BrianJarrett.com

Recently I’ve started making real use of portable applications running from my thumbdrive. There are a lot of portable apps available but I’ve also had to search for some of them. I thought I’d use this page to showcase the portable apps I use in hopes that it’ll make your search easier by organizing them all in one place.

Many of the portable apps I use on my thumbdrive come from PortableApps.com. They also have a really nice start menu that, once installed on your thumbdrive, will allow easy access to your portable apps. What’s also nice is that it’ll work with any .exe so it’s not restricted solely to apps from PortableApps.com. I have several apps I’ve downloaded from elsewhere but have easy access to via the PortableApps start menu.

These are the same apps I use on my home computer so I’m getting the same …read more »

Here’s a tip I picked up from a co-worker (thanks Matt H.) a few years back during a big ETL rewrite he and I were doing for the company I worked for. First off, I don’t recommend doing ETL in Perl. Perl is interpreted, which makes it a little slower, and it also can become a maintenance nightmare. I love Perl but coding ETL in Perl is exhausting. I’d recommend using something like DataStage, Informatica, or Data Integrator instead. Those programs are expensive though, and if your company is on a tight budget they might not spring for any of those tools. Perl is free and that really is one of the cheapest ways to go about this. We’ll proceed under the premise that you’re left with no other options.

This code snippet can be used for a fact table load job. I’m presuming a working knowledge of Perl, ETL, SQL, and dimensional modeled (star schema) databases here. This also presumes you have knowledge …read more »

Perl has no built-in “trim” function so you have to write your own using search and replace and regular expression matching. Below is simple trim function that will remove spaces from the beginning and end of any string …read more »

Date::Manip doesn’t work “straight out of the box” on Windows due to the fact that Windows doesn’t have a timezone defined. I use Perl on both Unix and Windows and as a result I use Date::Manip on both systems as well. When I was a newbie this confounded me to no end when coding for Windows. I couldn’t seem to find a good solution for it but ultimately through research and determination I figured out how to fix it.

I create a system variable in Windows for the timezone and then …read more »

I’ve released a new version of my PhotoRenamer Perl script (version 1.2.1). This script was primarily written for my own usage but I figured that I’d release here in case it’s of some use to others. The new version, along with more information, is available via the original post here.