So I have a new project - the project is probably a very odd thing to most anyone who finds this blog because the market for this project is pretty small. The giant company Qualcomm has a bunch of smaller groups of the company. One of the smaller components of that I deal with professionally is the Enterprise Services group. The Enterprise Services group provides a bunch of different things to transportation companies and one of those things is asset tracking mixed with tools to enforce hours of service, equipment performance, risk assessment and a host of other things. In my day job we hav...

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I was recently contacted by a user of twiSQL who was using the services of Twilio combined with my library twiSQL to send text messages directly from a SQL server. The problem that was reported was that there were some encoding issues with sending a text message with a hyperlink as part of the text. This was something that I went a few rounds with figuring out when I initially developed the library and apparently there was an opportunity here to do it better.  I am happy to say that I have updated both the public and donation supported version of the library at this time and they ...

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Let me begin by saying how much I truly believe in the technology of Twilio.com - they have built a reliable and scalar solution to enable telephony features through a simple API. If you have not been introduced to their services you will want to have a look at them in the very near future. To make the use of the services that Twilio offers easier I have built two special use projects that are free for download and use. twiCLI is a command line tool for the Windows environments designed to place phone calls and send text messages, and twiSQL is a set of SQL user defined functions ...

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mediaSync is a Windows tool designed to help sync an iTunes library with a portable music player - or anything with removable media for that matter (USB drive). It is designed for true two-way sync of media additions/removals - and to do it quickly. If you have not checked this free product out and are frustrated by other "sync" solutions on the market why not give it a go? In the latest build of the product (1.0.0.4) I resolved some issues that a user reported with regard to proper playlist generation. There were cases where some tracks were not properly being added to playlist files - oops...

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In the EDI components of my work we are frequently exchanging data with customers that is perhaps not the best of quality. In particular there are cases where we get non-ASCII data in our transfers. In truth we probably should be able to handle these data values but today we cannot - mostly because there is nothing above ASCII 127 that we need to make use of.  So... we need a solution to clean this data before we inject it into our process. In a five minute search of the Google I couldn't come up with anything that solved this problem so here is what we are presently using - perhaps i...

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