Blogs

I thought it was time to put together a little list of my favorite computer things i use to make my life easier. No big deal just the things i use everyday no matter if I’m at work or at home. I find myself using these products all the time.

Hope you enjoy my list and post comments and share your thoughts

1) Evernote – I first found the app for my the iPad before i knew about the website. But it’s be came one of my favorites and there’s a desktop version and one for my blackberry too.

Last Friday I got a data request from a group asking for a report to be generated bi-hourly for customer request that were not responded to in a time span of two hours. So looking at the data I noticed that there were two columns that were time stamped one when the request was submitted and another when the request was completed, so this was easy I filtered out where the completed data was null and wrote a where statement using a Datediff syntax to breakdown the input date time stamp by hour and then subtracting two so my sql statement looks like the following example.

As I start to dive deeper into the Business Intelligence area I’ve started putting together a list of my favorite blogs covering this area, in no particular order.

• http://www.bidn.com/
• http://sqlbi.blogspot.com/
• http://cwebbbi.spaces.live.com/
• http://denglishbi.spaces.live.com/
• http://bi-polar23.blogspot.com/
• http://sqlserverbiblog.com/
• http://shahfaisalmuhammed.wordpress.com/
• http://tomislavpiasevoli.spaces.live.com/default.aspx
• http://bimatters.spaces.live.com/

This is a shout out to my former team member learning about SSIS packages for the first time and getting ready to move from SQL 2000 to SQL 2008. Here’s some good reference points for how to do the basics.   Now before you call me and ask what does SSIS stands it stands for SQL Server Integration Services. So below is a couple links that i found i think you may find helpful in your new adventure.

You every want to plan a project or host a committee meeting virtually but don’t have a conference call number of your own or know where to start? Well your in luck thanks to a little company called Dimdim you can now host online meetings, trainings, and brainstorming sessions from the comfort of your own home for free. Dimdim is a software company that provides a web-based platform for real-time, rich-media collaboration and meetings. Dimdim provides free web conferencing service where users can share desktops, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam. Dimdim was recognized in 2009 as a up and coming startup and received many awards over the years. Dimdim is free for meetings under 20 people and only 25 dollars month for meetings larger then 20 but with that extra cost you get tons of premium features such ask online meeting logging meeting attends automatically and recording of the meeting and online signups of the meetings. Which comes in handy for tracking who attended your training and allowing for people to sign up for it up for them online. Dimdim is a awesome product i found out about from Kevin Rose and it comes in handy so often. if you have questions about it let me know and i would love to tell you more about it.

Just like the title said it’s not that hard and it one of the most important things in software and process development is the the Documentation part. But it’s most often the most over looked do to time and no short term benefit. But long term after the developer has forgotten what they did back then the documentation they have written will still be there for the next developer to come along and revise, enhance, or just get a better understanding of what is taking place and how it done. Below are a couple of things everyone should remember when documenting.