Here’s a revised version of the trailer for Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse, which explains the show’s concept much more clearly and features a lot more ass-whuppin’. Plus, parachuting and assassining. The show’s central conceit — that these “Actives” are blank slates who can be programmed to have any skillset or emotion — comes out [...]

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SQL Server 2005 includes an undocumented function, sys.fn_varbintohexstr, that converts a hex value to a string representation of that hex value (0×3a becomes ‘0×3a’), but there is no function to go back from a hex string to a hex value. Below is something that does the trick quite nicely
CREATE FUNCTION dbo.HexStrToVarBin(@hexstr varchar(8000))
RETURNS varbinary(8000)
AS
BEGIN 
    DECLARE @hex char(2), @i [...]

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