Sooooo... last night I decided to submit to Digg again. I also went on some random blogs, etc. and spammed some comment sections with links to a new site I'm starting. I think the graph speaks for itself.

Normalizing a database isn't always the right way to go. Basically, normalization guarantees certain kinds of data integrity. But all the JOINS you'll end up using are performance suicide. For read-heavy applications you de-normalize. That's something to keep in mind for sets of tables we use that are very large and mostly used for reporting (read only). For most of our financial data we need the data integrity so we normalize and deal with the penalty hit of using JOINS. One financial app I maintain is a good example.

The last week of June, 2008, was aqua-hell. On a daily basis the evening commute was fraught with flooded streets. Getting home was an adventure and a gamble. "Should I plow through this deep puddle and risk a stalled engine? Or do I go through the detour and hope it's not just as terrifying."

The fact that I lowered my front springs by 2" doesn't help in these situations. Here's a shot of the Mustang before the conversion. No pictures from after. Use your imagination. The suburbanites with Explorers and Grand Cherokees must've been proud. All that wasted gas money so that a few times a year that unnecessarily large gas guzzling behemoth can prove useful.

Summary

With Linux LVM, you can dynamically add or remove hard drives from a server as your ZoneMinder storage needs change.
ZoneMinder is a Linux, open sourced software system to record multiple camera streams. Unlike other server services, ZoneMinder (ZM) requires massive amounts of storage. Storage needs differ with various factors such as:

We've been hiring here at Blue Cross as we tend to do. This time it's for a position on my team. Given the high volume of talented people out there, I was looking forward to reading their resumes. Being the naive guy I am, I forgot about one thing: bullshit. Yes, it's out there. It's out there on a lot of resumes. In fact, sometimes you can't even detect it until the candidate comes in for an interview. Then it takes on a more amusing verbal form and you're stuck there for the full hour until it's over.

Some people on the other hand are quite talented. In fact, they can do things with Access that even Access can't do. Well, maybe because their version of Access uses a "company engine". Sounds special. I wish I had a special "company engine" for my Access installation. We're stuck with the Jet database engine. For those of you unfamiliar with MS Access, it's just a database itself. In fact, the database portion of it is the Jet database engine. The rest consists of frontend functionality built on top of it. This results in an all inclusive product that handles relational backend data storage with frontend development such as forms and reports. Not a bad combination. In fact, it's a very useful, easy to use, quick and dirty way to get things done for many businesses. Granted, once you go beyond a rather small threshold Access is no longer a viable solution. Hell, it's VBA doesn't even support try/catch blocks. The shame. But I digress.

I swear, I haven't seen something this stupid in a very long time (and I work with Access everyday).

DoCmd.OpenTable "TblOracleUploadAdjs", acViewNormal, acEdit
DoCmd.RunCommand acCmdSelectAllRecords
DoCmd.RunCommand acCmdDelete
DoCmd.Close acTable, "TblOracleUploadAdjs"

For the uninitiated, what this does is open a table up, select all the records, deletes them, then closes the table. The better way to do this would be to execute the following query:

delete from TblOracleUploadAdjs;

Or to fully solve this:

Dear SanDisk,

As a proud owner of a Sansa View (16 GB), I'd like to request a firmware change. Overall, I'm quite pleased with the device. I primarily use it for podcasts. Each podcast is typically 45-90 minutes long. As others have stated, the inability to quickly skip through large sections of audio is extremely frustrating. In fact, it's a deal breaker. No matter how happy I am with this product, this oversight makes it unusable. Like any busy person I don't always have time to finish the whole podcast. In between podcasts I listen to music and then go back to finishing the podcast. However, I refuse to kill my thumb and my sanity by holding down a button for 10 minutes to fast forward 8 seconds at a time through over 1 hour of audio. If you would like for me to remain a loyal customer, please fix this oversight. The Sansa is a far superior product to the iPod in many respects. However, without this issue being fixed, I'll revert back to using an iPod. That's how important this feature is to me.

This is one of the better articles on the site. Basically, a large company took their successful, but aging mainframe system, hired some right-out-of-college hotshots to build a new system in the latest language (VB.NET? Seriously?), and failed miserably. Great exercise in bad software engineering. Reminds us to be more careful when we brazenly think we can replace an existing system. Also a good reminder that the language and syntax doesn't matter, the architecture matters more.

If your business logic is all over every layer of your app (sound familiar?) then you're pretty much hosed. One of my recent projects has this trait to a small degree because of the ad-hock changes to business logic and inadequate development time allowed.

If you're trying to get your Sandisk Sansa View MP3 player to work in MTP mode in Linux, follow the instructions on this Ubuntu Forums thread:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4028386

Here's my addendum to those instructions and how well they worked for me.

My Setup

* Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)
* Amarok 1.4.7 Music player (latest release)
* Sansa View 16 GB (firmware according to 'mtp-detect': 01.02.09A)

The first thing I did when I got it a few days ago was update to the latest firware, 1.02.09 on 2/23/08. I was using it in MSC mode in Amarok 1.4.5 and it successfully transfered songs. However, there were plenty of minor problems when playing the mp3's when transferring in MSC mode. What was frustrating was that this was inconsistent even between songs on the same album. One song would display correctly under a given album, but another song from the same album wouldn't display. It would show up under the "Unknown Album". Some careful double checking confirmed this. This and other problems listed below affected some mp3s, but not others. As for the album art, all the art was embedded within the mp3 files, not as JPGs within folders. I prefer to keep the art embedded within the files for better maintainability.