We have a client who wanted their point-of-sale web application to launch and run in Firefox in 'kiosk' mode, so that it took up the full screen and no browser menus, tabs, etc. showed up on the screen. Internet Explorer has a kiosk mode built in, but Firefox doesn't (the closest it gets is 'full-screen', but some parts of the browser are still visible, although slid partially out of view). I found a Firefox kiosk plugin that looked like it would do what we needed. Ran it through some tests and it looked good:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1568

To use it: install the plugin, then restart FF, then go to Tools > Add Ons and find the Full Fullscreen plugin in the Extensions list, click Options, then check 'Fullscreen on startup', check 'Prevent navbar auto-popup' and check 'Hide tab bar', then close the Add Ons dialog. Set your default page to the page you want the browser to launch with, close all pages/tabs and restart the browser. Your default page should load and take up the entire screen.

Our client asked about cookies, since their application uses them to remember a terminalID for the point-of-sale terminal to load. Cookies work normally, since things are just running in the browser, so no problems there.

Note: this doesn't do a lockdown that prevents a user from hitting F11 to toggle between full and regular screen views. Users can hit alt-F4 to close the browser, too. If they do, when they relaunch the browser it will load up in kiosk mode again.

It'd be nice if Firefox had this built-in, but since it's a pretty rare requirement, I can see why it wouldn't be. This plugin filled the gap nicely.

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I had a case recently where I had to query some data from a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database and insert a row in the results before the result set. Here's a spiffy little example of how I did it. Neat little trick that can come in handy for cases like this.

-- First you create a var that's a table with cols that match you desired resultset:

declare @tbl table (
  categoryID int, categoryName nvarchar(100)
)

-- Then insert the data you need in the first row:

insert into @tbl (categoryID, categoryName)
 values (-1, 'Unknown')

-- Then select and insert the rest of the data:

insert into @tbl (categoryID, categoryName)
select categoryID, categoryName
from category
order by categoryName

-- Check the results:

select * from @tbl

This was very handy recently inside of a Cold Fusion cfquery tag for adding a "dummy" category to a list of categories. The dummy category got the "Unknown" category name and then the rest of the categories were added to the table. Then in some other code some sets of products got related back to the categories in the table. Products that didn't have a categoryID assigned to them fell into the "Unknown" category for display in an heirarchical tree we did with some jQuery.