How To Insert a Tick in Excel, Word, Etc

Sometimes in programs like Excel when you can’t find a shape that you want, a possible workaround is to use a font. Webdings and Wingdings offer shape-based fonts, so you get shapes instead of the usual characters. For instance, if you want to get a tick in Excel, you can use the “a” character of the Webdings font. To do so, just select the Webdings font (as opposed to Arial or some other conventional font), and type “a” like how you’d normally do so, and you should see a tick appear

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Bloated SnagIt Screencapture Utility

I hate it when I want to do something but have to wait for it. I know, I know, it just goes to show how impatient I am, but don’t we live in the age of instant gratification where everything must be done in the snap of your fingers.

Screen capturing is something that I (probably) do on a daily basis, so imagine my annoyance when something like screen capturing can’t be done in a quick, painless process. My basic requirements are simple: I want an area of my screen quickly captured and saved in a JPG format on my desktop so that I can do whatever I want with it.

With that requirements in mind, I downloaded SnagIt, tried it out, and after a few days realised that I cannot live with software as slow as it was. While it fulfilled my requirements perfectly, it went too far above and beyond, because with the SnagIt software came the ability to capture text, to capture a window or region, to save as a multitude of file-types, to browse your screen captures, etcetc. It was too much for me, though I could imagine how other people could benefit from these features.

Perhaps software should come in a few flavours. In my SnagIt example, the software in its entirety made me a dissatisifed user. If, however, it came in a “lite” version that did basic screencapturing quickly and easily, I would be sold.

In any case, I switched to a C# freeware called Cropper, which does what I want perfectly. That’s the screenshot of how it works: a simple and elegant solution that allows you to:

• Takes over the default PrtScrn (Print Screen) key
• Capture the region under the mouse
• Capture the active window
• Capture a selection

Awesome stuff. Download it free here:

http://www.codeplex.com/cropper

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M1 3G / 3.5G Mobile Broadband Manual APN Configuration Settings

I now know the manual APN settings for M1 Singapore using the Huawei USB modem - after much pain. Great if you’re on Linux, Unix, Mac, or configuring a 3G router / access point (when the automatic installer won’t work). Here are the settings:

Dial Number: *99#
Username: ppp@aplus.at
Password: ppp
PDP Type: IP
APN Name: sunsurf

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The Best Windows Right-Click Image Resizer Application (Free!)

I think digital cameras are great, especially since they removed film out of the equation, making photography convenient and easy. It does become too good of a good thing though, as digital photos tend to pile up rather quickly.

One of the annoying things that I constantly face is the need to resize my photographs or pictures. The way I used to do it was to fire up my editor, wait for it to load, resize the photograph, then save it. The whole process felt clunky and annoying.

So I went looking around for a better way to do things, and I discovered Image Resizer, a free software provided by Microsoft!

Basically, Image Resizer integrates into your Windows right-click menu so all you have to do is to right-click on any number of photographs to resize them. It even helps you save the resized images as a copy, so you don’t have to worry that you might accidentally overwrite the originals.

You can imagine that this software will come in handy for anyone who needs to resize photos to share with friends, to upload on the net, or to fit on a compatible cell phone, personal digital assistant (PDA), or Portable Media Center so you can enjoy your photos while on the go.

This little app gets 2 thumbs up from me! Best of all, it’s free! Download Image Resizer from this page.

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How To Create a Stored Procedure using C#, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008

Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 is amazing. It truly is an integrated development environment, because EVERYTHING is integrated. I just learnt about stored procedures today and how creating stored procedures is so easy in Visual Studio. Here’s the steps that you need.

1. In Visual Studio, create a solution if you haven’t, and to that solution, add a project of the type “SQL Server Project”
2. Next, right click on that project (not the solution) and add an item of the type “Stored Procedure”, and choose “Stored Procedure” as the sub-type that we want.
3. You should see the stored procedure added to your project as a file. I’m using C#, so it’s added as a new C# file, with some template code added already.
4. Try adding this code chunk:
   

   SqlPipe p = SqlContext.Pipe;
   p.Send(”Hello!”);

5. Now we can test out our new stored procedure by right-clicking on the project and selecting “Deploy”. This will create a DLL file and copy it over the SQL Server.
6. Open up SQL Server Management Studio and click on the button titled “Create a New Query’. You should see a screen pop up on the right.
7. Enter this code:
   

   USE [YourDatabaseName]
   GO
   EXEC [dbo].[WhatYouNamedYourStoredProcedure]
   GO

8. Now right-click in that code space and select “Execute”. If you experience this error: “Execution of user code in the .NET Framework is disabled. Enable “clr enabled” configuration option”, then execute the following query first:
   

   sp_configure ‘clr enabled’, 1
   go
   reconfigure
   go

9. You should see the text “Hello!” appearing in your output window
10. To do something that’s actually useful, we can add in the following code to our stored procedure, which essentially selects all records in our database and outputs them:
    

    SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection(”Context Connection=true”);
    SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(@”SELECT * FROM YourTable”, conn);

    conn.Open();

    SqlDataReader rdr = cmd.ExecuteReader();
    SqlContext.Pipe.Send(rdr);

    rdr.Close();
    conn.Close();

11. Done! You have just created and run your first stored procedure. Wasn’t that easy?

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