MS Access is fantastic as a stand-alone reporting tool, and even decent as a front-end GUI for a MySQL back-end (Access has been very good to me and my odd-shaped career), but it was never designed to run as a server. Also, Microsoft really, really hates it when you do it anyway. After searching for alternatives to the previously mentioned heresy, I noticed that if the commercial Reporting product required Java, it was a proprietary fork of Jasper Reports. Ultimately, we ended up rolling our own with node, a smattering of npm modules and a whole lot of pounding forehead to keyboard. The WordprocessingML spec is definitely taking up far too much real estate in my brain that could be otherwise used for more worthwhile things like cat videos and dread puns.

You are right, Musk is a workhorse and his success is astonishing. And if you choose to, you can work as hard as he does. But here is the problem... If you put in the time and somehow manage to deliver that widget for him by the deadline, you will get a pat on the back (not from Elon, your manager maybe) and a gift card. And then you get a new unrealistic deadline. Then, Musk's net worth balloons by a billion dollars. No matter how hard you work, how much you sacrifice, how much profit you create for the company, you will never be as successful as Elon Musk as long as you are working for Elon Musk. "I'm doing it for the opportunity to be promoted," you say. Granted, but we're never going to get there. Not in that meat-grinder kind of environment. The narcissists will get promoted over you. The sociopaths and psychopaths will end up as the directors and VP's. But not us. We're the horses doing all the work, kind of like George Orwell's Animal Farm. Been there, done that. It was a solid six months before I had returned to something vaguely resembling sanity. It took me that long to be able to look back and understand how much I had been caught up in that hunger games mentality. I am grateful to say that I currently work for a man that appreciates the work his employees do and we are rewarded accordingly. And we aren't working crazy hours with boneheaded deadlines. I think I'll stay here.

I don't use the frameworks published here, per se. But, I still find them quite valuable. When I'm here, I'm not looking for a solution, I'm looking for new ideas, different approaches, and novel ways to think about coding. If I need a solution, I go to GitHub or (in my usual environments) npmjs.com. If I need help, it's google and Stack Overflow. When I want inspiration, I come to Code Project.

This falls under the 'checking to make sure I'm not leaving my drink on the roof of my car before driving off' category of suggestions. You may want to make sure the database connection is not closing and reconnecting between each record. This is something I've run into back in my old Access days. :wtf:

I think it's important to break this down. Protesters protest, it is their function. I would argue that protesting, when properly conducted, is not immoral, regardless of the laws of any given country. Looters loot... and destroy stuff, hurt people, etc. Yes, I am overloading "looter" with lots of negative behavior. Protesters are not looters, and looters are not protesters. Looters are taking advantage of the event, not joining it. Okay, let's say a person shows up to protest, but decides they want a new TV for free, at that moment, they are no longer a protester, but a looter. Then, the full force of law enforcement should take effect. Firing tear gas into the crowd of protesters has absolutely no effect on the looters, but it will piss off the protesters. Whether that provocation is deliberate or not, it is still provocation that does not solve the issue of looting. Honestly, I could not care less about most sports. It seems to me that each sport requires such specific physicality that we're getting weird emergence at the end of the bell curve. A person who puts on a dress in order to attack women is a predator, and should be dealt with accordingly. A woman trapped in a man's body, regardless of their state of transition, is simply trying to be who they are and not get beaten to death in the process. Two different people that, on the surface, look the same. We need to dig deeper in order to stop the predators and protect the persecuted. This is bad typing. It's no wonder the system keeps crashing because the devs keep conflating smallints with strings. Some of them like it that way, but it's mostly because the manager, who has never learned to code but has some pull, put it in the design documents and demands that it be so. And then blames the strings for the broken system. Culture reflects the environment. When the environment is a cage*, however hidden or subtle, the culture will reflect desperation, destruction and despair. * or a trap.

I have seen the many-tentacled monsters manifested from the murky depths of Code First. Epi's with their SAS armor fear to step within the shadow of these Lovecraftian beasts. The Oracles on high, throw ever more power against it, and the leviathan will not be sated. When it takes 109 left joins, 20 sub-selects and 17 decodes to pull a single death record, there is nothing but eye-clawing madness and sound of your own screaming. So... no. I do not like Code First.

It always seemed to me that Patterns were a sort of matryoshka doll attempt to fix that OO design mixes data and code, and not in the functional, 'the code is the data,' sort of way. And I'm not too big on premature encapsulation, either. As much as I am fascinated by Conway's Life, I wouldn't use gliders as a data transmission mechanism.

It occurred to me a few years ago that the salary surveys peppered throughout the year are significantly skewed high. I certainly wasn't going to participate in a survey when I knew that my salary was going to be half of the bottom end reported. But if folks like me participated, the survey would be more accurate. Things are better now, but I still haven't entered the "range" yet. Then again, one of my colleagues has taken to calling me "The Magic Man", so it ain't all bad. I just wish my wand could control the amount of money flowing into my bank account without getting me arrested. ;P

Androids dream of them, certainly.

Xaotiq wrote:

The likelihood of common criminals doing this anytime soon is near nil.

See, I think that very lack of evidence that hackers are exploiting fingerprint scans demonstrates that they are indeed not being sent to the CIA/NSA/IRS, etc. Because, you know, zero day.

Moe's Hypothesis: "If hackers have not exploited a particular set of data, that data has not been collected or used in any meaningful way."

Well, if you wanted to keep the river metaphor going but make a point, you could make the name more interesting: Swamp, Alligator Food, River Blindness, Eerie Banjo Music... ;P

Access is part of about 90% of my development projects. Usually as a RAD front end to MySQL, PostgresSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and sometimes more than one at the same time. How many dev tools do you know that can connect to SQL Server, MySQL and Oracle at the same time? The ACE DB Engine is really only good for apps with tables less than 100K records, or so, but Access makes a great desktop front-end. Access != ACE (Access <> ACE for the VB fans). Yes, it's best use is for desktop apps connected to shared data for 20 or less people (up to 50 with a RDBMS back-end). The Sharepoint/web integration is basically hell, since you can only use macros (no VBA). Using macros is like trying to build a house when the only tool you have is a bag of sporks. Although, the new JavaScript integration in 2016 may help change that. As I've grown as a coder, it took me a while to understand certain concepts that are now must have features in modern languages/ide's: Managed Code, VBA in Access has always been managed. Lambda Expressions, oh, you mean you can just create a function and call it from anywhere? You know, like a function in an Access module rather than class. Binding fields in a table to controls on a form is ridiculously easy (built-in sanitizing, character limits that match the field, data-types, a plethora of events to add validations, etc.). Don't worry if this frightens you, its lack of layers scares many. But, then again, you may not want to listen to me as I am a wildling coder. After some excellent instruction in high school, I did not go the the ivory towers and have spent most of my career on the other side of the wall between IT and everyone else... solving problems as quickly and efficiently as I can, with only the tools I have available to me.

"But then, something happened that the ring did not intend." - Fellowship of the Ring

Possibly computer generated, like the nonsense science papers? A computer on peyote?