Vadivel's blog

TEDxChennai happened in IIT Madras on November 29th 2009. This is the first time I am attending one such event as the cost (Rs. 1028) was affordable for me :) If at all you haven't known, a ticket in TEDIndia was approx Rs. 1 Lakh and 10 thousand. It seems its 1/3rd cheaper than what it used to cost in California (approx 3L phew). Overall it was an mind blowing experience and I loved every moment of it. Post lunch sessions were power packed more interesting when compared with pre-lunch session. In particular I liked these sessions: 1. Romulus Earl Whitaker - a wildlife conservationist and founder of the Madras Snake Park! He should be called as 'Snake Man'. The snaps he showed and the work he explained made my jaw drop. 2. Sri. N. Vittal - ex-Central Vigilance Commissioner, ex-Secretary to Government of India in the Ministry of Information Technology, Chairman of the Telecom Commission and Secretary to the Department of Telecommunications. He has been columnist for the Econ...

When ever SQL Server is (re)started ‘TempDB’ gets recreated. So the below query should give us the time of when ‘SQL Server’ was last started. Select create_date from sys.databases where [name] = 'tempdb' When a SQL Server starts all the tasks which it initiates makes an entry in sysprocesses table with its ‘login time’. That said, all we need to do is find the least login_time which has got recorded in that table! 1. Select min(login_time) from master.dbo.sysprocesses OR 2. Select login_time from master.dbo.sysprocesses where spid = 1 OR 3. Select login_time from sys.dm_exec_sessions where session_id = 1 Technorati Tags: SQL Server

This one is hilarious :) I couldn’t stop laughing after watching this short cooked up movie. If you are in IT for atleast one year then you would love this as much as I did :)

Today I ran into the below error: Msg 8115, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Arithmetic overflow error converting IDENTITY to data type int. Arithmetic overflow occurred. As the error suggests in the table the max limit of INT (2147483647) has reached. For the sake of people who haven't seen this error before let me simulate it. Create table MaxInt (   sno int identity ,   Fname varchar (30) ) Go ---Inserting my first record Insert into MaxInt values ('Sample') /* huh i can't insert billions of records like this and show :) Let me Reseed to last few numbers */ DBCC CHECKIDENT ( MaxInt, ReSeed, 2147483646) --Try inserting a record. It would Insert into MaxInt values ('Vadivel') /* Trying to insert another one .... now you would see the error mentioned above as we have reached the max of INT already */ Insert into MaxInt values ('Vadivel') Select * from MaxInt ...

Only yesterday I came to know that we can add webtoim@gmail.com to our Gtalk contact list and start chatting with that BOT. I understand that now, instead of Googling and digging Wikipedia for the correct answer, you can take assistance from the WebToIM Bot that is designed to answer such questions. Few of my observations: 1. Almost for all questions it starts answering as ”hmm…” which looks odd to me. 2. Very often even for basic questions (or) for questions for which I would get the answer by googling is throwing me “Sorry. I couldn't understand what you are asking. Please rephrase.” 3. I tried the following queries “Whats your age” it said sorry. I rephrased it as “What is your age” it again said sorry. Finally I asked “How old are you?” and it answered hmmm... 3 years and 9 months old 4. I got this response quite often as well hmmm... I found ...

Check out these videos to understand about Microsoft Surface computing. Both the videos are really cool I loved it thoroughly.   Technorati Tags: Microsoft Surface Computing

For past few days my laptop got quite a few malwares / virus. I somehow got it cleaned using few free anti-virus softwares / with the help of various articles in the Internet. During the course of research!!! I stumbled upon a very interesting article on how to make use of your HOST file to protect your machine. Check out http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm This Host file for Windows, has entries to block ads, banners, 3rd party Cookies, 3rd party page counters, web bugs, and even most web browser hijackers. This is accomplished by blocking the internet connection to malware sites. But one thing which I have noticed as of now is my laptop has become slightly slower after replacing my old HOST file with the new file given in that site. I opened the HOST file and OMG there are hundreds of malware/ad related website listed there. I am not sure how they managed to collect all these address :) Technorati Tags: HOST file

Thumb Rule is as much as possible avoid using FUNCTIONS within WHERE Clause of your SQL Query. Let me show you some very basic examples to substantiate this theory. --Table schema Create table tblDateExample (dtStartDate datetime) Go -- Populate dummy records into the table INSERT tblDateExample VALUES ('2009-04-15 12:00:00.000') INSERT tblDateExample VALUES ('2009-04-14 12:00:00.000') INSERT tblDateExample VALUES ('2009-04-13 12:00:00.000') INSERT tblDateExample VALUES ('2009-04-12 12:00:00.000') INSERT tblDateExample VALUES ('2009-04-11 12:00:00.000') INSERT tblDateExample VALUES ('2009-04-11 12:00:00.000') INSERT tblDateExample VALUES ('2009-04-11 12:00:00.000') INSERT tblDateExample VALUES ('2009-04-11 12:00:00.000') INSERT tblDateExample VALUES ('2009-04-10 12:00:00.000') INSERT tblDateExample VALUES ('2009-04-09 12:00:00.000') INSERT t...

The query has exceeded the maximum number of result sets that can be displayed in the results grid. Only the first 100 result sets are displayed in the grid. If you happen to get this error message in your SQL Server 2005 then read on: In "Results to Grid" format one cannot display more than 100 resultset.   So just change the result format to either "Result to Text" or "Result to File" option Example to reproduce this error: Step 1: Ctrl + D (setting to Grid format for demo purpose) Step 2: Try to print the current datetime for 101 times for example Select GetDate() Go 101 You would see the error as we are trying to display more than 100 resultset in a "Result to Grid" format. Just in case you thought 100 is the limitation of GO command in SQL Server try the below script Create table tblQuestion4 ( Sno int identit...

Got this code comment as a email fwd. Its really funny :) // // Dear maintainer: // // Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine, // and have realized what a terrible mistake that was, // please increment the following counter as a warning // to the next guy: // // total_hours_wasted_here = 16 //

From Denis blog I came to know recently that we are able to use sp_executesql without declaring the variables! It really sounded strange to me. I thought it to be one another bug :) So thought would dig deep into this and see what best I can conclude. --Dummy table schema Create table tblQuestion1 ( sno int identity, fname varchar(50) ) Go --Lets add some dummy records into the table Insert into tblQuestion1 values ('Alpha') Insert into tblQuestion1 values ('Beta') Insert into tblQuestion1 values ('Gamma') --So-called strange script Declare @strFetchData nvarchar(100) Select @strFetchData = 'Select * from tblQuestion1' Exec sp_executesql @alpha = @strFetchData If you have noticed we haven't declared @alpha in the script but SQL hasn't complained about it! I thought the easiest way to understand would be to go through sp_executesql procedure. Sp_helptext sp_executesql go Result - "(server internal)" … so its not a stored proc. I tried a...

From the day I saw Google Finance i was thinking what tool they would be using to display those cool, user friendly charts! After hours of searching on the web I learned that they were using some sort of custom in-house build tool/logic. Fair enough, but that doesn’t solve my problem. I wanted to create some graphs similar to that for few of my projects. On further ‘googling’, just recently I stumbled upon amCharts which has the similar charts like Google finance. You can download and use all amCharts products for FREE . The only limitation of the free version is that a small link to this web site will be displayed in the top left corner of your charts. Btw, if you don’t want the link go ahead and purchase the product. del.icio.us Tags: amCharts , Google    Technorati Tags: amCharts , Google

1. Browser – IE 8.0 and/or Google Chrome 2. Anti-Virus – One of the lightweight software is AVG. Check it out @ http://free.grisoft.com/ 3. Offline thesaurus and dictionary - http://wordweb.info/free/ This is a cool app which sits on your task bar. For finding meaning of a word just block the word and press CTRL + Right click on it. 4. Photo Organizer – I love Picasa and am using it for quite sometime now without any issues. http://picasa.google.com/download/ 5. Creating / Editing blogposts - http://writer.live.com/ 6. Zip Compression utility – I was using Winzip then WinRar but offlate I have started using 7-zip an open source project . Download it here http://www.7-zip.org/download.html 7. Instant Messaging – I was using MSN and Yahoo. But offlate I am using only Gtalk or the Chat feature which comes embedded within Gmail. May be you might want to try out Skype if you love talking more than typing :) 8. Download Manager – I use Free download Manager for quite s...