Six Nations 2010

The Italian television La7 will broadcast all the matches featuring Italy. Good news, as last year it seemed that we could only see the Six Nations on Sky (or, like my luckier friend Pancho, at the stadium).

It's a pity I won't be able to see the other matches... which, according to Murphy's Law, are the ones I'm most interested in. And I'm sure I'm not the only one. Well, another axe to grind about rugby in tv... I should be used to it, but guess what: I'm not!

Thanks again to La7 for giving us a glimpse of the show.

Master and Student

You never know where you'll end up when you are looking for some details on SQLServer...

And whither then? I cannot say.

This time, for instance, I ran onto this post and found out where the Grasshoper thing in Head First Design Patterns comes from...

It must be time for revelations!

An (incredible?) breakthrough!

I don't know how many times I've seen the Little Lord Fauntleroy movie, almost each and every Christmas with my grandma. I don't even know how many times I've seen the Star Wars original trilogy, either by myself or with my children.


Is it possible that only today I realized for the very first time what everybody has always known???

Dal Treno

I went to Sesto Calende to visit uncle Mimmo and Aunt Zaza so many times and I never knew Montale wrote a poem that mentions it... until now! here it comes:

Le tortore colore solferino
sono a Sesto Calende per la prima
volta a memoria d'uomo. Così annunziano
i giornali. Affacciato al finestrino,
invano le ho cercate. Un tuo collare,
ma d'altra tinta, sì, piegava in vetta
un giunco e si sgranava. Per me solo
balenò, cadde in uno stagno. E il suo
volo di fuoco m'accecò sull'altro.

Eugenio Montale

I like reading Montale very much, also because I find it so hard to understand what he means. That brings me back on planet Earth... I think it is very useful to feel ignorant every now and then. Not many share this idea, though...

There and back again

That's it, last year I reached my target of 69 books, and I'm ready to try and beat it this year. Hope I won't need another road accident to buy me some time!


Meanwhile, I've just finished the first book of 2010: The Hobbit. That puts me in a difficult situation, because I haven't read The Godfather for a while, I had half a mind to read the Harry Potter saga and I have four freshly delivered (thanks mum!) books on Dexter, the blood spatter expert that puts in good use his forensic experience. But... how can you finish the hobbit and leave The Lord Of The Rings on the shelf? It's already 10 months since I last read it...

File import in SQLServer 2005

After some tries, and despite of all the ultra-mega-super-lightning-integrated environment provided by Microsoft, I still think that the fastest way to bulk load a csv file into a SQLServer 2005 table is to use plain old Transact-SQL. Assuming you have a csv file with the same structure of an existing table, all you have to to do is write a few lines in your query window and fire an F5:

BULK INSERT your_table
from 'absolute/path/to/your/file'
WITH
(
    FIELDTERMINATOR = ',',
    ROWTERMINATOR = '\n'
)

Obviously, you could also use different terminators, but all you need to do is to alter the specified parameter.

Progress?

You work for a company that produces custom software products. One of your customers experiences a warning message. To give you the best feedback possible, he disciplinately gets a printscreen of the application displaying the message and one of the directory that contains the files produced by the application.

Well educated customer, ain't he? at this point, as you have a helpdesk account, he e-mails the picture with some explaining text...

...too simple, isn't it? that's why he actually printed the images, scanned them, converted them into a pdf and emailed it...

Of course this enabled him to pen down a couple of notes on the images, but... ehm...