetDataBack set me back 70$, but it was worth it to get all my music, documents and photos back. I can tell you this, once I am done moving everything around, I am backing up everything online.

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Geeky/Programming Life

T-Mobile Hotspot Access with Total Internet Add-On

A few months back when I got my T-Mobile Dash, it comes with the “T-Mobile Total Internet Add-on” which says “T-Mobile Internet with Hotspot”.

Ok, cool. Access to their hotspots at Starbucks, Hotels, Airports, etc, right? Well fine, but what is my username/password for the site? (hotspot.t-mobile.com)

Tried my phone #, and T-mobile password, nothing, just couldn’t figure it out. Finally stumbled across it on howardforums wiki – 10 digit phone number and last four of SSN, and on login it asks you to change.

So now, cool, I have access to the hotspots, This week it looks like I am going to have to try to get out of the “office” and work from a Starbucks for an afternoon, just to get some human interaction 🙂

 

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Business Intelligence Geeky/Programming SQLServerPedia Syndication

SSAS: Deploying Cube OLE DB Error – Login Failed

If you are deploying/building a cube in SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), and you get tons of errors, and littered throughout you see

OLE DB error: OLE DB or ODBC error: Login failed for user ‘NT AUTHORITYANONYMOUS LOGON’.; 28000.

You should take a look at your data sources, and on the impersonation tab, play around with the different options. Usually it is set to “Use the service account” or “default”. I have tried “Use the credentials of the current user” but got errors back when deploying saying that the impersonation method was invalid for processing. I have found that “Use a specific user name and password” works. As I sit and wait for the cube I just finally got to deploy to finish, I figured I would write this up in a post. Your mileage may vary.

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