My goodness, the weeks have flown.    I haven’t had the time to properly devote to any one geeky project.. but there’s been a bunch of smaller things going on.   I’ll try to sort them from Geeky-est to Meta.

I used Cross Apply for the first time

Its hard to do better than Stack Overflow, so here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1139160/when-should-i-use-cross-apply-over-inner-join

My use case was pretty simple:

• I had a sproc which would return inventory of stocks held.
• Anybody who had more than 100 stocks,  I was trying to create an option from those stocks (100 stocks = 1 option) (for scale testing purposes)
• However, to create an option, I needed a valid combination of symbol, expiration date, and strike price (so that web service lookups against the market would return valid data)

The lookup of what is valid is something like SELECT TOP 1 EXPIRATION, STRIKEPRICE from <stuff we already know about> where SYMBOL=@symbol

The cross apply becomes something like this:

INSERT INTO (new thing) 
SELECT (bunch of old things from S, LOOKUP.EXPIRATION, LOOKUP.STRIKEPRICE) 
FROM inventory of stock S
CROSS APPLY (  select top 1 ... ) AS LOOKUP

I had to reformat my W7 box at home

Something went haywire, and the computer would freeze every time a video played on a web page.  Even ads.  I tried all kinds of stuff around uninstalling and reinstalling drivers…  SAFE mode worked ok, but coming out of safe mode = kaboom.

So I decided to restore my machine to a previous known good version, thanks to Windows Home Server.

But I forgot that my machine had a RealTek integrated network adaptor, which the WHS restore CD doesn’t know about.. so no connection for restore!   I tried looking for the drivers CD, couldn’t find it in 5 minutes

So I reinstalled Windows 7 from scratch.   And still no Network driver.   I had to go get the drivers on a different machine, and bring ’em over by sneakernet.   At this point, i was committed, so I continued the reformat.

I currently have a robocopy going from my WHS backup to my new working directory.  My incredibly awesome nomenclature is:   “c:\2013“.  That’s where I put my stuff.    If a project spans years, it gets copied from one year to the other.   One folder per project.

Life Balance

• Family Reunion Road Trip
• 2nd swim time with Father in Law.. I’m getting better at this treading water stuff.
• Not much running.. 5 miles here, 0.6 there, 2 more squeezed in
• Fourth of July = dogs went crazy while we were not home = broke through drywall to get out of basement and tear through the house
• Dryer motor getting repaired, thanks to a shoe.   And a dryer vent, thanks to a dog (it was next to the drywall above)
• Crazy dogs led to walking the dogs in the morning.  I am not a morning person.
• Today is door replacement day, thank you Lowes
• Back deck is done!  Thank you Steve Ader.  He does good work.
• 3 birthday parties … ages:  30, 33, 1.. and an upcoming 86.

Looking forward

• I’m hoping to get my Android + OBDII set back up again.  I want to see how much gasoline I’m spending over a 2D map.
• I could write about tracking down some performance problems in EF .. mostly around context.Attach() .. and how I replaced it with a single update statement.
• I could write about my current project, the “feel” of it, as it went from “we don’t trust the system” to “hey, this is working pretty good”.
• I need a different home backup solution.    If I upgrade one more hard drive, my WHS will be at reasonable-capacity, and honestly I just use it as a NAS.  I have a 1 year old off-site backup, which is not automated enough for me.    I have only used WHS’s restore the way it was meant ONCE – when my laptop got unstable, and i restored it to itself — and that was a beautiful thing — but once in 6 years?   Compared to 7 or 8 reformat’s (changing OS’s usually, or new owner for a machine)?   … contemplation is needed.

peace out.