SJGP Software

Windows famously had the Blue Screen of Death, when the computer was hopelessly frozen in an error state; Macs have the spinning Rainbow Wheel or Beach Ball that often also spells doom. I thought of those recently when I faced a dead computer interrupted mid-upgrade. While recently upgrading the operating system on my MacBook Pro, I got this screen: Nothing but a greyish-white backdrop and a darker grey circle-slash in the center. When I'd power down and back on, same thing. It was well and truly stuck mid-upgrade. How do you fix a Mac when an OS X upgrade fails in the middle of its upgrade?

When selecting data in SQL Server, the WHERE-clause has, in my experience, ignored the case and done a case-insensitive comparison. For example, my Individuals table may have a mix of upper and lower cases, depending on how people entered their names: SELECT firstname, lastname  FROM Individuals WHERE lastname = 'Timmins' firstname lastname --------- -------- Tammy TIMMINS Tellie timmins Tommy TimMinS Tubby Timmins My query selected all four people with the last name "Timmins" without caring if it was all capitals, all lower case, or a mixture. I rely on that behavior all the time. But once in a while, we need to do a case-sensitive query. How can we, for example, find Tommy TimMinS and correct it to Tommy Timmins?