Tuesday, April 3, 2007
The feature I’d most like to see added to iTunes “smart playlist” building is the ability to exclude songs based on metadata. I like to listen to music that I haven’t heard in a long time and / or that I haven’t heard very often. The only problem is that when I choose to select songs based on the criteria “Least Often Played”, iTunes annoyingly adds its own sub-sort based on Artist. That means that my 50-track “smart” playlist will include, for example, 25 songs by Bruce Springsteen. That doesn’t give me much randomness and it drives me crazy.
What I should be able to do is create a “Recently Played” playlist (or use the existing one) and add a limiting factor to a separate playlist like this:
Artist is not in the playlist “Recently Played”.
That is what I’d really like.
Friday, September 22, 2006
How to Hack MySQL Paging Functionality into Microsoft SQL Server
Web developers using PHP and MySQL have a crucial piece of functionality that classic ASP developers working with Microsoft SQL Server don’t. It’s pagination. Using MySQL’s LIMIT and OFFSET commands you can very easily add pagination to recordsets that you want to display on web pages. If you’ve spent any amount of time searching for a way to do this with ASP and SQL Server, you know that the code is pretty hard to find. You’re lucky if you find it at all. The few tutorials on the ‘net tend to be overly complicated and pretty bad hacks, usually involving convoluted and resource-intensive subqueries on top of subqueries. This solution is certainly not the best, and it, too, is a resource hog, but it’s the only one I’ve got, so I’m sharing.
[click to continue...]
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Jon is one of my developers at work. He recently started a WordPress blog called Rusty Razor Blade. I’m guessing that most of what he’ll be posting is going to be fairly technical stuff about MySQL, LAMP, AJAX, and JSON. So far his first really interesting post is a MySQL Triggers Tutorial. It’s actually a bit better than the help page on mysql.com, and if you know what a trigger is in Microsoft SQL and have always wanted the same functionality in MySQL, you should give it a read.
Tuesday, October 16, 2001
If any of my beloved readers are SQL whizzes, I have a little problem posted on my development blog. I will love you forever if you can give me any ideas …
Tuesday, October 16, 2001
Help! If anyone can help me out with this I will severely owe you one. I have this SQL query that I need to return just one more field, and I can’t figure out how to do it. (The query is in the extended text for this entry; click on the icon or the comments link to get there!) Currently the query needs the parameter [TeamID] to run, and it returns the Sum of the Wins and Losses for the [TeamID]. (The Sum of the Wins is the Sum of the AwayWins and the Sum of the HomeWins. And the Sum of the Losses is the same except for Losses instead of Wins …) What I want to be able to do is to have it return the [TeamID] as well, so that I can build another query on top of this one. Anyone? Anyone? Please eMail me if you have any thoughts …
[click to continue...]
Friday, October 12, 2001
I’m almost ready for a beta release of PoolPlayer. I need to get a better name for it, I know. Right now I’m working on letting the user (or the app) delete a week from the database regardless of whether there are any games associated with that week. It’s not as easy as it sounds. But I should be done soon. Woot!
Wednesday, October 10, 2001
This is going to be a blog for information related to my many projects. Mostly I will probably write about programs I am writing and web development work I am doing, and I imagine this will mainly be a personal blog. I doubt many people will be interested in learning about listview columnheaders or SQL parsing problems.
