In Seattle!

Well, I've made it here. It was a long flight from Adelaide, via Sydney and San Francisco. I'm about to turn in now because I haven't slept for quite a while.

It's been good to meet Itzik and Lilach Ben-Gan - they're great. We'll need to get them out to Adelaide some time.

Got my phone back :)

Thanks to Moneeta at Optus, I now have my phone back. My charger's at home though, so I can't charge it up to re-install it until I get home tonight. But it's very nice that I get to take it away with me. :)

Keeping my teeth until Star Wars Day

With my trip to Seattle now confirmed, I've had to delay my wisdom teeth extraction until Star Wars Day, at Tooth Hurty.

It's all arranged - mostly

My flights are booked. I'm leaving for Seattle on Saturday. Leaving Seattle late on Thursday night (well after the meeting) to come home via London, with plenty of time to get to the Arsenal game on April 1st. Now I just need to arrange tickets. I figure my podcast should help, plus the people I know.

All very exciting. God is definitely on my side in the way that this has been able to be arranged. And thanks to Microsoft for letting me be part of the beta exam process!

Very sad for the people who have missed out. You know who you are.

And I need to get my phone back before the weekend!!! Judy (from work) is looking into it for me. Come on Optus!

Bitwise reversing

The geek in me is clearly alive and strong. I found this post on reversing a string using bitwise XOR quite appealing.

Although really, it's not that different to storing a character and swapping them over (plus swapping the characters that way would be more 'obvious', which I think is always a feature of good code). The thing that makes a recursive function slow here is that you're building a new string. This function (and one where you swap characters) simply changes the string in-place. Plus it does it from both ends at once.

Personally I'd rather have the variables named better (instead of 'i' and 'len', why not use firstHalfCharPos and secondHalfCharPos, or something tediously long but descriptive like that?), but I do admire the 'fun' of the bitwise XOR, and it's a good way of demonstrating the principle of XOR.

No word yet

Still haven't heard about the trip to Seattle. The email said we'd hear by the 20th. I figure that means tomorrow, because it'll be the 20th in Seattle by then. I tried phoning on Friday and Saturday to find out if the offer really was open to non-US residents, but I only got voice-mail and haven't heard back yet.

Glasses fixed

Well, in the end I fixed my glasses myself. I felt like I didn't have the right tools for the job, but I got it done, and I'm not sure why L&P couldn't do it. Anyway - I'm wearing my ordinary glasses again now, with both arms attached. :)

A few SQL Rules

I just came across Jeff Smith's post (thanks to Darren). I like Jeff's advice. I'm pleased to say that I do all this - despite the odd bit of flak I might take over my use of derived tables. I think derived tables are great.

The very fact that Jeff has made a post like this tells me there are a bunch of people out there who don't do these things, and that makes me really sad. It really frustrates me when people do nasty nasty stuff with their queries, and I often feel like people approach writing a query like they would approach an API. But anyway, I like Jeff's rules.

Here's a thing I quite like these days...

select
   'colname1' = whatever1,
   'colname2' = whatever2,
   etc...

as opposed to:

select
   whatever1 colname1,
   whatever2 colname2,
   etc...

Giving my columns names this way (the first way) means that all my column names are lined up nicely, and even all the definitions are lined up nicely, assuming I hit tab before the equals sign. It means that when I come to glancing at the query, I can see exactly what the result columns are - and this really helps in my derived tables too!

And now for some name-dropping

Well, if the trip to Seattle goes ahead, then Robert Scoble will arrange a geek dinner! We exchanged a few emails today - he told me about a Daniel's Broiler in downtown Seattle, and stuff like that.

Unfortunately I won't be able to catch up with Ron Jacobs while I'm over there. I listen to his ARCast podcast regularly, but he'll be in the UK while I'm in Seattle. And even if I get to come home via London, I have more important people to catch up with than Ron there. Family, not just Arsenal players.

Please don't let it be true

Chris Hewitt has just told me that he received a similar invite for a meeting to discuss one of the other beta exams, and that it said something about "US only". But this can't be true, because there were heaps of addresses in the rest of the 'to' list that were in .uk, .pl, .it, .hu, .ru, etc... It can't just be for Americans.

*sigh*