Undelivered mail returned to sender

The clever little spammers must be desperate. Lately they’ve been using the old “undelivered mail returned to sender” as the mail subject, in order to get our attention.

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Quick disk cleanup

Every few months, I like to do a little spring cleaning and remove the hundreds of temporary and backup files which get left behind by various applications.

While there are a number of tools which can tidy up your hard disk using the Windows XP/2000 graphical interface, sometimes a simple batch file is all you need:

del "%systemdrive%\*.bak" /s /q
del "%systemdrive%\*.tmp" /s /q
if exist "%systemdrive%\temp\" del "%systemdrive%\temp\*.*" /s /q
if exist "%systemroot%\temp\" del "%systemroot%\temp\*.*" /s /q 
del "%userprofile%\local settings\temp\*.*" /s /q

Copy and paste the above five lines into your favourite text editor and save the contents to your desktop. Just make sure the file extension is either “.cmd” or “.bat”. Something like “Cleanup.cmd” is probably a good name.

Keep in mind that deleting files this way actually deletes the files permanently instead of putting them in your recycle bin.

How to lose a customer, Amazon style

Having been assigned the job of transferring some 20-odd kilograms of VHS-C and Video8 tapes to DVD, I set upon the task of researching video capturing, editing and authoring software.

And what a task it was.

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Office personalised menus

Microsoft have done a number of counter-intuitive things over the years in the quest of “improved usability” and after the pesky “office assistant” and the distracting “auto spelling and grammar checker”, the “personalized menus” introduced in Office 2000 are often the very next thing many advanced users turn off before they use any of it’s components.

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Finding duplicate records with SQL

Although I don’t spend a lot of time doing any type of relational database administration, occasionally I get asked to find duplicate records in tables. Here’s the easiest way to do it, assuming your database supports subqueries:

select f1, f2, f3 from t1 where f1 in (
   select f1 from t1 group by f1 having count(f1) > 1
)
order by f1;

I’ve surmised that you’re trying to find duplicates on the “f1″ field. Substitute “t1″ with your actual table name and “f1″, “f2″ and “f3″ with your actual field names and include or omit as many field names you want to output in the first part of the statement.