I’m migrating a Business Intelligence project from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2012. Microsoft has, overall, done a great job with their development and migration tools, and some of the new features of SQL 2012 are great and will save me a lot of time going forward. One neat new feature in SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is Project Connections: you can define a connection at the project level, and all packages in the project automatically inherit a reference to that connection.
So this project I’m migrating has maybe 40 packages, many of which had the same two connections (primary source application and the DW database). In SQL Server Data Tools, you can open a package, right-click on a connection, and “Convert to Project Connection.” So far, so good. Problem is, all those other packages that have a connection of the same name will not inherit the project connection because the local one overrides it (by design). And if you open another package and delete the local connection, every task and data flow component that used that connection gets the dreaded red “X” icon–they don’t automatically revert to the project-level connection with the same name. Best I can tell, the only way to fix it in SSDT is to reconfigure every one of those broken tasks and components. The Internet is full of articles showing how to convert a connection in one package, but nothing gave me any clue what to do with the other 39 packages. I couldn’t accept that I would have to do all that–there must be a better way.
Working on a report from a MySQL database, I needed a table of all dates for the next year. With SQL Server (2005 and later) there’s a CTE/recursive method to do this pretty elegantly, but I couldn’t find anything similar for MySQL. All the solutions I found involved temporary tables, loops, and/or stored procedures–none of these were viable options for me because it’s a production database and I can’t just go changing things. I needed a simple query, and since I couldn’t find one, I made one.
I mentioned a while ago that I have a Linux web server set up with Kerberos SSO in our AD domain. Setting it up was a lot more tedious than it seems like it should have been. I found bits and pieces of useful information here and there, and some step-by-step guides to help with specific sub-tasks, but I couldn’t find a good, intranet-specific guide to help me understand the big picture—what pieces I needed (and didn’t need) and how they fit together. So here’s part 1 of my attempt to rectify that situation (part 2 will be the WordPress integration—I’m still working on that part).
I’ve started a project to move the front-end of our intranet from SharePoint to WordPress (SP is just too icky to do any serious front-end work with). The plan is for WordPress to become the front-end and CMS for news-type content, keep SharePoint for file library and calendar-type stuff (at least for now), and use the SP web services to integrate the SP content into WP. All of the various authentications involved must be transparent to the end-user.
I’m a fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done, but it suffers from one major shortcoming, at least for me: it offers some great methods for managing inputs and outcomes, but it is little help for managing knowledge in a usable electronic form, largely due to its reliance on paper as a least-common-denominator representation of ideas. Paper is inherently disconnected, and any given piece of paper can only be in one place at a time.
I’m beginning a personal project to help me manage the barrage of different inputs I juggle every day. I know I’m not alone in this, so I’ll be sharing my thoughts here as I work through this project. I don’t know what form the end-result will take—could be software, could be a change of my habits or mindset, I don’t know.
Step 1 was to list my main sources of input—email, IM, our help desk application, etc.
There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophies. – Shakespeare
I said before that generalization, patterns, and abstraction are powerful ideas, but they have their limits. It is useful to reduce a thing to its core principles, but beware! Taking reductionism too far you can lose the essence of the thing. Poetry is far more than words and meter; man far more than mammal; and reality far more than relativity or quantum mechanics.
Ideas are the most basic of tools with which we understand and influence our world. And like tools, not all ideas are created equal—some ideas are more powerful than others. What makes an idea powerful?
A powerful idea conforms to absolute truth—the way the world actually is, not necessarily the way we think it is or want it to be. A powerful idea has a broad scope—it can be appropriately applied across a variety of disciplines, explaining diverse phenomena or solving diverse problems (or, if you prefer to put it this way, solving the same problem across diverse domains).
εν αρχη ην ο λογος – John 1:1 Our world behaves in consistent, predictable ways. If it were not so, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, philosophy, economics, engineering, medicine, and countless other disciplines would simply not work. Every discipline studies a range of specific phenomena and aims to distill the detailed observations into general principles or patterns of behavior. It is this ability to generalize that allows us really to know anything at all.
Charlie Savage reported Monday in the New York Times that the Obama administration is seeking legislation that would require “back-doors” in all encryption products and services in the US. Of course, they cite terrorism as a primary motivation. How best to balance the needs of law enforcement (and of government in general) with the privacy and liberty of the citizen is an age-old question. While I sympathize with the needs of law enforcement, the Internet wiretap plan simply will not accomplish its stated purpose.
From my trip to Seattle a while back. Unfortunate circumstances that took us there, but we did get a chance to hang out at the waterfront for a while. I just kinda liked the unusual perspective and framing of this one.
We’ve been thinking about developing a quick application to replace a paper HR process—should be a simple state machine with four possible states: Submitted, Accepted, Rejected, and Completed. But then we realized we would need email notifications and a coherent security model. These requirements—workflow, notification, and security—happen reasonably well in the old paper model. Not perfectly, but well enough. These mechanisms are ingrained in the way people do their work, but to implement this in a computer application would require us to build it from scratch.
It used to be that network infrastructure was one of an organization’s most valuable assets and security was geared toward protecting the infrastructure; but costs are falling, and the network has become a commodity.
Meanwhile, the volume and value of information stored electronically are growing rapidly. For this reason, Dan Greer advocates a paradigm shift in information security, which he calls the Enterprise Information Protection Paradigm.
We suggest that this paradigm be called enterprise information protection (EIP).
I was blown away by how good these are. I inherited this recipe from a friend. I can’t find it anywhere on the Web, so I’m putting it here. Enjoy! Ingredients: 1 lb Hamburger 1/2 cup Ketchup 1 Tbsp Mustard 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce 1/2 tsp Chili powder Onion powder and garlic powder to taste Hamburger buns Shredded cheddar cheese Directions: Brown hamburger; drain. Add ketchup, mustard, worcestershire, chili powder, onion powder, and garlic powder to hamburger and mix.
Stressed at work? I highly recommend Getting Things Done by David Allen. The main thing I learned from GTD was how to manage my email—keeping my inbox empty and using a single folder for archived messages. It’s been several months, and I need to read it again, but even the few tips I remember from my first reading have helped me manage an ever-increasing workload without a mental meltdown.
All of my company’s inbound and outbound email goes through a security service that scans for spam and viruses. From time to time I get an email from someone saying that they got a message that they consider spam. I see that as a good sign. Here’s why: Spam filters are machines, with some human input to fine-tune the filter criteria, doing the best job they can. The algorithms are ever-improving, but they’re still just computer programs.
Inspired by an episode of the Ockham’s Razor podcast:
Mark Dodgson:
I want to argue that failure doesn’t get the credit it deserves. If you want to understand success, you must appreciate the ubiquity of failure, and if you’re not regularly failing, you’re not trying hard enough.
William McKnight, Chairman of the Board at 3M Corporation, 1949-1966:
As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative.