Destroying a hard drive

Interesting article from the BBC on destorying your computer’s hard drive.

What’s the best way to destroy a PC?

General Video Tutorials

Here are some useful places to find video tutorials:

• http://www.youtube.com
• http://www.teachertube.com/
• http://www.videojug.com/
• http://www.videojug.com/tag/technology-and-gadgetsideo
• http://blip.tv/
• http://video.google.co.uk/
• http://www.teachers.tv/
• http://www.commoncraft.com/ *

* I especially like Common Craft’s approach.

SQL Server Performance Tips

These SQL Server Performance Tips are from Simon Harriyott’s blog.

SQL: With Ties

When you need to return the top number of rows in a result set you would use SELECT TOP which can be a percentage or number e.g.

SELECT TOP 5% … etc
SELECT TOP 5 … etc

This is fairly simple but what if the fifth, sixth and seventh rows had the same value.  You would probably want to return them as well.  This can be achieved by using WITH TIES e.g.

SELECT TOP 5 WITH TIES EmployeeID, Salary
FROM Employee
ORDER BY 2 DESC  /* the 2 represents the second column */

The result set would have 7 rows.

Also see With Ties – SQL Server Tip from Simon Harriyott’ blog for an excellent example.

New Media and Web 2.0 explained

I found this pdf recently on How to use New Media.  It’s a useful explanation of web 2.0 and includes a number of practical examples.

Web design reference

Sitepoint have released a major update to their free online reference, covering:

• html
• css
• javascript

http://reference.sitepoint.com/