abi.exdream.com - Benjamin Nitschke's Blog - meinSport.de

Pics from my new office in Hamburg

Benjamin Nitschke (abi) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 16:50:16 GMT

As I briefly mentioned before one of my companies (realis communities) moved to Hamburg and we got a nice new office directly at the Alster sea in the city.

Here are a few pictures to give you an impression. We work here for a few weeks now and are now setteled in.

This is my desk, as you can see, there are a "few" monitors there (and all of them quite big, ranging from 24 to 19 inch). I mainly look at the big 24" in the middle, but also use the other two. On the left side is my laptop, it is not always there, but it is useful from time to time if I need another PC for testing something. But even with this large space (I control everything with 1 keyboard and mouse via the program Synergy), I still have so many overlapping windows. After reading this article (Joining The Prestigious Three Monitor Club) from Jeff Atwood at CodingHorror.com I thought the more space you have the less overlapping windows you should have. But it is more like the more space you have, the more programs you have opened up :) I still use Switcher quite a lot to find the program windows again.

Ok, back to the office, this is one of the other rooms where most of my colleagues sit, currently most of them are away shooting some new video for meinSport TV. They are all nice guys, but you know, no programmers, do I have to say more?

Then there is finally the view out of the window, its still winter, but all that water from the Alster is comforting.

Next I will shoot some photos of my setup at home (more PCs, less monitors, but big ones ^^). I hope this does not bore you.

SQL Tools for synchronizing databases

Benjamin Nitschke (abi) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:10:32 GMT

In the past I usually updated any local database changes directly at the server everytime I uploaded something. If your database is small and the changes occur not very often, this is not a big issue, but once the database grows and especially if you update something here and there very often, it is an absolute waste of time and annoying to do all this by hand. The SQL Management Studio does not really help you out like for example when you are trying to backup data or restore them again. You can connect to two databases, but you can't even have them side by side in a window and you certainly cannot drop anything from one db to the other. You will be able to copy some data from one table into a table of the other db, but that is pretty much about it.

Scripts are helpful, but if you are not a SQL pro and do not want to waste even more time getting involved with that (keep in mind I did most of my SQL coding in either LinQ or some other object releational mapper like EntitySpaces). I checked out some tools a year ago, but saw not really the need to purcase them (especially when you need these tools once a month for 5 minutes and they cost like 500 bucks). I think I bought something cheap and crappy for a few bugs, but it does not work anylonger and did not support my 64bit system. If you do a google search on sql tools you will find a lot of tools, and quite a lot cheap and crappy ones too, probably also quite a few free tools. But the more business related the problem is, the more unlikely it is to find freeware and open source (nobody wants to do this for free). Sometimes I get lucky and find exactly what I'm looking for and it only costs somethink like 19 bucks, then it is ok, even if you use it just for a short while.

Anyway, today I checked out some tools again, first the Teratrax Database Compare tool, which is nice and simple, but does cost quite a bit ($200 per developer). After I entered all the data for both databases it was able to figure out where there are changes, but once I tried to actually synchronize the database schemas (remember, I'm not interested in the data, copying that over is not so hard, I even have some functions in my code that do that) the program stopped and cleared all fields. I checked both dbs and nothing happend. I tried it some more times, but no errors appeared, it just did not work. This was very frustrating.

Instead I went to the next google search result ^^ It was SQL Compare 6 from Red-Gate. I'm already a Red-Gate customer (using the Ants Profiler quite a lot and recently have been using the new Exception Hunter tool), but I always found their SQL tools to expensive for me, especially since I do not do much SQL work (at least I don't want to ^^). Anyway, I fired up SQL Compare after installing their whole SQL toolbelt and quickly entered the connection data for both db connections, clicked next a couple of times, saw some nice statistics and messages and was all done. I checked my local database I used for testing and yes, everything from the other server was there, with default values, descriptions and so on. SQL Compare 6 is priced at around $300, so even more expensive then Teratrax and certainly more expensive than some of the other tools I have encountered. But it works and if I need it again for a few more times in the next 2 weeks (the trial period) I will probably buy it. The amazing thing is that they claim they have already 150 000 customers of the SQL tools, that is quite a lot of money they have generated with some developer-specific-tools. But then again, more than a million people have downloaded XNA Game Studio Express and I would not have guessed there are even so many programmers around (at least I do not see them in the real world, maybe they are all hiding).

Ok, end of story, all the boring database stuff is well again. Also makes generating database code much faster when done locally from a synchronized database instead of pulling the schema from some online server.

Videos about Web 2.0 and Santa Claus

Benjamin Nitschke (abi) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 21:20:11 GMT

I just saw the following post on Scott Hanselman's blog:

My high school friend Matt Hempey (we were in Intro to Physical Science in middle school also, so I've probably known Matt for 20+ years) and his a cappella group The Richter Scales have put out the definitive Web 2.0 Music Video. That's Matt on the solo. Matt used to work at Vertigo with Jeff Atwood but recently went to Paypal. He's living the Web 2.0 dream!

And I thought, why not push one of the videos my team at meinSport.de has produced as well. It is pretty funny, but just available in German:
> >

Searching for a C#/ASP.NET Programmer for meinSport.de

Benjamin Nitschke (abi) — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 19:29:32 GMT

Warning: Shameless plug ahead.

We at realis communities (german community website builder company, bla bla, see links at the right side: meinSport.de, StudiHelp.de) are searching for C#/ASP.NET Programmers right now. Since we are a german company and the following is posted on german job sites, you probably won't understand it if you can't read german. Anyway, feel free to send us an application if you are interested (and skilled of course ^^).

And the same thing as a word document:
SearchingForMeinSportCoder.doc (216.5 KB)