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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:

 

Read more: If a tree falls in a forest...

AN OPEN LETTER TO GRETA THUNBERG by Jason D. Hill, professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His areas of specialization include ethics, social and political philosophy, American foreign policy and American politics. He is the author of several books, including “We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People” (Bombardier Books/Post Hill Press). 

You are not a moral leader. But I will tell you what you are, Greta Thunberg:

Read more: Greta Thunberg, Ecological Ballast

... 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?

Read more: How to Dedupe a table in MySQL

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.

Read more: String-Matching help for SQL Server

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

So, you downloaded a torrent expecting a nice AVI- or MPG-file for instant-action AV entertainment, and all you got was a big .bin file and a funny little .cue file? Here's the Linux-way of how to extract the content from them:

Read more: How to open .bin & .cue Files?

Yet another bespoke file format that unsuccessfully attempts to futher the agenda of vendor lock-in: If you are running Windows, you need to purchase PowerISO from poweriso.com , if you are running X86-based Linux flavour, the same people offer a free program to read and write .daa files. Go figure...

Read more: How to open .daa Files?

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