The Crystal Reports Saga… I am getting my TeamTrack software upgraded to Crystal Reports reporting. Right now I have implemented a capability in the Config File that will allow reports to be added and edited at will, provided that you have a Report Creation Tool. I am allowing ten reports at the moment, and will see how I go. I have not decided if to use one dataset type, or four for the different types of reports. That is to be determined. And I believe that the best way to implement some of this is effectively to do a crosstab query in the backend, combining all the common data onto every line. I believe that the technical name for this is ‘de-normalizing the data’.

Apart from some issues, things are working. The data is being displayed OK on the screen, and then exported to Excel, Word and PDF quite well. I am really impressed at how easy it is to get the data to display correctly. I am sure that when I try to do some fancy reports that I will have issues, but right now it looks fine.

With the SMH advising that the current temperature is 39C, I thought I would provide a link to a friends Web Site. FindU.Com agregates weather reports from around the world, and then sends it to weather organisations like the BOM and NOAA free of charge as a public service. According to this site, Bankstown and Sydney airports have reached 103F. That is hot

I am not sure where you would get it, but Slashdot linked to a board game called Deflexion. This is a game similar to chess and checkers, but many of the parts have mirrors and the idea is that after each turn a small laser is fired and if a non-mirrored part is hit, then that part is out of the game. The first person to hit the equivalent of the king in chess wins.

Make Magazine has an article how Custom Laser Etching is done on an Apple iBook. It is probaby not a good idea to try this on the lid of my poor DELL since it is only plastic with some silver paint. But for peopel with titanium or aluminium computers this is a cute concept. I guess this is also how custom iPod etching is done too.