Archives for August 2003
Heading down to Austin in the morning for a nice long weekend with my sister, brother-in-law, mom, step-dad, and of course my wife and 3-year old son. Birthday festivities Saturday evening, and then the real reason for the trip happens Sunday evening -
Texas Longhorn football. Texas opens the season at 6 PM Sunday against New Mexico State.
Hook'em!
Ever since the Mavericks season ended in heartbreaking fashion to the Spurs in the Western Conference Finals, I've been counting the days to the start of next season. Along the way, I've also been counting the major off-season milestones, such as the date when teams can start talking to free agents, as well as the date teams can start signing free agents. To my dismay, the Mavericks didn't land any of their targets, and it looked like they would go into next season with essentially the same squad that finished last season.
How quickly things can change...
It seems that the Mavs and Warriors agreed to an 8 player deal tonight, pending league approval. The main players in the trade are
Nick Van Exel from Dallas for the Warriors'
Antawn Jamison. Also being sent from Dallas in the deal are
Avery Johnson,
Popeye Jones, and
Evan Eschmeyer, in exchange for
Danny Fortson,
Chris Mills, and
Jiri Welsch.
I had hoped that Dallas would be able to do a deal without losing Van Exel, and so I was a little disappointed when I heard the news. However, I actually like this trade (though I have reservations about Jamison's contract - 6 years and $69 million remaining on his contract), especially if Fortson can return to form after some injury problems over the last couple of years.
Time will tell.
Why isn't there a single-character wildcard for use in ADO.NET's
Expression property?
I came across this recently when I needed to filter a DataView (using the
RowFilter property of the
DataView) so that only records containing Value LIKE '2__' (underscore is single-character wildcard in T-SQL). This way I get 200, 201, 202, 203,..., 299, but not 2000, etc.
After a thorough review of the MS docs and my ADO.NET book from Wrox (which incorrectly states that * is for single character wildcards), I decided to just use the LEN() function available in Expressions and limit my results to LEN(Value) = 3 (based on example above).
Then end result is something like this:
MyDataView.RowFilter = "Element='Topic' AND Value LIKE '" & Chapter & "%' AND LEN(Value) = " & TopicNumberLength
Sure would have been nicer to just have a single-character wildcard.
A
dog in St. Louis survived the gas chamber...
Hopefully anyone with a website or email hosted on one of my servers was sleeping between the hours of 4 AM and 6:30 AM Central Time this morning. On the off chance that one of you wasn't, and tried accessing something, my apologies. It seems that the power company is having problems. We were completely without power for over two hours, and it has been back on intermittently since.
And for the smart ass, yes, my servers are on UPS. Of course the "U" in "UPS" is true only as long as the batteries last, and I am not a rich enough man to have batteries to last me 2 and a half hours.
Oh, and by the way...when the average high temperature as been above 100 degrees for several days in a row, like it has been here in North Texas, including the last couple which were closer to 110 than 100, and the lows are barely making it into the lower 80's, the servers were the least of my worries -- I wanted the damn AC back on!