A dark, intense character study of a man who offsets many personal acts of valor and selflessness with a few acts of horrifying cruelty. Literal warfare as a metaphor for the main character’s inner turmoil. Big Philosophical Questions about good and evil, the ethics of interfering with less advanced civilizations, finding purpose in a post-scarcity society, and most interesting of all, what it means to be human in an era when machines do everything better than people, including the things we thought made us uniquely human.

Great stuff. I would have given it 5 stars if not for the twist ending. I have nothing against twist endings per se (in fact I love them when they’re well executed), but in this case I felt like it robbed me of a perception that I had spent 468 pages developing.

In any case, the scene with The Chair was the most unsettling thing I’ve ever read. It disturbs me even now.

Here are my ideas (which I’ll be cross-posting to the official crowdsourcing site):

• You currently utilize 100 different email systems for only 180,000 email accounts. Convert all of them to Gmail. Publicly ask Google, a corporate resident of California, to assist you with this.
• You currently operate 9,494 servers. To get an idea how excessive this is, consider that Facebook (which has orders of magnitude higher storage and processing demands than any government) currently operates about the same number of servers. Make your 130 department-level CIOs each produce a public online report that: (1) justifies each server; and (2) for each justified server, explain why it cannot be virtualized, put on a SAN or moved into a cloud for a fraction of the cost. I suspect you will find thousands of unnecessary servers.
• Implement a “Crowdsource Waiting Period” for new IT projects. The Statewide IT Capital Plan proposes the development of at least 25 web-based applications. Before awarding any of these projects to the usual gigantic IT vendors for the usual gigantic cost, require the Departments requesting these systems to post the functional requirements and a sample data set online and allow a 6-month period where any developer can submit a no-obligation prototype at their own cost. You will find that many of the systems you propose building from scratch can be developed at a fraction of the cost by building on top of existing platforms with existing tools. Some of these projects will still go to the giant IT vendors, but those are the ones which should.
• Any state government website that is merely informational or does not require transaction processing should be converted into a hosted blog (which can be operated for free at WordPress.com or Blogger for example) or to a Social Network group (which can be operated for free at Facebook or LinkedIn for example). Then you can get rid of some of your 400 web servers.

That should get you started.

It’s hard to argue that the The Princess & The Frog has been anything other than a disappointment at the box office. After more than 2 months of wide release, it has yet to cross the all-important $100 million mark (and because it fell a sharp 54% last week, there is a possibility that it may never cross it.) To put this in perspective, consider that the family movie released two weeks before it, A Chistmas Carol, pocketed $100 million in just 24 days and the family movie released two weeks after it, Alvin & The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, joined club 100 million after only 8 days. And even if PATF drags itself across $100 million with its last theatrical breath, its domestic gross won’t come close to recouping the $140 million the film cost Disney to produce and market.

Some people have argued that the Frog’s low numbers can be attributed to a bad release date. People who make this argument either don’t know or have forgotten that the first Chipmunks movie opened this same exact week in 2007 to a record $44 million.  Others have claimed that a “Princess” movie was a hard sell for boys. Are these the same experts who claimed that Pixar’s 2006 hit Cars was a tough sell for girls before it went on to gross $461 million worldwide? If this were a real issue, we would have seen it with the earlier Disney princess movies.

Whatever The Princess & The Frog lacked at the Box Office, it’s more than made up at the Mall. The merchandise is a smash hit.

According to the L.A. Times, Princess Tiana merchandise already accounts for 20% of “Disney Princess” merchandise sales, which works out to about $800 million a year. The Toy Industry Association has nominated Mattel’s Just One Kiss Princess Tiana doll as individual Toy of the Year and The Princess & The Frog brand as Toy Property of the Year. I just checked a few minutes ago and Princess Tiana dolls still held the No.1 and No.4 spots in Amazon.com’s doll category weeks after Christmas. Princess Tiana bedding is outselling perennial favorite The Little Mermaid 3-to-1 at major retailers. Are there any Chipmunks who can squeak that?
And just think, if PATF follows historical patterns, these fantastic merchandise numbers are merely an appetizer to enormous DVD sales that will go on for years.

So where does this leave us? To me the verdict is clear: America was more than ready for Princess Tiana, but Disney didn’t deliver the movie it wanted.

I’m just glad nobody mentioned race.

So that explains how I came to buy My One and Only Thrill, the latest album from jazz sensation Melody Gardot. Wow. Five Stars. No wonder it’s number one on iTunes for the genre. A focused collection of Gardot’s trademark ballads with a couple of bassa nova and blues tracks thrown in, it’s a must-have for anyone who appreciates silky, demure vocals on top of smooth string arrangements. My favorite track is the opening one, Baby I’m a Fool, followed by the sunny and wistful If this World Were Mine. One of the pleasant surprises about the album is that, unlike many jazz releases, it’s mostly composed of original tracks instead of remakes.

Where R&B ballads have loud vocals with long-held notes, jazz ballads win you over with low-key nuance. Gardot is simply a master at this art of understatement. Once you develop an ear for this style, it’s hard not to find her discography stunning.

On a personal note, Gardot still lives in Philly and once attended the Community College of Philadelphia. I used to work about two blocks from there. I wonder if I ever passed her on the street.  These days she’s too big a star to be found walking down Spring Garden Street, but if I did see her I would buy her a juicy cheesesteak for gracing the world with this brilliant album.

Don’t take my word. Watch the video for Baby I’m a Fool on YouTube.

In my old designs, for various reasons ranging my private nature to the dreadful chore of moderating spam comments, I intentionally left out a way to contact me and I did not allow comments. With the new design not only do I allow both, but I welcome people to interact with me on the social networks, something I’ve found to be a lot of fun even with the downsides. The new generation of WordPress anti-spam plugins went a long way to changing my mind too.

We’ll see how it goes.

One of the simple things I need to do all the time—everyday actually—is confirm that particular files have been refreshed with new data on schedule (and then take particular actions depending on the outcome of these checks.) This is ideal grunt work to automate with SSIS.

In order to get a file’s Last Modified Date with SSIS 2008, you need to do three things:

• 1. Create a package-scoped SSIS string variable to store the actual date that your target file was last modified. Let’s call that variable File_Updated_Actual.
• 2. Add a Script Task to your package with a ReadWrite variable called File_Updated_Actual (it must be spelled exactly as it is in Step 1).
• 3. Add the following code to the Main() method of your Script Task (obviously replacing \\YourServer\YourFolder\your_file_name.txt with the actual path to your file):

Basically this code uses the System.IO namespace built into Windows to retrieve the date the file was last modified, convert that date to a string and then store the string in a SSIS variable.

Once you have the last modified date stored in a SSIS variable, you can use it anywhere inside your package. Something I commonly do is compare the variable’s value to a target date (such as the date the file should’ve been refreshed). You can make such a comparison by changing the evaluation operation of any precedence constraint to “expression” and then adding a simple equality expression in C# language syntax (which is different than the VB/.NET syntax used above for the Script Task—yes I know, this is one of many idiosyncrasies that give SSIS such a steep learning curve).

I hope that helps somebody out there.

Still, those blank stares got me thinking about the widespread lack of understanding of BI both inside and outside the IT department. And since I disagree, mildly or strongly, with all of the current definitions of business intelligence that I’ve found on the web and in books, I’ve decided to put forth my own definition. To wit:

The Cato Definition of Business Intelligence

The use of information technology to strategically collect, store, transform and deploy an enterprise’s data. A principal goal of business intelligence is to derive knowledge from information in a way that will facilitate improved decision-making. The creation and use of an Enterprise Data Warehouse is a common method of carrying out a business intelligence strategy.

Have a good day.

Here are some techniques I’ve learned over the years to deal with them.

Open your source file in a text editor (or its native environment), find the column causing the error and then place a single quote in front of the first numeric value in that column. This will force MS Access to view the entire column as text, even if it contains some numeric values. If you need to perform numeric calculations on that column once it’s successfully imported into Access, just open the table in Design View and manually change the data type back to a numeric type.

If your source data is a Microsoft Excel file, always bring it in with the Import Text Wizard in Access instead of its Import Spreadsheet Wizard. The reason is that the Text Wizard permits you to change the data type of any column before importing it, but the Spreadsheet Wizard does not. Simply save your Excel file as a CSV file first.

If you import Excel files into Access on a regular basis, it would behoove you to change the value of the following Windows Registry setting to 0 (zero), which will permanently force Access to guess each Column’s data type based on all of its values in instead of just the first 8 or 10:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Jet\4.0\Engines\Excel]
"TypeGuessRows"=dword:00000000

(Disclaimer: Only modify your Windows Registry settings if you understand what you are doing and have a backup copy.)

If you try to import a file programmatically with VBA and get a type conversion import error, open your source file in a text editor, add a new row at the top of the file, and then enter “Jamel Cato” as the value in each field causing the errors. Then try it again.

If you’re using the DoCmd.TextTransfer method to import a CSV file and Access is skipping or rounding your values after the import, then try adding this line just above the line where you call TextTransfer:

 [YourSourceFile.txt].[YourColumn].numberformat = "@"

If your source file has a field with may contain a value with more the 255 characters, change the Access data type to Memo.

If the problem field contains monetary values (such as dollars), try changing the data type to integer or double.

If you have a particular format or layout that you expect to import frequently, save your Import settings as an MS Access import specification which you can use over an over again. The easiest way to create one is to click the Advanced Button, then Save As while using the import wizard.

If you will be importing a very complex source file, or you need to tweak the import settings of certain fields in ways not possible with the Import Wizard, then create a schema.ini file in the same directory as the source file you will be importing. You can Google the specifics, but in a nutshell a schema.ini file is a text file where you can hard code every possible Access import setting. This works best with delimited source files.

If your source file has dates in short format (such as 15-Nov-2008), but Access always brings it in long format (11/15/2008 0:00:00), then just create a query with a calculated field that formats the date the way you want. For example:

ExpDate: Format([YourDateField], "Short Date")

If your source data is a text file that Access refuses to import, then try using Access to make an ODBC connection to the file. You can do this by creating a new data source in Windows and selecting “Microsoft Text Driver” as the ODBC driver.

If you try all of the above and still get import errors, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that your source data is probably corrupt. The good news is that in the process of discovering this you expanded your skills so much that you could probably get a job as a Microsoft Access Developer.