blog
My blog of techy stuff, ranging around SQL (SQL Server, that is), C# and .net, JavaScript and a smattering of stuff about the Orchard CMS (that powers my site) as I get more familiar with it. There's the occasional non-technical post when something is of interest to me that I feel is worth sharing, but they should be few and far between
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Recovering access to a SQL Server that you don't have 'sa' access to anymore
It's happened to most all of us at one time or another; an instance of SQL Server has been inherited where no one knows the sa password, or is a member of the sysadmin role, it's annoying when it's a …
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Generating the bootstrap carousel on my homepage
Back in 2017 I wrote about bootstrapping a carousel onto my homepage (was it really that long ago!?) and ever since then I've been adding, removing and modifying items in the carousel by copying, …
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Reactive Extensions - Their NuGet packages were renamed
This is an aide-memoire which may be of use to others, though it's old news and almost certainly won't be relevant unless you've got some relatively old codebases that need to be maintained and …
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Converting a load of files from UTF-16 to UTF-8
There's a database here that I've been meaning to get into source control for a long time. Luckily we have regular backups of it (that have been restore proven) and it never changes so it's been …
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Changing a Git branch that's tracking a remote
Having done some work against a local branch that's associated with a remote for a certain piece of work I've decided I want to keep the work (it's given me some proof-of-concept ideas) but start …
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The anatomy of a FIX message
In my current role I've spend some time working with the FIX protocol, which is:
an electronic communications protocol initiated in 1992 for international real-time exchange of information related …
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Using PowerShell to start and stop Hyper-V virtual machines
I've been doing a bit of VM Host upgrading recently and being able to mainpulate VMs on said hosts via the command line makes things go a lot quicker! Here's two PowerShell commands I've executed …
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How to force Windows 10 / Server 201x to scan for updates
One of the irritations of Windows 10 and its accompanying server editions is that there's no user interface surfaced to re-scan for available updates. The ability to do this comes in handy if, say, …
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Don't slash your globs the wrong way!
I inherited a couple of AngularJS applications that are built using gulp scripts when I started in my current role. Putting to one side the swathes of repeated code both within the build scripts …
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Refreshing the Windows icon cache
I just updated to the latest and greatest version of Visual Studio Code, but alas my taskbar was still showing the old icon:
From this GitHub comment, here's a quick way to force the shell to …