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1. Humans shall make no law respecting an establishment of boundaries or prohibiting the free exercise therein, or abridging the freedom of access, or the right to peaceful assembly.
In other words:
The cat is entitled to go outside any time s/he wants.

Winter in Poland is cold - it is -20°C today and the rivers and lakes are frozen over. Hot food helps and was thus consumed. I hope I am wrong, but it appears to me that Polish cuisine consists of cabbage, cabbage, cabbage, potatoes and some meat. And large dill pickles. This is what lunch today suggested in any case: I had 3 different types of cabbage piled high onto my plate - red cabbage, cole-slow and sauerkraut - by a lovely little old lady in the local eatery who thought I lacked essential gasses.

A horse walks into a bar and orders a pint of ale, The barkeeper says: "You're in here quite often, do think you might be an alcoholic?", "I don't think I am", said the horse, and then vanishes out of existence. 

You see, the joke is about Descartes' philosophy of "I think, therefore I am, I am, therefore I think", but to explain this before the joke would be putting Descartes before the horse.

Bishop Berkeley espoused the school of thought called Idealism, which went along the lines of: "To be, is to be perceived". One fyne day he dreamt the following conundrum up: "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?" The implication is that if no one perceives the event, not only does the tree not make a sound, but the tree does not even exist.

This is, of course, a load of old rubbish. The good Bishop can't do me for defamation since he ceased being perceived in 1753. Had he lived in today's more cynical world, he may well have come up with more relevent thought-experiments to illustrate the philosophy of Idealism, thus:

 

A Collection of Coding Rules gathered over the years...

 

... without destroying the database. 

You can do it all in the shell:

  • Create a SQL script from the database to drop all the tables
  • Execute the SQL script against the database

mysql -u[pwd] -p[user] [dbname] -s -e 'show tables' | sed -e 's/^/drop table /' -e 's/$/;/' > dropalltables.sql
mysql -u[pwd] -p[user] [dbname] < dropalltables.sql

A quick and dirty way of stripping duplicate records out of a MySQL table!, if your table has no indexes or constraints:

Assuming the name of the offending table is customers:

CREATE TABLE customer_dedupe AS SELECT DISTINCT * FROM customers;
RENAME TABLE customers TO customers_dupe;
RENAME TABLE customers_dedupe TO customers;

Done!

But what if your original table had indexes?

The task of matching strings between heterogeneous systems, especially that of matching personal or company names or addresses, is not easy with SQL Server's limited set of built-in string SQL functions. Here is a C# CLR-Assembly (with source code) for SQL Server with some advanced string-handling functions that may help:

  • LTrim - like Oracle's LTRIM function.

  • InitCap - like Oracle's INITCAP function

  • FlattenCharSet - Replace western characters with diacritics with best-choice, non-diacritic characters

  • StripPunctuationMarks - Remove all punctiation marks from the given string.

 

Directly Burn DVD's from .avi files

Here is a quick and simple-to-use utility to convert an AVI file to the weird intermediate files and to then write them all to a DVD. It is called avi2dvd and is written in BASH-shell. It is unlikely to run on Windows.

More about it here at https://sourceforge.net/projects/avi2dvd

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