The mysteries of Microsoft Access: Built-In Functions

I rag on Microsoft all the time, but my dark secret is I'm a power-user of many of their products. Only a true geek can know the darkness at the heart of Microsoft software.

The darkness varies. Word is bad to the bone. Outlook is a complex mix of hacks and insights, kludges and cleverness, a slouching beast with thwarted aspirations to nobility. Excel has kept its pure Mac heart in the company of demons. PowerPoint is simply dumb. And then there's Microsoft Access ....

Access is the most complex of all, a broken veteran of too many wars, too many gunfights, too many shady deals, too many dark betrayals ... and yet ...

Access can still do yeoman's work. If you learn its twisted paths, where to go and where to fear, it can chew through gigabytes of data, transforming strings, exposing relationships ... There's a fierce engine behind a tinsel town facade. It is also very strangely documented -- not the least because it's a house of cards and mirrors built upon a half-dozen dead "strategic" technologies. There are vast amounts of information buried in the peculiar not-quite standard help files, but it's all piecemeal. The web resources are often little better.

Take Access Built-In Functions for example. You can write some very fast and powerful tranformations of text strings using these, none of my 3 books on Microsoft Access discuss them in any detail. A web search turns up a few references, but nothing definitive. Microsoft's site has almost nothing.

Almost, but not quite nothing. Here, at long last, is the Alphabetic List of Microsoft Access 2003 Build-in Functions. Here's the list by category. Here's a discussion in the context of expressions.

BlogJet 2 - don't upgrade yet

BlogJet 2 is now available with some nice improvements on the prior version:

Post Management and Searching

BlogJet now stores your posts in the cache, so you can access thousands of your posts in a blink of an eye (even with no connection). Finding posts is now easier because of the instant search, which shows results as you type.

Alas, it's NOT ready. I upgraded based on past experience and it through an access violation within minutes of my using it. That's bad coding.

I'd give it another 2-3 months before upgrading.

Update 3/21/07: The latest release is 2.0.0.9 and it didn't work with Blogger correctly a few weeks ago. I'm going to try Microsoft Live Writer for a while.

The new blogger: One HUGE fix

It's been a long time since I had anything kind to say about Google's blogger. It's been a long painful slog since Pyra sold out. One of the first things Google did was make the blog title a part of a post URL, so editing a title typo broke links. It was downhill from there.

Into this dark morass shines a wee bit of light. The new blogger editor search works. What? You thought it worked before? Wrong. The old search was "phrase search" only, so "paradox fermi" would not find "fermi paradox". The new search is, at a minimum, implied-boolean word search -- it may be even smarter than that. Hallelujah.

I love the tags of course, and I'll be making extensive use of them to tie posts together. I'll also be gradually migrating to the new template editor.

Gosh, it's good to have something nice to say about blogger. Maybe Google will even fix the URLs one day.

The secret and tortuous path to submitting a blogger bug report

Google makes it almost impossible to submit a bug report. This page tries to help:

The Real Blogger Status: It's Called Blogger Support - Not Blogger Mindreaders

In my case they lost one of my 15 blogs when I migrated from Blogger old to Blogger new. I did something wrong, there was a bug in the old blogger, and the conversion makes it impossible to correct either bug. Getting help from Google/Blogger is a matter of tricking the bot into moving the request up the ladder. It's not easy ...

Bose QuietComfort 2 Noise Cancelling Headphones - product defect is causing sidearms to crack

I was a wee bit surprised tonight to see that a chunk of plastic had fallen off one arm of my Bose QuietComfort 2 Noise Cancelling Headphones - Headphones and Headsets. On closer inspection there are cracks along both sides of the headphone arms.

Turns out this is a manufacturing defect. Bose will send me a new set (though I’ll be paying shipping one way). Annoying, since I’ll miss ‘em.

If you know someone with a pair, suggest they look for significant cracks.

Update 2/22/07: Bose sent me a new kit, it took about 2-3 weeks for the exchange. I'm glad to have them back, and pleased with Bose service. I wonder if Minnesota weather might have played a role in their demise; I'll avoid freeze-thaw cycles in the future. Since Bose did well with this one, I'm going to look at buying their new earbud headset ...

My iPod shuffle impressions: the cradle from heck

Last year I modified a first generation iPod Shuffle for my mother. I've been pleased by how it worked. This year, a $50 Apple settlement check burned through my pocket and I bought myself a 2nd generation shuffle. Alas, I missed the new ones by a day, so I got the crummy old ear buds.

As usual, I'll update this review as I work with it. Comments:

• lovely packaging
• I hate the cradle. It's another stupid proprietary connector to clutter my desktop. The device is too small for a full iPod connector, but Apple could have put a mini-B USB connector in it. That would have been a compassionate act of great good karma, but instead Apple stuck us. It's enough to make me think fondly of Vista.
• Did I mention I despise the cradle? There's no audio out. The only thing worse than sticking me with YAC (yet another cradle/connector) is omitting the audio out. So you can't charge and play.
• nice decals
• I failed the IQ test. I assume that's what the cryptic directions are. "Red dot: on while any button is pressed when hold is off".
• It plays music.
• It mounts on my desktop so I can, in theory, use it as a thumb drive. If I carried the stupid cradle.
• Miserable cradle.
  

Using Amazon S3 and Jungle Disk to backup an Aperture vault

Backing Up Aperture With Amazon’s S3 - O'Reilly Digital Media Blog. 10Gb one time upload and store would be about $20/year, so use as an image library backup would realistically cost $20-$50 a year. Competitive!