I found a nice tip for selecting random rows from within a SQL Server 2000 database. Well actually, pseudorandom. Since my undergraduate thesis was on the topic of pseudorandom number generation, I might as well be precise. For some reason, my non-geek friends find it awfully funny when I mention pseudorandom numbers.

I found this scathing review on Slate of Michael Moore and his upcoming flick, Fahrenheit 9/11 I have yet to see the movie but plan to soon. It’s good to read a critical review to make sure I have a balanced view of the movie.

We recently saw Margaret Cho try out some new material in Claremont. I think she’s absolutely hilarious and poignant. Some say she relies way too much on her Korean mother, but having a Korean mother myself, I think she’s spot on with the impression.

Plug-ins are a powerful way for users to dynamically enhance the functionality of an installed application. Is there a high priority feature you want that is low priority for the developers? Perhaps you can write a plug-in.

Regarding Syntax Highlighting, Daniel Turini pointed out that SnippetCompiler has the ability to export code to the clipboard (and to a file) as HTML.

I’m a huge soccer fan so I had a good laugh at this funny video.

I’ve probably read a hundred or so posts of people looking for a way to syntax highlight source code listings in HTML. Maybe I’m the last to discover this site, but http://www.manoli.net/csharpformat/ is the answer for me so far. Just cut and paste some C#, VB, html/xml/aspx code int the text box and click “format my code” and voila! You get some clean HTML displaying nicely formatted code.

You’ve probably heard the term Impedance Mismatch thrown around when discussing object relational mapping. I’m sure it comes up every morning at the water cooler. Maybe you’ve even thrown it around yoursef a few times. Do you know what the term means?

Quick! What is the definition of the word moot? I’ll use it in a sentence.

I’m right in the middle of reading this book right now and I can’t heap enough praise upon it. This is a worthwhile read.

We’ll be out enjoying the wilderness this weekend at Sequoia National Park. I once worked at a company with Sequoia in its name. This park is not owned by them.

UPDATE: I finally followed up with part 2, only 8 years later.

Wolfgang Puck could not be reached for comment.

Be aware that there is a PayPal scam going around. I received the following email which had a forged from address of “DoNotReply@PayPal.com”. There’s a reason they don’t want you to reply, because it exposes the scam. They’d rather have you run the attached program. DO NOT DO IT! This is a scam. It is easy to forge the headers of an email. It didn’t come from PayPal.

Test First Development, the process of writing unit tests to test the code you are about to write, is one of my favorite software practices that has an impact on producing better written code. However, it’s no a panacea. It is true that I use the debugger much less often because of TDD, but there are still occasions where it’s important to manually step through code line by line.

Typically when you spawn a new thread, you want to give it a name to facilitate debugging. For example:

This is one of the funniest tech support stories I’ve heard in a long time. Even you non-geeks can appreciate this…