Part of being an Australian means you need to accept that sometimes, an expression or offhand turn of phrase you hear a lot won’t make much sense if you think about it logically. That’s mostly OK because in my experience, people use phrases and clichés they don’t understand without thinking twice; the phrase takes on almost the status of a single word and has a generally understood meaning — and sometimes that’s just…enough, you know?

Here would be a good place to give my statement some solid reinforcement with a few concrete examples of such, but it’s late at night and this blog is hardly a showpiece of academia so I’ll leave the filling of the aforementioned gaps as an exercise for the reader. As you are a constituent of my readership I am certain that it is just to bestow upon you the qualities of resourcefulness, zeal for truth and thirst for knowledge so this burden will be of little imposition to you. And you could start here.

But, to carry on, the point of this post is to say that Guam (see #5) is quite close to me really, being only a few thousand kilometres away and not tens of thousands, like, say, Greece or England.

So what? Well it gets crazy when a conversation goes something like the following:

Me: Hey, what’s up? [obviously imagine me looking way cool at this point]
Other Person: Oh man I just went to a sporting event, it was neato.
Me: Oh yeah? Like, where was it?
Other Person: Dude it was in like, Guam! Took us an hour to get there.
Me: Gee I sure am suitably impressed. Way to go, casual acquaintance! See ya round hey.
Other Person: Ace! See ya.

You can see where the possible confusion could arise where this conversation takes place between two residents of Australia. Guam is being used here as a token to exemplify an exaggeratedly far away location to place special emphasis on the sporting event’s location being very distant. In a place such as the U.S.A. or the Isle of Mann this is fine and congruent with the speaker’s meaning, especially since Guam has indeed been a far-flung outpost of the United States since World War II with its U.S. military base bristling with weapons I imagine to be poised to cause the mass destruction of South East Asia.

N.B. All of the above text is to justify the images contained within this post.

Well, what have I learned? The first item was about HTML and CSS and really Javascript as well — you might call this “DHTML” but who am I to judge? The second was about SQL Server and how a client (e.g. Query Analyzer or a website) resolves a named instance of a SQL Server.

1. You can hide a DIV element using visibility:hidden; in CSS, and then show one of the child elements of the DIV using Javascript, without modifying the visibility of the DIV. How about that!
   I have a demo HTML page that is similar to our real scenario, having two radio buttons and an image in an invisible DIV. The first radio button makes the DIV visible, which, as you would expect, shows the image that is a child element of the DIV. This is how I thought you would need to do things. The second radio button in the example page shows only the image, without showing the parent DIV element — and it still works! This was unexpected for me because surely an element shouldn’t be shown if it is inside another, invisible element? This works in Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox 2 but I haven’t tried any other browsers.
2. We’ve been setup new SQL Servers at work and maybe to save IP addresses, or maybe to ease administration (DNS entries? Server administration overhead?) load, we are using named SQL Server instances on a single hostname (e.g. BNESQL5000\SQL5000) where BNESQL5000 is the hostname and SQL5000 is the name of the SQL Server instance on the server.

   Now the other afternoon, I could connect fine to the named instance using Query Analyzer, which I had running since that morning. Another dude at work couldn’t connect using Enterprise Manager (ergh, clicking — I’ll do it with SQL cause I’m a Real Programmer). Obviously I was connected and using the server, so it wasn’t a problem with the SQL Server instance itself — it was running fine. So I ran netstat on my PC to see which TCP port I was connected to the SQL Server on. It was port 50433 incidentally, so I said to my Enterprise Manager-using friend, “Try BNESQL5000,50433″ as your SQL hostname, which sneakily connects directly to the named instance without using its name. Well voila, my Enterprise Manager-using friend connected straight up and started hammering out database changes with his clicky mouse like a demon.

   You’re probably wondering, “Omg Glenn, tell me how this named instance and TCP port magic happens!” and that’s great because I am going to tell you. The way it happens is that when you try to connect to a named SQL Server instance your client goes “uhh, the bit before the backslash is a hostname, duhhh, but there’s a backslash so, um, that’s the name of an instance innit?” and so it connects to port 1434 (standard SQL Server port of 1433, plus one) which is where the SQL Server Browser service is listening. There, the client asks the question of “which port is named instance ‘SQL5000′ listening on?” and the SQL Browser replies with port 50433. So then the client goes “BOOYA!” and connects to port 50433 without any complaints or further ado.

   So obviously, the problem was that the SQL Browser service wasn’t running on our server, after it was rebooting or something silly. I smugly informed the DBAs what was going on and they fixed the problem in no time. All was well.

So here ends Lesson One of “Stuff I’ve Learned”, I hope it was informative and sufficiently brief!