Hey Jer,

If you are sick of being a programmer and are looking for a new job, I think I've found the perfect one for you.  The Nationals are hiring for their on field T-shirt throwing, hot dog shooting, all singing, all dancing crew.  Send your resume along.  http://washington.nationals.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/mlb/help/jobs.jsp?c_id=was  Seriously though, you totally have enough on your resume for it, all you need to do is walk into the interview and say "I was Shamu..."  then rub your stomach like you are hungry and you are totally in.  Maybe you could even replace their Furby looking mascot guy in the eagle screech suit.

So Doug 2 and I went to the National's game last night against the Phillies and we sat right beside the Nat's BULLpen.  A few days ago they called up the 6'11" Jon Rauch, and I saw him pitch on TV.  But it wasn't until we were at the game and I saw him in the dugout that I realized just how much he looks like Bull.  These two could easily be long lost brothers.  Just check out the comparison photo below (sorry for lack of photoshopping on this one, don't have time).  I mean, Rauch is just Bull plus 5 inches... heh heh heh...

So I'm enough of a manager now that I don't get to code often. Blah blah blah. I don't like it but that's the way it works for now. When I do get a chance to write some code I'd like to make the most of it. So I've got a problem where I'm parsing XML reports and then inserting a subset of the data into a SQL table for record keeping and the like. The insert appears to be approximately 1223 records of which there are only 372 distinct pages. Rather than have non-unique URLs in the table I figured I'd get rid of the dupes on insert with a trigger. That works great. I don't know about the efficiency, but at least I can still write a trigger.

Now what I'd like to do is have the trigger update a count field in the table in addition to preventing the duplicate item from inserting. This is where my trigger fails. The trigger is syntactically valid and when inserting the 1223 records, only the 372 unique URLs are actually inserted. However, the count column is not being incremented. Has anyone ever tried to do this or know for a fact that it's not allowed?

Here's the SQL:
CREATE TRIGGER DistinctURL_Insert ON dbo.T_PolicyURL
FOR INSERT
AS

DECLARE @TheURL VARCHAR(255)

IF (SELECT COUNT(*)  FROM T_PolicyURL p, INSERTED i WHERE p.URL = i.URL) > 1

BEGIN
 SELECT @TheURL = URL FROM INSERTED
 ROLLBACK TRANSACTION
 UPDATE T_PolicyURL SET FormCount = FormCount + 1 WHERE URL = @TheURL
END

In the digital age, new albums often "leak" onto the internet about 1 month before they're released.  This typically happens when a journalists burns his/her promo CD and releases it to a file share network or mp3 website.  simplemp3s.com is a good example of a site that always has stuff weeks before its due out.  Since leaking is becoming so common, I've often wondered why music companies don't watermark their files.  They only release a limited number of promo copies, so it seems it would be easy enough to run the album through a few filters prior to each burn that would give each track a "signature."  It would have to be audible, since various file formats remove high/low frequencies, and it would have to be subtle enough not to ruin the song.  But once this is done, it would be simple enough to trace it back to the user they first shipped it to.

I'm not the only one with this idea, it seems, as Sony has finally gotten their act together in time for the release of Oasis's new album, Don't Believe The Truth.  Good news for artists, bad news for me -- but way past due.

In another counter-piracy move, I remember that No Doubt released Rocksteady early with 30 second clips mixed into 3-4 minute songs to prevent pirating.  Instead, it prevented me from buying the album because I thought it was complete $&*#$.  And when John Bliss told me that he'd bought Rocksteady and it was great, I thought he was either insane or had very low standards.  It wasn't until their second single was released on the radio that I realized I'd been duped.

Disney just announced they're re-releasing The Blunchblack of Blotre Blame on DVD to coincide with the 50th anniversary of their animated masterpieces Blackula, Blackenstein and The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

So I just wrote a handy utility in C# that decrypts your Windows product key (serial number) and your Microsoft Office product key(s).  I haven't really found a good example of anyone else doing this, especially in C#.  Anyone think it's legal to redistribute this code?  I notice that this guy offers the exe as freeware but provides a link for donations.  He doesn't offer the source, of course, just the exe.  And his office key finder is actually incorrect since it doesn't take into account an office 2003 install on XP, it just gets the XP office serial.

Are there digital copyright issues involved here?  It's not like this is a key generator, which has no legal purpose.  I legitimately needed to recover my product key on my home PC before doing a reinstall since all I have is the disc.

So I'm going to buckle down and develop an RSS aggregator pretty soon to keep track of my friends' blogs.  So far, I plan to develop two web components.

The first piece will act as a personal launchpad and contain 5-10 of the most recent threads from each site.  This will be a private page that registered users can browse to if they want to keep up with someone else's blog.  I have a pretty good idea of how I'm going to do this one since it seems pretty straightforward.  Depending on what kind of mood I'm in, I may even add the ability to pick/choose your own blogs.

The other piece is "bloggings of the moment", which will appear in my righthand poll/ad space and contain a link to ~ 3 newe posts.  I want this piece to be pure text, not dependent on ASP or remote web feeds actually being online.  So to achieve this, I'm looking for some recommendations.

First of all, I need to write a collection engine, so that my links are not dependent on remote feeds being online.  If I were hosting Shiny D myself, I would make this a Windows service that updates a little .htm file or .txt file that I include in the template.  However, I do not host this site & do not have permission to deploy windows apps to my host.  I can only see 2 other so-so options for aggregation:

1. Asynchronous web requests
   Whenever a new page is loaded, I can call a little aggregation method in a new thread.  This will keep the links just slightly out of date but will look very sketchy if no one has been to Shiny D for 8 hours and I load up a page for the first time.  My second page request will look very different than the first.  FYI, this asynch approach is currently how the Shiny D XML feeds work, only my feed is build after a user makes a new post, not on every page load.
2. Application variable
   I can create a semi-permanent .NET application variable that includes a timer.  Every X minutes, the object will invoke an aggregation method and rebuild the .htm include file.  I think as long as I make my object serializable, this will work exactly as needed.

Another crazy thought is to throw some JISM (or is that AJAX?) into the mix.  My recent bloggings section could be completely blank & update every 15 seconds with new headlines/links (if needed).  I'd appreciate any feedback or suggestions!

So what do you think "woot" stands for?  I always thought it was "a jubilant expression of joy," like "woo hoo" or "hooray."

Acronym Finder lists 5 definitions.  Oddly enough, the one that I thought was MOST common ("We Own the other team") is the one they list as "less common" :

WOOT - Want One of Those
WOOT - Waste of Our Time
WOOT - Way Out of Topic (online forums)
WOOT - We Owned the Other Team (gaming term; less common)
WOOT - Wonderful Loot (Everquest gaming slang; also seen as W00T)

http://www.acronymfinder.com/af-query.asp?String=exact&Acronym=woot

Microsoft's computer slang reference backs up my "other team" definition.  However, UrbanDictionary.com has 48 definitions, many of which go with my first thought: it's something nerds say when they're excited.  I'm thinking that even if w00t did originally mean something weird in haxor, it has become equivalent to "yay!"

FYI, pictures from our wonderful honeymoon to Fiji are available at http://www.negrelli.org/!  Highlights include a coconut tree climbing contest, Easter Sunday at a Fijian church, native dances & lots more coconut-related activities.

Google is causing quite a stir with its rich javascript/XML over HTTP apps.  These have become so popular, in fact, that a new term has been coined ("AJAX") to describe the methodology.  This has led to a great deal of debate as to where/when this technology was FIRST used, mostly from Microsoft employees bitching that the MSDN deep nav isn't getting the street cred it deserves as the pioneer of the technology.

I think "AJAX" rocks, though I cringe when I hear the acronym, but I'm annoyed that this is another Microsoft "innovation" that was simply thrust into our faces by IE.  Since it used this proprietary approach, MSDN's nav didn't even work in Firefox for a time.  Similarly, the Shiny Donkey voting system got lots of flak from annoyed Firefox users.

As far as I know, the W3C hasn't even accepted this as a standard yet, but it seems its here to stay.

A post on "AJAX" that caused quite a stir:
http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php

An MSDN blog post complaining about the naming convention:
http://blogs.msdn.com/dareobasanjo/archive/2005/03/22/400372.aspx