martin-evans.me.uk Always finish the day on a success

I ordered a Smiley Micros Arduino Workshop book and Projects Kit a few weeks ago. I'm based in the UK and Smiley Micros are in the US and I paid via PayPal so I expected it to take some time for it to arrive. The PayPal payment took the best part of a week but after that I received an email saying my kit was dispatched and 6 days later it arrived. Thank you Smiley Micros, US Postal Service and Parcel Force.

I've recently uploaded a new experimental (and development) release of DBD::ODBC 1.26_1 to CPAN. This contains over 200 block code changes so it is a VERY significant change and should not be used on production servers until you have tested it. This release adds little in the way of functionality (and a few bug fixes) but is a major push to get DBD::ODBC truely ODBC 3.0 compliant and as such it will REQUIRE an ODBC driver manager to translate ODBC 3.0 calls to ODBC 2.0 if you are unlucky enough to have an ODBC 2.0 driver. I include the changes below but a few notes in addition:

Firstly, I should say I don't use Windows that much these days. The Windows machines where I test DBI and DBD::ODBC I set up ages ago with a Perl built with MS Developer Studio and I tend to keep them for that purpose. However, I bought a whole load of nice shiny new parts to build myself a new PC a month ago and installed Ubuntu and Windows as I thought I could get a more up to date Perl on Windows at home.

I'm pleased to announce the 1.25 release of DBD::ODBC. A full list of changes since the last major release is listed below and at DBD::ODBC Changes. New features include support for MS SQL Server's XML type, a new odbc_lob_read method, overriding of types on bind_col. Many thanks to everyone who has reported issues and helped with the development and testing of DBD::ODBC and especially all my friends on #dbi, Perl Monks and my colleagues at Easysoft Limited..

Today someone posted a problem using the SQL Server XML datatype with DBI/DBD::ODBC on the dbi-users mailing list. I sorted their problem pretty quickly but noticed his code using length() on scalars which were bound with bound_col was not reporting the correct length. The example and output are below:

Just spent around an hour trying to get my wife's laptop to connect wirelessly to my Canon IP5000 printer connected to my new Windows 7 x64 machine. It all worked fine when I was running Windows XP x86.

In the last few days I've released what hopefully will be the last development release of DBD::ODBC (1.24_4). If you run Windows especially and Perl 5.13 even more, then please test.

Ok, so someone is bound to say I'm just using a blog entry to complain about a company and although I am, it was not me that got the bum end of a deal from Dell. My friend, does not use computers every day and is self employed in the building industry but needs better records for his tax and the production of bills and would like to watch a DVD or two. He found a laptop he liked but could not find anyone selling it and found something almost equivalent from Dell.

I just upgraded from Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala to 10.04 Lucid and my Oracle SQL Developer stopped working entirely. I didn't bother trying to look in to it as my SQL Developer was rather old anyway so I downloaded 2.1.1.64 and it didn't work either. Seeing the warnings on the SQL Developer page about supported JDKs I first checked what I had installed.

I am happy to announce another development release of DBD::ODBC. Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release and especially to all my friends on the #dbi irc channel and perl monks. My intention is to add a lob writing method and full support for DBI's DiscardString and StrictlyTyped attributes in the next development release before releasing a final development release and finally a 1.25 full release. To support the new odbc_lob_read I've had to delay the binding of columns until the first fetch instead of as before when the result-set was described. This should not have any adverse effects but you are advised to test this release as without any feedback it will move to the next final release. The changes since the last full release are: