Chronicals of… a developer in Johannesburg

I was browsing on my usual opel forum and found this link. Very good. Apparently it is banned…

You wont understand it if you haven’t lived here…

This is for those who use string concatenation to join character variables and hard coded strings to form some sort of new output.

I found this when trying to throw and error and using the variable to describe the nature of the error. It will affect your PRINT, SELECT, and SET statements too.

EG.
DECLARE @Output varchar(100), @SomeVar varchar(10)
SET @SomeVar = NULL

SET @Output = ‘This will be ‘ + @SomeVar
RAISERROR (@Output, 12, -1) — or what ever you want here

The problem with the above is that trying to concatenate a null with a string will make the entire string null. So throw in an ISNULL and then we’re all set.

SET @Output = ‘This will be ‘ + ISNULL(@SomeVar,’NULL’)
RAISERROR (@Output, 12, -1) — or what ever you want here

Right now I am recovering gigabytes of windows mail files in the hope to get my client back to the point he was at before the files got deleted.

I have already got the Outlook.pst and Archive.pst files back.

Windows Mail data recovery is another story. You need to recover the entire store folder as the data structure is different from Outlook Express. The best thing is to recover the files and then re-import them into windows mail.

The software GetDataBack is fantastic!

Good Products (holding thumbs). Support not too good.

First I looked on the site and bought this product:

OpenWeb OpenBrowse

The website describes happy fields of ADSL honey and rivers of milk. Virtually uncapped international ADSL browsing. It doesn’t mention anything about this being an “add-on” service. Also there is no documentation or even a mention of this special application you HAVE to download in order to convert your pc into a local proxy – it only arrives in your account activation email. Furthermore, this application is linked to your external IP address and any other machines on your network now have to run through your pc’s local proxy.

The software is good and pretty stable though, so I’ll give them that.

After a couple of emails to the OpenWeb support guys – and some one-liner replies (which were no help) – I realised that I need an ADSL account too.

So I got a local one like this:

OpenWeb Local Only ADSL

So far all is good. I can browse, upload photos to facebook, gmail, google etc. Just no Skype.

All in all a good deal for what you pay.

After final wedding planning and a great honeymoon away from it all, I am now back.

Caught up with current events, and wishing there was some sunshine to catch up on too.