Sunday, November 27, 2005

Record anything you can hear on your PC!

I downloaded this program a couple of weeks ago and found it to be easy to use. I have been able to record playlists directly from Napster and iTunes. Once you set the program it will record all songs to seperate files and even look up the name and details on Gracenote.

Get it here.

Discover the Ultimate Streaming Music Recorder

Saturday, November 26, 2005

Big Brother arrives in the UK

ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) cameras are being used to create a "24x7 national vehicle movement database" that will log the movement of every vehicle on the United Kingdom's roads. Your every move will be retained in the system for two years.
According to an article in The Register, the system will go live in April of next year and will process 50 million number plates per day by year's end. ANPR camera systems are to be placed every 400 yards along motorways.
(ANPR mobile unit)
Besides "denying criminals the use of the roads", the system will also link to other databases to identify vehicles that are unregistered and untaxed. The system will be used in the war on terror; UK police have lobbied for detention periods of up to 90 days without charges for terror suspects. Once police have a tip or a suspect in custody, they can sift records of vehicle movement along with everything else.
This technology was predicted sixty years ago by Robert Heinlein in his 1941 novel Methuselah's Children. The novel takes place in a near-future Earth society that is very closely regulated. The individual's right to privacy typically means little compared to the right of society to take what it needs from citizens. For example, the movement of every vehicle on the road is monitored by roadside cameras, just like it will be in Britain. Some individuals, however, use other technology to maintain their privacy.

The car waited for a break in the traffic, then dived into the high-speed stream and hurried north. Mary settled back for a nap.
When its setting was about to run out, the car beeped for instructions; Mary woke up and glanced out. Lake Michigan was a darker band of darkness on her right. She signaled traffic control to let her enter the local traffic lane; it sorted out her car and placed her there, then let her resume manual control. She fumbled in the glove compartment.
The license number which traffic control automatically photographed as she left the controlways was not the number the car had been wearing.

Monday, November 21, 2005

Connect to any database!

I found a great program the other day as I was looking for a solution to import or link Paradox tables to an MSAccess front end. It is called DBExtra.

Major Features

Connect to Your Data

  • Create unlimited projects and organize your data by object groups.

  • You can connect to:

    • MS Access

    • MS SQL server

    • MySQL

    • Oracle

    • DB2

    • Paradox

    • DBF

    • FoxPro

    • Pervasive

    • Excel

    • Text files

    • Almost any other database through ODBC

  • Connect to databases located on a web server.

  • Assign friendly, meaningful names to objects and fields and only those friendly names will be shown to users.

  • Maintain database objects easily from the DBxtra data explorer.

Explore Your Data

  • Create business intelligence from your data with the DBxtra Data Explorer.

  • Group your database objects any way that makes sense to find the data you need quickly.

  • Filter and sort your data any way you want.

  • Assign aggregate functions.

  • Send your data by E-mail.

  • Send HTML mail.

  • Export your data to a MS Excel sheet, pivot table chart and linked data sheet.

  • Export your DBxtra reports without losing formatting to PDF, Excel or HTML.

  • Upload your data to a web server.

  • Store filters for quick and easy future access.

Create Powerful Queries

  • Create sophisticated Queries with no SQL or programming knowledge.

  • Users who know SQL can add unlimited expressions directly to queries.

  • Queries can combine results from different databases, including any of the database types DBxtra supports.

Create Powerful Reports

  • Create DBxtra Reports in just seconds.

  • Select report data sources from the data explorer.

  • Apply DBxtra filters, sort orders and groups to display only the records you need.

  • Create a clean, professional format with the DBxtra visual report designer.

Design and Deploy Active Server Pages in juts a few Minutes

Create and deploy Live connected ASP pages - without ASP, HTML or programming knowledge - All that in Just a Few Minutes.

Easy Object Maintenance

  • Maintain your objects directly from the data explorer.

  • Right click objects to rename, reassign to another group, delete and perform other management tasks.

Schedule Your Reports

  • Schedule your reports to send automatically to end users, customers, suppliers or any other interested parties at any frequency.

  • Merge e-mails and reports to customers and suppliers.

User Security

  • Define groups of users with similar job functions or data needs.

  • Ease administration by assigning privileges to entire groups of users at once.

  • Assign privileges to specific users as necessary.

Get DBExtra here