Sending emails with non ASCII characters from ASP

To have an ASP page send an email with non-ASCII European text (Cyrillic, Greek, Czech, etc) you’ll need to use UTF-8.

Reading multi language text in Microsoft Office

Reading documents with Cyrillic text is a breeze on a Mac, but with MS Office it can be a right pain the backside, so if your company does business in the Russian market it can be very frustrating. Here’s a quick tip on how to read multi language characters – to write Cyrllic and co, you’ll have to buy a license.

It is the Microsoft Way.

Serving an Excel Worksheet to a browser.

Writing an excel worksheet to a browser is pretty simple – all you need is the correct response type, and to format the data using an HTML table.

Handling dates in Javascript

A few pointers.

Skewing random numbers towards 0

A quick way to skew random numbers towards 0 is to raise them to some powers – the higher the power, the higher the skew.

var num:Number    = Math.pow( Math.random(), 2 );

Finding files on the command line and doing something with them

find a_directory -iname “*.zip” -exec unzip -d another_directory {} \;
This will unzip all files from a_directory into another_directory

find a_directory -iname ‘*.gif’ -or -iname ‘*.jpg’ -exec cvs add -kb {} \;
This add all image files inside a_directory to CVS as binary.

The Joys of COUNT

COUNT has actually two forms: COUNT(*) counts the number of rows in a table; and COUNT(expr) counts the non-null occurrences of expr. This is very useful for generating reports, e.g.:

SELECT COUNT(*) AS ‘Total’, COUNT(ID_winner) AS ‘Claimed’

Referring to a parent object from within an XML event handler

The mx.utils.Delegate class in Actionscript 2.0 is the only way I have found so far to refer to a parent object from within an XML event handler.

Converting a collection to a JScript object in ASP

Enumerators are collections of data that can be iterated through. Although useful, they are not compliant with ECMAScript standards, and therefore I prefer not to use them. Some objects in the ASP environment however, such as Request.Form, are provided as Enumerators, and need to be converted them to standard JScript objects. Here's a couple of routines to do so.