A recent seminar on testing ... and some lessons on reflectiveness.

Recognising when it's time to move on.

"I resent you putting pressure on me to take those decisions."

Thirteen thoughts on the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech.

Unfortunately, one of the most annoying SSIS bugs did not make the cut for the SQL Server 2005 SP2 bug fix list: namely, when you add additional output columns to a Derived Column Transformation (and maybe other kinds as well) that is upstream from one or more Union All Transformations, the new columns you add get "stuck" behind the Union All transformations--that is, they do not show up as input columns in the Union All, and consequently do not flow past the Union All.

"Ms. Dean's article does women a disservice because it buys into this classist image of "programming" and will track them, as it has in the past, into applications in which they are neither able to manage the complexity of programming, nor able to grasp the application in full."

Barbara is as we used to say in the Sixties, right on, when she points out that the job seeker has to internalize society and its grim demands. She mentions Fromm, who in Escape from Freedom points out how the modern urban dweller confuses his own needs with those of society and cannot "relax": even his leisure is structured and compulsive.

This post describes some initial troubles I had inserting into a SQL Server table with an Identity-based PK with SSIS while keeping the surrogate PK values from my source data, which happily led to a solution suggested by commenters to the original post.

[This scene, and perhaps the entire movie, takes place in complete blackness: the audience sees nothing. Some audience members walk out in puzzled disgust. The remaining members watch (nothing), listen, and are entranced, because The Soul selects her own Society.]

How do you help someone face up to criticism?

I've had a couple of bad experiences in discussions about the architecture of the product. Does this ring a bell with anyone? Or have I just mishandled the question?

May you Go To a better place if such a place is

All this puts me squarely in the programming mainstream, but there's no getting around the fact that people persist in seeing my world as less worthy of respect. I've learned to live with it, even embrace it, though early on in my programming career I was somewhat insecure about it.

An article in which I describe the corruption of Amazon authors INCLUDING MYSELF by the ease of spamming your own book with positive reviews, and in which I take steps to clean up my act in this regard!

When we were at University, we thought only Truth mattered. Now we are in the real world, we know that only Secrets matter. - paraphrase of a quote by Edsger Dijkstra in the persona of the CEO of "Mathematics Inc.", in the Hosannah building.