For those of you considering a new laptop

... then you're probably looking at getting an Intel Sandy Bridge powered device. The new platform offers great performance and much improved battery life. Great, right?

Yes, in theory - but it has a big fat FLAW in it. A design flaw in the chipset can cause your SATA performance to be severely impacted. Intel are working a fix but replacement devices are due in April at the earliest.

Anyway, this site has a lot of useful information about Sandy Bridge laptops.

In particular, there's a post from today which explains how you can get a Sandy Bridge device returned, depending on the manufacturer.

Check it out - but unfortunately you will need to wait until end of March to put in your orders! Oh well.

Editing document properties in Microsoft Word 2007

Nothing new here, but a lot of people have trouble finding this in Microsoft Word.
1. Click on the Office icon in the top left:
2. Click on Prepare -> Properties
3. There is a menu in the top left of the panel that has just appeared. Click where it says Document Properties, then click Advanced Properties.
4. Click on the Custom tab, and there you have it.

Bonus Tip!


Once you've updated your fields and clicked OK, you need the updates to reflect in the document. To do this:

Press Ctrl-A
Press F9

Happy Wordsmithing!

LinqDataSource FormView Update error "Could not find a row that matches the given keys in the original values stored in ViewState"

The Microsoft Linq's LinqDataSource is a great control for saving time when binding data to a web user interface.

But there are a few gotchas you may need help with. Here's one:

OK, when Googling the above error, you'll find a bunch of people saying - just add the DataKeyNames property to your formview! Well that doesn't always fix this problem!

Yes, there is a more insidious cause for this error... mismatching case in the spelling of the id field.

You see, the LINQ designer capitalises all instances of the string "id" which occur at the end of a name to "ID". This causes issues because you, the developer, merrily put the name of the database ID column into the DataKeyNames property as you wrote it in the database definition.

For example:

<asp:formview datakeynames="RecordId" datasourceid="MyDataSource" id="FormView1" onitemupdating="FormView1_Updating" runat="server">
</asp:formview>

, not realising that the LINQ designer has named your primary key field "RecordId" as "RecordID"

Yes! It's as simple as that.

So next time you get the "Could not find a row that matches the given keys in the original values stored in ViewState" error, open up your DBML file and double-check the name of your primary key field.

By the way, this applies to insert and delete operations too.

How To Drop All Foreign Keys in a MS SQL Server Database

Today I needed to remove all foreign keys in a database. This was necessary because I was building a script to build a database from an initial import, plus a bunch of new tables, and alter statements.
So I needed a clean slate before running the initial import (DROP + CREATE) script.

The script below completely blows away ALL foreign keys in your DB.

Enjoy!

SET NOCOUNT ON
GO

DECLARE Fkeys CURSOR FOR
SELECT 'ALTER TABLE ' + TABLE_SCHEMA + '.[' + TABLE_NAME + '] DROP CONSTRAINT [' + CONSTRAINT_NAME + ']'
FROM information_schema.table_constraints
WHERE CONSTRAINT_TYPE = 'FOREIGN KEY'

OPEN Fkeys

DECLARE @Statement NVARCHAR(500)

FETCH NEXT FROM Fkeys INTO @statement
WHILE (@@FETCH_STATUS = 0)
BEGIN
   PRINT N'RUNNING ' + @statement
   EXEC sp_executesql @statement
   PRINT CHAR(13) + CHAR(13)
   FETCH NEXT FROM Fkeys INTO @statement
END

CLOSE Fkeys
DEALLOCATE Fkeys
GO
SET NOCOUNT OFF
GO

Excluding files or directories while deleting in Linux

When you use a graphical UI, removing a selected group of files or directories is easy! You just click a few, then delete.

On the command line (in Linux, for example), this isn't so easy.

Today I needed to clear out all Wordpress themes in a blog, except for the one currently in use.

How did I do it?


cd /var/www/mywordpresssite/wp-content/themes/
rm -rf `ls | grep -v themetokeep/ | grep -vF \.`


The above command removes all files and directories EXCEPT themetokeep, and those with dots in them. The latter is VERY important. If you include '..' in the rm-rf command, it will attempt to delete everything up one directory as well. In this case, that would have been the wp-content/ directory - yep, not a good idea!

Let's break that command down a bit:

ls

- the simplest way to list files. It just lists the names (no file size, dates, etc) of all files and directories in the current directory. Some systems are configured to hide the . and .. directories when ls is used with no parameters. However, some are not - which is why we need to be careful by adding that last grep.

|

- the pipe directs the output from one command to the input of another. In this case, we are sending the output of the ls command to the grep command, instead of printing the ls command's output to the shell.

grep -v themetokeep/

- grep - a great program that applies regular expressions to any input you give it, and outputs the result. It is essentially a filter.
- We are using the -v parameter to invert the match. This means we want to output all files and directories that do NOT have the name themetokeep/
If we didn't include -v and simply types grep themetokeep/ then we'd get an output list which only includes that directory.

grep -vF \.

- So now we have the output of the ls command, filtered to exclude the directory themetokeep/, and now we are filtering it one more time to remove the . and .. directories.

This is really important because we don't want to delete the current directory (wp-content/themes/) and we DEFINITELY don't want to delete the parent directory (..) - as this would remove all our plugins, cache, uploads, etc.. Please don't make that mistake as I once did! :)

- The -F parameter - to be honest, I am not exactly sure why we need this, except that if we don't use it, we won't be able to match the directories with dots in them. So use it.

- We put the slash before the . so that it is treated as a literal dot, and not the regular expression match character, which means 'any character'

rm -rf `...`

- rm - the delete command. We need -r to allow us to delete directories (and all their subdirectories). We need -f to suppress the 'Are you sure?' prompts. In other words, we're telling rm to delete everything we tell it - no questions asked.
- We put the filtered file list within the backticks ``, so that the file list becomes the instruction to rm.


Hope that helps you  - any questions - leave them in the comments!