Louis Davidson : Misc

Un-SQL–Thanksgiving

drsql — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 13:00:00 GMT

So here it is the night of Thanksgiving Eve here in the United states, and some time tomorrow I will likely be extra stuffed with Turkey and fixin’s and have begun to prep to do some shopping on Black Friday (if not catatonic from the mythical wonder...(read more)

Do you care where an idea comes from?

drsql — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 04:30:15 GMT

Ok, so you are the lead ______________ for your company. The big cheese, the super duper guy who knows everything…right? So then some newbie comes up with an idea that might solve a problem you have been dealing with for a few days/weeks/months/whatever. What do you do?

A. Ignore his idea and use your own, genetically superior idea

B. Ignore where the idea came from, pretend it is your own.

C. Accept the answer, give the newbie credit, put it in your toolbox so next time you will know it too

If you didn’t answer C, I am glad we aren’t coworkers.

Frankly any other answer blows my mind. Clearly, the people who hire a person on the top of their field will know more than most people. And it should be expected that a person 15 years of experience with some topic/product will know more than people with 1 or 2. Everyone has access to the same search engines, so they can find new ideas and act upon them. Ideally there is a review process where people that have the life experience do much of the reviewing, but still that usually goes both ways. Reviewing ideas before executing them should be done even if it is the companies chief smarty pants, if for no other reason that when people of lesser experience try to validate an “experts” ideas (or hopefully disprove the expert and win some cool points,) the worst that can happen is that someone learns something new. The best thing that can happen is a disaster is averted. And that can’t be a bad thing, right?

But going back to the “expert” role. Too often being saddled with the moniker “expert” gets mistaken for “perfect.” Unless I suddenly become perfect, and man, that ain’t happening any time soon, everyone make mistakes. In fact, I know that one of the things I am most proud of is my complete lack of competitive pride. (I am the best, baby!) To me, the key is how the person who is saddled with the title expert handles it. All to often, the gut reaction is A. “Well, you can’t be right. My idea is clearly better as it was formed from my superior intellect.” This might not be that horrible, like if the decision was where to eat lunch, but if you were the engineer who designed the Titanic, well, not good. The answer B is just evil.

Who cares if there are 2 experts at your company? Or on the planet? Competition should drive you to work harder to be better, with the final goal being everyone being better…not to harm others…

A few Word tips and tricks for writers

drsql — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 05:51:13 GMT

Edit: Added ideas from comments at the end of the blog

Not exactly a SQL topic, but I am working on formatting a chapter from a book I am working on with a cowriter and I realized that there were a few things that I find myself doing over and over with Word that I wanted to share. All of the tips are useful for formatting SQL in your blog posts, at the very least.

1. Shift – F3 – Applying this to a word/highlighted text in your document will cycle through the different states of capitalization. For example, if you have:

Fred is a crazy dude.

Highlight it and press Shift-F3:

THIS IS A COOL FEATURE

Again:

this is a cool feature

And finally:

This Is A Cool Feature

If you are like me, you code everything originally in lowercase, but editors almost exclusively like the way caps look, so I find myself constantly setting keywords to caps using this feature. I learned this in a few sessions with Microsoft Learning where the person proctoring the session was using it on the screen. Saved me hours on the last book (you heard me, hours. I probably spent over 1000 hours writing and it might have been 2000. The book was 680 or so pages with lots of T-SQL.)

2. Get the application puretext from http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/. This handy application will clear all formatting from text you have stored in your clipboard. Nearly every publisher has a style sheet that they require you use, and frankly if you have any Word skill at all you always use styles for titles and headings at the very least. The most annoying thing though is that the text you copy from SSMS has formatting in it, so when you paste it into your documents you have this formatting that you need to get rid of in lieu of the stuff that the publisher wants. With Puretext you simply use a slightly different paste key (like Windows-V) and you get the plain text you need. Same time estimate for this feature. Before I found this application I used to paste into Notepad, the copy it to the clipboard and then into Word. Very tedious.

3. Hotkeys on styles – As mentioned in 2, nearly every publisher has a style sheet that they require you use, and frankly if you have any Word skill at all you always use styles for titles and headings at the very least. Applying “heading 1” three or four times is no big deal, but applying code in text 1000 times in a 80 page chapter is not quite a much fun.

So, if you open up word, and find the styles ribbon (this is Word 2007, you can do much the same stuff in earlier versions, but I won’t demonstrate). Clicking the little arrow under the Change Styles button opens up the styles bar:

Now you can right click on any of the styles, choose modify to get the following:

Click on Format and choose Shortcut Key:

Once you choose a key (for the Code [ST] style I chose Alt-C. Now I highlight the term I want to make look like code and press Alt-C. Saves tons of time.

Note: A few commenters have noted that there is a way to make this work without PureText using Word functionality (I will demonstrate the Word 2007 methods. There are two ways:

First, when you paste text into Word 2007, you get a little menu at the end of your paste:

Click that and it will say:

Keep Source Formatting
Match Destination Formatting
Keep Text Only
----------------------
Set Default Paste

This would be a clumsy way to keep text many many times, but it is nice for the occasional use. More interesting is the Match Destination. A lot of times I use text formatting to strip away some text formatting so I can reformat it.

The second is to set the default paste method. Opening up the Word Options menu from the Office Menu you see:

You can set it to behave using any of the three methods mentioned by default for several scenarios, the most interesting “Pasting from other programs.” If you didn’t want to set up something like PureText, and you only used Word (I am using LiveWriter right now, and I like pasting text into here for code, but not from blogs and documents) then that would be a very viable plan too.

What it just goes to show you is that all of the Office products are freaking massive. After writing 3000 pages or so using word through the years, I consider myself an above average user, but in reality, in comparison to what features are in there, I am a novice. These are just a few tricks I have learned, the first two from others (the second was from a newsgroup posting by the author, who’s website you will find the tool), the third something I started doing on my own (didn’t come up with the idea, just found it.) If you have other ideas, please share them here, on your blog, at conferences, etc. Writing is a chore to start with, but formatting is a nightmare if you don’t know the tricks of the trade.

NDA's not amongst friends

drsql — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 14:35:55 GMT

Yesterday's blog about the changes to metadata function changes in SP2 was one of a number things that I have recently learned about that have been driving me crazy. And we thought we would have to wait until SP2 was put out to release that information. Luckily it was published on the connect site in open Internet so it was sharable. Of course, it is also retractable, as that is not the perfectly reliable place to get new features.

Almost any person who works for a company that builds something is under some sort of NDA. You cannot call the newspaper and tell too much about anything that your company does, or you would be busted (I worked at a high profile company once that monitored phones after meetings to see if they could figure out who would rat them out to the press...and they very often figured it out. Clearly those folks who called the press were not the Valedictorians of their high school, even if they were home schooled only children. But I digress)

Having an NDA that your coworkers are also under is not a tremendous problem. After demos you often have the excited discussion: "Bob, did you see such and such feature?" "Yeah, that was cool"

Over the past few weeks however, there are a few things that I have seen under NDA's that are really cool, really useful, and quite applicable to current situations that my company/a client is in. So I sit in a meeting, discussing some feature, or doing some task manually that I know is going to vastly improved some day.

Clearly I am just venting a little bit, because there is nothing I can do other than just bide my time and wait until we are given the go ahead to tell everyone. No doubt I will be back to tell you what I hear!

crossposted to: http://drsql.spaces.live.com