Daily Cup of Tech

I am working on a project and I am storing large amount of data in Access.  I needed a quick an easy way to remove duplicate records based on a specific field in one of my tables.  I thought, “This shouldn’t be too hard since there is a query wizard to determine duplicate records.” 

Man, was I wrong!

After about a day of trying, I figured out the following little trick:

1. Make a copy of your original data table but just copy the table structure, not the data.
2. Edit the new table and change the field with the duplicates’s index to No Duplicates Allowed.
3. Save the new table.
4. Create an append query that will append all of the data from the original table to the new table.
5. Run the append query.  You will see a number of warnings/errors.  Simply accept them to complete the process.
6. Rename the original table.
7. Rename the new table with the same name as the original table.

You should now have all the duplicate records gone!

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/03/29/remove-duplicate-records-in-access/trackback/

I always knew that ink was costly but I never knew it was this expensive:

Yikes!  You’re better off trying to refill that magenta cartridge with the stuff that is pumping through your veins!  It will at least be cheaper and you’re always making more!

[Wizonk!]

Inkgrabber.com - Inkjets up to 92% OFF Retail

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/03/22/ink-is-way-too-expensive/trackback/

What is the one thing that every IT guys keeps harping on?  Backups!  You have got to do your backups. Regularly. Consistently. Accurately.

In fact, go and do a backup this very second.

Seriously.

Stop reading.

Go and do a backup right now!  Your documents, your websites, your e-mail, your pictures.  Everything!

Go!

Don’t worry.  I’ll wait.

Now that you’re back and you’re not worrying about backups, I can let you in on a little secret.  If you didn’t just perform a backup of your website and suddenly it disappeared, there may still be hope.  And this hope’s name is Warrick.

The purpose of Warrick is to attempt to rebuild your website from different sources on the Internet that make cached copies of your website.

From the Warrick site:

Warrick is a utility for reconstructing or recovering a website when a back-up is not available. Warrick will search the Internet Archive, Google, Live Search, and Yahoo for stored pages and images and will save them to your filesystem. Warrick can be ran through our website or as a command-line utility (directions for downloading, installing, and running are given below).

Warrick is most effective at finding cached content in search engines in the first several days after losing the website since the cached versions of pages tend to disappear once the search engine re-crawls your site and can no longer find the pages. Running Warrick multiple times over a period of several days or weeks can increase the number of recovered files because the caches fluctuate daily (especially Yahoo’s). Internet Archive’s repository is at least 6-12 months out of date, and therefore you will only find content from them if your website has been around at least that long. If they don’t have your website archived, you might want to run Warrick again in 6-12 months.

I don’t know if I would be willing to leave the entire security of my website in the hands of Warrick.  But, if everything is gone anyway, what have you got to lose?

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/03/20/forget-backups-ive-got-warrick/trackback/

OpenWith.org Desktop Tool

Do you have files on your computer that you don’t know how to open? If so, you need the OpenWith.org Desktop Tool!

For almost any file on your computer, the OpenWith.org Desktop Tool will tell you what type of file it is, and show you free programs that will open the file. It will even download them for you!

You simply right click on a file and select “How do I open this?” and the OpenWith.org Desktop Tool will look up the file!

OpenWith.org Desktop Tool is compatible with 98, ME, 2000, XP and Vista.

Download the OpenWith.org Desktop Tool

Instructions

This will be a huge help for people who get scammed into buying expensive programs or don’t know how to use a file.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/03/17/open-any-file-quickly-easily-and-for-free/trackback/

As I wrote in Big Brother Google Is Watching Me, Google’s new interest-based advertising is pretty freaky. So, I thought that I would help everyone out by sharing this Firefox plugin that may help.

TrackMeNot is designed to perform random search engine searches to as to hide your actual searches in a sea of unrelated searches.  The idea is to make your search patterns undetectable and, this, Google can not create an accurate search profile on you.

Here is what the website says:

TrackMeNot  is a lightweight browser extension that helps protect web searchers from surveillance and data-profiling by search engines. It does so not by means of concealment or encryption (i.e. covering one’s tracks), but instead, paradoxically, by the opposite strategy: noise and obfuscation. With TrackMeNot, actual web searches, lost in a cloud of false leads, are essentially hidden in plain view. User-installed TrackMeNot works with the Firefox Browser and popular search engines (AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN) and requires no 3rd-party servers or services.

I’m going to give this a try.  The hard part will be determining whether or not is is actually successful in covering my tracks.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/03/16/firefox-plugin-to-foil-google-interest-based-advertising/trackback/