ScreenFlow

Price : $99.00

URL : http://www.telestream.net/screen-flow/

Notes : ScreenFlow looks freaking amazing.  If I had to do regular screencasting, I would spend the $99 to get this application.  It appears to do, save, and export everything.  This is the best solution for any professional screencaster.

Snapz Pro X

Price : $69.00

URL : http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

Notes : If I was going to pay money for a screencast app, it would be ScreenFlow.  However, I do use Ambrosia Soft’s Wiretap Studio, so I know they make great software.  If $30 is enough to effect your decision, I would highly recommend looking at this before ScreenFlow.

Jing Free

Price : free

URL : http://www.jingproject.com/features/

Notes : Jing Free is pretty sweet, but only captures a maximum of five minutes of video.  For my assignment that ended up being good so I could keep my videos short.  The pay service looks really helpful for sharing captures ( images, videos, etc ), but I just can’t justify signing up for this yet.

Silverback App

Price : $69.95

URL : http://silverbackapp.com/

Notes : This capturing app is geared towards taking videos for usability studies.  This is a really cool application that I’d take a closer look if I wasn’t such a server side programmer.  Be sure to watch the demo, it’s a really cool application, just not good for what I was doing.

Screentoaster.com

Price : FREE

URL : http://www.screentoaster.com

Notes : This is a free web based screen recording service that I use fairly often.  You can’t beat free, and this will run on your MAC or PC since it’s browser based.  Definitely worth a look if you need something quick and want to sharing capabilities.

In case you need help removing iOS4 from your iPhone 3G, here are the steps that I followed to downgrade my iPhone 3G to OS 3.1.3.  Before we get going, I’m not taking credit for these instructions since this is a cleaned up version of this MacRumors forum post.  Shout out to my buddy Tony Rodgers for sending me the original link.

Required Downloads

Before you get to the steps, be sure to download these two files first.

• iPhone1,2_3.1.3_7E18_Restore.ipsw ( this is the OS 3.1.3 restore file )
• blackra1n ( pick the installer that matches your OS )

Restore iPhone 3G to OS 3.1.3

1. Connect your iPhone, open iTunes, then click your iPhone to go to the Summary screen.
2. While holding down Alt ( OSX ) or Shift ( windows ), click the Restore button.  If you held the correct key when clicking restore, you should get a File Open prompt.
3. Select iPhone1,2_3.1.3_7E18_Restore.ipsw that you downloaded earlier and let iTunes do it’s work.
4. After iTunes tries to verify the update, it should throw an error.  This error is normal, so disregard even though iTunes has left your iPhone 3G in restore mode.  Close iTunes.
5. With your iPhone still connected, open blackra1n and click “Make it rain”.
6. Manually power cycle your iPhone 3G if it doesn’t restart automatically for you.

That’s all there is to it.  I know these steps work because it’s exactly what I did on my iPhone.  The last part of the uninstall is pretty hairy since I wasn’t able to close iTunes without unplugging my phone.  Also, when I ran blackra1n, my phone never rebooted on it’s own.  The screen went black and I just unplugged the iPhone and forced a restart.  When my iPhone booted up, I was back on 3.1.3.

I hope this helps somebody out because iOS4 on an iPhone 3G is horrible.

With these functions, you can generate random integers in their native range.

 SELECT dbo.getRandomInt( NULL, NULL ) 

Or you can restrict your random integers to a range of your liking.

 SELECT dbo.getRandomInt( 1000, 1000000000) 

Just as a reminder, here are the native ranges for these four integer types as supported by MS SQL Server 2005

Each of these functions have the same structure and primarily differ only by the integer type’s native range.  Here is the guts of one of the UDFs in case you want just the facts.

/******************************************************************************
Generate a random int
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
USAGE :
 -- Get random int in the default range -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647
 SELECT dbo.getRandomInt( NULL, NULL )

 -- Get random tinyint within a specific range
 SELECT dbo.getRandomInt( 1000, 30000 )

REQUIREMENT : Since you can't call RAND() inside of a UDF,
this function is dependant on the following VIEW vRand :

-- BEGIN VIEW
 -- This is only a helper VIEW since currently you can not use RAND() in a UDF
 -- DROP VIEW vRand
 CREATE VIEW [dbo].[vRand]
 AS
 SELECT RAND() AS 'number'
-- END VIEW

******************************************************************************/

USE SmartEarth
GO

IF OBJECT_ID (N'getRandomInt') IS NOT NULL
 DROP FUNCTION getRandomInt
GO

CREATE FUNCTION getRandomInt( @min_in int, @max_in int )
RETURNS int
WITH EXECUTE AS CALLER
AS
BEGIN
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 DECLARE @max int,
 @min int,
 @rand NUMERIC( 18,10 ),
 @max_big NUMERIC( 38, 0 ),
 @rand_num NUMERIC( 38, 0 ),
 @out int;

 -- define this datatype's natural range
 SET @min = -2147483648    -- -2,147,483,648
 SET @max = 2147483647    -- 2,147,483,647

 -- Check to see if a range has been passed in.
 -- Otherwise, set to default tinyint range
 IF( @min_in is not null AND @min_in > @min )
 SET @min = @min_in

 IF( @max_in is not null AND @max_in < @max )
 SET @max = @max_in
 -- end range check

 -- get RAND() from VIEW since we can't use it in UDF
 SELECT @rand = number FROM vRand

 -- CAST @max so the number generation doesn't overflow
 SET @max_big = CAST( @max AS NUMERIC(38,0) )

 -- make the number
 SELECT @rand_num = ( (@max_big + 1) - @min ) * @rand + @min;

 -- validate rand
 IF( @rand_num > @max )
 -- too big
 SET @out = @max
 ELSE IF ( @rand_num < @min )
 -- too small
 SET @out = @min
 ELSE
 -- just right, CAST it
 SET @out = CAST( @rand_num AS int )

 -- debug
 -- SELECT @min_in AS 'min_in', @max_in AS 'max_in', @min AS 'min', @max AS 'max', @rand, @rand_num AS 'rand_num', @out AS 'out'

 -- return appropriate
 RETURN @out;

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

END;
GO

So where do you get the code?

You can view all functions and view online at the following gist.github urls:

• VIEW : vRand
• UDF : getRandomTinyint
• UDF : getRandomSmallint
• UDF : getRandomInt
• UDF : getRandomBigint

Or you can just download all the source code in one zip file here.

Hopefully this will help somebody out.  If you’re a DBA or just a tsql wizard, let me know what you think.  Can I do these functions a better way?  Is this already built into SQL2005 and I just didn’t know it?  All of this tsql was written against SQL Server 2005, but I’m pretty sure it would work on SQL2000 and SQL2008 as well.

Here’s the iPhone version of ericfickes.com on Intersquash.

Pretty sweet service.

Usage is simple :

1. Open with Internet Explorer
2. Point and click through the options
3. Click the ‘Make Script’ button

From here you can paste the xcopy script directly onto the command line, or into notepad and Save As “yourfile.bat”.

Download xcopier here

XCOPY maker in action