by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/11/06 10:06 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/11/06/5936141.aspx
Sometimes the problem is understanding -- the more one knows, the more cynical one becomes.
Last night was one of those odd music nights.
Somewhere between Real Bad News and Deathly and It's Not and Wise Up and Invisible Ink and Stupid Thing, all good music but a bit more depressing than I needed, I realized that I need something a little different.
So I tried Celine Dion instead. Only in French, which to be honest is the only way I can stand listening to her for some reason (I don't speak French,l there is just something very soothing to me about a woman's voice singing in a language I don't know....
Maybe it is the lack of understanding that helps? This is music that feels pretty trite and uninteresting to me when I can understand it (which also induces cynicism for me), so perhaps I need to stop understanding so much!
I'll try the theory with Michele Greene -- Ojo de Tiburon. I don't understand this music either, and it works. Maybe it really does help.
Ok, I'll try that. Stop understanding a bit.
I should probably answer a question now. Let's see if the same lesson can be learned in technology....
Well there is one that Yuhong Bao has been asking rather insistently, like here and via the Contact link and so on:
What is the status of collation support in Access 2007?
That one's easy -- the same as every prior 32-bit version with that Windows 2000 post-Beta 1, pre-Beta 2 snapshot that the blog post Extending collation support in SQL Server and Jet, Part 0 (HISTORY) talks about.
No change yet, even in the latest version (Access 2007).
Though they did add support for complex data. From GPM Erik:
The primary feature we added to the new Access engine is support for “complex data”. Complex data really isn’t so complex – it is simply a join in relational terms, or a repeating region in XML terms. What it brings to Access is full schema compatibility with Windows SharePoint Services lists. This allows us to take SharePoint list data offline and to provide rich-client UI for SharePoint using Access.
In the application, complex data usually shows up as the ability to select more than one value for a field. For example, imagine an Issues list with a column for “Assigned to:”. In a single table you could only assign an issue to one person, and Access would provide a simple bound drop down list of people to Assign to. With Complex data, you can (still looking at a single table) assign the issue to several people at the same time, and Access provides a drop down check list with the ability to select several people. This works just the same way as it does in SharePoint.
Behind the scenes, Access does just the same thing a developer would when building the same functionality. We create a table for the join information and create a many-to-many join (in this example between issues and people). The Access database is fully normalized, and there’s no string manipulation monkey business or anything untoward going on – its just vanilla relational joins. However, from the end-user’s point of view, it is far simpler than building the tables and setting up the relationships herself. And since SharePoint doesn’t support joins, it maps directly with the SharePoint way of doing the same thing.
Back when I was there we called such things queries. :-)
I'll try again to argue language support enhancements for the next version, but in the meantime that workaround still works any time your OS supports the languages/scripts/characters you want.
For the life of me, I can't understand the tradeoffs here -- I am left dizzy trying to pin them down.
I'm telling you, the problem really is understanding, sometimes. It makes a person cynical....
So what's the fastest way to un-know stuff? Or to find some more innocent, less cynicism-inducing knowledge? :-)
This post brought to you by ख (U+0916, a.k.a. DEVANAGARI LETTER KHA)
Yuhong Bao on 18 Nov 2007 12:44 AM:
BTW, the open source equlevent to this is capturing a SVN snapshot of a library and then using it in a released program.
Marc Brooks on 21 Jan 2008 1:04 AM:
RE: needing really soothing female voice, Celine Dion is a miss. A HIT would be Karin Bergquist of Over The Rhine. Trust me on this one, you won't fine a female whose voice is as instrumental as hers (pun most definately intended).
Michael S. Kaplan on 21 Jan 2008 1:12 AM:
Celine works for me, when it is French -- but not English.
I had an ex-girlfriend I stayed friends with for a bit after who (after she broke up with someone else) was playing Ms. Dion's "Seduces Me" on repeat, semi-continuously. It did not take me long to associate the song not only with the singer (who I don't care too much for in English anyway) but with this guy who kind of screwed her over -- so it was double secret Celine hatred!