The pilot stood to the rear of the pedestal… and guided his craft by simply leaning in the desired direction of travel.

Sound familiar?  Looks pretty familiar too (well, from the ankles up):

This all started back in 2007 because of the pending Blogger FTP cutoff.  They pulled that plug in 2010.  In between, and since, I’ve been playing with numerous versions of WordPress, themes and plug-ins.   I’ve finally gotten the site back  ... continue reading »]]> For those tuning in at home, yes, I’ve finally relaunched under WordPress, such as it is.

This all started back in 2007 because of the pending Blogger FTP cutoff.  They pulled that plug in 2010.  In between, and since, I’ve been playing with numerous versions of WordPress, themes and plug-ins.   I’ve finally gotten the site back to the original level of functionality, including all the old archives imported from Blogger, and even the hand-coded deep archives going back to December 2001.  I think that means that pretty much everything that was ever on this site is still here.  Although, going by my first post, there must have been a precursor, I just don’t remember what it was.    Fortunately or unfortunately the Internet Archive does remember.  Mmm  mm,  1996-licious.

In any case, we’re coming up on the 10-year anniversary of this blog as such.  Does it count when you’ve taken years off at a time?  Will there be a party?  Will I at least finally come up with a theme I like?  Stay tuned to find out.

http://thisisnthappiness.com/post/3505600711/advertising-doesnt-work

Habitual drunkenness is usually, psychologists inform us, the result of the inability to accommodate oneself wholly to reality. It is often a vice in that unfortunate class of people who have imperfectly coordinated artistic facilities. They yearn vaguely for something other than the world they know but they lack the capacity to create a  ... continue reading »]]> http://thisisnthappiness.com/post/3926904033/habitual-drunkenness-is-usually-psychologists

Habitual drunkenness is usually, psychologists inform us, the result of the inability to accommodate oneself wholly to reality. It is often a vice in that unfortunate class of people who have imperfectly coordinated artistic facilities. They yearn vaguely for something other than the world they know but they lack the capacity to create a world nearer to their hearts’ desire. Still more, do they lack the capacity to attain a comprehensive vision of the beauty emanate in this world. Neither the art of escape nor the art of revelation is possible to them. Nevertheless they have perceptions they cannot use and impulses that never come to fruition. Drink, or some other drug, by relieving their sense of impotence and by blurring the unfriendly outlines of the real world brings them solace and becomes a necessity.

 

via Google Books.

Courtesy of NASA, who else?

And by “SoL” I mean “switching to WordPress.”

I guess I should say “thank you” for finally making me do it…  ... continue reading »]]> So, blogger is discontinuing support for FTP-updated blogs, which essentially means they will no longer support self-hosted blogs. You can either point your domain (or a sub-domain) over to them, or you’re SoL.

And by “SoL” I mean “switching to WordPress.”

I guess I should say “thank you” for finally making me do it… maybe.

It used to require some fairly ugly, resource intensive hacks (cursors, temp tables, etc.) to emit an inclusive list between two data points when the source data might not include an entry for every point (for example, a calendar, where not every day contains an event). In SQL  ... continue reading »]]> Blogging this so I don’t forget it…

It used to require some fairly ugly, resource intensive hacks (cursors, temp tables, etc.) to emit an inclusive list between two data points when the source data might not include an entry for every point (for example, a calendar, where not every day contains an event). In SQL Server 2005 and above, this is trivially easy, with a Common Table Expression (CTE) and a Recursive Query. To emit one record for every date between 1/1/2008 and 1/31/2008, you do this:


WITH datecte(anydate) AS (SELECT CAST('1/1/2008' AS datetime) AS anydate
UNION ALL
SELECT anydate + 1 AS anydate
FROM datecte AS datecte_1
WHERE (anydate < CAST('2/1/2008' AS datetime) - 1))
SELECT anydate
FROM datecte AS datecte_2


If you need more than 100 days (the recursion limit is 100), add this to the end:

OPTION (MAXRECURSION 1000)

The fact that they stop recursion short at 100 by default would seem to indicate that this is an expensive procedure, but even if you’re just using this to produce a dummy table with all the dates for several years, it’s a nice shortcut.

I just tried the following query, which emits a record for every day between 1/1/2000 and 12/31/2020:


WITH datecte(anydate) AS (SELECT CAST('1/1/2000' AS datetime) AS anydate
UNION ALL
SELECT anydate + 1 AS anydate
FROM datecte AS datecte_1
WHERE (anydate < CAST('1/1/2021' AS datetime) - 1))
SELECT anydate
FROM datecte AS datecte_2
OPTION (MAXRECURSION 10000)


On my P4-641+ the script emits 7671 records in 0 (that's zero) seconds and "spikes" the processor to all of 3%. Granted this is not a complex query, but at least we know the recursion (if it really is recursion internally, which I doubt) isn't expensive by itself.