Technology Musings
In: VirtualBox
18 Jun 2009Sun has published a preview of VirtualBox 3.0, dubbed Beta 1. As typical, they consider this to be buggy and offer it with no express commitment to stability. Not that such warning would deter any self-respecting geek!
Just as VirtualBox 2.0 added a whole host of amazing new features, so too will VirtualBox spring forward, bringing it closer to feature parity with products like Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion. The major whiz-bang feature for VirtualBox 3.0 seems to revolve around improved 3D graphics support. Sun is claiming support for Direct3D 8/9 for Windows guests and OpenGL 2.0 for Window, Linux, and Solaris guests. In addition to these major features, the typical slew of bug fixes and minor enhancements have been added.
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Update: I’ve added an additional section, “Multiple CalDAV Calendars” that details the extra steps required to synchronize more than one Google Calendar.
With iPhone OS 3.0, Apple introduced new functionality for calendar synchronization. No longer is this ability limited to Exchange and MobileMe; with CalDAV and ICS support, you can sync or subscribe to many calendars. This is a boon for those of us that use Exchange for work, as previously we were unable to sync any other personal calendars and instead, had to rely on a desktop program.
The two most prominent supporters of CalDAV for calendar bidirectional synchronization is Yahoo! and Google. Below, I’ll show you how to sync your main Google Calendar with CalDAV and also subscribe to additional calendars via ICS files.
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In: iPhone
10 Jun 2009I’ve updated to iPhone OS 3.0 build 7a341, which is said to be Final/Gold Master and these are my initial impressions in short form.
While Microsoft provided connectors for Oracle, Teradata, and SAP BI for SSIS 2008, there are many other database systems left out of the mix. Fortunately, SSIS is exceptionally flexible in connecting to various data sources and allows other vendors to provide native support. The MySQL team did just that with Connector/NET 6.0, their ADO.NET provider. This tool allows us to use the the ADO.NET connections in SQL Server Integration Services to easily connect to MySQL. This is a walk through on how to connect to MySQL with SSIS 2005 utilizing the Connector/NET 6.0 ADO.NET provider.
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Common Table Expressions were a new feature added to SQL Server 2005 and provide an efficient way to recursively query relationships stored in a normalized table. We’re going to build on that essential functionality to flatten a typical corporate structure so that all children, grand children, great grand children, etc. roll up into a single, flattened parent, regardless of depth. To graphically visualize this, take a look at the actual relationship we’ll be querying against:
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