Fall Weather

Ah rainy 49 degree nights - finally perfect coding weather.

Thought for the day

No doubt about it, web apps are a lot of work.

Twitter - no longer just for the birds

My first thought when I heard about the social networking site, Twitter, was something like, "well that's great for teenagers with a lot of time on their hands." But somewhere along the way the IT Development community seems to have taken a shine to tweeting. Ok, well just so no one can accuse me of falling into online curmudgeon status you will find my Twitter link to the right.

Hamlet Under the Stars

Tonight was perfect for and evening with Shakespeare in the Lagoon at Stan Hywet. For my money Andy Nagraj's Laertes was the best performance of the night. Highly recommended.

Social Networking

NPR did a spot this morning about how social networks such as facebook, myspace, linked in, meetup.com is impacting people's lives. For the under 30 crowd not having an account on facebook is equivalent to not having a phone number. Essentially you don't exist. Initiations to parties are now going out via facebook or myspace. After all, email is so 1990's. For some of my older friends (not to mentions John McCain) just browsing the web is a daunting task. How ironic that a technology that is supposed to bring people together is now dividing them primarily based on age.

Hard to beat free

Today while browsing my junk email folder I found what appeared to be a inquiry from a recent ad posted on Craig's List. Further investigation showed that it was spam sent from what appears to be a rival seeking to duplicate the Craig's List format - free online advertising by region. If you really want to get a new service going I don't think that sending spam with a From name of Tommy Tallywaker to a recipient of back.be.nimble26@gmail.com is going to do the trick.

Craig's List really has demonstrated the power of the web to offer an incredible amount of value all for free. How traditional media will complete with this model is still to be determined.

Subreport Linking

Sometimes the simplest things cause the biggest problems. In this case it's the Subform/Subreport linking feature of Access. My application uses a two-field primary key that links two tables together and this works perfectly with Access forms. However when I try to use the same technique in the report module, it just does not work. Period.



A Google search returned no pertinent posts about this problem. However testing has shown that a single field key works in both contexts. The solutions seems to be to add a extra key (Autonumber field) to the tables just for reporting purposes. I hope this post somehow gets indexed and saves someone else from the frustration of finding a work-around for this issue.