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‘Save our CEOs’ Teaser

Adobe ConnectNow is a great way to share ideas, discuss details, and complete work together — all online. Reduce travel costs, save time, and increase productivity with a web conferencing solution that’s easy to access and simple to use. It’s free, so sign up now.

It comes with

• Screen sharing and Remote control
• Video conferencing
• Chat pod

via Adobe ConnectNow web conferencing from Acrobat.com.

How many of you know that when you delete a file it really doesn’t get deleted even though it does not appear on your drive. There are utilities which can recover these kind of data from your computer. Here is an open source tool which can truly erase the data.

Eraser is an advanced security tool for Windows, which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. Works with Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 2003 Server and DOS.

Eraser is Free software and its source code is released under GNU General Public License.

The patterns used for overwriting are based on Peter Gutmann’s paper “Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory” and they are selected to effectively remove magnetic remnants from the hard drive.

Other methods include the one defined in the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual of the US Department of Defence and overwriting with pseudorandom data. You can also define your own overwriting methods.

via Eraser | Heidi – Internet Security and Privacy.

Washington, DC — The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) announced today that it has fined three broker-dealers — J.P. Turner & Co., of Atlanta, Park Financial Group, Inc., of Maitland, FL, and Legent Clearing, LLC, of Omaha — for failing to implement reasonable anti-money laundering (AML) compliance programs, including the failure to detect, investigate and report instances of potentially suspicious transactions in low-priced stocks.

J.P. Turner was fined $525,000, Park Financial was fined $400,000 and Legent Clearing was fined $350,000. In addition, two individuals — Park Financial’s former CEO and AML compliance officer Gordon Charles Cantley and J.P. Turner equity trader John McFarland — were barred permanently from the securities industry. David Farber, a Park Financial equity trader, was fined $25,000 and suspended in all capacities for 30 days. S. Cheryl Bauman, J.P. Turner’s former AML compliance officer, was fined $30,000 and suspended from acting as a principal in a securities firm for 18 months, while Robert Meyer, a former J.P. Turner branch manager, was fined $5,000 and suspended as a principal for one month.

via FINRA – FINRA Fines Three Firms Over $1.25 Million for Failing to Detect, Investigate and Report Suspicious Transactions in Penny Stocks.

The Global ATM Alliance is a joint venture of several major international banks that allows customers of the banks to use their ATM card or debit card at another bank within the Global ATM Alliance with no fees. Participating banks cover Asia, Australasia, Europe, Africa and North America.

Participating banks are:

• Bank of America (United States)
• Barclays (United Kingdom (primarily England and Wales), Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar and certain countries in Africa)
• BNP Paribas (France, Ukraine)
• China Construction Bank (China)
• Deutsche Bank (Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Spain and Italy)
• Santander Serfin (Mexico)
• Scotiabank (Canada, Caribbean, Chile and Mexico)
• Westpac (Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Vanuatu, Cook Islands, Samoa, Tonga, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands)
  • Westpac Banking Corporation (Australia, Fiji, Cook Islands, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu)
  • Westpac New Zealand Limited (New Zealand)
  • Westpac Bank – PNG – Limited (Papua New Guinea)
  • Westpac Bank Samoa Limited (Samoa)
  • Westpac Bank of Tonga (Tonga)
• ABSA (South Africa)
• UkrSibbank (Ukraine) “UkrSibbank” joins Global ATM Alliance

Posted for international travelers from Wikipedia page titled Global ATM Alliance

In a letter sent to its member countries, the WHO said it is officially raising its infectious diseases alert to Phase 6, its highest level, in recognition of the fact that the virus is now undergoing communitywide transmission in Australia as well as in North America. Such spread in two distinct regions of the world is the primary criterion for raising the alert level.

via Swine flu pandemic declared by World Health Organization – Los Angeles Times.

WASHINGTON, — Environmental Working Group (EWG) today called on The Coca-Cola Company’s chairman and chief executive officer Muhtar Kent to take immediate steps to reduce children’s exposure to bisphenol A (BPA), a toxic chemical used in beverage bottles and beverage can linings.

“Along with hundreds of thousands of Environmental Working Group supporters, I was very disappointed to read reports in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and The Washington Post that a Coca-Cola representative joined chemical and food processing company lobbyists in a recent meeting to consider, among other things, the use of “fear tactics” to protect the market for the toxic chemical bisphenol A (BPA),” EWG’s President, Ken Cook wrote Kent.

An internal industry document obtained by journalists and EWG show that a Coca-Cola representative took part in a May 28 food and chemical industry strategy session at Washington’s exclusive Cosmos Club, during which, the document said, “Attendees suggested using fear tactics (e.g. ‘Do you want to have access to baby food anymore?’)” According to the leaked document, “Their ‘holy grail’ spokesperson would be a ‘pregnant young mother who would be willing to speak around the country about the benefits of BPA’.”

“Is this the kind of “marketing” effort that Coca-Cola stands behind when it comes to toxic chemicals that contaminate the food supply?” Cook wrote.

More at EWG…

CROSS APPLY

 

Here is another nice one (CROSS APPLY) and also note the key features here:

Create Function GetOrderDetails(@OrderId Int, @count Int)

      returns table

As

RETURN

      Select top(@count) * from [Order Details]

      Where OrderId = @OrderId

In the above example note the usage of @count in top. I just wanted to show the output of the following statement using the CROSS APPLY statement:

Select * from Orders

Inner join [Order Details] on Orders.OrderId = [order details].OrderId

Check this:

Select O.OrderId, OrderDate, ProductId, UnitPrice, Quantity from orders O

CROSS APPLY

      dbo.GetOrderDetails(O.OrderID, 3) AS D

ORDER BY

      O.OrderId Asc

 

This statement returns all the Orders and only the first three detail records. The APPLY clause acts like a JOIN without the ON clause. Refer to both CROSS APPLY and OUTER Apply here.

 

Event Notification and DDL Triggers

 

This function called Event Notifications is a feature that can be used by applications using SQL Server. This Event notifications executes in response to a variety of Transact-SQL data definition language (DDL) statements and SQL Trace events by sending information about these events to a Service Broker service.

A sample event will be like this:

 

CREATE EVENT NOTIFICATION log_ddl1

   ON SERVER

   FOR ALTER_TABLE

   TO SERVICE ‘//northwind.com/archiveservice’ , ‘current database’;

 

In the above example, ALTER_TABLE is a DDL statement. Refer to DDL Events for Use with Event Notifications for a complete list of DDL Events.

 

Similarly DDL Triggers are a special kind of trigger that fire in response to Data Definition Language (DDL) statements. They can be used to perform administrative tasks in the database such as auditing and regulating database operations. The old DML triggers operate on INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements, and help to enforce business rules and extend data integrity when data is modified in tables or views. DDL triggers operate on CREATE, ALTER, DROP, and other DDL statements. They are used to perform administrative tasks and enforce business rules that affect databases. They apply to all commands of a single type across a database, or across a server.

USE Northwind;

GO

IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM sys.triggers

    WHERE parent_class = 0 AND name = ‘safety’)

DROP TRIGGER safety

ON DATABASE;

GO

CREATE TRIGGER safety

ON DATABASE

FOR DROP_SYNONYM

AS

   RAISERROR (‘You must disable Trigger “safety” to drop synonyms!’,10, 1)

   ROLLBACK

GO

DROP TRIGGER safety

ON DATABASE;

GO

 

 

 

 

 

Error Handling

 Simply anything can be handled with the TRY/CATCH:

BEGIN TRY

Select 1/0

Select Cast(‘a’ as DateTime)

END TRY

BEGIN CATCH

    SELECT

        ERROR_NUMBER() as ErrorNumber,

        ERROR_MESSAGE() as ErrorMessage;

END CATCH;

 

 

These statements will show the following errors.

 

 

    SELECT

        ERROR_NUMBER() AS ErrorNumber,

        ERROR_SEVERITY() AS ErrorSeverity,

        ERROR_STATE() as ErrorState,

        ERROR_LINE () as ErrorLine,

        ERROR_PROCEDURE() as ErrorProcedure,

        ERROR_MESSAGE() as ErrorMessage;

 

 

 

 

May be I’m writing this very late, but will be useful for someone who is looking for features that are introduced in 2005. The content may not be properly formatted as it was prepared in a hurry.

Common Table Expression

A common table expression (CTE) can be thought of as a temporary result set that is defined within the execution scope of a single SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, or CREATE VIEW statement. A CTE is similar to a derived table in that it is not stored as an object and lasts only for the duration of the query. Unlike a derived table, a CTE can be self-referencing and can be referenced multiple times in the same query.

A CTE can be used to:

• Create a recursive query. For more information, see Recursive Queries Using Common Table Expressions.
• Substitute for a view when the general use of a view is not required; that is, you do not have to store the definition in metadata.
• Enable grouping by a column that is derived from a scalar subselect, or a function that is either not deterministic or has external access.
• Reference the resulting table multiple times in the same statement.

Using a CTE offers the advantages of improved readability and ease in maintenance of complex queries. The query can be divided into separate, simple, logical building blocks. These simple blocks can then be used to build more complex, interim CTEs until the final result set is generated.

Sample (Northwind database):

WITH TopCustomers (City, Cnt)

AS

(

      SELECT City, count(*) FROM customers

      GROUP BY City

      HAVING count(*) > 1

)

SELECT * FROM

      Customers C inner join TopCustomers on C.City = TopCustomers.City

 

TOP function

SQL2005 allows TOP within the sub query also:

— Simple TOP query

SELECT TOP(5) *

FROM Employees;

— Nested TOP query

SELECT *

FROM (SELECT TOP(5) *

      FROM Employees

      ORDER BY [EmployeeId])

AS E

Order by EmployeeId Desc

Pivot Table

Another feature in 2005 is the Pivot table:

 

SELECT ProductId, Sum(Quantity*UnitPrice)

FROM [Order Details]

GROUP BY ProductId;

 

 

The same query as a Pivot table:

WITH Sales(ProductId, SalesAmt)

AS

      (SELECT ProductId, Quantity*UnitPrice

            FROM [Order Details])

SELECT ‘Sales’ AS SalesByProduct, [23], [46], [69], [15], [3]

FROM

      (SELECT ProductId, SalesAmt FROM Sales) AS SourceTable

PIVOT

      (

      SUM(SalesAmt)

      FOR ProductId IN ([23], [46], [69], [15], [3])

      ) AS PivotTable;

 

 

Though this doesn’t look very flexible, there will be instances where this can be applicable.

 

 

President Barack Obama bends over so the son of a White House staff member can pat his head during a family visit to the Oval Office May 8, 2009. The youngster wanted to see if the President’s haircut felt like his own. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
This official White House photograph is being made available for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way or used in materials, advertisements, products, or promotions that in any way suggest approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

Find more photos check out The Official Whitehouse Photostream