If the field in question (in this case: “year”) is of SQL-type “bigint” then SPSS will show these values in the majority of the cases as “MISSING”. Sporadically some values appear, but they are completely wrong.

Once the cause is known (problem with the “biging” type), the solution is straight-forward: Cast the type to another appropriate type which is understood by SPSS. Which type you choose obviously depends on the values stored in the affected fields. Casting blindly to “int” may (I haven’t tested this!) resolve in strange results if the values lie outside of the “int” range (-2^31 to 2^31-1). In this case you may need to cast it to something alphanumeric like “varchar” and re-cast it in SPSS into “Numeric”. As said, I haven’t tested this but I thought it might be worth mentioning!

So, here’s the above query with the appropriate cast:

Note also that in this case you need to add an alias for the column ( “… AS year” ). Otherwise SPSS will return it as “VXXX” (where XXX is a sequential number).

I have tested this solution on all combinations of SPSS 11.5, SPSS 18, SQL-Server 2008 64bit, SQL-Server 2008 Express 32bit. And casting the value worked every time.

Depending on your use, it may be helpful to create views which do the casting. I have not yet tried this, but I don’t see a reason why it shouldn’t work. Additionally, it might be noteworthy that I have only encountered this problem with “bigint” so far. There may be problems with other types as well. I expect, casting them to something else should work there too.

Some other tools are available of which I don’t remember the names. But why not use something that integrates well with Konqueror in KDE? Like “FSView” (short for file-size view)? Well, for one thing it’s painfully slow, and what makes things worse it’s utterly unreadble. But what I figured out this afternoon, is that the app actually offers some quite nice settings. The buty of Konqueror integration is that the “plugins” can insert thei own menu-items wherever they like. Which is nice, because they then integrate well with already existing menu options. But on the other hand, if you are used to open menu paths like “Plugins -> MyPlugin -> Settings” or “Edit/Tools -> Options -> Plugins” you won’t find them.

In the case of fs-view, the options are neatly tucked away in the “View” menu. Which actually makes perfect sense. But working too much on Windows-inspired user interfaces twisted my mind too much and I go looking into the non-obvious places out of pure habit

Now, to spice up fsview a bit I made the following changes:

• In the “Visualisation” sub-menu:
  • Set “Nesting” to “Vertical”
  • Set “Border” Width to 3
  • Disabled both options “Enable Rotation” and “Shading”
• In the “Stop at Area” sub-menu:
  • Set value to “400″
• In the “Stop at Depth” sub-menu:
  • Set value to “2″

Both “Stop at …” settings limit the number of times fs-view has to redraw/rearrange the grid. This should speed things up and it becomes more readable. The end result looks something like this:

FSView with customizations

In any case, running fs-view on folders with a large number of files can be very slow and make konqueror even unresponsive while it’s running. Be patient. In my opinion, if you want to determine the biggest file/folder as quickly as possible, the “du -s” method (as outlined above) is preferrable.

On their blog they say, if you’re an eager Zend Framework developer and want to get your copy of their Cheatsheet poster, you’ll just have to send them an email and you’ll get this great Poster delivered to your office or home or whatever, free of charge. So that’s what I did and guess what, a week later I received this very useful poster in the mail.
So if you are a Zend Framework developer yourself and want to own this cool poster, don’t be shy, just send an email to Björn Schotte over at Mayflower.

Here’s a photo of the poster in our office @ Visual Online, Luxembourg

Solution:

This most likely indicates that you are missing the “libpq” headers:

should solve the problem

until now i was unable to find a real solution to my problem, but here’s a little workaround which should get you up and running again, in case you’re running into the same problem.

close the project, then just open the .project file at the root of your project in your favourite text editor and check the ‘natures’ section, make sure it contains the following line:

that should do the trick.

it works pretty much like any other tracking service. you go to the website, enter the tracking code an tada… you get all the details corresponding to the entered tracking code. but this is only works if you have one single tracking code!

if you want to check multiple tracking codes, that’s where the real fun starts. instead of simply using a textarea, where the user enters one tracking code per row, they chose to make it really easy for the user. you have to open your favourite spreadsheet program, enter the tracking codes one after another into the sheet, save it as CSV file and then upload it to the server. and only then you’ll get the tracking details for your multiple tracking codes. after seeing this i thought: you can’t be serious!?

regarding user friendliness, this has to be the worst possible solution there is. which brainiac did come up with this stuff?

see for yourself: http://www.trackandtrace.lu/ (sorry, the site is only available in french)

Excel is a horrid solution for data entry, and even worse for data archival. And yet, it’s one of the most commonly used solutions. One of the most useful information in any given data-set is the information about when the information was created and when it was last modified. This is something that any decent developer in charge of a data collection (let’s just call it that for now) will add to each data record.

Alas, a lot of non-it people manage and store their data in excel worksheets. And that is OK with me as long as they pay attention to data archival. In it’s most simple form, data archival can be achieved by storing the data as a CSV file and including the following metadata:

• Which column represents which value (the name of the variable)
• The data type (number, text, date, …) of each column
• If a column is “coded”, please also include the meaning of each code.
  For example a “Yes”, “No”, “Maybe” column might be stored as “1″, “2″ and “3″. Which means in it’s most basic nature it’s a numeric variable, but the different values have a meaning attached to them. So: Add this list in your metadata description.
• If any computations or checks are performed on the values, please add them to the metadata document as well!

Even if the timestamp values might seem superflous at first, it will be of great help to anyone tracing errors in the data. Imagine that you would at some point need to fix some values that were entered/modified during a specific time period for whatever reason. Without this most basic bit of information you will be up for a treat. However, if it’s been rigurously implemented since the beginning, you’ll have the problem solved in no time.

Now, each halfway serious database system will offer you this kind of functionality out-of-the-box. But Excel is no database system (I intentionally left out the word “management” as this issue is a bit more general!). So it does not offer you a straight-forward way to solve this. But even if it’s not straight-forward, it’s simple enough for about anyone using Excel do add this bit of information.

Assuming that you use the first two columns (numbered 1 and 2 in excel) of your worksheet to add creation- and modification timestamps simply open up the Visual Basic editor (found in Tools->Macro or somesuch), next, in your project tree (in the top left of the screen) select your workbook (the .xls file), and in it’s sub-tree double-click the Worksheet that should have the timestamps set automatically.

Then copy/paste the following text into the just opened code editor and you’re done. I hope the comments will give some insight as to what happens. Note that in this case I will ignore the first row of the sheet, and obviously, the first two columns. If that does not suit your needs, feel free to change this script to your liking.

the video shows a presentation from Jason Fried from “37Signals” about how he runs his company.

as i’m working for a small internet service provider myself, i found this video very inspiring and a must-see for everybody in the business.

i think that there are a lot of very good points being made, like teleworking, focus on what matters, don’t waste your time on “david vs goliath” battles etc.

i recommend this video to everybody who owns or works for a small web-related company

Source: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1329-my-talk-at-the-business-of-software-conference-september-2008

One thing I have realised is that in the past, developers seemed to care more about clean coding and standards.I have the impression that all this is seriously going down the drain since – let’s name it- the “Broadband Revolution”. Since then about everybody has an Internet connection at home and the number of wannabe web-developers skyrocketed. Now, if you google for JavaScript/HTML/whatever references you do not find one reference, you find hundreds. And about all of them seems to be written by somone who thinks to know better.

Why do these people re-invent the wheel by writing down on their web-space what’s already been written by domain-specialists? Are they trying to show the world just how “good” they really are? Are they looking for recognition on the web that they could not get in real life? Because, frankly, I would not have much respect for the work they do

Back to topic. About standards. Consider the following excerpt:

Note: The latest W3C method to connect an event handler to an event is to use the addEventListener method, similar to Java. However, this is not supported by Internet Explorer, and since Internet Explorer owns 96 percent of the browser market, we can ignore addEventListener.¹

It’s statements like these that drive me up the wall. And it’s one of the first links I got back from google when looking into the ins and outs of event handling in modern browsers. I am all for education and educating new (web-)developers about how things should be done. And this simply is not the way! Stating that you should throw out all the standards, simply because the market leader does not support it is just wrong. With this train of thought, the standards will never be adopted properly. Now this is the special case of Web-Browsers and JavaScript support, but this example easily spans over other areas as well.

Having a text like this in the top google hits surely gives newcomers the wrong idea.

I am honestly curious to see how the web evolves in the next few decades. But maybe I’m just too pessimistic and it will all turn out well. Time will tell!

¹:  http://bucarotechelp.com/design/jseasy/96001603.asp?x=52&y=9&page=2