SQL Advice Requested

Ok, time to admit when I need some help.  Even though I work with SQL daily, I'm not an expert.  So here goes. I know it should be simple but I just can't wrap my head around it. Something in the back of what I call a brain is whispering "Self Join" but I've had some issues making that work.  Here's what I'm trying to do - -I want to look at popularity of links.  So over a particular time period, say the past 24 hours, I can know what people are linking too a lot.  So clearly I have a table of urls where I need to find all duplicates when the number of urls is greater than some threshold.  Any thoughts ?

Mock table structure for urls

• id
• url
• pubepoch

Clearly I have to select from urls by a date range of seconds against pubepoch.  That part I get and I'm starting to get real, real familiar with date stuff in php.  The next step is where I get hung up.  Any thoughts?

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Its Memorial Day this Weekend???? Or the Nature of Working at Home

Someone told me today that it was Memorial Day this weekend (for non-U.S. readers that's a 3 day weekend near the end of May).  I had absolutely no idea.  None.  And it struck me that this is really symptomatic of working from home exclusively.  No coworkers* to ask you what you're doing, etc.  Very, very odd.

*Strangely my two cats never bothered to ask.  Perhaps they already made plans without me.

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Reminder: OSCOM is Next Week

Just a reminder that I'm going to be there next week if anyone wants to find me, talk, beat on me, etc.  Catch me in the halls or at lunch.

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More Thoughts on Desktop Linux

I had an interesting experience yesterday helping out Andy on his new press release.  Now writing press releases is, without question, an art and I was happy to help him.  I'm not a star press release writer by any means but I understand the elements.  So anyway, he IMs around 9ish with "Help Help Help" and I respond with "5 minutes".  He shoots me the url and I take a look.  My first move to was paste the text into Open Office Writer and see how that worked. 

The paste was basically ok but since I copied from the top down, I got the sidebar cell contents as well.  Just as a comment to anyone who writes a press release -- reporters and analysts want a stream of text that they can easily copy from.  When I remarked on this to Andy, he pointed out "Oh if you copy from the bottom up..." and while I agree, its silly to make someone do extra work.

So anyway I made some changes, rewrote it and then started pasting it back into IM to him.  ***NOTHING***

I could see it but he couldn't.  Then he realized that Trillian doesn't accept Unicode.  So I paste into gedit and copy out of that.  Same thing.  He finally launched AIM directory and used that.  Which worked.  But when something like Copy and Paste fails, its very disconcerting.  In Office there is always the Paste Special command which lets you paste in as ASCII and I think that's really something that is needed as a cross the board thing.  I know that lots of people think we should just go to Unicode whole hog but that's just not realistic.  Either we make it easy to migrate there or its just a huge issue.

Still every day I marvel at just how well Red Hat 9 is doing as a desktop Windows replacement.  I've been regularly using Evolution, Gaim, Gimp and other tools and it all just plain chugs along.  Nary a restart, nary a crash.  I did, however, boost my ram to 512 megs from 256 and that was a big improvement.

While I wouldn't recommend that a web developer like myself shift away from Windows, I do think that you can run in tandem quite nicely.  You just can't get rid of Windows because of the need to test on IE.  As good as Mozilla is, it is still in a minority and you have to check on both platforms.

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