Steven Reimer

Google has recently announced AppInventor which is a web based visual IDE for Android. I've already submitted a request for an account. I've been a bit slow in figuring out the visual design aspects of Android so I am looking forward to using this as a tool to design my layouts. My one question is: will it have a way to edit raw code?

Read more about it here.

Can't decided what I like better - the acoustic guitar or her voice

I have been posting a lot of tech tips lately. As I've mentioned before, this is often for my own benefit so I can go back and review what I did when I have the same issue a year down the road. 

Today's tip is for handling single quotes in PL/SQL. I'm working with Postgres 8, this may also apply to Oracle. I have a function that is taking a string value which was failing if that value had a single quote in it. I tried using the quote_ident, and quote_literal functions provided by PL/SQL but they didn't work as I would have expected, adding additional quotes to the ends of the value so I had to fall back to a string replace function:

REPLACE(column, '''', '''''')

This replaces all singe quotes within the string with two single quotes as needed.

Google has released a Linux command line tool for interacting with it's services. Most useful is uploading images to Picasa. Here's an example of how to upload a directory of images:

google picasa create --title "AlbumName" Pictures/*.jpg

Download at http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/

Here are some more examples from Google.