Peter Miller

A couple of quick hitters...

• You know how annoying it is in Windows XP when run a script or program directly using the "Run" dialog and a DOS box pops up and closes immediately before you can read it? Well beyond the snide recommendations I'm sure to hear about switching to a real OS, you can run a program using /K switch with cmd.exe and the dialog will stay open until you close it. Useful for me when shelling out to run Ruby programs
• Ever had to answer the question, what would be the impact of dropping this table or renaming this view be to our database? If you're working with SQL Server a really useful tool for this is SQL Digger. It allows you to search through views, stored procedures, UDF's, etc for occurences of the search text
• I'm working on some notes for setting up a Windows XP environment for developing Ruby programs in; while I was looking around I noticed a lot of favorable reviews for TextMate, an editor/IDE for OS X. Unfortunately, it's creator is pretty negative towards the idea of porting it over to us folks using Windows. Maybe he will change his mind eventually or maybe someone will step in to fill in the gap and get something similar up and running for Windows.