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Thursday, November 06, 2003

Clark On Iraq. I may be wrong, but based on this story I think General Clark has visited more families with lost soldiers in Iraq than President Bush has. Interesting. Anyhow, check out what he says about Iraq: Success means that Iraq is... [Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite To Stupid] 7:23:11 PM  Permalink  comment []

How not to get rich as a consultant I looked for it today, but couldn't find on the web, an anecdote I remember about Dashiell Hammett. The way I remember it was that he was working for the Pinkerton's in San Francisco in the mid-20s. There was, I think, a jewel theft, and it was known that the thief was on a ship bound for Australia, due to sail immediately. Hammett was assigned the case, and had a ticket to take the trip to Australia. Instead, he caught the thief before the ship left port. Disgusted with himself for not getting the trip, he quit. I felt a bit like that today. I've been doing some SQL Server consulting in San Francisco off and on, helping with some data import checking, something that I've always been really good at. This week they asked me to come and help with an optimization problem. They had three related queries and they were taking too long to run: 11, 13, and 9 minutes. The programmer, and old friend of mine, was too busy with other stuff to put the time into optimizing it. He showed me the thing: a "between" where clause wasn't using the index on the date field, instead of doing an index seek, it was doing a scan, eating up resources. So I pulled the relevant code out of the stored procedure, and did some tests. I also did some poking around on Google, and remembered that you could give "hints" to TSQL to force it to use an index. Sure enough, adding about 15 characters to the stored procedures, and the job was done: from 11, 13, and 9 minutes, the queries went down to about one and a half, three and a half minutes, and 19 seconds. Jeez. Trouble is, it took me about an hour and a half to do this, and I made the mistake of showing it to everyone. So instead of perhaps a day's worth of work, or even two, I had the problem solved, the solution documented and tested, and the production copies of the stored procedures updated right after lunch. I guess I won't get rich as a consultant, but it's fun to get a bit lucky and zoom right in on a fix for what might have been a sticky problem. 7:22:22 PM  Permalink  comment []

Is It Possible To Make Money Developing OS X Applications. Yes, it's possible. But, before you start, here's some advice. (Brent Simmons via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu] Interesting stuff. I'm just starting work on something that may become a Mac app. It'll probably be cross-platform, but Brent's advice is still good. 7:13:07 PM  Permalink  comment []

Print your own temporary tatoos. [John Robb's Weblog] Oooh. Must have! 7:02:29 PM  Permalink  comment []

Jim McGee points out Jerry Pournelle's take on the political spectrum. [John Robb's Weblog] 6:43:29 PM  Permalink  comment []

Dean Calls for Humans to Mars. The Mars Society reports (proudly, no doubt) that during an online national town meeting conducted by the Washington Post and Concord Monitor, Democratic presidental hopeful Howard Dean today called for the United States to launch a humans to Mars... [Martian Soil] Maybe those guys with Confederate flags? 6:04:28 PM  Permalink  comment []

Texas approves biology textbooks that say nothing about alternatives to evolution [FARK] Yay! 5:54:00 PM  Permalink  comment []

Cannabis can help MS sufferers [New Scientist] 5:51:12 PM  Permalink  comment []

© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.