I spend a great deal of time searching for solutions to weird programming problems under certain platforms. PHP has a good developer community and it’s easy to find answers in the comment boards below the online manual entry for each function, and usually the developers who post there are pretty knowledgeable.

Access is a different story though, because there’s no “official” site like there is for PHP where discussions can take place, and also because Access developers tend to span the entire spectrum of complete beginners who have just started dragging things around and barely write any code, to people who write VBA code using whole libraries of Windows API functions. The beginners are generally the ones asking questions, so most of the information space online is taken up by repeated references to the same sorts of questions.

And anyway, the “no official discussion space” problem is the most severe. I find that the discussions on Experts Exchange are usually pretty informative, whereas other sites tend to go downhill from there. When you’re looking for information, or an article addressing a specific problem, why wade through the entire Internet? Unfortunately there’s no choice, and 95% of the pages returned by Google are irrelevant.

For example, I was searching for why a simple JOIN expression won’t work using DAO databases and the “OpenRecordset” function. Let’s say I want:

dim db as Database
set db = CodeDb
dim rs as Recordset
set rs = db.OpenRecordset(“SELECT * FROM a INNER JOIN b ON a.key=b.key”)

For some reason, that doesn’t work. It’ll work fine in the Query Builder and when you save it as a query, but not in code. So the workaround is to just do:

set rs = db.OpenRecordset(“SELECT * FROM a,b WHERE a.key=b.key”)

But that’s a limitation because you can only simulate inner joins. I’m sure the answer is out there, but I haven’t gotten around to wading through the tons of detrius out there also to find it. I think knowledge-bases can be improved significantly, perhaps by using the Wikipedia model and allowing users to modify a single article stating an issue and addressing it clearly, rather than using the discussion-board approach which generates a lot of noise.

You know how Google changes their logo for holidays? For example, on Halloween it was orange and decorated with pumpkins and witches brooms. Actually I don’t remember; I just made that up. But today it should say “Foolgle”, I think. Or the topmost search result should be something extremely silly.

“I’d like to see Bill Gates dead.”
“I’ll drink to that.”

Cascading style sheets: One of these days, I’m going to redo this site with them. But it works so nicely now, with my ultimate table-nesting design. But I’ve learned a lot over the past five hours. And in one website I’m designing, I found a nice tab-control script someone had built (simple and elegant) which works well, except that it loads all of the page data at once. This facilitates instant tab movement (the browser doesn’t have to load anything when the user clicks from one tab to the next; it’s already been downloaded so the content shown changes instantly) but for a data-heavy site the initial load may take a while. What I’d like to do is figure out how sites like Gmail use Javascript to open back-channels to the server and load segments of a page. I can then populate tabs that are switched to in that way, to avoid loading the whole page again– just load the contents of the tab the user switched to upon the switch. This should make for a very efficient and streamlined site.

Luckily, yes, because otherwise they’d be always asking the men for help with trivial questions and using up the men’s valuable time and resources which could otherwise be spent towards tackling the really hard math problems which the women could never hope to understand. This is a very lucky thing indeed, that most women don’t like math. Think of how little progress humanity would have made, otherwise.

—————– Original Message —————–
From: Gwen
Date: Mar 29, 2005 1:16 PM

Luckily, most women do not even like math.

—————– Original Message —————–
From: Michael
Date: Feb 14, 2005 11:30 PM

Well, we tend to think our personalities would end up the same no matter what sex we were. Fundamental parts, yes, but then there’s the age old question of how much we are based on who we intrinsically are (that wasn’t very well phrased) and how much is based on how we’re treated, as well as the images of others like us we see out there in the world. Let’s say you were interested in math, but as a girl, how much discouragement would you get from pursuing a career in math or taking advanced math classes? Maybe not that much nowadays, but in the past you would have. But then if you were headstrong enough, it wouldn’t matter.

Well, I can recite the digits of pi out to about 500 decimal places and that’s not from memorization either (I have a rather poor memory); I’m actually summing the infinite series in my head. It’s quite fun and a bit challenging.

Oh, of course not, that’s silly. I score all over the place on those online I.Q. tests (which I haven’t taken for a long time, but a while back in a bout of boredom I went through a bunch.) The highest I ever got was 159 on some spatial test but I don’t think that proves anything other than that if I had size 160 shoes that would mean I had extremely large feet. I could sit here and stare at the wall all day and eventually die and what would that get me? Not a whole lot of fries for my Happy Meal. More like a Sad Meal, I would say. They should have that, by the way. At McDonalds (yuck), I mean. For days when you’re just feeling blue. Fortunately today I would (if I liked McDonalds, that is, and bought this whole symbolic thing) buy the Happy Meal!

—–Original Message—–
From: Marianne
Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2005 12:01 PM

Is your Intelligence Quotient really 199?

A tiny piece of a song I just put together. Getting the chords to sound right was a lot of work. Listen.

A pen and ink abstract drawing I’ve been working on here and there for a while.

Here it is! When I was in high school I made some nice color covers for our literary journal, and the year after I left the next class wanted me to make a cover for them. So I put this together, but I thought I’d lost the image long ago. But I just found it! The title of that issue was “waiting”. Not my best work, in retrospect (though I thought it was cool at the time), but that’s what you can do in a hurry with TrueSpace2. I made those hourglasses from scratch, though I don’t think they actually have sand in them. I’m sure you can claim that’s symbolic of something.

BfEs? Nice to have had someone attach some terminology to it, thanks! The same concept applies to what I’ll call BfBs, wherein if the book’s too engrossing I’ll take it out the bathroom and finish it elsewhere. It’s rather challenging getting through something just one or two pages at a time, because something not quite interesting enough to drag out of the bathroom is likely not interesting enough to warrant frequent bookmarking and the slight backtracking that needs to take place when I start reading again each time to establish what happened right before I left off. I have a whole stack of Scientific American magazines in my car’s back-seat pocket, the rationale being that if someone makes me wait in or near the car at least I’ll read something somewhat informative and balance out the time-wastage being inflicted upon me with so-called productivity.

I have a bunch of friends who think nothing of showing up hours late to things and I have to get it through my head finally after repeated incidents that arriving fifteen minutes later than the called-for time for anything we’ve planned generally means I’ll be the first one there. And to think I hurried… Never again! And I’ll be carrying a BfE in my bfecase.

Argh. Got toner all over myself again, today.