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.

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.

Dear SanDisk,

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)