Personal Weblog of John Wood

One of my very first programming jobs was maintaining and developing a large Fortran application. The application consisted of numerous statistical analysis programs used by test developers at Educational Testing Services. So when I received my current Dr. Dobbs email subscription, the following article brought back a lot of fond memories. Because I could not find the actual article on the Dr. Dobbs WEB site, I have reprinted it here. If I eventually locate it, I’ll then include a link.

Fortran: Staying Up to Date

In an industry when things change at GHz speeds, there’s solace in the permanance of tools like Fortran, which has been around since…what, the 1950s? Well “yes,” now that I think about it. John Backus spec’d out the “IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System” in the early 1950s, and delivered the first Fortran compiler in the late 1950s, or thereabout.

Mr. Backus was my kind of guy. When asked many years later why he created Fortran in the first place, he responded that “much of my work has come from being lazy.” He went on to add that “I didn’t like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.”

What brought all this to mind is the note from Absoft that it has released the first commercial Fortran IDE for Windows and Linux (and MacOS not far behind). The IDE, which comes bundled with Absoft’s Pro Fortran 10.1 tool suite, supports development for multi-core processor from Intel and AMD by providing auto-parallelization and auto-vectorization. According to Absoft, performance tests with Pro Fortran 10.1 auto-parallelizing and auto-vectorizing compilers have demonstrated superscalar speed improvements on several industry benchmark programs. With the IDE, tools can be run from the GUI or the command line. It also accepts select third-party tools, such as compilers from Apple, GNU, and Microsoft and VNI’s IMSL numerical libraries.

There you have it. Even at 50 years old, Fortran is kicking up its heels. Which makes me wonder: What do you think Ruby or C# will look like 50 years from now?

– Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Another good Fortran article worth a read locate at Dr. Dobb’s is Fortran and IMSL: It’s MacOS’s Turn

eHarmony’s Vice President of Technology, Mark Douglas, cites SQL Server’s row locking mechanics as the biggest detractor. It appears this was a major roadblock to scaling their application enough to accommodate their fast growth. Find out more from the entire article here…

eHarmony spurns Microsoft, finds match with Oracle 10g

This is my second time using Livewriter for this blog. I recently had to re-image my PC and am now in the process of reinstalling most of the software. Naturally, I’ll only install those tools I currently use. Livewriter is definitely on the shortlist.

At my organization I am the principal Oracle DBA but recently had to absorb more SQL Server responsibility. As Murphy’s Law would have it; no sooner do I get responsibility for a specific technology I am new to, but the you-know-what hit the fan. To make a long story short, I have to really dive in to extensive reading and research to try and alleviate some dire performance issues . While setting up some new RSS captures I came across this recent article which may just prove to be of enormous benefit. I happen to have used Diskeeper on my personal home system for years and have always been incredibly satisfied with it.Â

Physical file fragmentation can hinder SQL Server’s performance. Learn how Diskeeper can help resolve this problem. By Howard Butler Sr. and Michael Materie.

Source: Keeping Your SQL Server Databases Defragmented With Diskeeper (Updated)
Originally published on 5/17/2007 4:11 PM

I’ve been using Outlook at work and for my personal mail for years and I have always had issues with the ability to view or segregate my email according to specific criteria. I’ve always felt I was was limited and could not attain the kind of granularity I sometimes desired. I blamed this on the inability to use complex AND/OR logic in the selection process.

Having had a technical career in IT for many years, I’ve subscribed to many newsletters and various groups. Consequently, I receive a fair amount of email on a daily basis. I’m also a pack-rat and I don’t like to discard ANYTHING. Well, at least not anything that is under a few years old. This being the case, my mailbox can become really cluttered, especially if I have not had a chance to read through it in several days succession. We all get busy in our work and our lives at times and it becomes difficult to read all of our mail.

Over the years, I had developed a number or rules to segregate mail from my inbox into appropriate folders. However, as groups have changed their from address or have included other criteria in their name or address, the rules broke down. My rules just were not cutting the mustard.

A few weeks ago while researching a totally unrelated technological issue, I stumbled upon a Google entry with a topic of Dan Brett’s Blog: Give Outlook a GMail Conversation view. I thought this looked pretty interesting! I was familiar with Outlook’s ability to group messages by conversation but was always impressed with GMAIL’s more complete method (replies are grouped into a GMAIL conversation).

Dan’s article revealed to me the ability to use SQL syntax within a View or a Search Folder. Well whatayaknow! Instead of depending on a bunch of rules to try and segregate mail as it comes in, I could enhance the ability to categorize, group, and view my mail by using Search Folders and Views which utilize advanced (but simple to build) SQL queries.

I followed Dan’s article but still ran into some issues when trying to reference the many different context objects which can be referenced in the SQL. I found the objects as documented by Microsoft but had a difficult time understanding their correct use. The Microsoft documentation on this leaves a lot to be desired. However, with some more research, I came across another very fine article: Using a SQL Filter in Outlook 2002/2003 Views. This article pointed out the ability to use the Advanced tab to construct selection criteria with available fields and then switching to the SQL method to manipulate and enhance the generated SQL statement.

As an example: I previously had a Search folder to view all email articles I receive from various Techtarget subscriptions. However, I did not want to see the article which I had committed to the Deleted Items folder. At the time I first constructed the SQL and using the Microsoft context documentation, I could not determine what context to reference or even what to look for in the context. Using knowledge gained from the Using a SQL filter in Outlook 2002/2003 article, mentioned above, I used the Advanced tab to select criteria for excluding a message in the Deleted Items folder

Now… looking at the SQL tab, I could see the generated SQL query

I then copied the generated SQL to notepad so I could combine it with my original Search query. The original query to find all my Techtarget articles looks like this: “urn:schemas:httpmail:fromemail” LIKE ‘%techtarget%’. After including the generated query and changing it to a LIKE operator, I came up with this SQL: “urn:schemas:httpmail:fromemail” LIKE ‘%techtarget%’ AND NOT “http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0x0e05001f” LIKE ‘%deleted%’.

This criteria now delivers the exact results I am looking for.