Every so often I check that web service, just to see what it comes back with.... nothing yet

Nice to see it is still in Vista, my little magic 8-ball dialogue! 

I just wish I could control the default.

One of those things that makes sense, but you may have assumed otherwise if not had cause to ponder it.  I'm talking about literary translation, and the liberties that the translator and their editor have to take while translating books from foreign languages to English and vice versa.

In Other Words, is a three part series from Canada's CBC, available on their podcast where by some highly regarded literary translators discuss their trade.  They all take the topic of these liberties very seriously, and feel that at times being faithful to the original means straying from it.

In the second episode, one of the guest translators recounts a cartoon to illustrate the point, in which the translator asks the author of the original work: Do you not be happy with me as the translator of the books of you? 

The series examines the question that you may assume we are reading a fidelity reproduction of Don Quixote or Dostoyevsky, until you read a second translation and examine the differences.  How is the difference explained if both are correct?

The third and final part of the series is due to appear on the podcast feed tonight, and makes for very interesting listening.

This script came out of a discussion here at the office around a product that isn't flexible or location aware in how it writes datetime values into the database.

This is also not paying attention to storing the date data in UTC or localtime or any of those concerns, just the semantics of storing whatever the date value happens to be.

What are your experiences with this?  Comments as always most welcome

Example script follows:

/*
    You can use the following proc at the start of your app to see
    what the current date format SQL Server is expecting from you
    based on the default language selection set on your login.

    Look at the dateformat field in the resultset of this proc.

    Use this if you want to honour the regional selection that has
    been setup on a per-user basis on the SQL Server
    (login properties of each user)
*/
exec sp_helplanguage @@language

/*
    Otherwise, you may also override the language settings if your
    application code can only format dates one way.

    This will avoid message 241 at runtime:    
        "The conversion of a char data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range datetime value."

    The 15th of Feb is a good example because there is no 15th month:
*/

SET LANGUAGE us_english
go -- dateformat is now = mdy

select cast('2/15/2003' as datetime) as US_1
go
select cast('15/2/2003' as datetime) as US_2 --Expect Msg 242
go


SET LANGUAGE british
go -- dateformat is now = dmy

select cast('2/15/2003' as datetime) as British_1 --Expect Msg 242
go
select cast('15/2/2003' as datetime) as British_2
go

You can grab the script here: 20070412.deepdark.net_dmy_mdy.sql (1.14 KB)

An MVP they call Brian referred me to a new Blog/RSS Feed client called FeedGhost.

It scratches my itch for a feed reader that can sync between multiple PCs through a subscription service, but the most impressive feature I have found so far is the UI.  It has set a new high water mark for me in the smartclient space. 

Check out the screen shots - but once installed you realize the screenshots don't do it justice. 

The timing of this news couldn't be better for me because I was reading my feeds on my "Beta Bliss" laptop - Vista RC1 & Office 2007 Beta 2 TR, and office expired 1st of April so I was in the market for a new feed reader.  I love it when things just come together