the frig blig

Today at work I rewrote a SQL stored procedure, replacing code which used a cursor with code that does not. I did this because since last week when we upgraded the database engine, this stored procedure has been executing dog-slow. I’d heard that cursors cause a performance hit so I was very happy to see the cursorless version running at least twice as fast as the original.

The new version declares a variable as a table datatype, which acts like an in-memory table. This technique was new to me. So I was very pleased when my work paid off.

This seki showed up during my lunchtime game with JJ today. I can’t recall ever seeing one before which included two points for one side!

My ISP inwa.net was back up this morning when I tried it from work. So ‘nevermind’ my previous post, my normal email account is working again and I think I’ll keep it as my main point of contact for now.

However, the first thing I did after checking my email (I use pine) was to make a local copy of my addressbook. A quick google led me to a convenient, time-saving script to reformat my pine addressbook into a CSV file importable by gmail. This little gem saved me mucho time, so many thanks to Cengiz Gunay for writing his perl script pineaddrbook2csv and posting it on the internet.

If and when inwa goes down again, next time I won’t lose all those contacts!

My ISP inwa.net has been down since July 2 — at least 4 days, quite long in internet time. I’m not sure if they’re the victim of a malicious attack, suffered catastrophic hardware failure, or just pulled the plug. If it’s the former, I wish them well fixing the problem. If the latter, I’m disappointed that they didn’t give their customers advance warning.

Be that as it may, I no longer receive email sent to my inwa.net address. Until such time as they are online again, please use my emergency backup email address: frieda dot peeps at gmail dot com (translated into the standard format). If you sent messages to me between July 2 and now, please resend them to this address.

The main thing I’ve lost with my inwa account is my addressbook. Shoulda backed it up; I know better. Let this be a lesson to me.

Thanks and sorry for the inconvenience.

Firefox 3.6.3 on XP/SP3 with ‘block popup windows’ checked did not prevent this sneaky popup on Activestate’s website.

And the beat goes on…

As this article in The Register reports today.

Posted my first app for Mac OS X on the Bamboo utilities page — a simple stopwatch. It was good practice learning the Mac software development tools: xcode, objective C, and the NS API. Once I discovered there was no built-in stopwatch applet, it was a natural. [I won’t be surprised if there’s a similar sample project in some tutorial somewhere. But I did this one all by myself — the best way to learn.]

I added a link to josekipedia on the blig’s go links page. I discovered this site a few months ago and promptly forgot about it. Very cool wiki for josekis — not only are variations numbered but they’re also color-coded (green=good, red=bad) and displayed on a nice interactive goban. And since it’s a wiki, you can make it better and more comprehensive — hooray!

I needed to pass yesterday’s date to a Windows program from the command line in a scheduled job, so I wrote yesterday to generate yesterday’s date and output it to the command line. I call it from a .cmd script which sticks it into an environment variable which I then pass to the app. Simple, straightforward, slightly stupid, sweet.