Tonight I spent 3 hours trying to get a simple, basic SQL query to work in Microsoft Access 2003.  The SQL query runs perfectly in Microsoft SQL Server 2005, however when run through the VB code in Access via the DAO layer it kept on failing with a syntax error.  Obviously the error message did not point out the cause of the error.  Since the SQL was perfectly valid and not complex, I was baffled.

Here is the basic query I had written:

I knew about MathML for some time now, but I never thought it was this bad. See, MathML is an XML based markup language used to describe in a standards compliant manner mathematical notations. In principle this is a cool thing, until I saw a real world example from Wolfram Research:

Whilst implementing a .NET application for one of my clients, I recently ran into a problem where a long running task would just suddenly stop working after about 30 minutes. No error, no exception - nothing. I had been troubleshooting this for 3 days now, and that is a very long time for someone with my experience (if I may say so myself). The difficulty with this problem is that there are no - and I mean absolutely NO errors. The only thing I could gather is that the long running task stops because the IIS worker process dies. I even added detailed trace statements - none of which helped.

When I was in Std. 8 many centuries ago, I swore on my own grave that I would never touch a computer since I hated it. Somewhere during that year I started breaking that promise and became more and more involved with computers. Today I realized I am back at that day - the day I swore I'll never touch a computer...