Devilb0y

Hi,

I'm just on the tail-end of fixing an issue at my place of work where a sproc went from taking 5-10 minutes to run to failing to return anything within an hour. The stored procedure in question is essentially a chain of CTEs with the first two returning the required dataset (first CTE is about 200k rows and the second narrows it down to about 10k), with 6 or so further CTEs performing calculations on this data to return certain business KPIs. It looks a bit like this pseudo-code:

WITH CTE1 AS (
SELECT * FROM BusinessData WHERE Date BETWEEN @ParameterDate1 AND @ParameterDate2 AND Condition1 = 1)
, CTE2 AS (SELECT * FROM CTE1 JOIN SecondaryBusinessData ON X = X WHERE CTE2.Co

Wrapping up Midnight Tides at the moment (a couple hundred pages left) and was just so excited after Iron Bars and Seran Pedac's escape from Trate that I had to write something.

Who the hell is Iron Bars? Surely one of the strongest character Introductions in the series as far as being a badass goes. Shows up in one scene, seems innocent enough, then in his next appearance he's ripping people's jaws off and killing Rhulad with his bare hands. The long greying hair and (I think?) beard make him look like Chuck Norris in my mind's eye, which is appropriate.

Anyway, Iron Bars and friends seem very cool.

Hi,

As the title says, I've painted myself into a bit of a corner this week and now have a party of adventurers plus 30 or so soldiers about to go up against a vampire and their undead servants.

I really don't fancy having 50+ entities in the initiative order but would like to try and avoid making combat too swing-y by having them all make their attacks on one initiative. Has anyone run something like this before? Is there some way to abstract large combats that the party are a part so that you can give a sense of scale while still focusing on the party?

Hi all,

This is a bit of a weird question, but I've been a "data engineer" for the past 6 months in a company that has been going through a lot of turmoil. Job security isn't great because of its financial position, we're not actually doing any development due to change freezes (so my skills aren't improving) and I may need to look elsewhere if things continue to go badly, but I feel like I don't have the actual skills or experience a data engineer should have and am worried about getting another job.

I was hoping people here might be able to point at holes I need to fill to very generally improve my skillset. I know that data engineering roles and the technologies they use can vary massiv

Hey folks,

I started Midnight Tides after a fairly long break from Malazan between the first four books, so I'll preface this by saying that I may have just forgotten something and hope you can forgive me if that's the case.

Midnight Tides obviously takes place before House of Chains; probably quite a long time before it based on events that are unfolding in the book. In conversations between Letheri characters (I believe it's Bug and Kettle, though I may be remembering the wrong scene) two things are mentioned which confused me.

1. The idea of holds (which, as has already been explained, pre-date warrens as sources of magical power)

2. The war between the Jaghut and the T'Lann Imass.

Hi folks,

Prefacing this by saying I'm fairly certain this is a dumb question, but I'm struggling to find the answer to it myself.

Recently bought a house (in May) and am going around bleeding the radiators in preparation for winter. All good apart from one radiator which doesn't seem to heat up at all and - when I went to bleed it - doesn't seem to have a bleed valve. Or at least not one I've seen before.

The Mystery Radiator Valve

The left side has nothing and the right side has this, which sort of looks like a valve, but I have no idea how to open this.

Does anyone know what this is? Can anyone give me any guidance on how to bleed it? And could the fact t

My fiance have just bought our first house in a housing estate in Ireland where every house has a big front lawn that runs right up to the public footpath. This feels weird to me as I've always grown up in places where your front lawn is fenced off in some way to stop people just randomly walking into your front garden. The problem is that no one else in the estate seems to have this and I don't want us to get a reputation as miserable bastards who want to shut themselves off from their neighbours.

What would you do in this situation? I'm thinking of gradually building a natural fence of bushes so it's not quite as definitive and sudden as a fence.

Hello friends,

I've decided to try and do a bit of research into the dumbest mobile suit armaments after remembering the knife that Stephen Lang's robot pulls in Avatar. Not because I think James Cameron stole the idea from Gundam, but because it just seems like a funny topic.

So far I can only really think of Heavy Arms from Gundam Wing with its rubbish little "Oh no, I've run out of ammo" arm knife, so I was wondering if you all could help me think of any others? They don't need to specifically be armed with knives, any weapon that isn't really practical for fighting a big block of metal (as is the case with a metal blade) would be great.

So, what do you think are the least practical mo

This question isn't specific to chapter 11 of the book, rather I just wanted to preface it with where I am. I also half-expect the answer to be something along the lines of "That sure is mysterious isn't it? Keep reading" but I want to make sure I haven't misunderstood something.

In one of the previous books, I want to say it was Memories of Ice, Paran visits the Beast Hold and sees the ancestors of the T'Lan Imass before the ritual of Tellann made them undead. During that scene it's revealed to him that before the formation of Thrones came the Holds, and that they are more primal and also can move. In Midnight Tides, no one talks about Thrones. It's all Ice Holds and Empty Holds etc. Yet t

I felt the need to quickly write out my thoughts with some questions to try and seek clarification after what felt like a pretty big bombshell of a chapter (Fear, Trull and Rulad visit the Kaschan Trench and learn about the war between Light, Shadow and Dark).

So, first off: the K'Chain Che'malle essentially doomed the universe as a final act of defiance against Tiste aggressions, by trapping Mother Dark at the heart of an abyss, forcing her to devour all life to survive. I think I'm understanding that right? She's basically a black hole I think? I LOVE that they come across as monstrous and unthinking in the early-to-mid parts of Memories of Ice, yet as the series goes on they're revealed

Hi all,

I've ripped a blu-ray and converted the MKV file to an MP4 (using Shutter Encoder) so I can work with the footage in Premiere.

I think I might have screwed up something in the conversion as the original MKV file uses a DTS audio codec for 5.1 while the MP4 uses AAC for stereo, which isn't a problem by itself except that when I play the footage in Premiere the dialogue is restricted to the right channel rather than being panned across both. When I play the file in VLC player it is correctly panned, so I'm guessing the problem is with the audio codec and how Premiere is interpreting it?

I've tried messing with the audio channels of the file within Premiere but I'm not entirely sure