John H. mentioned as an aside that someone at his work is opposed to non-meaningful primary keys. John H is (rightfully in my opinion) strongly in favor of them. I was just mentioning that Date (of Codd and Date) gives strong theoretical support for surrogate keys - in case the guy might be impressed by that sort of cite. And then I made a joke about an old Date+Codd dispute over nulls, which exposed as having an unneccesarily obscure sense of humor. OK,not everyone has a favorite database theorist...

Sorry. I guess I skimmed. I thought it was in reference to the Phoenix.

Yeah - my fault for nattering in what is supposed to be a natter resistant zone...

It's not that the guy at work was in favour of them, more that he kept coming up with meaningful data that seemed to him like he'd found the right key, and I was trying to sell the concept of the arbitrary key to him.

I'm one step ahead of him, but roughly seventy-three steps behind you guys, it seems.

I've even run into this with fellow database analysts (who are supposed to bnow the theory). They claim to understand the concept, but see all these cases for exceptions - which makes it seem to me that they don't really understand the theory.

SpikeMe got a post eaten and kicked back to the home page -- that's a new one. Wasn't SpikeMe the same one who Read New went to the middle of the thread, too? Wonder what's up with that.

Edit: and no yellow box. It's a browser detective story.

She was on the wrong screen, I think. She did make it here, but it logged her out again. So she e-mailed instead.

It seems like an AOL issue, but one that Allyson, for instance, isn't happening.

She did say it took her 20 minutes to type her post, weren't other people getting errors if the DB timed out their session before they hit post? Could it be a combo of a time-out error and AOL?

I forgot to close a quotation mark on

blog on the Firefly site:

J. Whedon is directing---love that!!!

and I got this: a problem with truncation?

From the third-party blog on the Firefly site:

J. Whedon is directing---love that!!! The energy he brings to set is amazing. Not only that, but watching him direct an ep is better than any film class you could take…why and what he notices is astonishing… my favorite thing is when he finishes watching a take and says, “GREAT!, PERFECT, AMAZING…going again…”

Seems to have been fixed, assuming you meant the firefly thread?

[EDIT: and I fixed what you posted here, because it was busting this thread]

Were you just wondering what the asterisks were for?

Ask Jon B but it's normally hidden, and it's a workaround for a certain browser.