Nothing I publish is perfect. Everything I publish is a “work in progress” to some degree or another. I once wrote about Agile Blogging. My thought was, “What if I could incrementally build up content, rather than have to sit down and write until all my thoughts were fully fleshed out and ‘perfect’?...

This SSIS package execution error can occur for a few reasons: Path to the file does not exist. So for example, if you’re writing the file to C:\Some\Folder\somefile.txt, C:\Some\Folder needs to exist first. Fix: Create the folder that the package will write to prior to executing it. Alternatively, ...

“Analysis” and “analytics” are extremely similar words… I mean, just the word-ending is different: “-sis” vs “-tics” Since the end of the words is where the difference lies (otherwise, there wouldn’t be two of them, right?), why not go find out what each suffix might indicate to get some clues as to...

I upgraded a project to Swift 4 today and hit a compiler error: ‘init(colorLiteralRed:green:blue:alpha:)’ is unavailable: This initializer is only meant to be used by color literals. The fix is pretty simple: Don’t use that initializer! (thank you, Captain Obvious!) The correct initializer to use fo...

SQL Server 2017 Reporting Services is no longer bundled with the main SQL Server installer, so if you’re looking to add the Reporting Services 2017 feature, you need to run the stand-alone installer. When you run said installer, you’ll be presented with a dialog asking for a product key. But uhhhh… ...

Questions -> Data -> Analysis -> Answers This flow is what it’s all about, isn’t it? At the end of the day, you want answers so that you can take informed action. But before you can get answers, you need to do a certain kind of analysis. But before you do analysis, you need data to perform the analy...

If you need to find some text within a database object definition, this script can be helpful. It should allow you to find text within the definitions of the following types of database objects: Functions (scalar and table-valued) Stored Procedures Triggers Views 1DECLARE @SearchString VARCHAR(255) ...

1USE master; 2GO 3 4ALTER DATABASE [DatabaseName] 5SET SINGLE_USER 6WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE; 7ALTER DATABASE [DatabaseName] 8SET MULTI_USER; 9GO

If you find yourself stuck in SINGLE_USER mode in a SQL Server database, do the following: 1 - Find SPIDs connected to your database 1USE master 2GO 3EXEC sp_who Note any SPIDs connected to your database, and then… 2 - Kill connections 1KILL [spid] -- do this for each spid returned by exec sp_who 3 ...

Measurements and Descriptions There are endless ways to measure and describe the world around us. When you boil data down to the essentials, what you get are… Measurement(s) Descriptions of the measurement(s) It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. It doesn’t matter the process that captured the ...

If one does not simply… “machine learn”… what does one do to cover all the bases and make sure that the process is complete and value-producing? Here 10 high level stages to check off as you take on a machine learning task. Business Metric Before you do anything with machine learning, you absolutely...

Not all questions are “predictive analytics questions”. That is to say, not every question you receive as a data science practitioner requires predictive analytics to answer. So how do you know if someone is asking a question that’s a good fit for using predictive analytics to provide the answer? Pa...

“Daddy, what is your job? What do you do there??”, asks my 5 year old in a curious tone as he tries to figure out why I went to work today instead of staying home to play with him. “Weeeell…” (not a confident start to my response, I know…). “Iiiiii…help people with data.” 😬 “Data? What’s data??” [Th...

Local receipt validation in Swift doesn’t seem to be widely written about. I’ve been able to find snippets of code scattered across the Internet, but nothing that brought everything together in one spot so that I could wrap my head around the whole process. I’ve been working on some code for a while...

The aim of this guide is to help you finalize the receipt validation process by computing the GUID hash for your app, and comparing it to the hash that’s stored within your receipt itself. This is a continuation of my receipt validation series. I’m assuming that… You’ve prepared to test receipt vali...

The aim of this guide is to help you parse a receipt and decode it so that you have readable pieces of metadata to inspect and finalize all of the receipt validation steps. This is a continuation of my receipt validation series. I’m assuming that… You’ve prepared to test receipt validation by settin...

You’ve prepared to test receipt validation by setting up your app in iTunes Connect. You’ve brought in a cryptography library like OpenSSL to be able to work with the PKCS #7 container that acts as the “envelope” for the receipt. Perhaps you’ve even done it the “easy way” with CocoaPods. You’ve loca...

If you’ve been creating the Core Data Stack without NSPersistentContainer and you’re thinking about switching things up to use NSPersistentContainer, you need to think about your existing SQLite persistent store. Creating the stack with NSPersistentContainer handles the creation of SQLite stores int...

What’s in a name? If a programming language comes with a named feature, you can be pretty sure it was named that way for a reason. It’s a safe bet that the language designers were purposeful in their naming, so if you can figure out that essential “Why’d they name it that?” question, you might be th...

If you’re targeting iOS 10 and above, you’ve got the opportunity to pick your poison when it comes to creating the Core Data stack. You could opt for the process I described in Creating the Core Data Stack with Backwards Compatibility in Swift — that process still works perfectly fine in iOS 10+. Al...

My last entry on escaping closures ended up having way more interaction than I anticipated! It goes to show that you never know what the impact of a piece of writing will have. But that’s a different story… :] Several readers commented here and on Medium with the question, “Why? Why do we need to ma...

If you’re mostly in the business of coding up closures to pass off to other functions as callbacks, you may not have run into the concept of an “escaping closure” yet. When you step out of the role of consuming other peoples’ APIs in to the realm of creating your own (and you do this all the time!),...

Every function; every class; every struct and enum and protocol is an API. YOU — are an API designer As developers, we move into and out of the role of “API Designer” constantly. Have you ever thought about that? You are an API designer! You create Application Programming Interfaces all the time. I ...

I admit – it might have taken me less time to figure out my runtime exception if I hadn’t just migrated my project to Swift 3 when I encountered the bug. That’s the problem isn’t it? You go in… you intend to do one thing. Before long, you’ve got 15 files with an M out to the right. The project build...

I hit the “No bundle url present.” roadblock today and had to dig a bit to find the solution. I’m going to describe how I encountered the problem, and provide the solution that’s worked more than once for me, ever since I found the suggestion in the React Native GitHub repository. The Problem You’ve...

Away with the Phone! Put your phone away. Far away. Not in your pocket. Not on your desk. In a drawer – away from you. Disconnect. You should be able to tell if you’ve got an emergency call coming in, but past that, aim to be completely oblivious to every other kind of notification flowing into your...

What do you do when you’ve got two (or more) optionals that you need to safely unwrap and work with? Code examples Suppose that you’ve got two arrays, both of which are optional. What I want to do right now is walk through a couple of scenarios where I unwrap them at the same time and print them to ...

In 2017, we live in a world where there are still non-iOS 10 devices out in the wild. If your app is targeting an iOS version earlier than iOS 10, or macOS Sierra (10.12), you’ll be unable to take advantage of Core Data’s latest “stack creation” class called NSPersistentContainer. So what can you do...

When you need to access the documents directory on a user’s device, what do you do? In the past, I know I’ve gotten used to typing out the same set of code over and over throughout my apps. I know, I know – DRY – don’t repeat yourself. One way to simplify this is to use a Swift extension to URL. Doi...

Core Data is an extremely powerful framework for managing and persisting data on your users’ devices. And let’s face it: saving data to your users’ devices is inevitable. The question is, which data management and persistence technology you use when the time comes for you to tackle this challenge? “...