By Soul Solutions on
Monday, 31 December 2007
 Being the last day of the year, always a good time to review what we've done this year. It's been a big year and it has gone way too quickly. Here's a quick review of our year:
January - Saw the launch of Look up and Smile for Australia Day
April
.
May
We took some time off in Thailand, looked after some ...
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By Soul Solutions on
Monday, 31 December 2007
Being the last day of 2007 and all, I thought I'd do a recap on the ViaWindowsLive community site. Since we launched the Beta site on September 7, we've had 27 articles sumbitted by you..keep them coming.
Article Contributions
- John O'Brien (7)
- Bronwen Zande (4)
- Derek Chan (3)
- Daniel Wissa (2)
- Vasudev Gurumurthy (2)
- Beth Massi (1)
- Robert McGrath(1)
- Gfw (1)
- Brian Peek (1)
- Darren Neimke (1)
- Marco Anastasi (1)
- Mike McDougall (1)
...
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By Soul Solutions on
Monday, 24 December 2007
Here's one I always have to look up. You've cleared out all the data in your tables and you want to set the autoid back to the beginning...or you want to start it at a particular number. DBCC CHECKIDENT is the command for you.
E.g.
command signature: DBCC CHECKIDENT(table_name, RESEED, new_value)
usage: DBCC CHECKIDENT(Customers, RESEED, 0)
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By Soul Solutions on
Monday, 24 December 2007
While helping out on a project, I ran a few unit tests. When it ran, my collegue remarked, "There's the letter coming out of the printer now". I was a bit surprised and asked if there was a config setting to prevent it from printing everytime i ran the tests. Unfortunaly no was the answer.
So in an effort to not kill as many trees I downloaded CUTEPDF which is a program that allows you to use it as a printer but saves the output to a pdf file. I changed all the printer references in the tests to point to the newly installed "printer" and whoolaa...no more trees being kill, and tests still run fine.
There's a few other programs out there that are similar, I've used CutePDF a few times now when i'm doing development and process testing.&am ...
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By Soul Solutions on
Sunday, 23 December 2007
Came across "Agent M" today on this blog. "Agent M" is a Windows Live Agent to help it's banking customers with enquiries, faqs etc. If you want to have a play with it just add m.m2u@maybank.com.my to you Live Messenger friends list and start asking questions etc.
I love seeing new examples of agets. I've played with smarterchild and encarta for a few years now..they can be very addictive...and earlier this year wrote a Live Agent for a demo. Improving and extending the words/phrases/questions etc. can be very addictive.
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By Soul Solutions on
Saturday, 22 December 2007
Our unit will be vacant soon..so we went in search of a realestate agent that does LET ONLY. Let me tell you it was SO hard to find. All seem to only do with property management. After calling about a dozen agents I found 1 that would do it! Pretty amazing hey?
Renovated 2brm Unit close to transport and shops
 
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By Soul Solutions on
Saturday, 22 December 2007
After working at home, for ourselves, on fixed priced work for over 12 months I'm finding it difficult to work in an office again. It's not just feeling cut off from the world...it the change in mentality.
In an environment where everything is measured in time and not deliverables your focus quickly changes. Instead of getting something finished by x date, new rules appear:
- don't work more than 40hrs in a week
- don't work later than 6pm
- needing to "build up hours" to leave early
So to make sure you're fitting into these timing rules you become a clock watcher..well a minor one at least..what time did you get to work, how long for lunch, how long till i have to be out of the building, have i done enough or too many hours in the week.
So instead of people concentrating on what they need to ...
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By Soul Solutions on
Saturday, 22 December 2007
So in this day and age is it considered polite or an insult for a guy to give up his seat on a bus to a gal?
Now that I have temporarily rejoined the crowd of cummuters it's interesting to watch those around you. Most days I'm pretty lucky to get a seat..the buses are always packed. While I stand I would never expect someone to give up their rightful seating position and offer it to me. About once a week this offer seems to present itself..thus far I have thanked the "kind gentleman" and sat..cause hey...if he wants to stand, I'll happily sit.
When it happens to someone else it is quite often amusing to watch the results which are either:
(a) very similar to mine and nab the seat
(b) the lady looks REALLY insulted, makes a fuss and the guy sits back down
(c) the lady looks REALLY insulted, the ...
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By Soul Solutions on
Wednesday, 19 December 2007
 Bored this Christmas and looking for something cool to play with? How about playing with some very new code that combines Silverlight and Windows Live Services. If you haven't played with it you should:
http://tafiti.mslivelabs.com/
And the big announcment today is the source code is available for you sink your teeth into:
http://codeplex.com/WLQuickApps
So if you keen to see what Silverlight and Windows Live Services are all about and have a few spare hours over the break I highly recommend checking this out. I'm sure it will generate some ideas for you in 2008.
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By Soul Solutions on
Sunday, 16 December 2007
Dell has some great Christmas deals out and while looking at their catalogue I noticed they have some wireless xbox 360 controllers for windows. I had always wanted to pick one of these up and now wireless - even better!
It was dead simple to install, little peice of software on the supplied CD and then plug in the usb dongle. Instantly I can now fly around, badly mind you, in Virtual Earth 3D.
You have 3 controls, the LT and RT (trigger fingers at the front of the controller) control zooming in and out. The multidirectional pad in the top left (left thumb) pans the map while the multidirectional pad on the right (for the right thumb) controls the point of view, rotating and tilting the map. The "A" button puts everyth ...
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