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Patience with Communication

By Ryan Lambert -- Published March 14, 2014

Over the past years I have created a number of systems that various folks in various roles use for their daily jobs. In supporting a variety of systems to a number of different people with widely varying experience and personalities I think I have finally learned something: Communicating with everyone is annoying to me.

Will it still work if I open my window during a solar flare?

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Bring Excel to its Knees!

By Ryan Lambert -- Published March 06, 2014

If you ever want to make Excel on a Mac die quickly, go ahead and do what I did. It's pretty fun to watch the RAM consumed by Excel climb up from its usual 80MB -250MB range climb above 750MB, and keep climbing. Apparently 1.7 GB is the magic number in Excel 2011 on my MacBook Pro:

Screenshot showing Excel's RAM usage in Mac OS' activity monitor

Even between Excel and Firefox taking up 25% of my 8GG, my computer never felt sluggish. Excel didn't run sluggishly either, it just kept chugging away happily until it died.

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Slow Down and Think

By Ryan Lambert -- Published February 25, 2014

I know, it's 2014 and we shouldn't have to think anymore, but let's just take a moment and think for a bit anyway. You might have seen news about an internet-enabled refrigerator sending spam emails lately, which might seem minor but it indicates a bigger problem of internet enabled devices that have zero or minimal security built in.

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Intro to the Site Maintenance project

By Ryan Lambert -- Published February 17, 2014

Warning: This post is outdated. It is here for reference purposes only.

I've written before about an automated website backup and restoration tool, but I've left the overall picture rather vague so far. This post will start to remedy that problem. I've decided to call the project "Site Maintenance" but I'm not very good at naming things, so I apologize for its blandness. This post will go over the main features of the project from a "why would I want it?" point of view. Let's get started...

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Creating a Web Interface for SQL Server Powered Application

By Ryan Lambert -- Published February 15, 2014

This post covers how to get an ASP.NET Web Application to connect to the DEMO SQL database we created here. This is not a full tutorial on creating Web Applications, but instead focuses on how to connect the project to a database.

If you have already followed that mini-series, you ended up with an MS Access database as a UI. This post assumes you've followed at least the first post and have created the database DEMO with the three tables, two views, and one stored procedure.

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