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title:
Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.


descrip:

One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com

Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY!!!
Back-up your data and, when you bike, always wear white.

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Friday, August 31, 2012

How to hook up your Windows.Forms event handler in C#

C# Station: Event Handling in C#:

// Invoking Method or EventHandler
b1.Click =new EventHandler(OnClick);

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posted by ruffin at 8/31/2012 10:27:00 PM

Digital forensics: "Ghosts in the ROM" -- NYC Resistor

Ghosts in the ROM ๏ฟฝ NYC Resistor:
While digging through dumps generated from the Apple Mac SE ROM images we noticed that there was a large amount of non-code, non-audio data. Adam Mayer tested different stride widths and found that at 67 bytes (536 pixels across) there appeared to be some sort of image data that clearly was a picture of people. The rest of the image was skewed and distorted, so we knew that it wasnโ€™t stored as an uncompressed bitmap.

After some investigation, we were able to decode the scrambled mess above and turn it into the full image with a hidden message from โ€œThu, Nov 20, 1986โ€œ:

A 25 year-old Easter egg. That's awesome.  Here's one of the four hidden images.

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posted by ruffin at 8/31/2012 12:35:00 PM
Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Gmail, please stop acting like you're on my desktop

Is it just me, or is Gmail's online interface becoming too cluttered? It's trying to be a desktop client. The beauty of Gmail in the browser is twofold: Clean interface and great searches. That's it.

Heck, with the phone and chat UIs, it's morphing from a complicated desktop application to a desktop. That's bad.

It's strange to think that sometimes not being quite done is your advantage, but after spending a little time in the fairly refreshing Outlook.com interface (rough around the edges, sure, but clean, with improved search), Gmail hits me as too cluttered.

Microsoft is potentially doing something right, though it might take Windows X before they get a feel for it. They're finally doing the Apple trick -- give everyone 90% of what they want better than they expected it, and tell them that's it. You're not getting your last 10%, because there are six billion last 10%s. We're giving you what we want, and you're going to like it, because it's smooth.

Google has, I think, finally [at least temporarily] plateaued. Wonder if Yahoo can make a comeback.

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posted by ruffin at 8/28/2012 09:10:00 PM
Sunday, August 26, 2012

Android phones "now only have one iPhone to compete against"

Devilโ€™s advocates play up sympathy for Samsung after Apple trial โ€” RoughlyDrafted Magazine:

Google hasnโ€™t been tremendously successful with Nexus, but it has up until now been forced to compete against both Appleโ€™s iPhone and Samsungโ€™s counterfeit iPhone. Google and its licensees, along with RIM and Microsoft/Nokia, now only have one iPhone to compete against, making their jobs all that much easier.

I still think Dilger's a blowhard, and am happy to see whichever rumor site was reflagging his crazy posts has stopped, but he's got a great point here.  All of Android gets to start competing differently instead of competing against every other phone company as they try to make a better iPhone.

Honestly, every freakin' smartphone is the same.  It's a monoculture extraordinaire.  Where's the bright green phone that's shaped to fit in my hand allowing me to text with Engelbart's chords?  It's about time someone kickstarted a little ingenuity.  At some point, they might get lucky, make a better mousetrap, and take the iPhone down. Hopefully the courts have moved these guys' cheese.

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posted by ruffin at 8/26/2012 06:24:00 PM
Thursday, August 23, 2012

Checking for null when concating string fields in Oracle

How do you do it? Here's the quick answer:

SELECT
CASE
    WHEN TRIM(FIELD_MAYBE_NULL) is NULL THEN FIELD_NEVER_NULL
    ELSE FIELD_NEVER_NULL || ', ' || FIELD_MAYBE_NULL
END AS CONCATTED_FIELD

FROM TABLE


Course it helps that NULL = '' in Oracle.

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posted by ruffin at 8/23/2012 04:29:00 PM
Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Distinct colors in javascript by index

What a pain. I've wasted hours trying to take in an index and produce a unique color to go with it. Here, it's to create icons that represent which table, out of over six-thousand, is a particular attribute's origin. It's impossible to come up with 600, much less 6000, easily discernable colors, I think. But this seems to work as well as it's going to without displaying more than one color at a time.

<head>
<script>
function determineViewRGB_stepped(i) {
        var intNum = 10;
        var lumStart = 80;
        var lumStep = 19; // seems about right to ensure all colors
                // are noticeably different from their neighbors in this scale.

        
        var modNum = (i%intNum);
        var divNum = ~~(i/intNum);

        var modDivNumBy6 = (divNum%6)+1;
        var divCntBySteps = ~~(i/ (lumStep+1) );
        
        var int111Iterations = ~~((i)/(intNum*6));

        var intZero = (int111Iterations * lumStep)%256;
        var intValue = ((modNum * lumStep) + lumStart) % 256;

        // console.log('i: ' + i + ' -- modNum: ' + modNum + ' divNum: ' + divNum
        // + ' modDivNumBy6: ' + modDivNumBy6 + ' divCntBySteps: ' + divCntBySteps
        // + ' intZero: ' + intZero
        // + ' int: ' + intZero
        // + ' intCompleteIterations: ' + int111Iterations);

        var intR = intZero;
        var intG = intZero;
        var intB = intZero;

        if (modDivNumBy6 & parseInt("1", 2)) intR = intValue;
        if (modDivNumBy6 & parseInt("10", 2)) intG = intValue;
        if (modDivNumBy6 & parseInt("100", 2)) intB = intValue;

        var strReturn = 'rgb(' + intR + ',' + intG + ',' + intB + ')';


        return strReturn;

}


function createViewIcon(intAttribViewId)        {
        var strReturn = '<span class="circle" style="background:'
                + determineViewRGB_stepped(intAttribViewId) + ';">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span>';

        return strReturn;
}

</script>

<style>
        .circle{
                        width:8px;
                        height:8px;
                        border-radius:4px;
                        font-size:8px;
                        color:black;
                        line-height:8px;
                        text-align:right;
                        float:left;
        }
</style>
</head>
<body>
        <!-- It's close, but I think you can eyeball the difference between
                the first and second circles -->
        <script>
                document.write(createViewIcon(1) + createViewIcon(2)
                        + createViewIcon(400) + createViewIcon(3000));
        </script>
</body>
Just for fun, let's try it out.



EDIT: This apparently doesn't work in IE9 unless you're in IE7 mode. That's no fun. I need to go back to the page where I got the CSS code from, as at first it did work for me in IE9, but I'm not sure what compatibility settings I had going on there.

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posted by ruffin at 8/22/2012 02:26:00 PM

PEP 20 -- The Zen of Python

PEP 20 -- The Zen of Python:
The Zen of Python

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!


Kinda loses its own championed terseness at the end, but good reading. I think the only thing I disagree with strongly enough to complain is, "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." No, that's obviously not true, as the dude's own blog seems to suggest.

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posted by ruffin at 8/22/2012 09:30:00 AM
Friday, August 17, 2012

Favorite git history to date


It's actually pretty enjoyable looking back over a git branch history.

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posted by ruffin at 8/17/2012 11:42:00 AM
Tuesday, August 14, 2012

"How to Create Circles with CSS"

It's a question we all wanted answered at one time or another. Why? So that we can programmatically create icons of whatever color we want without sitting in Paint for hours changing dot colors. (Edit: Okay, I have done the color block with background-matching gif/png with transparent middle before, but that still feel kludgey. I'm happy enough with this degrading to blocks on older-but-not-ancient browsers.)

How to Create Circles with CSS | Bryan Hadaway's Web Tech Blog:

Making circles with CSS3 is very simple, but not very well supported with older browsers. If your design depends on circles (and you need to accommodate users on older browsers) you should definitely use images instead.

I wanted icons then text, and the below works (spacing's a little weird so it'll fit in the blog design). There's some extra stuff as I tried to figure out why IE9 wasn't playing nicely. Turns out it's the lack of a doctype at the top. Once it's there, it all worked. Not so lucky in Camino (essentially Firefox 3.6).
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
        <head>
                <style>
                        .circle{
                                width:12px;
                                height:12px;
                                border-radius:6px;
                                font-size:12px;
                                color:black;
                                line-height:12px;
                                text-align:right
                        }

                        .circle2{
                                width:100px;
                                height:100px;
                                border-radius:50px;
                                font-size:20px;
                                color:#fff;
                                line-height:100px;
                                text-align:center;
                                background:#000
                        }
                        
                </style>
        </head>
        <body>
                <div 
                        class="circle" 
                        style="background:rgb(200,200,200);">
                        &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Hello</div>
                
                <div class="circle" style="background:green;">
                        Hello (without spacing out)</div>
                <div class="circle2">Hello </div>
                <div style="width: 100px;
                        height: 100px;
                        text-align: center;
                        color: #fff;
                        line-height: 100px;
                        font-size: 20px;
                        border-top-left-radius: 50px;
                        border-top-right-radius: 50px;
                        border-bottom-right-radius: 50px;
                        border-bottom-left-radius: 50px;
                        background-image: none;
                        background-attachment: scroll;

                        background-repeat: repeat;
                        background-position-x: 0%;
                        background-position-y: 0%;

                        background-size: auto;
                        background-origin: padding-box;
                        background-clip: border-box;

                        background-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); ">Spam</div>
        </body>
</html>


So here that looks like this (the first row is what I wanted)...
     Hello

Hello (without spacing out)



Hello
Spam

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posted by ruffin at 8/14/2012 06:30:00 PM

Seriously? Outlook 2011 doesn't "paste as quotation" (apparently not)

Is there any way to "paste as quotation" in Outlook 2011 for - Microsoft Answers:

Is there any way to "paste as quotation" in Outlook 2011 for Mac?

According to Guruprasad Ra, a "Support Engineer" (so he likely knows better than most), apparently not. Sure, you could write a macro, but that takes some googling & there's no guarantee that wouldn't require a lot of testing (the one above is apparently buggy after 2003).

I have no idea how Outlook 2011 was released. Honestly, Microsoft should have put all their engineers on creating a connector for Exchange and then bought a great email client already released for the Mac -- or even just tweaked and rebranded Thunderbird. That'd be some interesting MS PR.

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posted by ruffin at 8/14/2012 08:57:00 AM
Thursday, August 09, 2012

vba-ing Excel to SQL INSERTs (or whatever)

Okay, maybe vba-ing your way from Excel files to raw SQL isn't the way most folks extract, transform, and load, but I like it okay when you get an Excel file of values.

This code is essentially the same as this jive from 2009, but I like that I've finally given up on adding a UserForm, naming it, adding a text box, naming it too, then stretching each until they look like a finished product.

Instead, I now just add a form, double-click a TextBox on there, and let this programmatically do the rest.

Option Explicit

Public Sub createSql()
    Dim i As Integer
    Dim intStart As Integer
    Dim intEnd As Integer
    
    Dim strInsertSql As String
    Dim strUpdateSql As String
    Dim strLine As String
    
    Dim strOut As String
    
        
    intStart = 2
    intEnd = 963
    
    i = intStart
    While (Not "" = Cells(i, 1).Value)  ' assuming there are no blanks in the first col
    'While (i <= intEnd)  ' if you'd rather hard-code
        
        
        strLine = "INSERT INTO TABLE1 " & _
            " (FIELD1, FIELD2) " & _
            " VALUES " & _
            " (" & _
                CStr(Cells(i, 1).Value) & "," & _
                CStr(Cells(i, 2).Value) & _
            ")"
           
        strInsertSql = strInsertSql & strLine & "; -- " & (i - intStart + 1) & vbNewLine
        
        
        
        strLine = "UPDATE TABLE2 SET " & _
            "FIELD1 = '" & CStr(Cells(i, 1).Value) & "' " & _
            "WHERE FIELD3 = '" & CStr(Cells(i, 2).Value) & "'; -- " & (i - intStart + 1)

        strUpdateSql = strUpdateSql & strLine & "; -- " & (i - intStart + 1) & vbNewLine
            
        
        
        i = i + 1
    Wend

    
    strOut = strInsertSql & vbNewLine & _
        vbNewLine & _
        "--------------------------------------------------" & vbNewLine & _
        vbNewLine & _
        strUpdateSql & vbNewLine & _
        vbNewLine & _
        "--------------------------------------------------" & vbNewLine & _
        "--------------------------------------------------" & vbNewLine & _
        vbNewLine


        
    '============================================
    ' making this so I don't have to set up the
    ' danged userform and textbox any more
    '============================================
    UserForm1.Height = 800
    UserForm1.Width = 1000
    With UserForm1.TextBox1
        .Top = 10
        .Left = 10
        .Height = UserForm1.Height - 40
        .Width = UserForm1.Width - 20
        .MultiLine = True
        .ScrollBars = fmScrollBarsBoth
    End With
    '============================================
    '============================================
    
    
    UserForm1.TextBox1.Text = strOut
    UserForm1.Show
    
End Sub

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posted by ruffin at 8/09/2012 01:13:00 PM
Wednesday, August 08, 2012

git needs to realize when there's a draw

You know in chess when you and your opponent make the same move back and forth thrice that it's a draw.

git needs to realize when this "threefold repetition" is happening too. If I have a file with a line that I need for, let's say, local debugging, then the maintainer waxes that line to make it live, then I rebase, take it back out to test locally, then check back in, overwriting the live fix... ad infinitum.

That's bad. git, left to its own devices, will often auto-merge those changes without letting anyone know. It shouldn't.

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posted by ruffin at 8/08/2012 02:11:00 PM
Tuesday, August 07, 2012

Went there today.

goto case (int)POINTS_OF_ORIGIN.SPATIAL; // Yep, went there.

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posted by ruffin at 8/07/2012 05:24:00 PM

Show running Oracle queries

Had a process go on too long, and I couldn't tell which of the several I had going was the greedy one.
 
process - How do I show running processes in Oracle DB? - Stack Overflow: 


SELECT sess.process, sess.status, sess.username, sess.schemaname, sql.sql_text
  FROM v$session sess,
       v$sql     sql
 WHERE sql.sql_id(+) = sess.sql_id
   AND sess.type     = 'USER'

Voila.

There are a few names on StackOverflow that I'm starting to recognize, and this Justin Cave is one of them.  I wonder how much of this is conscious branding and how much is [neurotic?] compulsion.  I can see how it'd be addictive, especially once you're an expert in something.  I'm no expert, but the git questions are just light enough on experts I could get sucked in.

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posted by ruffin at 8/07/2012 12:49:00 PM

Materialized Views in Oracle Docs

Materialized View Concepts and Architecture:

This chapter explains the concepts and architecture of Oracle materialized views.

Profit.

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posted by ruffin at 8/07/2012 10:01:00 AM

Find current user in Oracle (from SQL Plus, SQL Developer, whatever)

from here:

select lower(sys_context('USERENV','SESSION_USER'))||
       '@'||
       lower(sys_context('USERENV','DB_NAME'))||'>' prom
  from dual;


... if only to check my sanity at one point.

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posted by ruffin at 8/07/2012 09:54:00 AM
Monday, August 06, 2012

WinMerge not saving merge once done

Rory Primrose | Using WinMerge with TFS:

Note: You need to click on the Save button on the tool bar within WinMerge merge to commit a merge before exiting the screen

I can't tell if this should fix things or not, but hitting Ctrl-S isn't working for me right now.  I go back into git after resolving the conflict with WinMerge and the conflict markers are still there.
posted by ruffin at 8/06/2012 02:26:00 PM

No, WebKit Isn't Breaking the Web. That's how it works.

WebKit Isn't Breaking the Web. You Are | Webmonkey | Wired.com:

We at Webmonkey hope itโ€™s obvious that building WebKit-only sites is a waste of time. If youโ€™re only interested in iOS users then take a tip from Instagram and build a native app.


Let's just quickly say that's crazy advice, and it misses the point of Glazman's critique.

If you don't know Objective-C, by all means, leverage what you do know if it'll make a strong HTML5 app for mobile devices. Use PhoneGap. Enjoy. No guilt required. Seriously, if you can't code HTML5 for other browsers you need to learn to code Obj-C in Xcode? Insane and inane.

The point is that those who use HTML5 shouldn't use browser-specific prefixes. Not sure how I feel about that either. If one browser (or rendering engine) is so far in front of another, then it's going to "win" the adoption war. Examples are written with webkit prefixes, they're copy and pasted, seem to work okay for their intended browser, and we're done. It's a non-trivial expense to learn that webkit isn't a standard if you're a gunslinger. (I'm not arguing we should be gunslingers, but that browsers should realize they exist. LOTS of them.)

If the other browsers support those CSS standards with their own prefixes (and with standardized ones), it's a heck of a lot easier to have the browsers support the different models than every programmer. Any time you're asking a programmer to write something twice to do things right (really, I'm pretty tired of if (document.getElementById) { branch1 } else...), you're doing it wrong. Get the cheese off of your face. Normalize. Put the logic where it belongs.

To be clear: In this case, it means Firefox needs to get over itself and chase WebKit. IE might follow. Do we care?

It's an ivory tower versus the market issue. You can't control programmers absolutely. I, in theory, like where Glazman is going. And in practice, just mentioning it will lessen the issue. Let's just stop pretending it's a zero-effort change for programmers to write platform neutral code and, therefore, as long as browsers are less than 100% equal, you'll always have a percentage of the code in the wild that supports one over the other.

Degrade? Sure. Write to treat each version of each browser equally? Impossible. [sic]

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posted by ruffin at 8/06/2012 09:02:00 AM
Sunday, August 05, 2012

Welcome to the cloud: Mat Honan's "Yes, I was hacked. Hard."

Here's what I think most people don't let themselves think about the cloud: Having your personal information online means anyone online has access to it. If you have your tax returns, Social Security card, and passport in your home, only someone in your home can get them. Digital information is available to anyone on the network where that info is stored. Thus Mat Honan's horror story where his computer, phone, and tablet (all Apple: Macbook, iPhone, iPad) are all locked and wiped remotely, with the hacker gaining his personal information, leading to the compromise of his business Twitter account, etc etc.

You're almost better off on some level checking your email the old, POP3 way. Check your email online, pull it down, and have the server delete it. Back that up locally, and store another backup off-site periodically. Geography still matters. Geography still provides security, if you let it.

I really enjoy being able to get pictures of family that I've emailed years ago immediately, but I don't need to do that with passwords, tax returns, and other personally identifying information. There should be a distinction made by the service. It should be harder than a simple password to get to emails with personal information.

And it should be tougher than calling Apple support with personal information from Facebook (apparently how Honan's account was compromised; the hacker knew enough about Honan to talk the support tech into unlocking the account) to get to that info too. Where is the guy calling from? Does his voice match a voice fingerprint Honan willingly gave earlier? etc etc.

Anyhow, here's a bit from Honan's "I was hacked" post describing what it's like. Worth reading. From Emptyage โ€” Yes, I was hacked. Hard.:

Hereโ€™s how I experienced it:

I was playing with my daughter, when my phone went dead. It then rebooted to the setup screen. This was irritating, but I wasnโ€™t concerned. I assumed it was a software glitch. And, my phone automatically backs up every night. I just assumed it would be a pain in the ass, and nothing more. I entered my iCloud login to restore, and it wasnโ€™t accepted. Again, I was irritated, but not alarmed.

I went to connect it to my computer and restore from that backupโ€”which I had just happened to do the other day. When I opened my laptop, an iCal message popped up telling me that my Gmail account information was wrong. Then the screen went gray, and asked for a four digit pin.

I didnโ€™t have a four digit pin.

By now, I knew something was very, very wrong. I walked to the hallway to grab my iPad from my work bag. It had been reset too. I couldnโ€™t turn on my computer, my iPad, or iPhone.

I used my wifeโ€™s iPhone to call Apple tech support. While on hold, I grabbed her laptop and tried to log into gmail. My password had changed. I couldnโ€™t reset it either because the backup went to iCloud, where my password had also changed.

I checked Twitter, and saw someone had just sent a tweet from that account. I tried to log into Gmail again, and now it told me that my Google account had been deleted. The way to restore it was to send a text message to my phone which I didnโ€™t (and still do not) have access to.

... [Apple tech support wasn't] able to stop the wipe on my Macbook. Or give me a pin to log into it. Or give me immediate access to my phone. They couldnโ€™t do much of anything, actually. Although they did set an appointment for me at the Genius bar tomorrow. Actually, I did that, later, when I called the store myself.

EDIT: Wow, I've never seen so many stupid typos. Wth was I doing in August of 2012? Watching The Untouchables?

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posted by ruffin at 8/05/2012 02:36:00 PM
Friday, August 03, 2012

How to find the number of version of a specific file are in your git repository

git rev-list HEAD -- path/to/file.cs

How to figure out how many versions of a file exists in your git repo.

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posted by ruffin at 8/03/2012 10:22:00 AM

Outlook.com in Camino: Not too good


No, I can't say I use Hotmail much for "real" email these days. Great spam bucket, though.

Looks like Outlook.com thinks Camino is a mobile browser (or, rather, it sees it's not supported and goes to the mobile interface). Sad. Of course, Camino is pretty much dead now, so it's not a huge deal. I like it as my alternative browser at work for Gmail and, well, Blogger (the ctrl shortcuts (a, l, i, b) still work in Camino). Guess it won't be my Outlook interface.

Outlook on Chrome is pretty snappy -- much faster than Gmail, and has a more intuitive search interface, I think.

That said, it's sad that Gmail's archive of my mail goes back farther than Hotmail's, especially considering how I, like many that have a Hotmail account, I guess, used Hotmail years before Gmail was born.

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posted by ruffin at 8/03/2012 09:07:00 AM
Thursday, August 02, 2012

ORA-12704 in your case?

sql - why does my nested case statement return a character set mismatch? - Stack Overflow:

The type of a case statement is determined by the first clause in it. In this case, the first clause is a varchar string rather than an nvarchar.

Try this:
UPDATE TableA t
    SET t.Last_Col = (CASE WHEN t.First_Col = N'ItemOne'
                           THEN N'anItemOne'
                           WHEN t.First_Col = N'ItemTwo'
                           THEN (CASE WHEN t.Second_Col = N'ItemTwo_A'
                                      THEN N'aSecondItem_A'
                                      ELSE N'aSecondItem'
                                 END)
                           ELSE N'NoItem'
                        END );

Wow. Weird. String fields != strings if the field is an NVARCHAR. But slap an N in front of your quoted strings and you're golden.

Slick interface you got there, Oracle.

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posted by ruffin at 8/02/2012 03:14:00 PM

Crazy idea, that. Separate UI from backend development?

Evil Brain Jono's Natural Log:

Maybe software projects ought to design their architecture so they can do security/performance updates in separate development branches from UI-relevant updates?

From the follow-up to the post I quoted from extensively in my last post.  Really?  You should design an app to abstract the UI from the engine?  Crazy idea, that.

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posted by ruffin at 8/02/2012 09:31:00 AM

Why releasing updates rapidly is A Bad Thing

Evil Brain Jono's Natural Log:

It's not like we weren't warned. Lots of people in the community tried to tell us that this was a bad idea. But somehow, despite being an ostensibly community-driven organization, somewhere along the line we learned to tune out naysayers from the community.
...
I've been thinking a lot about the fundamental disconnect between the developers and the users. I think it comes down to: Software developers have a perverse habit of thinking of updates/new releases as a good thing.
...
Only after I heard from dozens of different users that the rapid release process had ruined Firefox did I finally get it through my thick skull: releasing an update is practically an act of aggression against your users...

So many companies release updates which radically change the interface for no significant gain -- they seem to be moving sideways rather than forward, changing things around for the sake of change.... I've come to the extremely humbling realization athat the single best thing most companies could do to improve usability is to stop changing the UI so often! Let it remain stable long enough for us to learn it and get good at it. There's no UI better than one you already know, and no UI worse than one you thought you knew but now have to relearn.


Bold emphasis mine.

For Firefox extension developers (and I've done a little), the real take-home is here: "Worse yet, we didn't do enough to preserve add-on compatibility, making the updates extremely disruptive to people who depended on certain add-ons; and we kept going with our old version-numbering scheme even though the meaning of the numbers had changed completely, leading to mass confusion."

Okay, also useful (this is becoming a "quotes to self" post): "Your users are temporarily tolerating your software because it's the least horrible option they have -- for now -- to meet some need."

The post is more than worth reading for anyone working with software development.

(discovered via link shared in the Real Software blog)

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posted by ruffin at 8/02/2012 09:17:00 AM

Hotmail : Consumer Gmail :: Outlook.com : Corporate Gmail

From Outlook.com Helps Microsoft Fight Google for the Workplace - The CIO Report - WSJ:

Microsoftโ€™s launch of the Outlook.com email platform, designed to replace Hotmail over a period of time, will help the company fend off Googleโ€™s challenge for its business in the enterprise.


This guy's got it. Hotmail's going away as a site only because Microsoft thinks this will be the silver bullet allowing it to change the brand -- they've already tried to make Hotmail into MSN and WindowsLive, neither of which worked. It's not going away because consumers don't like it. It was the Coke of consumer email. It's now the Pepsi, but only barely. It's nowhere close to (ie, lightyears ahead of) Yahoo's Snapple.

The crucial point is that Hotmail for consumers is fine. And Microsoft would love for you home users to keep using the site and clicking the ads. But Gmail is apparently making so much more cash on providing corporate (and university) Gmail "solutions" than advertising that Microsoft would just as well forgo the consumer ad revenue if it means they can sell to the enterprise. So poof, hello comes Outlook.com, adless hotmail with a few social features thrown in.

Here's why it's a long-term winner (where "winner" here only means "better idea than just hotmail.com"):
  1. Anyone who has used Hotmail & Gmail knows Hotmail's interface doesn't just stink0rz, but stink0rz hard relative to Gmail (if nobody was better, you couldn't really complain as loudly).
  2. Outlook.com will be able to sync to Exchange servers like Outlook the client.
Right now that syncing (number 2) is only going to be calendars and contacts, not email, for some reason (perhaps we're still using Hotmail's very mature engine for email and grafted on the Outlook sync?), but you get the point. (And just in case you didn't...)

The two biggest barriers to entry keeping business and other institutions from considering Hotmail for their email solution are gone. Profit.

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posted by ruffin at 8/02/2012 07:57:00 AM
Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Apple Fail: lower end 15" Retina MacBook options

Apple Expands Build-to-Order Configuration Options on Retina MacBook Pro [Updated] - Mac Rumors:

Update: Some readers have noted that selection of the new CPU and storage options on the low-end model does not seem to register with the online store system. Typically, changing options results in live updating of the price and shipping estimates during the configuration process, but changes to the CPU and storage are not having that effect. Consequently, customers are unable to place orders with these new custom configurations on the low-end model.

Update 2: Within minutes, Apple has now pulled the new configuration options entirely, once again leaving RAM as the only available onboard hardware upgrade for the low-end model.

Update 3: There are now conflicting reports on whether or not the new options have been pulled. Many readers are reporting still seeing the options and are able to add the configurations to their shopping carts, while others viewing the same pages are not seeing the new options.

With this and the issues on the iTMS recently, we've seen a couple of issues where quick fixes were sent out and only slowly, I assume, propagate to each server farm.  I think we can take it when some folks from the same geographical area see different stuff online that there was a hot fix deployed that's slowly replicating out. The only other option I can think of is that they rolled out a new feature, and the store UI was ahead of the backend that processed them. That is, they couldn't go live until every box had the new stuff installed, and were waiting. That's a stupid design process fail, not just a simple mistake, so let's assume hot fix.

And hot fixes == fail.  I'm not arguing they shouldn't be done, but that they do indicate something didn't go quite right.

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posted by ruffin at 8/01/2012 12:04:00 PM

Visualize a historic diff of a file in git

This python script is awesome.

I wanted to be able to line up several versions of the same file line by line through time to see what had changed from one version to the next commit... and the commit after that, and the commit after... Those kinds of changes are hard to eyeball with the standard git log -p, which just spits it all out like it's on a giant roll of dot matrix printer paper.

This python script calls git and displays the last N number of revisions in vimdiff... which is awesome. Admittedly it's all command-line stuff, though you could change to make it gvim if you wanted, I'd imagine, and it's stuck in vim, whose diff is a little, well, stodgy, but all in all, a perfect fix to a bothersome problem.

There's some room to improve, (I added...

if N > 4:
    COMMAND = 'vim -O'

... already, and will probably add a --range option to let you pick the 3rd through 7th versions of a file, eg)

but this is a great tool for visualizing files stored in git.

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posted by ruffin at 8/01/2012 11:01:00 AM

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