I finally fixed my problem with DBEdit. Thanks to some help by Angus Johson and David Witerod. If anyone else is having the same issue here’s a description of the fix:

I removed all traces of dbEdit then installed the 1.0.3 plugin

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I removed:

eclipse\features – Removed dbedit*

eclipse\plugins – Removed dbedit*

eclipse\workspace\.metadata\.plugins – Removed dbedit.core and dbedit.ui

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I’m still in the learning stage but once I become more familiar with the plug-in I’ll post a quick review.

I’ve been out since Wednesday because I went to a friend’s wedding in Denver. The wedding was a lot of fun and despite the record breaking 105 degree heat, I really enjoyed being in Denver. I’m sure I missed a lot of stuff and I’m in the process of going over all of the blogs from the past few days.

And of course all of the exciting hockey news happened while I was away. Seriously, Pittsburgh? Andre-Fleury, Malkin AND Crosby? That city is going to own hockey for the next 15 years. Bob, your team is going to be insane. The Penguins get Crosby and the Avalanche get ?Forsberg, Hejduk, Tanguay ? pick 2?. Life isn?t fair.

One of the cool things I saw this morning is MSN’s answer to Google Maps – Virtual Earth. I like MSN’s version better because I think the interface is a little bit cooler (the way it saves locations, the blog-it link) but the real reason I’m going to use virtual earth from now on is the quality of the satellite images.

Being from small town Wyoming, I tend to look for places that are in the middle of nowhere. Here’s Google’s satellite version of Green River, my home town, and here’s Microsoft’s. MSN blows Google out of the water.

I’m man enough to admit that I really like Harry Potter. I used to be a hater, but I finally read the books and enjoyed them. So while part of me felt bad while reading this, it was too hilarious not to post. The guys at ESPN’s Page 2 write some good stuff and this is no different.

There’s a spoiler there from Book 5, so if you haven’t read it yet, you might want to skip this.

In my search to find a good SQL Editor for Eclipse (SQL Explorer has some bugs and hasn’t been updated in a while) I’m checking out DBEdit, which I’ve heard good things about. I was using the steps posted by Dan, but I ran into a few problems.

First, after unzipping the plug-in files into the plug-ins directory, the DBEdit perspective wasn’t showing up for me. When I went to Window-Open Perspective-Other.. I didn’t see it on the list. I’m still not sure exactly what the deal was, I think I was missing some files, but I had to go to Manage Configuration and search for updates before it showed up. Maybe that has to be done with all plug-ins, but I’d never had to mess with it before.

Once I got the perspective to show up I figured I was free and clear….not so much. I installed the Microsoft JDBC Drivers but when I configured the connection and tried to connect, it told me my password was wrong. After digging around, I figured out it had something to do with using Windows Authentication (instead of SQL Server Authentication). I couldn’t figure out how to configure the Microsoft JDBC Driver to use Windows Authentication so I installed jTDS Drivers. They have a special property “Domain” that allows you to specify which domain to pull the logon credentials for. Here I thought I was close because I no longer got the invalid logon message. I got another one:

An internal error occurred during: “Fetching children of [instance-name]“

In googling that, I found a reference to a message sent to the CF Aussie list but no solution.

So now I’m stuck.

301 days after Gary Bettman locked out the players, the NHL is finally back. For me, it’s been rough to watch hockey be joke of the American sports scene. It’s been even harder to see the apathy that came with the NHL lockout.

But finally hockey is back and now it can focus on getting the fans back. Lower ticket prices, more scoring and better marketing of the players will go a long way toward that goal.

Also, I don’t care where you’re from; Sidney Crosby needs to end up in New York with the Rangers. Put the future of the NHL in the biggest US market – there shouldn’t even be a question.

Let?s play hockey.

I use Notepad to jot down any random notes I have throughout the day. Phone numbers, e-mail addresses, songs I want to download later, snippets of code – everything goes into Notepad. I’m not very good at clearing these out, so by the end of the week I have 5-6 instances of Notepad open with no idea what they’re all supposed to do. There must be a better way…….. /foreshadowing

And there is.

WikidPad is a desktop wiki which means it’s a cooler, organized version of notepad. It lets you tag your notes, set an icon for them, set the priority and a bunch of other various flags. I just downloaded it today, and I’m still playing with it but it looks like it has a lot of upside. It’s definitely better than having a bunch of notepad windows open, but it does take some organization.

I just saw a really cool implementation of the Google Maps API – http://www.kokogiak.com/gmaps-transparencies.html. He used the API to create his own version that has the regular Google Maps view overlaid on the Google Maps satellite view.

Very cool.