Youtube Parental Controls

This post is really about nothing. What I mean by that is that Youtube (a Google company) has nothing in regards to parental control. But they shouldn't feel alone in this, since many major content providers seem to have put families at the bottom of their priority list. The average family-friendly feature is simply a button that can be interpreted as "Click this to activate a simple filter for content by family members". I could write different posts, one for each provider: Netflix, Apple, Google, Amazon, but today I will stick with Youtube.

Animating a Hurricane Forecast

It's hurricane season in Florida, and with the impending threat of hurricane Irma, people are fixated on the forecasts.

One idea I always had around these times was to create my own hurricane tracker, but what I want to track is how much the forecast deviates from the actual path. This content is hard to find. I don't think any weather service would be happy to share how their forecasts were off. In fact, even if the forecast is correct, at the end of the day people don't seem to care much. But I am curious to see if forecasts are mostly accurate or what they missed.

SSRS. Dataset or View? Pros and cons.

In the last few months I've been using the tool SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), which was Microsoft's answer to Crystal Report. It uses Visual Studio and SQL Server as a way to publish report files as web pages.

A dataset is the "heart" of an SSRS report. It is simply a query that you run from the report. In many ways it's similar to running a view in SQL, in the sense that the query may join multiple tables, use parameters, use common table expressions (CTE's) and almost every function that a query can do.