Samsung Shipping 1-Gbyte Flash Chip; 8-GB Stack Planned

Samsung Shipping 1-Gbyte Flash Chip; 8-GB Stack Planned

NAND flash chipmaker Samsung Electronics says it has entered into mass production of an 8 gigabit NAND flash memory chip aimed at mobile phones, MP3 players, gaming consoles, and other consumer devices.

[via Extremetech]

Programmatically printing reports ... SP2 = Ouch!

I've been doing some more hack development work with SQL 2000 Reporting Services. I really like the programmability available via the web service.

Courtesy of some code provided on Reporting Service stalwart Bryan Keller's blog, I've been playing around with sending reports rendered via the web service direct to the printer. Now for some reason the reporting server I was testing against was only the RTM version and everything was working terrific. That was 3 days ago, my how things change in three days.

Come today we wanted to run out our 2500+ reports, which was going to save our Backoffice staff hours of manually printing individual printouts, we find that the production reporting server has SP2 installed and for some reason this causes the footer of the report to be dropped and the right-hand margin to be cut-off.

I have a feeling it might be something to do with rendering the reports with Letter sizing rather than A4 sizing. I'll post later when I discover the culprit. Meanwhile we're running our production report printing off an RTM Report Server, oh joy!

 

Print PDF from command line and make Acrobat go away

Some C# code that this "hack developer" of a DBA put together. Put in a console app in Visual Studio. When executing the compiled program just pass the full path and filename as the argument. One bug that's surfaced already is that it doesn't like mapped drives, but UNC paths work fine. Otherwise … enjoy !!!

using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Threading;
using System.ComponentModel;

namespace PDFPrinter
{
class PDFPrinter
{
[STAThread]
static void Main(string[] args)
{
if(args.Length > 0)
{
try
{
Process myProcess = new Process();
myProcess.StartInfo.Verb = "Print";
myProcess.StartInfo.CreateNoWindow = true;
myProcess.StartInfo.FileName = args[0].ToString();
myProcess.Start();
myProcess.WaitForInputIdle();
Thread.Sleep(5000);
if(!myProcess.CloseMainWindow())
{
myProcess.Kill();
}
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
string excepMsg = "";
Exception current = ex;

while( current != null)
{
excepMsg = current.Message;
current = current.InnerException;
}
Console.WriteLine(excepMsg);
}
}
else
{
Console.WriteLine("You need to specify the name of the PDF file to print.");
}
}
}
}

Big deals means big purchases

It's strange what huge discounts can do for a customers purchasing plans.

I wasn't planning to buy a large Plasma or LCD TV and I already have a large 21" Compaq CRT monitor for the computer. Thanks to a great deal (almost 50% off) through work we're lashing out and buying a LCD TV for the lounge and a 19" UltraSharp^TM LCD Monitor for the computer.

New toys ... and it's not even Christmas ....

SQL Server 2005 Install Woes

Just trying to install SQL 2005 on a Windows Server 2003 virtual machine and I get the following error.

Running: InstallToolsAction.10 at: 2006/6/19 9:2:22
Error: Action "InstallToolsAction.10" threw an exception during execution. Error information reported during run:
Target collection includes the local machine.
Fatal Exception caught while installing package: "10"
Error Code: 0x80070002 (2)
Windows Error Text: The system cannot find the file specified. Source File Name: sqlchaining\sqlprereqpackagemutator.cpp

Compiler Timestamp: Tue Aug 9 01:14:20 2005
Function Name: sqls::SqlPreReqPackageMutator::modifyRequest
Source Line Number: 196

---- Context -----------------------------------------------
sqls::InstallPackageAction::perform

WinException caught while installing package. : 1603
Error Code: 0x80070643 (1603)
Windows Error Text: Fatal error during installation. Source File Name: packageengine\installpackageaction.cpp
Compiler Timestamp: Fri Jul 1 01:28:25 2005
Function Name: sqls::InstallPackageAction::perform
Source Line Number: 167

---- Context -----------------------------------------------
sqls::InstallPackageAction::perform

This helpful KB article advise me that the installation files have to be in specific folders. These two folders must be under the same level of a folder or the root folder of a drive. The names of these folders must be exactly Servers and Tools. The Servers folder contains all the files that are required to install major SQL Server 2005 components, such as database engine. The Tools folder contains tools components and Books Online for SQL Server 2005.

Handy information to know. Would have been helpful in the setup documentation, then I wouldn't have wasted my time.

We live again ...

After screwing up my Community Server blog so much that I only had to look sideways to get an ASP.Net error, I thought I'd better go with something a bit easier for me to manage.

I mean I am a DBA first and a hack of a developer second :)

It only took me an hour or two to setup this blog (including hunting down a suitable template) on Blogger.com and it publishes the content across to my own website. How cool is that?

In the coming weeks I'll port my old posts from my viewable, but not editable, blog and clean out all the Community Server stuff.