Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Super Crunchers

I finished reading this book: "Super Crunchers".

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I'm not going to go into much detail here.  Suffice to say, I was not the target audience.  If you work with data, you won't learn anything.  I'm not really sure who the book is targeting.

As an academic (Yale, no less), I'm sure the author would want me to back up my argument.  I won't, because he's a lawyer and it's not worth it to me to pick a fight with a lawyer! 

And because he's a lawyer, I'll be sure to point out the more positive reviews.

Eye On BI- Supercrunchers- Practical BI

Jamie's Junk - Supercrunchers and Microsoft Data Mining

800-CEO-READ Blog- SuperCrunchers- The Good and The Bad

Friday, April 25, 2008

Yet another helpful error message - Apple edition

In the interest of fair play, I thought I would post this lovely Apple error message I got a few days ago:

AppleError

"iTunes cannot run because it has detected a problem with your audio configuration".  Shoot.  I guess my sound drivers got corrupted or something?  Well, let's see where the help goes:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304424

It says:

Solution

QuickTime may need to be reinstalled. Follow the steps below to uninstall QuickTime and then download and install QuickTime using the QuickTime standalone Installer.

  1. On the Start menu, click Control Panel.
  2. Windows XP and Windows 2000: Open the Add or Remove Programs control panel and select QuickTime in the list of currently installed programs.
    Windows Vista: Click Uninstall a program (or alternately, click Programs and Features in Classic View of Control Panel) and select QuickTime in the list of currently installed programs.
  3. Click the Remove button and follow the prompts to remove QuickTime from your computer.
  4. Download the QuickTime standalone installer from
    http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/win.html.
    Note: There are two options for downloading QuickTime, be sure to select the second option that does not include iTunes.
  5. During the download:
    • If you choose to run the installer, proceed to the next step.
    • If you choose to save the download, double click the QuickTimeInstaller file, then proceed to next step.
  6. Follow the on-screen instructions to install QuickTime.
  7. Reopen iTunes.

No, seriously.  Uninstall and reinstall QuickTime?  That's a problem with my audio configuration? 

Column Headings from SQL Results - Easier Way « Rhonda Tipton’s WebLog

I was going to write this one up, but Rhonda Tipton saved me the trouble:

Column Headings from SQL Results - Easier Way

When you cut and paste data from a SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) result grid into Excel, it doesn't give you the column headings.  I find it surprising that Microsoft chose this as the default.  But to their credit, they gave us a way to change this behavior.  Rhonda did a nice writeup, so I see no need to repeat it here.