"How would I know?"

Sir John Chisholm - Competing Chairs?

I read with interest George Monbiot's article, especially where he mentioned that the MRC (Medical Research Council, UK) is run by an arms manufacturer. This set me to digging, not least because I currently happen to be working at one of the Research Councils myself...

So, as it turns out, the chairman of the UK Medical Research Council, Sir John Chisholm, is also Chairman of Qinetiq.

Sir John's Declarations of Interest are listed here, but I leave you to draw your own conclusions as to how these two 'callings' marry up, especially in the current climate of moral turpitude (MPs expenses, et al). Of course, we all know it's just about the money...

have you seen this cat...?

have you seen this cat

Copy existing SQL Table structure into a new empty table..? Easy...

Here's the SQL Server thing: I want to copy an existing table's structure, but not the data.

Here's thefix:

SELECT * INTO MyNewTable
FROM ExistingTable
where 0=1

... which will do exactly that! Nice. Thanks to Josh for that.

SQL won't import from Excel? Truncation error? It's rubbish, that's what it is...

It sounds like the JET/Access driver is looking at a sample of the data in your spreadsheet and making an assumption on the data types from that. Because there are likely no rows with data > 256 chars (say) in the first x rows, it’s reading it as char(256). –i.e. It’s inferring data type and length from a sample of your source data, it’s not looking at the destination at this point.

In order to work around this then try the TypeGuessRows registry key as detailed in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/189897 - which allows you to tweak the sample set the driver uses in trying to determine the data type/length. Setting it to zero is a broad brush, but it's an instant fix.

If that doesn’t work, then export from excel to CSV and use a SCHEMA.ini file to tell the Text driver explicitly what the data types/lengths are (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms709353.aspx).

A useful resource for this sort of stuff is http://www.connectionstrings.com, see the pages on Excel and text file connection strings/settings.
(Apologies to Dunc for publishing the fix as my own (ah, if only))

Almost 39 years on, and the words of Bertand Russell continue to ring true...

The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was "given" by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East. We are frequently told that we must sympathise with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. [...] What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy.

—Bertrand Russell, 31 January 1970

France 6 – C’est le Weekend!

25/07/08 – finished school at midday, so we had lunch at the Bistro de Bourgeois, in a little village called Chavignol. This village is famous for two things – the goats' cheese (Crottin de Chavignol, which comes in three 'phases' – fraise, demi-sec, sec), and that purveyor of fine wines, Henri Bourgeois. After lunch, we went and purchased some of said wine (LE CHENE SAINT-ETIENNE, complete with sliver of oak from the 300 year old tree). Yum – I think you're driving home, Paspartout!