A letter to Publix

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While surfing the net looking for nutrition facts. I stumbled across the Fair Food Campaign being conducted by the Coalition of Immokalee workers. I read some, then I watched their “One Penny More” video.

Then I wrote this letter.

Dear People in Charge of Publix,

I love shopping at Publix and I love tomatoes. I especially love the opportunity to support the Florida economy by buying produce grown in Florida from a chain based in Florida.

However I’m disturbed and deeply concerned by the claims of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers that Publix is not willing to use it’s buying power to support Florida tomato farm workers. When I look on your website, I see in the Publix Products Q & A that  the store has a position on the safe handling of animals. But I see no similar statement of position on supporting a livable wage right here in your home state. I want to be fair so I’m asking; what is your stance on human rights in general and the rights and conditions of Florida Farm workers in general? Is it true that you’ve resisted the Fair Food campaign that even Taco Bell is supporting? I mean seriously… Taco Bell? If you have a statement of some kind giving a reasonable explanation for what looks to be lack of support for basic human rights, I would love to see it.

But if don’t get the information I want to hear about my favorite grocery store, I will use my small and insignificant buying power to try to get you to change your mind. I will also do my best to convince my friends, family, coworkers, neighbors and casual acquaintances to do the same. I am willing to pay a penny more per pound of tomatoes if it means the person that picked them is getting a fair wage. (Or at least closer to a fair wage. Honestly I don’t think a penny a pound is enough.) If I have to pay my extra penny elsewhere, so be it.

I added this to the top of the Coalitions already compelling form letter and sent it. Now I’m waiting on a reply. You can write your own letter (or do any number of things) at the CIWs take action page.

A letter to facebook

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Dear facebook.com,
Your photo management interface is inexcusably bad.

  1. In what universe does it make sense to “Edit Album Info” in order to move a photo to a different album?
  2. Why can’t you move a photo to an album unless it already exists?
  3. Why can’t you create an album without uploading photos?
  4. Why is your only  option for creating an album without uploading photos buried on the last tab of some (but not all) edit album screens?
  5. Why does that “create album” actually just rename the album you were editing (despite the fact that you have to specifically ignore the rename option to get there?

Any one of these might be excusable but all of them together makes me want to stomp your interface in the throat. Is there no usability testing in facebook HQ? Do you not understand your top tasks? Do you need testers? Because I will donate the 45 minutes of my time that I wasted trying to move a photo from one album to another and tell you what’s wrong with your interface. Any time.  You have all of my contact information.

Sincerely,

Me

An invalid schema or catalog was specified for the provider “MSDASQL” for linked server

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Make sure “level zero only” is checked on the MSDASQL provider.

Now to the question!

SQL Server’s linked server feature lets you link to a remote server through an ODBC connection. Once the server is linked, you are supposed to be able to reference it using four-part notation like so:

SELECT * FROM linkedserver...tablename

If you’re like me that query will give you an error message instead of a result set. So you will Google the error and be told by forum posts the world over that the openquery function is your only hope.

Now openquery is a great little piece of work but it doesn’t contribute much to code-readability. But since it’s your only hope, you’ll try to clean things up by creating elaborate views that mimic the tables in the linked server and then using those views in other views until the whole mess is so complicated that all of your queries timeout and you spend most of your database time watching a progress bar and wondering why life hates you.

Here’s the alternative.

  1. Go to the provider options screenIn SQL Server 2005 you can see the list of providers in a folder above the linked server (assuming you have appropriate permissions). Right click on MSDASQL and go to properties. In SQL Server 2000, the provider options button is in the dialog box where you create the linked server.
  2. Check the box that says “level zero only”

I don’t know what this means (even after reading the definition). I think it means that the SQL Server won’t do any optimization of the result set (it will be the responsibility of the linked server) but that’s just a guess.

I do know that after checking that box, my four part query worked. It took me about three days of searching to find that answer at the bottom of a thread somewhere so I’m posting it here in hopes that the Google gods will smile upon it.

Also thank you Alexandre Léveillé.