My mate Rob really wants a cat. Really wants a cat. So I guess he was displacing his need with a super-generous Christmas pressie, the Furminator for my cat, Lady.

Ok it appears as being a little pricey for what is essentially a comb but my god! This is no ordinary comb, this is a “deshedding tool for cats”. Its a tool! Which not only means that its safe for a man to use, but it also works better than ANY other brush/comb I’ve ever tried on Lady.

Seriously, just check out the pics and videos! Awesome!

So I ordered a printer cable from Ebuyer yesterday just before 7pm and it arrived at 8.45am today.

I didn’t even choose the quickest delivery option. I chose the cheapest 5 day delivery slot.

Wow.

But this is obviously only contributing to why so many people now get frustrated when things ordered do not arrive by the time their next breath is drawn.

I can’t complain about the service, quite the opposite, but they’re not doing retailers any favours by being soooo quick!

So following my Xbox’s RROD I’m told that Microsoft offer a 3 year extended warranty for this failure. They will pick up and return for free and you can book a super fast collection with UPS. This is only fair. But I was led to believe that my later model of the Xbox Pro with its later chipset shouldn’t succumb to the RROD? Apparently not.

So I bought an Elite. And I’ll sell the Xbox that Microsoft fixes on EBay.

Am I a mug? Possibly. Probably. Ok, yes. The phrase “What you own, owns you” spring to mind.

So it’s December 23rd, I’m looking forward to seeing my brothers and generally spending Christmas playing games and having fun.

Then I get the red ring of death.

Great. Can’t afford to buy a new console at 200 squid so guess I’m just going to have to take it up the proverbial like a man and play cards instead.

Thanks Microsoft. No really, thanks.

One of the draw backs of SQL Server 2000 and 2005 is that although you can script individual objects (tables, stored procs etc.), you can’t script multiple objects in one go – well, not that I’m aware of anyway.

The Database Publishing Wizard (DPW) solves this issue by allowing you to:

• script all objects from a database in one go;
• script specific objects;
• script all data or data from specific tables;
• script to a specific database version;
• do most of the above from command line.

I now use this almost daily combined with .bat scripts or NAnt with CruiseControl to keep my development databases “clean” but also for deployment purposes.

Microsoft released a v1.1 of the DPW in 2007 which has some frustrating bugs at times and released a v1.2 and a v1.3 in 2008 which I believe is also installed as part of VWD 2008 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 – so you may already have it! These updated versions as far as I can tell simply provides support for the later SQL Server versions’ database object/data scripting.

So, I recommend reading the documentation for v1.1 as well as the known issues list too.

The odd thing about DPW is that Microsoft don’t seem to publicise it. Maybe they don’t want to have to support it? I only found v1.1 originally because I needed the functionality it offered. Apart from the v1.1 Codeplex home, the associated Microsoft page and the v1.2 direct file download I can’t see any info regarding the product at all. How strange …