Tuesday, December 28, 2010

My greatest claim to fame

Sadly, my greatest claim to fame is that I invented the [citation needed] tag. I'll stop sobbing in a corner one day.

P.S. if anyone writes [Citation needed], then [Citation provided].

Markov Chain generator

As it turns out, with a sufficiently dense input text, a Markov Chain generator is actually reasonably easy to implement.

From page 62 of The Practice of Programming:


set w1 and w2 to the first two words in the text

print w1 and w2

loop:

randomly choose w3, one of the successors of prefix w1 w2 in the text
print w3
print w1 and w2 by w2 and w3
repeat loop


Sunday, December 26, 2010

Sargability of monotonic functions in SQL

An excellent writeup by Quassnoi about search arguments of monotonic functions and how most query engines don't handle them, and how they should.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

SQL Server Management Studio 2008 R2

While it's a great idea to include a debugger to step through T-SQL code, it's not very well done. I frequently get a window handle error, and then I either need to reboot client or restart SSMS.

Microsoft - do some QA testing before release cool new features like this. It's tantamount to baiting me!