Answer My Searches

The MediaWiki Installation Guide is very friendly and easy to use. Just follow that and it will walk you through the whole installation …. unless you hit one of my issues below:

Things to Consider:
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From my research I’ve found TinyPic to be the best option. It offers unlimited image hosting, generates some standard HTML to paste where-ever you need to, and its ads seem very tolerable.

Background:
Imageshack and similiar image hosting services are very useful. Not only can you quickly upload images you want to share at no expense to yourself, but it then generates all kinds of useful HTML and link structures for you to paste including an automatically generated thumbnail.

See look how easy, I can post a link in a forum, email, etc!
This is a huge time-saver.

However ImageShak and a few other services I tried are just over-run with ads. If I recall even the thumbnails they generated had ads. And their generated links linked back to their page holding my image, not just the image. So you’d end up on a page with 90% ads and 10% my image. I was embarresed to use that thing!

So I set off to find an alternative. So far TinyPic seems to be the best option. It’s not as feature-rich as ImageShack but I’m not ashamed to use it in forums

Resources:

1. This page has an excellent run down of free image hosting services i.e. no registration required. It even lists their storage and time limits.
2. A Del.icio.us Tag Listing is also useful to would-be researchers in this department.

Answer:
Just use the datalength function instead of the len function.
Example:
select datalength(notes) from Mytable

Background:
I was shocked to learn that this:
select len(notes) from Mytable
Gives me this error:
Server: Msg 8116, Level 16, State 2, Line 1
Argument data type text is invalid for argument 1 of len function.

This article explains the why and how of this situation in more detail and offers other useful functions for text fields.

[tags]Ms SQL Server, MSSQLSERVER, TSSQL, T-SQL, Len, datalength, text field[/tags]

Technically it will pick up your NT login name but for me it’s the same as my GoldMine login name so it works great

Steps:
1. Go to your Goldmine directory.
2. Locate the file GM.ini
3. Make a backup (copy it and rename the copy)
4. delete the line in the [GoldMine] section that says user=…
5. Save the file.

The next time you open up GoldMine it should pick up your login name from windows.
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Today I describe how I will make data-driven charts and graphs for an intranet site I’m developing. After an hour of researching the Python graphing libraries out there, I decided to go with Matplotlib for the chart generation. It seemed like the most server friendly option because it seems to run fast and it required me to install the least amount of other programs. (Plus this guy really likes it.)

Here is the chart image I’m able to make so far (code below):

It’s not pretty yet, but this post is focusing on the cgi mechanics. I’ll update you when I learn the intricacies of plotting data in Matplotlib.
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