Free faxing with Skype

I discovered a wonderful little add-on to skype that allows you to fax with your computer. For infrequent faxers it is free, and there are paid options for those who fax a lot.

Internet Access

The laptop that my wife mailed me finally arrived with all the required amenities. I am slowly starting to catch up on my online activities again. I really missed having a computer and an online connection.

I am looking forward to being rejoined with my family during Christmas vacation.

Basic Pictures

An army chaplain was nice enough to take some pictures of us in basic training.
For those who are interested... here are a few pictures of me and what life was like.

From Military/Basic

From Military/Basic

From Military/Basic

My album with a few extra pictures can be found here:

Military/Basic

After Basic

Well so far AIT has been mildly dissapointing. They are so overbooked with recruits that we are put on waiting lists for months.

I am able to talk to my wife each day on the cell phone which really helps. She has shipped me a laptop which should arrive in about a week which we should be able to do video chat on, that will be nice. We are hoping to have her move down here right after Christmas vacation.

Graduating Basic

Well basic was definitely an experience. Physically it wasn't too much of a challenge given my county upbringing; but I missed my family a lot and wasn't allowed hardly any contact with them. I am looking forward to AIT with apprehension, we'll see how much freedom I have, I'm hoping for the best and planning for the worst. I really miss computers and hope I have access to them both for programming and contacting my family.

I took this photo for my wife, it's not my standard uniform, but I really like having something I can go on a nice date in now.

Invalid use of side-effecting or time-dependent operator in 'UPDATE' within a function.

I have run into a very interesting and very frustrating problem with Sql Server.

So far my experimenting points to a bug in sql server, though I wish it was something I was doing wrong.

I have created a scalar-valued function that uses a table variable. According to microsoft's msdn and several other sites doing inserts, updates, and deletes on local table variables in user functions is very valid.

In my case I was able to get Inserts and Deletes to work, but am having all sorts of issues with the Update statement. I copied microsofts example one and that executed fine, so then I started replacing pieces of their code with my own and saving/executing until it was a duplicate of my original function. At this point I assumed something must have been cached incorrectly in my original query window.

However, I needed to add a second update statement to the function and while the first one still works the second one won't take. So after messing with it for a bit I once again executed the microsoft example and bit by bit copied each piece of my sproc over replacing their code; and what do you know it worked again.

The only difference I can see is that their update statements are inside of a While loop, so it is still a bug in sql server, but I might be getting a little closer to a better work around.

Update: Looks like it might have been my problem after all, which is wonderful. I was using square brackets around my table variables; on a co-workers suggestion I removed those and my queries started working.

I'm guessing that all I was doing before was figuring out a way to bypass the query parser as can often happen in large stored procedures.

salesforce insufficient privileges on custom page

I recently created a new custom apex page in SalesForce. It worked fine as an administrator but regular users were unable to find it.
All of the solutions I found assumed someone was pretty familiar with navigating the SFDC admin area so I figured I would give the path where the answer is located.

The page that helped me the most is here.

1. Login as an administrator
2. Click on the 'Setup' link on the left of the upper right hand side
3. Under 'Administration Setup' in the left hand column, expand the 'Manage Users' list
4. Click on 'Profiles'
5. Click on the NAME of the profile you want to give permissions to ( under the Users area you can see what profile your users are assigned to )
6. Scroll to the bottom of the page
7. Click on the 'Edit' button for the 'Enabled Apex Class Access' area
8. Move your new class into the enabled list and click the 'Save' button
9. Scroll to the bottom of the page again.
10. Click on the 'Edit' button for the 'Enabled Visualforce Page Access' area
11. Move your new page into the enabled list and click the 'Save' button

That should be it, anyone in that profile should now be able to see the new page.