Sometimes, there is a lot of activity on my Macbook Pro drive, and I would like to find out what is causing all these Disk I/O’s. I found this thread that can help: http://superuser.com/questions/89266/whats-causing-all-the-disk-activity-on-os-x There are two suggestions on that thread. Either using ‘iotop -C 5 12′ or using ‘fs_usage’. What I would like to […]
My PPA Int’l eSata ExpressCard is finally working with Snow Leopard
After I had read a post about someone who managed to boot his Macbook Pro from an external drive using a PPA Int’l eSata ExpressCard, I ordered such a card too. However, it did not work fro me. My external drive would not mount. I never found out why, but after I upgraded to Snow […]
How to synchronize users after a database restore
After restoring a database on a different server than the one it is coming from, it will contain orphaned users. Here is how to find these orphaned users: exec sp_change_users_login ‘report’ In order to fix this, the logins for the reported users will have to be created on the new server if they do not […]
Could not load file or assembly ‘AjaxControlToolkit’ or one of its dependencies. Access is denied.
I was getting the following error message when I was trying to access a web application using the Ajax Control Toolkit on a new server: Could not load file or assembly ‘AjaxControlToolkit’ or one of its dependencies. Access is denied. Looking deeper, I found out that the error 0x80070005 was raised. Reading various threads and […]
SQL Server Profiler and ALTER TRACE permission
Yesterday, I wanted to use SQL Server Profiler to check what was happening on the database side of an application I am developping. However, SQL Srever Profiler was giving me the following error message: In order to run a trace against SQL Server you must be a member of sysadmin fixed server role or have […]
What process is using my disk
Sometimes when I hear my hard drive grinding, and I am not doing anything special on my Macbook Pro, I’m wondering what process is suddenly using the disk so heavily. I had been looking for a tool that would tell me what processes are causing the disk I/O’s for a while when I discovered that […]
Showing hidden files in Finder
Sometimes, it is usefull to see hidden files in Finder. It can be achieved by issuing the following command in a shell: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE Finder has to be restarted in order for the new setting to take effect. To hide the hidden files again, relace the word TRUE by FALSE in the […]
Front Row on secondary display
Henrik M. posted a neat solution on Apple’s discussion board to to have Front Row display video on an external monitor or TV. First, you have to get the ID of the external display using this utility: http://rapidshare.com/files/54473723/displaysInfo.zip, and then enter the following command in a shell: defaults write com.apple.frontrow FrontRowUsePreferredDisplayID 12345678 where 12345678 should […]
User defined function to remove accents and special characters
I am working on a database containing city names in French, and I needed to use these names to create URLs. However, the city names contain accents and special characters like apostrophe that I did not want in my URLs. So I had to write a User Defined Function to make the city names Unix […]
Changing collation
Once, I was in a situation where I had to change the collation of a database. This is not an easy task, since collations are defined at three levels: Database, Table and Columns. So even, if you change the database collation, all the table and fields will still retain the original collation. Changing collation in […]