Category: How To

The Two Sides to Job Hunting

I have had students ask me about how to get hired or who is hiring. I have also had employers ask me how to find developers when they have had a tough time hiring quality employees. These are tough questions to answer, but I have been on both sides of the table.

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French and Other Language Characters – Classic ASP

Recently working with PayPal and Classic ASP I stumbled unto a problem where French characters were being encoded and displayed as unreadable text. It turns out that PayPal returns the result to you using UTF-8. In C# this would be an easy fix. Language characters can be tough in classic ASP.  I had searched for quite a while until I found the following code: Continue reading French and Other Language Characters – Classic ASP

Auto-Link Using Regular Expressions

Auto-LinkingI was recently asked if I could automatically turn website text (ex: www.google.com ) into HTML hyperlinks.  My first thought was ah CRAP!  I also wondered why they could not use the link tool in the editor, but they asked so I delivered. With about 5 minutes on Google, I found the perfect solution that worked for me.

Mind you I was working in C# for this, but since it is a regular expression solution; it will apply to virtually any language.  The one change that I had made from the original code was to add in a piece that also auto-linked when the text included “http://www.”.  You may or may not want the extra addition that I had made.

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ieGetNavigationHistory Popup Error

Recently received a laptop from a friend who had a popup error every 3 seconds when using Internet Explorer 9.

The error was a simple popup with an “ok” button as its only option to continue.  The key text on the popup was “ieGetNavigationHistory” and was clearly having trouble loading that routine.

Easy Fix, but hard to find… Continue reading ieGetNavigationHistory Popup Error

How to use SQL to Extract a Number from a String

Recently I had a need to extract the number from a string in the database.  The string would be something like ‘Monitor 16″‘ or “16 inch Monitor”.   I would need to get the size for various reasons including fees and reports, but no real good way of doing it.  I have come up with the following Scalar SQL Function to do this very job.

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MaxMind GEOIP Look-up for Microsoft SQL

Recently I implemented a GEOIP solution on a client site; however, the site was built on a Microsoft SQL database engine and I could not find a solution for looking up the country name easily.  Through some quick Google searches I had tripped on the site for which I started at ( http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/csv ).  The site maxmind.com gave me the MySQL solution and the mathematical solution for creating the integer.  Based on this information, I created my own function in MS SQL to retrieve me the calculated IP integer for easier use.

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Using Social Media in Toastmasters Clubs

Recently I had lead a Social Media workshop. Specifically what social media is and how to us it your clubs.

Social media can help in your recruiting processes, education processes and in basic communication to members and non-members.
Social media can help with your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as it creates more back-links to your site, creates more dynamic
content and keeps everything fresh and new.

The biggest challenge is the age gap. Social media is often used and used best by the younger generations. It is good to use
social media because to attract the younger generation as this keeps the balance between the “Old Guard” which has the experience
and the “New Blood” which gives the clubs a future.

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