The Ji Village News

Category: Technology

  • Accessing external USB disk attached to my ASUS RT-AC68U router

    I have my own cloud storage server using ownCloud for many years now, and love it. It’s like DropBox, only better. However, even with that, it’s still nice to have a shared storage for my home network. So today I bought a Seatate Ultra Slim USB 3 disk from Costco, with 2TB capacity. It is…

  • Initial impressions of SQL Server v.Next Public Preview

    Microsoft announced its SQL Server on Linux public preview yesterday. I’m really excited to check it out. Here are some interesting things I found during my testing. I’ll write more as I play with it further. If you want to play it on Ubuntu, it needs to be 16.04 or above. I didn’t pay attention…

  • Java regex Matcher’s first group is the whole pattern

    I didn’t realize that Java’s regex class, Matcher, uses m.group(0) to denote the entire pattern. I spent some time debugging it. Hence this note. As is stated in the documentation, “Capturing groups are indexed from left to right, starting at one. Group zero denotes the entire pattern, so the expression m.group(0) is equivalent to m.group().”…

  • Changing non-nullable column to nullable in SQL Server is quick and painless

    In T-SQL, you can only ALTER COLUMN one at a time. Initially I was worried about operational cost of this change, but it turned out this change is instantaneous. Mind you, I’m not suggesting you should do this without a good reason.

  • No 32-bit for SQL Server 2016 Express

    I’ve learned that SQL Server 2016 Standard and Enterprise Editions no longer provide 32-bit. But I do wonder about SQL Server 2016 Express Edition. It’s different in that it’s free, and mostly geared toward lightweight usage, people who are learning, etc. So perhaps it still offers 32-bit? After some upgrade work to one SQL Server…