2 weeks into Chicago

I am in Chicago right now, dreading the oncoming winter. Yeah, I hate winter. Boo You. I hate it because it makes me lazy. I don't like to be in bed till 11 am and still not in mood of coming out of the blanket because you worked so hard over night to make the interior this warm, cozy. In the midst of this paradise, who would like to think that you have a class starting in 30 mins or the project manager waiting for you. Less spoken the better about the everything turning stone cold, literally. Water is cold, kitchen utensils are cold, damn it the toilet seats are cold. You would hate to come out of the hot shower for the same reason. Why go out and say hello to cold air, invite them to touch you, give you a tingling shiver.

I can go on for more but in the midst of my harangue I forgot the main thing.

I am in Chicago for my internship, at RIM, the creator of BlackBerry, in case you didn't know that. Its been 2 weeks here. The place is nice, people are nice, facilities are awesome (I meant free unlimited coffee of course), work i seven more interesting and the best part, no fixed committment when to be in office and when to come out etc. If one may remember the one thing I used to hate the most while employed at Samsung is the punch-in punch-out system. One has to be in office at best by 10am and one canno tleave office before 4pm with maximum of 1 hr break in betwen. What is this, a jail?

Anyways, that being said I'll try to put in some things that I learned during these 2 weeks. In simple words, my work pertains to developing application in VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) for a database in MS Access. What does the database contain? Well, nothin but which guy has which device with him, who is responsible for the device etc etc.

My first order of business was to resolve the size difference between the front end and back end. It is a common observation that when you open the modules, forms etc for changing in their codes and close the application after the updates you'd notice that the size of the front end has increased. My thought process was to separate each of the forms, macros, queries etc from the application and analyze their size individually. This didn't work. After some research on the web, I found out the solution.

The automatic compaction feature of Access is not enabled by default. If not done so, Access front end would incorporate the back end wholly which is unnecessary. The checkbox to enable the automatic compaction can be found in the Access Options. Initial side effects would involve slowing down of opening or closing of application but that would settl edown soon. One doesn't even need to tell the Access to compact everytime the application is closed. It can be invoked periodically at a predefined time stamp or you can set the size beyond which Access will automatically compact and repair the database.

Among many other itsy bitsy things I learned this was something I thought worth putting into a blog. May be in my next post after 2 weeks I'll have something more interesting than this.

Goldy Blank