I upgraded to an iPhone 4S yesterday and have been playing with one of the new features, Siri, trying to get it to understand “Text my girlfriend”. I had associated Emma with my contact record but it wasn’t finding her contact record in the address book.

I store most contact records as Title, Firstname, Surname. E.g.:

Miss Jane Smith
Mr John Doe

If you ask Siri to make an association then in your contact record it will store the name of the relationsip (sister, brother, etc) and the full name including the title.

However when it tries to lookup that relationship it will fail.

The simple fix is to remove the title from the relationship on your contact record and it should all start working again.

On October 1st I am going to be hiking up Snowdon with some of my colleagues from work to raise money for the road safety charity Brake. Every 30 seconds someone, somewhere in the world, is killed in a road crash. Brake campaign to improve road safety within the UK and also support those affected by road deaths.

I would really appreciate it if you could sponsor me and the team by donating to Brake via our JustGiving page: http://www.justgiving.com/FSGSnowdonWalk

I am told it may look like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELdijJpGcyc
But more likely like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHcm5kX65JM

I will be taking my camera and phone so will tweet, Facebook and photograph the sun, rain, snow or hail (delete as appropriate).

Thank you,

Dan

JustGiving: http://www.justgiving.com/FSGSnowdonWalk
Brake: http://www.brake.org.uk/
Fleet Support Group: http://www.fsguk.com/

Jigsaw puzzle

Originally uploaded by Daniel Durrans

I have picked up the camera again after months of not having had any motivation to take a single photo. I have started a Project 365 – one image every day for the next 365 days. I am hoping this will not only improve my photography skills but also provide the focus necessary to get the camera out of it’s bag.

Emma has been working on this jigsaw for the last few days. It has been sat in the middle of the living room in the Puzzle Store that she got for Christmas. Slowly working from the outside in she has constructed all of the edges and a reasonable proportion of the upper half on the puzzle.

I was having trouble trying to import a quote escaped CSV file into SQL Server 2005 using BULK INSERT. It kept giving me an unexpected EOF error until I used a format file where I created a dummy start and end column to pick up the initial ” and final \r\n.

For example this format file will import six columns which are all formatted as:

“column1″,”column2″,”column3″,”column4″,”column5″,”column6″

9.0
8
1       SQLCHAR       0       1       ""          0     ExtraField          ""
2       SQLCHAR       0       100     "\",\""     1     ModelId             SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
3       SQLCHAR       0       100     "\",\""     2     QualifyModelId      SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
4       SQLCHAR       0       100     "\",\""     3     MediaAspectCode     SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
5       SQLCHAR       0       100     "\",\""     4     SmallImageFilename  SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
6       SQLCHAR       0       100     "\",\""     5     MediumImageFilename SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
7       SQLCHAR       0       100     "\""        6     LargeImageFilename  SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
8       SQLCHAR       0       100     "\r\n"      0     ExtraField           ""

The following slice of code will search a table and return any rows where there is a clash between the date range in the row (ValidFrom and ValidTo) and the date range in the variables (@InTo and @InFrom).

Null dates are treated as either infinite past or infinite future accordingly.

WHERE
NOT (
(@InTo < ValidFrom AND @InTo IS NOT NULL AND ValidFrom IS NOT NULL)
OR
(@InFrom > ValidTo AND @InFrom IS NOT NULL AND ValidTo IS NOT NULL)
)


What is loud, fast, very hard, and makes this happen to cars:

A train going over a level crossing when the car shouldn’t have been there. Don’t play on the railways kids!

This car was left in the car park at work by Network Rail. It was recently used as part of their campaign to convince drivers that driving over level crossings when the lights are flashing is generally considered a bad idea.