This position was sent to me by Torin Dragsbaek of JVT Advisors. If you would like additional information, please contact him at the address at the bottom of this post.

This PCWorld Article announces that "the beta version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 is available to the general public starting today." You can go directly to download the beta by going here. It is apparently only compatible with Windows XP Service Pack 2. The features being touted are "tabbed browsing, a toolbar-integrated search box, and limited RSS support." Hmmm...any other browsers out there that already support those? Anyway, it will be nice to have IE finally catch up on these features.

Important note - according to Microsoft: "IE7 replaces IE6. You can uninstall IE7; this will revert you back to your IE6 installation."

I generally stay away from politics on this blog, but it has always been something I am passionate about and thus I cannot help speaking on it occassionally. Yesterday, the Senate voted to end debate on the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, effectively ensuring his nomination will succeed. Most Democrats have come out in opposition to the nomination, however the vote to end debate included 19 Democrats. This stikes me as playing both sides of the table. These same Democrats are likely to tout their "no" vote in the upcoming mid-term elections, banking on that you are not aware of their vote to end debate and its significance. So, in doing my part, here are a list of names of Democrats who voted in favor of Alito's nomination by choosing to end debate:

Arkansas - Lincoln (D) Yes; Pryor (D) Yes
Colorado - Salazar (D) Yes
Connecticut - Lieberman (D) Yes
Delaware - Carper (D) Yes
Florida - Nelson (D) Yes
Hawaii - Akaka (D) Yes; Inouye (D) Yes
Iowa - Harkin (D) Not Voting
Louisiana - Landrieu (D) Yes
Montana - Baucus (D) Yes
Nebraska - Nelson (D) Yes
New Mexico - Bingaman (D) Yes
North Dakota - Conrad (D) Yes; Dorgan (D) Yes
South Dakota - Johnson (D) Yes
Washington - Cantwell (D) Yes
West Virginia - Byrd (D) Yes; Rockefeller (D) Yes
Wisconsin - Kohl (D) Yes

Recently, I needed to write a simple query that would randomly grab a single product record from the database. In the past, I have used QueryRandomRows() to do this, but this can be very inefficient if you want to pull a random record from a large data set. I happened upon a solution for MS SQL that is extremely simple (this is an oversimplified version of my query):

<cfquery name="qryProducts" datasource="#application.dsn#">    SELECT   TOP 1 id, productName    FROM   products    ORDER BY NEWID() </cfquery>

Obviously, you can alter how many rows you return by changing the TOP 1. Also note that using the RAND() function will not work even though it may seem more logical. This is because "repetitive calls of RAND() with the same seed value return the same results." This means that within a single query, RAND() will return the same result for every row.

I am sure I have seen this blogged elsewhere, but I cannot remember where exactly (so forgive me if this is not new).

Raymond Camden has generously agreed to speak at the first meeting of the newly revived Boston ColdFusion User Group. The meeting will be on Friday February 3rd at 6:30pm (sorry about the short notice, but I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity with Ray in town next week). The location is the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 600 Atlantic Ave. (4th floor) directly across the street from South Station. To ease security, interested attendees are asked to RSVP to me at brinaldi@remotesynthesis.com . Feel free to send topic suggestions as well.