Randolph Yesterday I spent pretty much the entire day playing computer games, because I needed a break. M played as well (and kicked my ass in Starcraft on Friday night), and is showing quite an aggressive stance in Civilization IV.
At work I've been busy with automating massive reports, and just this week managed to change a 4 hour manual process into a 45 minute process. I wasn't happy with this, and after doing some reading one evening, managed to trim it down to 12 minutes. That's more like it.
At the moment, I'm reading "Visual C# 2005 Unleashed", and have some new ideas for my parser that I wrote last week. I think I might be able to make it process its 800MB of data even faster.
I read a good quote in this latest book, and only the geeks will appreciate it (source: Hoffman, K. 2006. Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Unleashed. SAMS Publishing, USA):
"It seems as though virtually every book on a programming language starts off with a program that prints the phrase 'Hello World' to the console. Rather than risk horrible karma and unknown repercussions from breaking with tradition, I am going to inflict my own version of 'Hello World' upon you."
12… I knew about the 45, but never heared for the 12. What was the text that inspired you so much?
It was a series of articles about derived tables. Since then, I've been given access to the SQL Server 2005 server, and that's running everything in a quarter of the time, so 12 minutes to 3!