Change is good

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So, for the “fun” of it, I added some dns names to my home network (namely the cablemodem and the router).  Now, it’s not like I really NEEDED to do so. The honest truth is IPv4 network addresses are rather simple to remember. So, I could just type in the IPv4 address of the device I want to reference and do fine.

So why bother?

Well, a former colleague of mine convinced me that it was time to change.  You see, IPv6 is coming.  I won’t bore anyone with the details, but let’s just say that I’m not about to try to remember the IPv6 addresses of any of my devices.  At first, the Luddite in me rebelled at the idea that I could no longer just refer to devices by IP address.  I attempted a few feeble attempts at arguments (hey, it’s easy to remember the IP address of some public DNS servers for example, and that’s one of the few times in an IPv4 network it really helps to have memorized some IP addresses.)

But the truth is, over time, I saw his point.  IPv4 was the old way.  IPv6, for a variety of reasons is the future.  My desire to be able to say I could remember the IPv4 address of my router was simply stubbornness.  The truth is, there really isn’t any real benefit to it.  The fact that I could (and did) reference my network printers by IP address wasn’t really helpful.  In fact, it meant that when I wanted to move it to a different address, I had to go to individual machines and make changes.  Now, I had  a small network, and only changed the printer address once in the past 5 years.  So it wasn’t a huge burden.

But now that I’ve moved to using hostnames, even for stuff I used to use IP addresses for, my limited memory can be used for more useful things.  And when I do reconfigure my network (say add another printer, or expand it in other ways) a simple DNS change and I’m all done.  I don’t have to go from machine to machine to make changes.

So, the moral of the story is, just because IPv4 made something EASY to do, it didn’t make it the right thing to do. IPv6 forced me to reconsider my thinking and in the end change for the better.

Sometimes, being forced to change can make you a better person.

SQL Server User Group

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Not much of a post tonight.  I didn’t realize it had been over two months since I last posted.  I’m sure all my faithful readers (all 1 or 2 of them?) have been holding their breath.

Anyway, tonight went to the local SQL Server Users Group meeting.  They had a remote demonstration on query tuning, one of my favorite topics.

In fact performance tuning in general has been a topic I’ve often enjoyed.

First rule: There is always a performance bottleneck.  This is one of the first rules I recall reading.  At first people object, “but the system is fast enough.”  That may be true.  BUT, there is still limiting it from being better.  Of course you might not be able to fix that limit.  But more importantly, it may not matter.

Second rule: It may not matter.  If your query is already running in subsecond times, it may not be worth spending any time on optimizing it any further.  Or, if your query takes 1 hour to run, but runs at night when nothing else is running, it may not matter.

Third rule: Optimize only what you need to.  A classic example of this I’ve seen is finding reports that run overnight and slow down other processes.  You start to optimize it and then think to ask, “is anyone still using this report?”  You find out the report is no longer being used.  Now you can achieve the holy grail (and perhaps the only exception to rule 1): infinite optimization.  Delete the report and suddenly you have infinitely optimized it.

BTW, these rules don’t apply just to SQL Server.

Optimize your life and enjoy more of your time doing things you enjoy.

The Hunger Games

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I’ll admit it, I’m a sucker for “fantasy” worlds. I don’t necessarily mean fantasy in terms of fairies and elves and goblins, but in the sense of wholly created “worlds” that feel complete.  One of the first I recall reading was the Earth-Sea trilogy which took place on a planet very unlike our own.

Anyway, the latest series I’ve been sucked into, like many is “The Hunger Games”.  For those of you who live under a rock and have missed all the hoopla, it is set in a future dystopia where “Districts” are required to send a male and female “tribute” to the “Capitol” to participate in gladiatorial combat to the death.  The opening scenes remind me much of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”

In any case, at a couple of points, the story’s hero, Katniss Everden is told by her drunken mentor, Haymitch Abernathy, “Stay Alive”.  On the face of this, when heading into near certain death, this advice from a drunk seems rather pointless.  After all, isn’t everyone in the “Games” trying to Stay Alive?  She at first dismisses him as a drunken fool.

However, as time goes on, despite not being able to communicate directly with him, she starts to understand him better.

And while never fully stated, I believe she finally realizes his advice wasn’t nearly as obvious as it sounds.  It is rather more like a Zen Koan.  By staying alive, she’ll live.

The first time she applies this lesson, without fully realizing it, is right when the games begin.  Unlike many of the tributes who go for the cache of items the Gameskeepers provide at the start of the game, she grabs one or two items and flees for the woods, barely staying alive in the process.  However, she learns that night that 11 of the 24 people who started the game died in the initial moments, most of them trying to grab items from the cache.  They had failed to stay alive.  More importantly, they had failed to follow the advice of “Stay Alive”.  Rather, while planning for the future (“If I can get these weapons now, I can use them later on”) they failed to take into account the present.  In the present there were 23 other tributes intent on killing them.

Soon Katniss realizes that by focusing on “staying alive” she can actually win the games.  She makes some mistakes, but also does many things right.  Once she’s assured that she can stay alive, only then does the actually go on the offensive.  As a result she at the end, she is still alive.

Ultimately, I realized this similar to the point I often try to drill into people when I say, “fly the plane”.  This reflects lessons learned by the NTSB and others that there are airplane crashes that result as a result of the pilot failing to do the most important job, flying the plane.  They may get distracted, or worse focused on the wrong issue and and end up flying the plane into the ground.

If you don’t believe me, think back to your early days as a driver and how you might have been easily distracted adjusting the radio, or picking up something off the floor.  If you’re like most drivers, you probably had a few near misses where the distraction from driving almost caused an accident, or worse, did cause an accident.

In my most memorable incident, I was in a vehicle with my father, approaching a merge and was trying to downshift.  I was still intent on learning to drive stick and this truck was a bit tricky at times.  But I was determined to properly downshift.  So determined in fact that I ignored the big red hexagonal sign with the bright white letters instructing me as to what I really should have been doing.  I also ignored (well honestly I think I may have snapped at least one reply) my father’s increasing admonishment to do as that sign instructed lest something bad happened.

I can’t recall if I successfully downshifted or not, but I do know that once I returned to the actual task at hand, DRIVING, I was about 40′ beyond said sign and was lucky I hadn’t been hit by a car from the other leg of the merge.  I had been distracted by something that I thought was very important, “downshifting and not stalling out” and missed the real goal at the time, STOPPING.  Or in other words, staying alive.  Sure, downshifting and not stalling out was an admirable goal.  And had the “stopping” part been successfully managed, the proper goal to focus on.  But the “stopping” part really trumped all else.

 

So: Stay Alive first and then focus on winning

 

 

 

My First Science Experiment

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I was thinking the other day about my first science “experiment”.

I was probably 4 years old at the time.  And I wanted to know if the TV basically did, what I now know would be referred to as “caching”.  Specifically, I wanted to know if I turned off the TV and turned it on fast enough if somehow the TV would “remember” the second or two of the episode that was aired while it was off and somehow play it back when the TV was turned back on.

I still remember the process.  It was obvious to me that the TV wasn’t going to remember very much (simple experience showed me that since I obviously couldn’t watch a show that was on an hour previous).  But, I figured if it was quick enough, perhaps somehow it was stored in the TV.

The problem though, was “how to tell?”  So I had to set up some conditions.  Basically it came down to watching enough TV to be able to guess what the next word would be in the sentence the actor or presenter was saying.

So once I determined how to do the experiment, I proceeded to sit in front of the TV and wait for a line of dialog where I figured I could safely guess the next word or two.  Then I’d flip the TV off and on.  I also tried changing the channel to see if that would affect things.

After a few tries, I was pretty much convinced that the TV wasn’t capable of caching anything.  I never could be sure though since I realized my guesses might be wrong.  But, my confidence was high enough that I concluded that when the TV was off, anything transmitted to me was lost.

So, at age 4 or so, I had somehow already figured out the scientific method and was engaging in science experiments.

That though has pretty much defined my life.  I have to remind folks, I received my BS from the School of Science at RPI, not the School of Engineering.

Scientist: It’s the way I roll.

 

White Ford Taurus

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So, listening to the 24 hours of SQL Pass webinars. The current topic is “I Was Young and Didn’t Know Any Better” and the panelists are sharing war stories of mistakes they’ve made.

So far they all sound familiar.  So I thought I’d share one of mine.  Well technically not my mistake, but one that I adopted.

Many moons ago, I was advising a company that was involved in building websites for car dealerships.  One day they needed to do an update to the live data.  This was back in the days when all code and updates were cowboy updates.  Of course you ran the query on the live database the first time. You didn’t necessarily have a stating database or even as was later discovered, good backups.

Apparently a customer needed to update a car in their inventory.

UPDATE AUTO set cartype=’White Ford Taurus’

Nice, syntactically valid… and a disaster.  Ayup.  Suddenly every car in the database at every dealership was now a White Ford Taurus.

Ever since then we called that the “White Ford Taurus” problem.

Now, I might mock doing updates on live data, but sometimes its necessary.  I’m curious how others prevent their own “White Ford Taurus” problems.

Personally, I just now make EXTRA effort to make sure I have a WHERE clause.

But I also tend to almost always do it as:

BEGIN TRAN
UPDATE AUTO set cartype=’White Ford Taurus’
if @@rowcount<> 1 rollback tran else commit tran

Or sometimes I’ll simply hardcode the rollback tran, run it once, see what happens and then rerun it with a commit tran.

So, if rather than updating the 1 row I want, I find myself updating 1000s of rows, I’ll catch myself and be safe.

Sure, it’s not perfect, both it and using the WHERE clause require me to make sure I don’t forget them.  But the more ways to catch it, the better.

Obviously avoiding ad-hoc updates on live data is preferable, but when you can’t, be extra careful.  And of course make sure you have good backups. But that goes without saying.

 

 

Processes

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It’s funny.  In my personal life, I’m a pretty casual person.  I don’t generally create grocery lists.  I don’t write detailed lists of things I need to get done.

That said I’m a HUGE fan of “process” when performing tasks that absolutely have to be done in a specific manner.  In my old job, I often had to do complex updates on web and databases servers with zero downtime.  In some cases, this is like replacing the engines on a 747 while it’s in flight. In cases like that I or my staff would create what we called a “CRP – Change Review Plan”. (I wanted to call them Change Review Analysis Plan, but I decided I didn’t want to take CRAP from anyone.)

Anyway,  a book I would highly recommend is The Checklist Manifesto. This delves into this concept far more than I can here.

However, one thing I learned years ago was when too much process actually can make things worse. There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, of an incident during the servicing of the space shuttle many years ago.  In the VAB while it was being rotated from the horizontal position to the vertical for attachment to the ET, a loud klunk was heard from inside the engine compartment.  Now, one doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that a loud klunk is probably NOT supposed to happen during this procedure.

So, what had happened?  Had a procedure been violated?  Well, in reality yes.  On paper no.  In order to provide quality control, almost anything NASA touched when it was servicing a shuttle would get signed off on by at least one if not multiple people.  Supposedly there was a checklist that at least 5 people signed off on to ensure that all tools had been removed from the engine compartment.  Sure enough, that list had 5 signatures on it.  However, the tool, I believe a wrench, now sitting at the aft end of the shuttle proved otherwise.

More recently (like tonight) I was reminded of this as I sat in on a meeting. The meeting was at a local college student club and the purpose was to discuss the fact that some unauthorized people may have gained access to an area they were not allowed access to.  There was some good discussion of what had occurred and how to avoid it in the future.

At one point someone suggested, “How about a video cam or something so the folks sitting at the desk can check to make sure the room really is empty?”  That’s a nice high-tech solution. But it was honestly in search of a problem.  The real problem appears to be that the people at the desk weren’t doing their job properly in the first place: making sure doors are locked and checking proper IDs.  I pointed out, adding yet another task to their job description was unlikely to solve the root problem and was unlikely to have kept the unauthorized people out.

Ultimately, it looks like the approach the students will take is honestly, probably the simplest one: Asking to change the door lock so that the desk person isn’t responsible for locking it, but rather make it autolocking.  This way, when the last authorized person does leave, it is locked automatically.  No additional processes are required and in fact the existing ones are simplified and made more failsafe.  The door in question should now be locked when it should be, whether or not the desk person checks it as they are supposed to.

Sometimes, the simplest solutions really are the better ones.

 

 

Customer Service: “We aim to please.”

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So, I’m sitting on the train today, when one half of the couple behind me returned from using the lavatory and remarked to her partner, “Don’t use the bathroom on the left.”  Apparently the previous user had been polite enough to put the seat up.  But not polite enough to actually aim.

All I could think was how nice it would be if the train had QuiCR on-board.  Within seconds she, or even myself having overheard the situation could have reported the issue and a ticket created.  That ticket could then either be handled immediately upon arrival at the destination, or perhaps in the meantime an email sent to the conductor so he could have closed the lavatory for the reminder of the trip; thus preventing any other unfortunate patrons from being exposed to those conditions. 

Quick feedback means a QuiCR response and a QuiCR response means a higher level of customer satisfaction. Think about it.

 

 

 

QuiCR

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I’ve been toying with an idea for a few months.  Ok.  I’ve been working on actively making it come to fruition.  Now I can announce the idea I’ve been working on: QuiCR.

With QuiCR, companies of all sizes will be able to get instant feedback and responses from their customers. There’s 84 million cell phone users out there, and via QuiCR, companies can leverage them and turn them into instant secret shoppers, or get their feedback, or have them report on maintenance issues that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Check it out out.  We’re still very early in the process, but I’m excited.

 

Deep Survival

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I’m currently reading a book called “Deep Survival”.  It was recommend to me by a buddy from the NCRC.  For years I’ve been interested in disasters and accidents.  Not so much the gruesome details that some enjoy;  but rather what caused them and why some people survive.  Deep Survival is more about the latter.

Why is it a trained SEAL can drown on a river while an untrained woman can survive an airplane crash in the Amazon and make it out to civilization?

The author, Laurence Gonzales, goes into the psychology of survivors.  One weakness of course is he can’t interview or ask questions of those who didn’t survive.

That said, in one chapter, he talks about maps and our places in them.  He points out often when people are lost it’s because they’re too busy trying to make reality fit their map.  They’ll look at a lake on the map, not see it in reality and convince themselves that perhaps the lake has dried up.  Or that the peak they’re standing on is really “that one over there.”

It’s only when they accept their reality can they become unlost.

I have to agree with him.  I tell people I haven’t been lost in the woods (or any other place physically) since I was about 3.  I’ve simply been “mislocated” a few times.  Indeed, I once came off a peak in the Adirondaks and after hiking awhile looked around and realized I had no idea where I was.  I didn’t consider myself lost, simply mislocated.  A little map reading later and some orienteering and 30 minutes later I ended up in the correct parking lot.

So a lot of it comes down to “attitude”.  You may not be where you want to be, but if you have the right attitude, you’re not lost.  You’re simply someplace other than you expected to be.  In August when I lost my job, I wasn’t lost. I was simply someplace other than where I expected to be.

While it was a bit scary (I was the sole breadwinner for the family) it was also a relief.  I no longer had the weekly commute from Troy to Virginia.  I could do other things.  I finally had lots of extra time on my calendar. Ok sure, the lack of income was a bit of an issue, but by focusing on the other factors, it really wasn’t so bad.

About two months later I was on a train when inspiration for a new business struck me.  Yesterday I filed the paperwork in the state of New York to form QuiCR LLC.  Under lawyer’s orders I can’t tell you what it is yet.  But stay tuned, over the coming months I will.

Only by letting go of my map, and accepting reality, could I end up where I am now.  It’s still a bit scary, but it’s also very exciting.

Think in Russian

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In the classic Cold War thriller, Firefox, Vietnam veteran Mitchell Gant has to steal the top-secret Soviet Union, titular plane.  Among its advanced features is that the systems are controlled by thought.  But only if he thinks in Russian.  This becomes a key plot factor in the climax of the film.

In my last post ; I remarked how many bad solutions I had found to sorting a SQLDataconnection Gridview.  Well I’m happy to say I solved my problem last night. (And as an aside, I will not be posting the solution at this time because while the solution itself is decent, I’m not sure the code is the best.)  Part of my solution was solved by “thinking in Russian”.

As I had mentioned, some of the so-called solutions to this problem that I had found on-line were pretty bad.  In one case the author apparently decided the easiest solution was to decipher the viewstate, extract out the information, sort it and stuff it back into the viewstate.  Now, as I’m writing this, I realize one advantage this has is that it removes a roundtrip from the web server to the database server.  But that’s about it.

I also saw a solution that involved passing the column name back to the code-behind and having that decide which of multiple stored procs to call.  I can’t say I favored this approach since it basically means a lot more maintenance if you ever say want to add a column to your Gridview (which turns out I decided afterwards I may want to do.)

Even worse, I’ve seen people propose things like building the select string on the fly and I can’t even begin to say how bad of an idea that is.

That said, the more I thought about it, the more I realized what the “right” solution was.  Rather than fighting the system, I had to think like the system.

So, after a side trip down to trying to use SqlDataAdapter, I went back to my first approach of using a SqlDataReader.  However, based on one example I saw, I decided to move this to a function of its own.  This, if nothing else resulted in cleaner code (since I was already calling the SQLDataReader in two places (see Rule of Three).  Once I did this, it was a little matter of figuring out how to bind the SqlDataReader to a Datatable and returning that.

Then I could bind the datatable directly to the GridView if I wanted to (which I do on the original Page_Load and Click_Submit OR I  could in the _Sorting event bind it to a local Datatable, sort that and then bind the resulting sorted Datatable to my Gridview.

Worked like a charm.  Well except for one little detail.  And this one I’m still not sure if it is a MSFT bug that lives on for backwards compatibility or I and MANY other developers are doing something wrong, but the GirdView incorrectly will always return “descending” for its sort direction.

So in this case the common (still not convinced it’s the RIGHT or BEST solution) is to stuff a variable in the Viewstate and read that back every time sorting is called and reverse it as needed.

Once I did that, I had working code that could sort my Gridview on the selected column that was clean, easily reproducible and made sense.

I’ve found with my forays into .NET Framework and VB programming that if my initial approach appears overly complicated or just plan wrong, it probably is.  So far in pretty much all cases, I’ve found that if I stop and try to “think in Russian” the solution will appear to me and is generally fairly straightforward and looks right.

Years ago when I studied Latin, I reached the point where I could read Latin natively.  I loved it. But part of the switch is being able to think in the structure of the language.  Not all languages use “SVO” (Subject-Verb-Object) order like English.   Latin, “SOV” (Subject-Object-Verb) order uses.  It takes some getting used to. But once you accept it, things get easier.

So I can’t fly a Mach 6 stealth aircraft, nor do I speak Russian, but I’m starting to think in VB. (Or is that I’m in VB starting to think?)