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March 30, 2005

I learned something new today!

SQL Server 2000 trick:

DO NOT use " SELECT @@IDENTITY FROM myTable " to determine the ID of the last record inserted. It works, but it returns ALL of the values for identity.

Instead, " SELECT @@IDENTITY " works the way you'd expect -- it returns ONLY the ID of the last record inserted.

The really cool thing is that one of our DBAs at work found this while doing a routine performance scan of the production database... And by removing just those two words " FROM myTable " from the query, on the production table size, we'll go from 4-6 seconds per record in my dataset, to 1-2 seconds per.

That totally made my day. I'm still excited at having THE TEAM speed up my app. We put the test version into a user environment, and it's processing around 7500 records in an hour. We're quite happy about it.

I'm tempted to ask the DBA to monitor the load testing that's going on, explicitly, so we can make some more improvements...

Posted by aland at 11:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 21, 2005

Fixing Login Delays

Daring Fireball: Login Delays and Damaged Font Caches on Mac OS X 10.3

Basically, to sum it up - if you get the Spinning Pizza of Death every time you log in, delete the font cache files from /System/Library/Caches/fontTablesAnnex

Good info... :-)

Posted by aland at 9:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 19, 2005

Sad

Sad sad news.

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/18/andre_norton_rip.html

Andre Norton died. A month and a day after her 93rd birthday.

http://www.andre-norton.org/

Condolences to family, friends and fellow fans.

Posted by aland at 11:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 16, 2005

What should I do with my life?

Interesting post at http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000411.html; I can relate to the 'cruising at less than full speed' but I still think I know what I want to do -- Code, solve problems, and make good software.

I'm not ENTIRELY sure -WHERE- this should happen, but I'm finally doing this again at work...

Posted by aland at 7:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 13, 2005

Getting Things Done

I've been reading a lot about Merlin Mann's 43 Folders and David Allen's book Getting Things Done.

A nice article was posted at MacDevCenter:
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/03/08/productivity.html. Read it if you think you don't have enough hours in your day...

Posted by aland at 3:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack