The Whiteboard

Robert Harvey

10:00 PM

Don't even think about it.

user41796

dang, already cast my OT VTC

Jimmy Hoffa

@RobertHarvey That is interesting.

user41796

Sorry, @RobertHarvey. Trolling you is far more fun that pulling apart these MS Access forms and trying to figure out what queries are backing whatnot.

enderland

Ha

dylanribb

@GlenH7: Anything sounds more fun than that.

Like, maybe, a root canal.

user41796

10:02 PM

@enderland Is there an easier way to find the queries besides opening the form and clicking on the properties of the UI element?

enderland

how many items are there? you mean for form controls?

ie you have a bunch of combo boxes or something?

user41796

@enderland yeah, form controls

user41796

right

user41796

first form has 8 drop down boxes

Robert Harvey

If your intention is to work for big banks running big iron, then by all means take the COBOL class. (I personally failed my COBOL class some 25 years ago, because I kept falling asleep during lectures). — Robert Harvey 45 secs ago

enderland

10:03 PM

@GlenH7 I'd probably just write a script to just print them all out :P

user41796

second form is essentially a data table driven by the selected combo box from previous form

enderland

depending on how many

user41796

Well, I'm trying to find the queries that populate those drop down boxes

enderland

are they bound or unbound?

user41796

don't know how to tell

enderland

10:04 PM

if you open the form up in design mode and have the properties window open you can leave it on the "recordsource" setting and see all the bound queries pretty easily

user55340

I rememberer the great cobol retraining in the mid '90s as y2k loomed. A number of students I worked with while a student myself in college were learning cobol to fix the code that ran stuff on the mainframe for student records.

enderland

is there SQL in the "recordsource" property?

user55340

COBOL: "it might be better than VBA!"

6

enderland

errrm sorry, row source for combo boxes

user41796

@enderland k. still looking. I think it's bound?

user55340

10:06 PM

@GlenH7 I was really trying for a pin to sit next to shog's message.

user41796

@MichaelT You can pin your own messages, y'know. :-)

user41796

I'm in pain here. Forgive me for not partaking in all of the fun ...

user41796

@enderland - so I see a RowSource field in the Data tab of Properties

user41796

and then it's bound to a column (#3 in this case)

user41796

@enderland - ok, got it (as much as I'm willing to deal with.)

user41796

10:13 PM

@enderland - because I know you'll appreciate this. Guess where the one query I was really looking to find was hiding? Yep, that's right. Specified inline as the rowsource.

Ampt

man this system is... massive...

running a wc to see exactly how big it actually is

I have a feeling that it won't be done by the time I leave

user41796

@Ampt You'll know it's really big if it isn't don't by the time you come back tomorrow.

Ampt

@GlenH7 That would be...... scary

user41796

I forget how long it took to run wc against the old codebase I used to work on.

user41796

Tally came in around 1M loc, so I know wc took a while to go

Ampt

10:25 PM

@GlenH7 that wouldn't surprise me if I was close to that

enderland

@GlenH7 sometimes that's helpful though, but more as a control rather than a "meaningful query" type thin

user41796

@enderland bleh. Seems just as dirty as winforms code-behind

enderland

actually I'm not sure when I'd have a complicated query in a combo box

user41796

@enderland when I laid it out nice & pretty in notepad++ it was 950 chars & 23 lines

enderland

@GlenH7 lol

I.... just. yeah... that's.... interesting I guess :)

user41796

10:29 PM

Ugh is what it is. And now I know why my version of this Access DB doesn't work correctly.

user41796

@Ampt You'll have to let us know what the final tally is

Ampt

@GlenH7 I will whenever it completes! My machine is slow so it could be a while

I wish it would print a tally or something when it hit X lines

to let me know it's doing something

enderland

@GlenH7 I'm having a hard time understanding how in the world you would want a control to have a 950 character query, maybe I'm too used to writing functions to make my controls look way nicer if my queries are complicated?

user41796

@enderland I really don't know what the guy was thinking. But I'm looking forward to the meeting next week where I get to call him on it

enderland

my roommate does all sorts of access dev work (except he has a hacking background basically) - I'll tell him someone had a combo box with a 950 character query, he'll probably get a laugh

user41796

10:34 PM

With an inner join for grins

enderland

lol

my downvote count on TW is going through the roof

I swear all I do is DV content there

user41796

@enderland check out gnat's DV record on programmers....

enderland

Ok, going to be a while to catch him

Ampt

oh, not as bad as I thought. 500k

durron597

back, but gotta run again. Thanks everyone especially @MichaelT for all your help!

user41796

10:39 PM

@durron597 yw

user41796

drop a link in here if you choose to edit your question. We'll either provide additional guidance or reopen votes

Ampt

I would be interested in an average view/vote ratio across the different SE sites

user55340

@durron597 Any time.

user41796

@Ampt that cropped up a little while back on MSO

user55340

@GlenH7 digging (though you can try to beat me...)

user41796

10:48 PM

@MichaelT Still fighting Access. And I know better than to challenge your search abilities.

user55340

user55340

From:

user55340

12

A: Why are votes per post on the decrease (what can we do to improve this)?

Warning: graph- and speculation-heavy post follows. I don't know what happened, but that trend has been reversed: After a low of ~1.9 votes/post in March of 2011, the rate has settled into a range between 2.6 and 2.8. That got me thinking about the network as a whole. For instance, I lo...

user55340

> So there's a big cluster of beta sites that get between 2 1/2 and 6 votes per post. On the right side we have some graduated sites with low voting and a handful (Skeptics, Science Fiction & Fantasy, RPG, Programmers, CS Theory, TeX, MathOverflow, Travel, and Mathematica) with v/p north of 5 1/2. There are also a number of graduated sites that aren't extreme in either direction.

Ampt

@MichaelT I'm guessing SO is waaaaaaaaaay out right

user55340

10:50 PM

@Ampt Yep. Thats the condensed image that removes SO (on the right) and closed sites (on the left)

user55340

Ampt

And that's a logarithmic scale

user55340

X (views) log. Y (votes) linear

Ampt

yeah. I mean that SO is factors of 10 away

user41796

@MichaelT - is the "why are polls bad" meta Q&A on MPSE or MSO?

user55340

10:55 PM

@GlenH7 Bit of both.

user55340

21

A: The halting problem - or - the fallacy of "real questions have answers"

I'm going to assume that this is a serious request (excepting the last few lines) and not just a bit of leg-pulling (it's not Friday). Seems that one of the consequences of coming up with a famous quotation is that everybody either misquotes you or takes it out of context. This is what was actu...

user41796

grrr. I'm regretting commenting at this point... I just want to provide a definitive link and get back to yelling at Access.

user55340

-11

Q: We have community wikis and normal questions; we need polls

Couldn't we make a new kind of question, similar to community wiki but call it a poll? For example: This question asks Is it always evil to have a struct with methods? This question is about best practice and is subjective. Clearly a "normal type question" is not suitable since it is unfair to ...

user55340

11% of Americans think that HTML is an STD

user41796

@MichaelT This is the one I went with. And maybe Robert will be able to explain it in better terms.

user41796

10:57 PM

@MichaelT no, it's far worse than an STD

user55340

> 77% of respondents could not identify what SEO means. SEO stands for "Search-Engine Optimization"
27% identified "gigabyte" as an insect commonly found in South America. A gigabyte is a measurement unit for the storage capacity of an electronic device.
42% said they believed a "motherboard" was "the deck of a cruise ship." A motherboard is usually a circuit board that holds many of the key components of a computer.
23% thought an "MP3" was a "Star Wars" robot. It is actually an audio file.
18% identified "Blu-ray" as a marine animal. It is a disc format typically used to store high-defini…

user55340

@GlenH7 The authorative question one is the one that explains it well.

user55340

1

A: Why was my question closed or down voted?

Too Broad The question you have asked either: has too many possible answers would require answers that are too long for the Q&A format Polling Similar to the recommend an XYZ close reason, some questions are polling for a design, or pattern, or name of a thing. If the choice as to which an...

user55340

Part of the reason I wrote those was so that I could easily find those posts.

user41796

@MichaelT The OP isn't (didn't seem to be) getting that polls just don't work and was trying to justify how they could. I was going to grab that answer but didn't think it would add much to their understanding. I didn't realize "halting problem" led to "polls are ick bad." Unfortunately, I don't think there's a way to safe the non-nullable ref question even though it's kind of interesting.

Matt S.

11:04 PM

Wait, is the computer asking and answering the questions?

user41796

@MattS. yes?

Matt S.

But then where does the computer get it's knowledge to ask and answer questions from?

What year is this?!!

user41796

@MattS. either Watson or the mechanical turk. I forget which.

Dynamic

What's a good way to learn Rails for somebody that's never did any back-end web development?

Matt S.

So we'd be contributing to other sites, so that Watson can contribute to the Stack Exchange network. That seems reasonable.

user41796

11:11 PM

@Dynamic what are you wanting to do? ie. a specific project or just that Rails sounds cool?

Dynamic

@GlenH7 Specific project

user41796

did something in particular make rails stand out as a good way to solve that problem then?

Dynamic

The fact that I have experience with Ruby scripting. I've more experience with Perl/Python, but I personally enjoy Ruby.

user41796

If you have the luxury of picking any language you want (which you do in this case), it's worth thinking about the problem itself and what languages would simplify solving that problem

user41796

ok, that's as good of a reason as any. :-)

user41796

11:15 PM

@Dynamic - so you're wanting ruby on rails then?

user41796

if so, I would start here for my resource hunting

Dynamic

@GlenH7 Seeing as it's the most commonly used Ruby web framework. I've looked at Sinatra, but I find it poorly documented and oddly redundant.

Oh, it's not that I can't find a good Rails tutorial/book/resource, but I really don't understand anything that's going on while following one. I can complete what I'm supposed to do, but can't re implement that into an original project.

user41796

@Dynamic I don't know enough of Rails to guess if the issue is understanding all the voodoo stuff going on within server services or where the hiccup may be for you.

Dynamic

It's probably just a matter of me finding time to sit down and dig into exactly what I'm doing.

user41796

that is often the case, yes

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