Monday, April 30, 2007

WM6 on T-Mobile Dash - Coming soon

Rumor has it the final version of the Windows Mobile 6 upgrade for the T-Mobile Dash has been leaked, and is to be officially released this Friday, May 4th. I'm so stoked! Story.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Dark Knight, cont'd

Video I shot this morning from my phone of the Joker's henchman jumping out of a truck and storming into the bank, guns drawn. I spotted Christopher Nolan, the director.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

The Dark Knight

The next installment of the Batman franchise, The Dark Knight, is currently being shot across the street from my office. They've re-purposed the old Post Office building at Van Buren and Canal as Gotham National Bank. I'll try and sneak some pictures today and upload them to my Flickr account...word is their security shoos away people with cameras. Story about the filming.

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Office Accounting 2007 - First Look

In October, 2005, I tried Microsoft Small Business Accounting 2006 and wrote it off after two minutes because of its lack of realistic account hierarchy support.

Today I tried the new version, Office Accounting Professional 2007. My first impression: there is no longer an artificial account hierarchy depth limit! Yay! My second impression: there are a ton of new concepts that I need to learn in order to use it as a basic ledger for my personal finances. I've set up a sandbox chart of accounts to play around with for the time being. What's confusing me now is that there are multiple ways to enter transactions, and they all seem to have different meanings and show up on reports differently. I'll keep playing...maybe I'll even RTFM. The user experience seems quite nice, so I think it will be worth investing some time to learn.

In related news, Quick Books Free Edition only supports one level of account hierarchies. GnuCash has released version 2.1.0 (Unstable) for Windows, their first non-alpha Windows release. I've been using GnuCash on my Linux box for about five years now. Unfortunately, I'm stuck with version 1.8.11 because my Linux distro is so far out of date the required packages for the new version can't (easily) be obtained—and I'm not willing to invest any more time in Linux at this point in my life (it's just too undocumented and takes too much time to figure anything out). Once the .msi gets posted (currently just source is online), I plan to try it out. GnuCash is the last real vestige holding me to Linux....

Thursday, April 05, 2007

OPENXML and sp_xml_preparedocument with Namespaces

Posting this for mainly my reference, as the SQL Server documentation is a bit slim. When your XML has namespaces, sp_xml_preparedocument and OPENXML have to be used differently. The bold text below highlights the gotchas.

DECLARE @Errors nvarchar(2000)
SET @Errors = '<Errors xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <Error xmlns="http://tempuri.org/Foo.xsd">
    <Code>-1</Code>
    <UniqueName>InvalidFormat</UniqueName>
    <Warning>false</Warning>
  </Error>
  <Error xmlns="http://tempuri.org/Foo.xsd">
    <Code>-1</Code>
    <UniqueName>MaxLength</UniqueName>
    <Warning>false</Warning>
  </Error>
</Errors>'

SELECT @Errors

DECLARE @x_handle int
exec sp_xml_preparedocument @x_handle OUTPUT, @Errors, '<root xmlns:x="http://tempuri.org/Foo.xsd"/>'

SELECT * 
FROM OPENXML(@x_handle, '/Errors/x:Error', 2)
 WITH (UniqueName nvarchar(50) 'x:UniqueName', Warning nvarchar(5) 'x:Warning') XmlErrors

exec sp_xml_removedocument @x_handle