So let's say that you were asked by your organization to make an intranet "database" using access, and that because of organizational policies, etc. there is no option to have a real webserver like a LAMP/NGINX/IIS stack.I recommend that you push strongly for real web technologies like PHP/C#/Java and try really really hard to not have to use Access. ......

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Ok, so I needed to convert .docx files to .pdf files on the fly, but none of the free php libraries that were available let me do it on my server (a webservice was not good enough). Basically either I needed to pay for a library (and have it maybe suck) or just deal with the free ones that didn't convert the formatting well enough. Not good enough! I found that LibreOffice (OpenOffice's successor) allows command line conversion using the LibreOffice conversion engine (which DID preserve

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I ran into this one because I was working with some tables in a normalized database and I needed to quickly check to see if an id existed, and if it didn't, I needed to insert and then get the id. This is what I came up with in the end: inside your PL/SQL block, you can have any number of sub blocks, like this (here I am using 2 PL/SQL variables: thisVehicleFuelTypeId ......

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Ok here is a cool trick I figured out that I hope will be helpful to someone: What if you wanted to block all the incoming ip addresses from a given country to a given site using only PHP and mySQL (without using .htaccess, etc.) and be able to log who you blocked into your mySQL database? First, you need to have a white list or a black list. I got ......

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Getting this silly thing to work turned out to be a painful experience, so I am recording my lessons learned so that if some other downtrodden programmer wants to see what I did, they will be able to figure it out faster (hopefully): Ok, so say you have a silverlight application and you want to talk to a database. Silverlight is Client-based, and Databases ......

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Fun with CLOBS! If you are using Oracle, if you have to deal with text that is over 4000 bytes, you will probably find yourself dealing with CLOBs, which can go up to 4GB. They are pretty tricky, and it took me a long time to figure out these lessons learned. I hope they will help some down-trodden developer out there somehow. Here is my original code, ......

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My organization has an ongoing project to take documents produced for internal regulations and such, change some of the formatting and then export it as PDF.Our requirements were that only one person would be doing this, but it has been painfully tedious and sometimes error-prone to do by hand. Enter the fearless developer to automate the situation!Since ......

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Hello! I have decided to start a blog of my adventures learning how to solve problems coding things with the intent that what I put out there might be of some use to some down-trodden developer out there that is trying to solve a problem that I have already figured out.

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