Random Hacks of Kindness #2 – Hacking for Humanity

This weekend I attended the Random Hacks of Kindess (RHoK) Conference in New York City. I even hacked a little and did a short presentation. It’s a conference for hackers who want to contribute free and open source software to help with humanitarian crisis response efforts around the world. The conference was held simultaneously at 21 global locations. The majority of the apps have some sort of mapping component. In attendance were hackers, project managers, fire chiefs and others from as far away as Sudan.

A variety of projects were worked on at the conference including  a mobile Incident Command app for responding fire agencies, hospital status monitoring app, and a Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping tool for the United Nations World Food Program. For a full list of problem definitions go here.

My project is a Twitter Search widget built for use with the open source ArcGIS Viewer for Flex. It monitors and maps Tweets for a geographic region, returning all Tweets within a specified radius. The ArcGIS Viewer for Flex is a mapping and visualization tool and it lets you integrate and display real-time data from multiple sources. In other words, you can use this tool to map Tweets alongside things such as earthquake data (GeoRSS), weather data (REST) and anything else with a geographic attribute, all in real time. Decision makers for emergency response agencies can use this visual fusion of real time information to help paint an operational picture, identify problems and see trends.

Many people opt-in for sharing their location information when they Tweet. If they have opted-in, the widget retrieves this information through Twitter’s Search API. You can see a live version here.  I originally built the widget for RHoK #0, right before the Haiti earthquake. This widget was used in the Haiti earthquake and the Tennessee flood. It has also been adopted by a variety of emergency response agencies that are using it today.

If you want to contribute to one of these humanitarian projects, check out the RHoK website for more information: https://www.rhok.org/

Resources:

Migrating from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008

Basically, I needed to migrate a fairly simple database from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 for a project I’m working on. The database has six tables, dozens of columns, properties and unique keys. There was also a stored procedure and a trigger just to spice things up.

I was quite happy with how easy and fast the migration went. I’ve had seemingly simple database tasks go sideways before and take hours to resolve. From beginning to end, this whole operation took about five minutes.

Here are the steps I used, although yours may vary slightly.

  1. Launch SQL Server Management Studio on your SQL Server 2005 machine
  2. Right click on the actual database then click Tasks > Detach. This step insures there are no active processes accessing the database.
  3. Since my SQL Server 2008 database was locked down, I copied the .mdf and .log files from the SQL Server 2005 machine over to the corresponding directory on the SQL Server 2008 machine via Remote Desktop. SQL Server does have an option to copy from one database directly into another. However, that involves opening ports in firewalls to allow access between the server, and I didn’t have that luxury for security reasons. 

    4. Note 1:  Make double sure you don’t overwrite an active database of the same name on the destination server!

    Note 2:  the default installation directory for these files on SQL Server 2008 is here: C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA

  4. Launch SQL Server Management Studio on your SQL Server 2008 machine.
  5. Right click on “Databases” then select “Attach”.
  6. This will launch the Attach Databases window. Select “Add” and navigate to the correct .mdf file that you just copied over.
  7. Follow any additional prompts.  I didn’t have any full-text catalogs so I just clicked “OK” when that pop-up window appeared.  For me , SQL Server 2008 automatically converted the old SQL Server 2005 database into SQL Server 2008.

If you follow these steps, and if there were no errors, you are almost done. Before you pop champagne and celebrate make sure you can access the database from SQL Server Management Studio. Open the tables and run a quick test query just to make sure. If you have a more complex database you might want to run multiple test queries, and run your application, just to make sure everything moved over properly.  If you have a migration story please share it here.

IE 8 Developer Tools – A great step in the right direction.

Even though IE 8 Developer Tools have been around for a while, since Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 (circa 2008), there are still a lot of developers out there who aren’t familiar with it. And, it’s well worth the time learning about it. Some of you may be wondering who develops against IE? Well, before I dive into the details, I wanted to say a word about that. According to w3schools as of October 2010, IE represents 29% of all browsers, and IE 8 browsers make up more than half of that number.

You should research your own website stats, and companies such as w3counter provide developer tools for that. In general, it’s fair to say that most consumer sites get a lot of IE-based traffic, and testing your app against IE is a good idea. If you don’t, there’s a strong chance you’ll frustrate a bunch of potential users and they may not come back, ever. If you run an internal site for an organization then you may have more control over which browsers (and browser versions) are used, and your life is probably easier than the rest of us.

I know I personally didn’t like testing against IE because with IE 6 and 7 the tools were pretty much non-existent and extremely unfriendly to web developers. I have to say that IE 8 made a huge step forward in my eyes when they included Developer Tools. Sure I have plenty of gripes, but all-in-all my job got much easier. Instead of blindly making changes and then reloading the page to see the results, I now do the majority of my testing and prototyping right in the Developer Tools.

Here just a few of the tools I find particularly useful:

  • Built-in Script debugger. Yep, it includes console, breakpoints, locals, watch and call stack.
  • Edit on-the-fly.
  • Inspect CSS.
  • Select element by click (Ctrl + B).
  • Clear cookies for domain
  • Tools > Resize (on-the-fly)
  • Show ruler.
  • Save HTML or CSS changes to a file.

I still have a wish list of things I’d like to see added, here’s my top five:

  1. Built-in HTTP transaction viewer. I mean they have Fiddler, why not bolt key pieces of it into the browser tools rather than having to launch Fiddler separately?
  2. DOM attribute inspector for those times when you have to dig deep; for example, when there are differences between content attributes and DOM attributes.
  3. Cookie Manager – including the ability to inspect/delete individual cookies.
  4. Automatically associate a selected element with its DOM index. Don’t make me have to hunt for it in a different view and then compare.
  5. Continuous hover and select item on page, without needing to click Ctrl + B every time. Sometimes I want to scan multiple items quickly.

So that’s it. This tool should save you a ton of time. Are there any items that are your favorites, and what do you want added to the wish list?