Visual C++ "Error Invoking ATL Object Wizard Component" [Digg.com This!]

In Visual Studio 6 in an ATL project when select Insert->New ATL Object from the menu I received an error:

"Error Invoking ATL Object Wizard Component"

I traced this to Visual Studio having moved locations (I don't even remember moving it, but our company puts tools in strange directories).

To find out what the location the VS registry keys point to try the menu option: Tools->Visual Component Manager. If VS has moved directory locations this will fail and tell you where it should be found.

Demo of Windows Live Writer [Digg.com This!]

Well this is my first post using Microsoft's latest Live brain-child "Writer".  This is designed to offer WYSIWYG blog posting for MSN Spaces and a pile of third party blogs.  Writer also boasts strong support for imaging/file posting, which I will now try to demonstrate...

...and that image was pasted inline with no fiddling from me.  I can also choose size as well as add a watermark ("CALCARIA") and use filers such as sepia tone, saturation, etc.

Here endth the post.  Now I'm going to really push Writer and try and to publish via the Blogger API.  I wonder how it's going to get the image onto my third party FTP site??

Parsing AOL Search Data [Digg.com This!]

Here's some quick-and-dirty parsing code for parsing the recently 'released' AOL search data. Instructions are specifically for SQL Server 2005 (as CSV import is a nightmare), but it should be ok for SQL Server 2000 and you can modify the Perl for MySQL I'd imagine.

1) Create a database called AOL

2) Create the table:

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[AllData](
 [AnonID] [varchar](10)
      COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS NULL,
 [Query] [varchar](150)
      COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS NULL,
 [QueryTime] [varchar](50)
      COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS NULL,
 [ItemRank] [varchar](50)
      COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS NULL,
 [ClickURL] [varchar](250)
      COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS NULL
) ON [PRIMARY]

3) Create a DSN for your database:

Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Data Sources (ODBC)

4) Install ActivePerl or your favourite perl interpreter if you haven't already

5) Install DBI and DBD::ODBC if you haven't already by running ppm3-bin from your Perl\bin directory (in the case of ActivePerl anyway) and type:

install dbi
install dbd-odbc

6) Copy the following Perl into a file and run it. Change the filename (user-....) for each of the ten files and amend as required.

use DBI;
use DBD::ODBC;

$dbh = DBI->connect('DBI:ODBC:aol', "", "");

if (!$dbh)
{
 print "z $DBI::err\n$DBI::errstr\n$DBI::state";
}

my $sth = $dbh->prepare(<<SQL);
INSERT INTO AllData
(AnonID, Query, QueryTime, ItemRank, ClickURL)
VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?)
SQL

$FILE = "user-ct-test-collection-01.txt";
open FILE;
$sText = <FILE>;

print "Entering loop\n";

while ($sText ne "")
{
 my ($v1, $v2, $v3, $v4, $v5) = split /\t/, $sText;

 #print "v1:$v1 v2:$v2 v3:$v3 v4:$v4 v5:$v5\n";

 $sth->execute($v1, $v2, $v3, $v4, $v5);

 $sText = <FILE>;
}

close FILE;

print "End\n";