This is a fun little “hall-of-mirrors” style mosaic browser for hours of psychedelic fun.

Yahoo! has a great mashup of road work overlaid on the map. Just in time for Memorial Day weekend, here is a link to road work in West Michigan.

I have wanted SQL Server intellisense for a long time. At the PDC05 Show Off, Damian Mehers submitted a demo of his newly created PromptSQL product. I was pretty excited about this and rushed to get it. Damian released several versions back-to-back, adding new features and improving the performance.

Well, he apparently got the attention of red-gate software. They have a number of very useful industry-recognized SQL Server management tools and they bought the application and called it SQL Prompt. After working on the application to spruce up the UI and improve the usability, red-gate has released version 2.0.

Overall the software is pretty solid. It not only suggests field names, but also can show syntax suggestions, stored procedure and function parameters, join suggestions, system variables, keyword capitalization, snippets and more. It is fairly configurable and makes it easier to discover and utilize T-SQL language features.

While they were working on the new version I noticed on the red-gate forums that they were thinking about a $99 price point. The original was $25 so I was glad I got in early, but now red-gate is actually offering it for free. I don’t know how long this will last or if the free license will expire, but I say, get it while it’s hot.

The Elexicon Blog is ready for Lightboxing!  You can take a look at Lightbox in all its glory by clicking on the following images (taken from DeviantArt)… then read up on how to place the Lightboxed images in your own posts.

Inserting this type of link into your Elexicon Blog posts is a little tricky, so I thought I would write up a quick tutorial for everyone.  When you are typing up your blog entry in “Write Post” section of WordPress, you’ll need to click on the HTML button along the text area’s menu bar.  Once there, you can insert your code for the Lightbox image links, which should take the following form:

<a href=”TARGET_IMAGE_URL” rel=”lightbox[SET_NAME]” title=”IMAGE_CAPTION”>
<img src=”THUMBNAIL_URL” />
</a>

Not too bad, right?  The rel attribute’s SET_NAME should be the same for all images that will be part of a particular Lightbox “slideshow”.  It must be different than all other groups, so it might be a good idea to use the date as part of your chosen SET_NAME.  The title attribute defines what caption the Lightbox image will have below it, and is completely optional.  Finally, the image URLs can be absoulte or relative, and can link images from an external website.

Happy Lightboxing!

Embedding images into your blog post can cause some funny formatting issues with the text, but I’ve found the solution.  When embedding an image, do not select any options for its alignment.  Selecing options for the alignment adds an attribute to the IMG tag, which then causes the text to wrap around the image, and it’s a pain to fix via CSS.  This interesting photo of Bill Gates and Jay-Z demonstrates what the typical image will look like when embedded into a blog post.

If you feelin’ like a pimp, Billy, go an’ brush ya shouldas off.
I got 99 problems but the Gates ain’t one.

So many captions…