Here's one thing that I constantly want to do.  I have a lookup table of some sort that needs to be moved to another database, but the data may need to be massaged somewhat before moving it around.  Plus I may want to store it in plain text format for versioning etc.

To this point I've been too lazy to implement it but I found a SQL guru (he must be if he went throught the trouble to write this) that has implemented just what I need.

I've used it this morning already and I'm quite happy.

Generate SQL statements from existing data in a table

I am no longer a registered Republican.  I am now a Libertarian.  Yes, I finally have had enough of the Republican Jeebus please-us spend-a-thon.

I can't say I left the Republican party, I can however say the Republican party has left me behind.  I'm not concerned about monitoring grown adult's bedrooms for deviant behavior and I have long since realized that Mohammad-fearing fundamentalists are not the greatest threat to this country.

Government is the biggest threat to our republic.  George Bush likes big government.  Therefore I can no longer support him or his party.  The war in Iraq has little to do with my change in parties.  In fact my conversion is mostly due to the growth of government and the resulting deficits that Big Dubbya is going to leave my generation (Gee thanks a lot).  At least we can now get to Ketchikan.  Ah yes Ketchikan, I knew a kid from Ketchikan that almost got kicked out of school for heroine abuse but I digress.

I dream of a day when we have a two party system of Libertarians and perhaps Republicans.  By then the childish idea of Socialism as championed by the Democrats will just be another sad chapter in the history of this country much like slavery and the criminalization of recreational drugs.

Viva La Revolution!

This week's reading assignment can be found here:

We're all big babies

This guy stole my idea for my second book but I'll let that slide for now.  Our society is devolving into an ipod filled, Paris Hilton admiring child care center.  Many of my friends and contemporaries frighten me with their child like behavior and attitudes.  Actually, most of my friends and colleagues are OK, the people who truly concern me are the casual acquaintances and and people that I interact with in public at the gym or in a store, e.g. situation that I can't help but interact with these fools.

Examples:
Adult mothers wearing "MILF" t-shirts (Britney Spears style).

Adult woman dressed as teen aged hookers.  These are the woman that wear tight jeans and tops when they are in the 40's and 50's.  What is wrong with dressing in something more suitable to your age?  I find a woman much more alluring when she dresses appropriately.  I'm  not a prude I just don't want to see your mom's saggy boobs hanging out of her baby t belly shirt.  (shiver).

There is just something about a woman in the appropriate clothing (a business suit, etc) that some men find very attractive.

Men in their 50's wearing hip-hop style baggy jeans is another non-starter.  What up with that homey g pimp daddy Ted?  Ted shouldn't wear that kind of stuff.  Actually nobody should wear that kind of stuff.  I love the old movies where everyone is wearing a suit or a dress.  The people in those movies are adults.  They say adult things and make adult decisions.

An adult buying a toy on credit.

I mean taking a loan to purchase a boat, jet ski, motorcycle, etc.  These are toys.  If you must take a loan out to buy this then you are a child plain and simple.  You are ridiculous.

A hobby you can not afford.

This is related to the above example.  Do you spend every weekend involved in an activity that is utterly non productive?  Do you spend a large amount of money on this hobby?  Do you make sacrifices for this hobby?  My grandparents had hobbies.  Gardening comes to mind.  They grew their own food.  I just don't understand the elevation of golf or hunting or fishing or football watching from a waste of time to a priority.  These activities are for retirement.  You should not be wasting all your money and time as a young man on frivolous activities.

The worst part of this whole deal is that this fool will want to talk to you about this hobby as if you give two shits about their childish pursuit of the great horned snipe.

Politics is Stupid.

Arggghhhh!  I think politicians love it when people get discouraged.  If you are too stupid or lazy or both to care about politics then not voting is your best option.  Please drive your jet ski into a boat dock and spare all of us your ignorance. 

Lack of a personal philosophy.

Do you live by a set of values?  Do you have standards?  I can't imagine discussing philosophy with today's Tylers and Skylers (my code for the boy-men of our era).  What are your goals?  What do you want to do with your life?  If you simply want to golf every weekend and watch football and drink so much alcohol you piss and shit yourself then by all means philosophy is not for you.

My puppy/kitty/fish/hamster/turtle is part of the family.

Thinking a pet is part of the family is childish.  This is how children think.  I love my big fluffy doggy.  Ooohhh, how cute.  It is cute when you are 5 but not when you are 35.  Grow up.  Don't let your dog shit on my lawn.  Take care of the damned thing.  Take it for a walk, give it a bath.  I'm all for responsible pet ownership but when a childish adult refuses to take care of his or her pet it is utterly infuriating and just plain pathetic.  Oh, and if your dog bites me I will do my best to have the animal put down, even if I must do it myself.  Your stupidity does not supersede my rights.

Here's a quick tip to get png's with alpha transparency to show up correctly in Internet Explorer.  Instead of hacking you website, hack the picture! 

Using a utility like TweakPNG, you edit the meta information of the PNG format to display a white background (or whatever color you want).

Open the .png in TweakPNG and insert a chunk named bKGD using the Insert menu.  Then simply double click your newly created chunk in the main window to bring up a color chooser.  Select the background color and away you go.

I was thinking about setting up Subversion at work to replace a long defunct Visual SourceSafe versioning system.  A co-worker asked me about it and that reminded me that I wrote a very good and very simpe (if I do say so myself) walk-through for setting up a fresh Subversion repository.

This is the original Subversion step by step walk-through I set this up on my home pc for http://www.whatsyour20.com and it still seems valid. 

It appears that the FSFS format is still preferred over the Berkeley DB format. 

I've posted on the ASP.NET Site about my experiences with WebHost4Life.  At this stage I can't recommend them as a good web host.  It's unfortunate because I've had good luck with them in the past.

I'll keep you posted on what's comes out of the latest hosting catastrophe.

I've found yet another blog and post(sheesh) regarding Query Notifications.  It's a survey asking some general questions.  If you have some complaints or comments head over there and let MS know what you want to see.  I'm still formulating my customer solution.

Observation:  Microsoft has a habit of assuming their solution should be satisfactory and doesn't really give an example of what to do if it isn't.  The user is left to try to piece together a solution that actually works in the real world.  So many of MS's examples assume that you are a drag-and-dropping cheeseball that uses SELECT * for queries and the SQLDataAdapterConnectorInterpreterManagerGateway for all things data. 

What about us folks who actually want to write code.  If I see one more MSDN artcile trumpeting the fact that you don't need to write one line of code, I'm going to puke.  Yeah instead of using a first class IDE supported language to write code I want to put some mish mash of bastardized markup into my ASP.NET page.  That's a great solution.  Try debugging that pile of angle brackets when something doesn't work.  Code is good.  I like writing code.  The IDE supports writing code. 

MS for god's sake let me write code!

In a follow up to my original article on Query Notification in SQL Server 2005, I've posted a question on the MSDN forums about Customer Query Notifications.

I'll keep you posted on whatever solution I come up with.

 

Seriously, SqlCacheDependancy looked like one of the best new features of ASP.NET 2.0.  Unfortunately, this feature is crippled because of the limited queries you can use.  See this MSDN article for more on that.  Basically you can't use TOP, ORDER BY, COUNT(*) and many other standard SQL clauses.  This is a serious limitation.

I am across this post about one person's attempt to get this to work which led to this post on the rules and some criticisms of the Query Notification mechanism.  Here is the official MSDN article on creating query notifications. 

So I wonder if this mechanism is too complicated for real-world use.  It certainly seems nice on first review but after trying to use it I can testify that it difficult to get this working correctly.  The query restrictions really limit your options. 

I'm not ready to give up because the potential up side to this is just too great.  One alternative I'm considering is trying the overloaded SqlCacheDependancy constructor and trying to pass the database and the table.  For joins and sub-queries I may need to hook multiple SqlCacheDependancy objects together with the AggregateCacheDependency.  This seems like a big pain but I think it may be worth it because your site gets much faster once it is all cached up.

Part 2 of the series looks at the motivation to increase your income.