"The Sleuth"

Is it just me, or are journalists getting dumber by the minute? Ted “Tubes” Stevens, the idiot senator who brought us such entertainment as “The Bridge to Nowhere” and “The Internet is not a Truck”, has a website. His website, like almost all websites, has error messages. Those error messages are customizable. It’s really quite simple to do.

The Washington Post has a columnist who has about as much knowledge of the Internet as Ted does. Ironically she calls herself “The Sleuth”. She wasn’t a good enough sleuth to use Google to find out that the error message on Ted’s site has been around awhile, and most likely was not written by Ted.

The Washington Post story is here
A link to evidence that shows the error message is not unique to Ted is here

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

It amuses me when journalists, pundits and the like say that blogging will replace journalism. It reminds me of the song “video killed the radio star”. Yes that was back when MTV actually played music videos. Don’t get me wrong, I love some of their shows, but where’s the beef music? Besides, radio is alive and doing as well as any other media. Would you buy a car that doesn't have a radio? The problem the mainstream media is facing is a result of their success. If you try to please all of the people, you can get good ratings, which means more ad money. I assume that’s why Cable News Network has become Celebrity News Network. It’s also why I no longer watch it.

The reason many people turn to the Internet for news is that they can choose from a wider variety and depth of coverage. On the Internet a story can link to other resources and commentary. This is good for media companies, if they have the one thing that should make or break any news provider, good journalism. Too often we see hype instead of journalism. Leave the hype to the marketing and ad people.

The result of hype being presented as journalism often leads to commentary that is more informative than the article. A good example, and the inspiration for this post, is a recent Fark.com thread. The article throws out a seemingly shocking statistic, but does very little to back it up from a statistical standpoint. About the only thing the article convinced me of is that the author either was trying to hype his own views or doesn’t understand statistics. However, the commentary actually presented information and resources about topic the “journalist” was hyping.

Why believe me, read the story and the commentary yourself.

Alcatraz

Alcatraz Island as seen from Fisherman’s Warf

Fire in the Sky

Southport Sunset

I saw a beautiful sunset this evening and had to take some pictures.

Sacramento Ruins

I Street Bridge

Sacramento has three bridges crossing the Sacramento River downtown; two of them are drawbridges. The Tower Bridge opens via the center span rising. Not two sides of it tilting upwards, the entire center span lifts as one piece. I’ve seen this many times. The I street bridge rotates 90°. This I had not seen, until Monday. It was an interesting sight.

List of Tables in a Database

I needed a list of tables in a database to create a script that would put an index on each of the tables. In SQL Server 2005 you can’t copy the list of tables in a database from the summary view. So how can you get a list of tables in text format? I turned to my favorite reference, Google, and didn’t find anything promising. So I decided to figure it out.

I happened to have a drop script in front of me, so I thought I would try using the sysobjects table. After running a simple Select statement on sysobjects, I noticed that all of the tables were there, along with key, etc. I also noticed a field named xtype. All of the user tables had the value “U” in that field.

So I tried:

SELECT [name] FROM [sysobjects] WHERE [xtype] = ‘U’

Yes, it was that simple.