mh-z | web-log

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 http://www.experts-exchange.com/“>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.

http://thomas.pixelmud.com/archives/2005/03/i_kept_neverwhe.html“>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.

Here’s what I think about resumes and about applying for jobs. My opinion may be somewhat speculative, because I was lucky enough to never be a frequent resume-submitter and so I can’t tell you how much of a response my resume, in particular, garnered. Nor did I spend as great a deal of time sprucing it up as I would now, given the opinions I’ve formed of late. But I’ve been on the other side of the table a couple times, reviewing resumes for a position, and I base what I say on that.

The bulk of this entry is based on an e-mail I wrote to a friend, who asked me to critique her resume. I wasn’t too impressed, and simply began stating what was on my mind. She called it a harsh criticism, but I say, good! Hopefully this was constructive, but in any case that should be a push to make things better.

I’m also going to revise this at a later point and write a longer article. As you’ll see, I have some strong opinions on this here topic.

The e-mail:

Hi ______. I’m going to ramble a bit about resumes in general and then tell you what I think about yours. In general:

Here’s what I think. First of all, design is very important. In a sea of resumes which look all the same, something that stands out because it’s well designed and looks different yet still elegant would get people’s attention. At least, it would get mine. I’ve seen many resumes that look like yours, and I find myself looking for little things which no one really ought to care about, but in the absence of other points to make decisions based on (because like I said, most resumes have almost the same content as far as my knowledge is concerned) that’s what draws my eye. I look for:

1. Grammatical correctness: consistent and correct use of tenses and punctuation.
2. Appearance: fonts, font sizes, and so on.
3. Amount of content. Number of job history positions and my overall impression of the skill involved in each one.
   
   Contrary to what many might think, when you say less about each position you’ve held it often conveys more. If you bullet-point a bunch of rather menial tasks you did at each position, it says that you consider these menial skills important and not just incidental. The less you say about each position, the more intelligent and ambitious you seem, because you aren’t concerned with the basics. For example, of course everyone knows Word and Excel, so there’s no point in stating that. But can you “develop complex reports” in Excel? (Even that doesn’t say too much, though.) Can you build PivotTables? (Aha, specifics — now we’re talking.) Do you know how to use array functions and edit (not just record) macros? To repeat, everyone knows how to use Excel but I want to know if you’ve figured out how to use the more advanced features it provides.
   
   …It’s the tone rather than the concise description of a position you held, because why would I care, with regards to the position I’m hiring you for, exactly what you did? You’re going to be doing something at least slightly and possibly considerably different now, so why do the specifics of your past positions matter?

Basically, were I looking to fill a position, I would be looking for someone intelligent, adaptable, and pleasant to work with.

This may be just me, but I’m big on grammar and consider good communication skills and writing skills important and therefore indicators of education level and intelligence (again, in the absence of other indicators). So, I find that I judge others based on grammar usage in their resumes. Typos aren’t excusable, because you have plenty of time to put this particular document together and proofread it repeatedly and have others proofread it, ad infinitum. It should be representative of the best you can achieve given all the time in the world, or at least nearly so.

Places to which you apply get a sea of resumes looking all alike. Don’t underestimate how little yours will stand out, and how easy it is for someone reviewing it to put it on the “discard” pile for the pettiest of reasons. They have to.

All that said, here’s what I say about yours. Little points, but were I scanning through resumes for a position, I would consider each one somewhat important and each one would add to my overall impression:

1. You need something between your phone number and e-mail address.
2. The whole top row is shifted too far to the right.
3. You have some sentences ending in periods and some not.
4. The dates after the entries in the “education” section are not a range, so they seem to mean something different from the dates below in the same column, for which there is a range. That’s a little inconsistent.
5. The Tahoma font does not have a “natural” italic version. Windows creates a “fake” italic version by slanting the letters. This looks bad. Verdana is the same thing as Tahoma with more spacing between the letters, and it does have a real italic version.
6. You need to list more skills than just Word, Excel, STATA, and the other two acronyms. (I don’t know what those are.) STATA is good as are the other two, but like I said a couple times, everyone knows Word and Excel (and Powerpoint). What else are you good at? I think you read a lot, maybe there’s a way to incorporate a mention of that. You’re outgoing, easy to work with, and have somewhat of a “tell it like it is” personality. Those are much harder points to incorporate, though, but if you find a way to subtly show them I think that’s worth a lot.

To sum this up: When I, as an employer, have a stack of fifty resumes to look through to fill one position, I look for excuses to eliminate each resume. A small mistake, inconsistency, or typo can be such an excuse. I have no choice but to eliminate resumes for the pettiest of reasons. On the other hand, something unique and interesting about a resume can lead me to put it in a pile of its own. Normally it’s hard to be unique and interesting, but one way to achieve that in a paper document is through the use of elegant and professional design. Colors would be especially helpful in this regard, and I don’t care what is traditionally done. Color printers are ubiquitous, and if black and white is the tradition, I will give you all the more credit for being willing to throw away that dogma.

Here is an article I found a while back which I almost entirely agree with. The author is looking for a programmer, but his points are just as valid when applied to any field: Joel on Software on Resumes.

I saw Sideways. I had trouble sitting through the movie, but that has nothing to do with the movie. I knew it wasn’t an action movie going in, rather, a reflection on life. Reminicent of Adaptation, another movie about coping with midlife crisis. Not really crisis. A realization of one’s mortality. A realization that one has lived the greater portion of life and has come through with dissatisfaction in the level of one’s accomplishments, whether they be material or internal. Am I the person I ideally envisioned myself to be? No, and why not? My life is half gone, and yet, what do I have to show for it? Why do I seem to have so little power to change who I am?

I’m ($this->self, not Person::self) about a quarter of the way through my life. Not halfway. Half of halfway, not considering the fact that I plan to live more than one hundred years. I’m just trying to get into the minds of the characters in the movie. It also reminded me of Fight Club, and for a second I had a thought that the two main characters, and here I should mention that I’m bad with names because I just saw the movie and it ended an hour ago, and yet I can only remember one of the two main main characters’ names. Jack, and… I had to look it up. Miles. Well, a name like Miles isn’t exactly so memorable, right? Because it’s not a name you hear nowadays. Is it short for something? I thought, maybe Miles and Jack are the same person. Just like Edward Norton and Brad Pitt in Fight Club. I’m not even going to try and think of their names in the movie. I mean, I already tried and failed. There we go, I looked it up. Tyler Durden. I knew that. I’m decent at crossword puzzles, would you believe it? Well, at least, I can currently do up to most of the New York Times’ Wednesday puzzle, because for the most part they do in fact increase in difficulty over the week. Miles did puzzles, in the movie. There was one scene where he was doing a puzzle and it showed the puzzle close-up for about five seconds, and I found myself grabbing a number and looking over to look up its clue, but of course the puzzle disappeared from the screen before I had a chance to really see anything. (I bet aficionados are going to get their hands on the DVD and freeze-frame the crossword puzzle close-up and actually solve the puzzle. Or they’re going to determine what day that scene was actually probably filmed on by finding the real issue of The Times wherein that particular puzzle, edited by Will “Take Off” Shortz, appeared.) Much like credits scroll by too fast to read them or take in any of the names and what they’re for, although most people don’t care. Surprisingly many stayed in the theater for the entire credits, this time.

I feel like my writing style, right now, is similar to that of Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. (It was before I revised this and inserted all these parenthetical remarks.) I’m writing my thoughts as they occur, with no desire or effort expended on cleaning up the sequence of thoughts or forming them into more sequentially coherent paragraphs. Would you believe I’m a programmer by trade? A program is the epitome of something with structure and order. A program also represents going off on tangents within tangents within tangents, as functions call other functions and so on. But each function eventually returns to the function which called it. It’s fun to do that with a conversation which has taken a vast number of turns, also. I’ve done that with friends, but I don’t think they’re as aware of the programming metaphor. Unwinding the stack, you could say. “How in the world did we get to be talking about that?” And then you trace it back to the very beginnings of the conversation, which is perhaps an exercise in memory, which is fun. Sometimes I have a good memory, believe it or not. Just not for names, unless I make it a point to remember them.

You are not your job. You are not how much you have in the bank. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your khakis. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. What happens first is you can’t sleep. What happens then is there’s a gun in your mouth. And what happens next is you meet Tyler Durden. Let me tell you about Tyler. He had a plan. In Tyler we trusted. Tyler says the things you own, end up owning you. It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything. Fight Club represents that kind of freedom. First rule of Fight Club: You do not talk about Fight Club. Second rule of Fight Club: You do not talk about Fight Club. Tyler says self-improvement is masturbation. Tyler says self-destruction might be the answer.

–Fight Club

This reminds me of The Neverending Story (the never-ending (not really) book). How Atreyu left all of his material possessions behind when he was transported into the story. Because we aren’t our possessions, and it’s good to remember that. It’s good to remember that “you can’t take it with you”, which refers to death, but you can’t even take yourself with you when you die. At least, it would be nice if you could, but I believe that’s wishful thinking and we should enjoy our lives here on this earth. The house is burning down around us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t admire the view.

I like Sandra Oh. I haven’t seen her in anything else. Her “maybe you should spank me, then” line is cliche, or maybe I’ve just heard it said too many times. Ha ha.

I don’t appreciate wine tasting more after seeing this movie. The characters could have shared a passion for, say, model airplane building. Or anything. Also, I didn’t see any cheese being tasted, and generally I understand that wine and cheese are tasted hand in hand. The lack of cheese in the movie, with the exception of the aforementioned line, was very disturbing to me.

Anyway, let’s unwind the stack. Cheese. Wine tasting. Sandra Oh. Fresh starts are nice. The house is burning down around us, but we can still admire the view. The Neverending Story. Fight Club. How for a moment Jack and Miles seemed like maybe they were two aspects of the same person. Remembering names. It gets a little fuzzy, here, and I think I’m just about back to the beginning, at least when it comes to the substance (what there is of it) of this article. Oh, yeah, midlife crises. Sideways.

I was looking up a particular poem I remember. Something I read years and years ago, while visiting my grandparents in New York as a kid. Maybe fifteen years ago. Something like that. (Obligatory cliche nostalgic moment:) Can you believe all that time’s passed? Anyway, it was a compilation of poems and wordplay by Willard R. Espy. I remember his name because many of the poems in that large hardcover book had a byline “W.R.E.”, and I wondered who that was at first. Unfortunately I can’t find the poem online. It was a clever little bit which the author claimed was something his daughter had told him, about how she had a full meal in an empty room by using puns. She started out with a roll on the ground, and so on (I can’t remember any more), except that it ended with her having “some wine from the cat” and Mr. Espy humorously groaned about that one. I’m not sure which book of his it is, but I’ll find and order it one of these days.

Anyway, I’m writing this mainly to be able to link to the http://www.espyfoundation.org/“>Willard R. Espy Literary Foundation website, which is what I randomly stumbled across, because I doubt many people link to that site. I see that he passed away in 1999, but from what I remember of that book he was clever in a way that I admire.

I’ll post the poem here if I find it, and if it isn’t too embarassingly silly because my appreciation of it is only based only on a childhood memory…

More nostalgia, perhaps:
– Disneyland isn’t so big or far away.
– Magic Mountain isn’t so big, either.
– I couldn’t get lost at either place, anymore.
– Disneyland got rid of the Skyway, the People Mover, and Captain EO.
– Life marches on.

I found that running a server on a wireless device was causing a great deal of network latency. For example, I had MySQL running on a wi-fi’ed laptop and was connecting from a desktop, where I was doing the main development work. The reason for this arrangement is that I keep switching computers and it’s easy to transport Access databases and PHP code files and such from one machine to the other, but it’s more of a pain to move back-end databases around, so I figured I’d just leave it on the laptop and use that as a server. I worked with it that way for a while, but didn’t think to test why the connection seemed so laggy until this morning.

Here’s what happens when I ping my laptop when it’s connected wirelessly:

Pinging 192.168.0.106 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 192.168.0.106: bytes=32 time=267ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.0.106: bytes=32 time=187ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.0.106: bytes=32 time=107ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.0.106: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.0.106: bytes=32 time=254ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.0.106: bytes=32 time=176ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.0.106: bytes=32 time=97ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.0.106: bytes=32 time=324ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.0.106: bytes=32 time=245ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.0.106: bytes=32 time=165ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.0.106: bytes=32 time=86ms TTL=128
Request timed out.
Reply from 192.168.0.106: bytes=32 time=134ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.0.106: bytes=32 time=55ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.0.106: bytes=32 time=283ms TTL=128
Reply from 192.168.0.106: bytes=32 time=203ms TTL=128

Ping statistics for 192.168.0.106:
Packets: Sent = 16, Received = 15, Lost = 1 (6% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 27ms, Maximum = 324ms, Average = 174ms

Of course when the laptop is wired in I see this:

Pinging 192.168.0.101 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 192.168.0.101: bytes=32 timeReply from 192.168.0.101: bytes=32 timeReply from 192.168.0.101: bytes=32 timeReply from 192.168.0.101: bytes=32 timeReply from 192.168.0.101: bytes=32 time
Ping statistics for 192.168.0.101:
Packets: Sent = 5, Received = 5, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms

So that’s interesting, because when I go the other way around and use the wirelessly connected laptop to ping the wired desktop, the latency is 6ms on average as compared to the average 174ms we saw going the other way.

Well, that’s why it was so laggy, but I can’t tell you why the connection itself behaved that way or if in general that’s how wi-fi works. Anyone know?

Q: Where does the Lone Ranger take his garbage?
A: To the dump, to the dump, to the dump, dump, dump…

Sometimes I post things here and delete them. Oh, those tragic pearls of wisdom which were nonetheless deemed by the author to not be worthy of permament inclusion in this database. That’s why you should check my site regularly and often.

I now know someone who claims to be able to type 140 words per minute (on a standard Qwerty keyboard), and that’s pretty impressively fast. I can only type about 100 WPM on a good day and that’s on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_keyboard“>Dvorak, which is “optimized” for speed and efficiency. On the other hand, come to think of it, a record for typing speed is held by a woman named http://sominfo.syr.edu/facstaff/dvorak/blackburn.html“>Barbara Blackburn (I’d think it would be strange if it were a man named Barbara Blackburn, wouldn’t you?) who can type 170 WPM consistently and uses Dvorak as well. I topped out at 50 or 60 on Qwerty when I was in high school before I learned Dvorak, so that clearly shows that I’m inferior and my brain operates at a slow and leisurely pace compared to those of others. Ha ha.

I set up a wireless network connection on an iMac, and when that was working downloaded and installed some programs. One of those huge-screen deals where the entire computer is contained within the screen (besides the keyboard and the mouse, of course). It took a while, and my personal dislike for Macs is maintained or amplified. I realize that this is mostly a matter of taste, and in general I’m responding to the “look and feel” of the operating system and peripherals and their design principles. The underlying computer (the hardware and what you can do with the software) is fine, and I’m not going to try and compare processor speeds or bootup speeds or anything like that.

1. First of all, the mouse was one of those one-button designs where you press the entire top of the mouse down to click. This means when you’re dragging something across a large area, where you have to pick up the mouse and reposition it while holding down the button, you’re prone to letting go of the button because there’s nothing easy to hold it down relative to. Picking up the mouse and moving it while holding the button is one of the most natural motions in the world, and I have no problem with it otherwise and do it unconsciously, but I had to squeeze hard and carefully position my hand and be conscious of the motion so I wouldn’t accidentally let go of the button while the mouse was in the air, something that happened a whole bunch of times and became quite annoying. I later noted little tabs on the sides of the mouse to grasp the body of the mouse so that the button could be held down while the mouse is in the air, but those didn’t naturally fit my fingers or feel comfortable. Maybe my hands are just too big for it, but I’m really not that much taller than the average person.

2. The lag between physical mouse movement and on-screen mouse arrow movement is extreme and on par with what I see with the worst wireless mice (those made by Logitech, based on limited experience), yet this was a wired mouse. As I noted elsewhere, I seem to be the only person who notes mouse lag… am I crazy?

3. Dragging or resizing windows, minimizing or maximizing windows, etc. was very slow compared with what I am used to. The system appeared to be struggling to keep up.

Setting up the wireless network itself involved a great deal of trial and error, but the menus were clear enough so that I didn’t have too much trouble. In all I wasn’t very impressed by Mac OS X; it didn’t seem like something I could get around in very quickly. Again, like I said before, that’s a matter of taste… and partly the fact that it’s something I’m not used to, but I tend to figure out operating systems quickly. (For example, I could set your VCR or the clock in your car that you haven’t been able to change…) The poor hardware design (the mouse where it’s very difficult to hold down the button while picking up and repositioning) doesn’t get that excuse, though. Notice I didn’t even say anything about the fact that there’s just one button…

Oh, I’m sure there are more important issues going on in the world right now.

How’s life?

“Could you pass the roast beef please?”
“Sure, and would you like a henway with that?”
“A what?”
“A henway.”
“What’s a henway?”
“Oh, about five to ten pounds, usually.”

I thought it was some sort of sandwich. Like a grinder, or a hoagie, or one of those terms you’ve never heard anyone using to describe a sandwich and where probably if they did, you wouldn’t want to eat it anymore.