Windows only: Better Paste is a simple, lightweight application (or AutoHotkey script) that tweaks the default Ctrl+V paste shortcut such that it pastes plain text every time; if you want formatted...

You know auctions, listings, and other sales are perpetually afoot online, but you lack the time to scour Craigslist, Ebay, and more in search of the obscure and awesome things you want. Let...

Pot racks are great for freeing up cupboard space, but they often cost quite a bit of money. If you're looking to get those pots up and out of the way for cheap, check out this tutorial. You'll be...

Once upon a time a snow day meant a reprieve from the labor of school and a day of freedom. As an adult, a snow day can still be fun but it also throws a wrench in your work. Photo by jpctalbot....

Note: This is a weekly round up of interesting stuff found on ruby-talk mailing list. You can subscribe to this list here. 1. Steven wondered whether it is necessary to clean up the string created from native C code(rb_str_new2) and passed to rb_funcall. Matz replied, You don’t have to (and you shouldn’t) free string objects. 2. Mohsin asked [...

We've all had them. One of those stored procedures that is huge and contains complex business logic which may or may not be executed. These procedures make it an absolute nightmare when it comes to debugging problems because they're so complex and have so many logic offshoots that it's very easy to get lost when you're trying to determine the path that the procedure code took when it ran. Fortunately Profiler lets you define custom events that you can raise in your code and capture in a trace so you get a better window into the sub events occurring in your code. I found it very useful to use custom events and a database snapshot to debug some code recently and we'll explore both in this article. I find raising these events and running Profiler to be very useful for testing my stored procedures on my own as well as when my code is going through official testing and user acceptance. It's a simple approach and a great way to catch any performance problems or logic errors.

In the previous article we learned about SQL Server 2008 Extended Events terminology, components and took a look at a simple example. In this article we'll take a deeper look with some more complex examples.

Ruby is used extensively in Web applications thanks to Ruby on Rails. But you can also develop Windows applications using Ruby. Interestingly the Windows API support is part of the standard installation (only on Microsoft Windows installations) and it is quite easy to use it! In order to use Windows API, you need to import “Win32API” [...

Learning Ruby is easy if you already know a programming language. But there are some ruby language features which can cause headache for a programmer migrating from C++ or Java. In this post, I will look at 10 interesting language features that are unique to Ruby. 1. Objects everywhere! – In Ruby everything is an object [...

Many programmers who are new to Ruby get confused when they see Ruby symbols. A lot us came to know about Ruby language through Ruby on Rails projects. In Ruby on Rails, symbols are everywhere! So it is essential to understand the concept of symbols in Ruby. A symbol in Ruby is an instance of the [...