After the popularity of Logo (Turtle Graphics) in the 80′s, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has once again come up with a new programming language for kids called Scratch. Scratch teaches kids skills necessary to become future technology professionals, such as creative thinking, clear communication, systematic analysis, iterative design, and continuous learning, while they create fun and interesting projects such as interactive stories, graphic animations, games, music, and art. Projects created with Scratch can be shared on the web with others.
In addition to home, Scratch can be used by schools, museums, community centers, or other group settings. While the tool is intended for 8 to 16-year olds, with some adult help it can definitely be used by younger children.
Scratch is available for both Windows and Mac platforms, and is available as a free download.
Since database are usually designed in development environments, migrating changes over to other environments (e.g. QA and production) is not a trivial task. This is because SQL Server does not have any built-in tools to compare database schemas.
There are quite a few third-party tools that would make your life easier, most notably, Red Gate’s SQL Compare (reasonably priced around $300).
At times, buying a commercial tool is not really an option, so one must resort to googling for free tools. There are three such tools that I am aware of:
- SQLDBDiff by SQLDBTools
A very decent tool that comes in both freeware and shareware versions. Freeware version is not badly crippled; only advanced features such as multi-database comparison, data content comparison, etc. are disabled.
- Database Schema Comparison Utility
This is a Code Project article that comes with C# source code of a schema comparison utility. The utility itself is pretty bare-bone, but gets the job done.
- StarInix Free Database Compare 2.0
I have not used this tool, but from the advertised feature list, it looks pretty good. Most notably, in addition to SQL Server, this tool works with Access and MySQL databases.
Recently when Windows Live Writer Beta got realeased, I signed up with Microsoft Live Spaces to give it a test drive. I thought that by now Microsoft would have learned from their past mistakes, but boy was I wrong?
The very first thing I noticed on Live Spaces was a huge banner ad across the top of my live space home page. I thought I would be able to customize my space and either get rid of it, or move it to the bottom where it’s less distracting. Sure enough I can remove the ad, but only if I sign up for MSN Premium (read $$$).
Has Microsoft not already learnt that distracting advertising does not work? If they haven’t then when will they?
It’s kind of ironic that soon after I finished writing a log viewer for my log4Net XML logs, I came across this universal log parsing tool by Microsoft called Log Parser 2.2. I started playing with it and it seems pretty good at what it does. You can create nice looking HTML reports and even charts from your log data (xml, csv, tsv, active directory objects, registry, etc.). All it takes is some basic SQL skills, and you are on your way to producing meaningful views / reports out of your log files. The beauty of the tool is in its extensibility; you can parse an array of data types using this tool.
