Originally published at From the Land of Meh.... You can comment here or there.

It’s a user-defined-function to split a given string into ‘words’. In this case I’m delimiting words using commas and spaces. So ‘Smith, Fred’ (with a comma AND a space) will be separated into ‘Smith’ and ‘Fred’.

For convenience, it returns a table with a ‘pos’ column, representing the position in the original text that the word was found.

Hope this helps someone out there.

CREATE FUNCTION SplitWords(@text varchar(8000))
RETURNS @words TABLE (pos smallint primary key, value varchar(8000))
AS
BEGIN
DECLARE @pos smallint, @i smallint, @j smallint, @s varchar(8000)
SET @pos = 1
WHILE @pos <= LEN(@text)
BEGIN
SET @i = CHARINDEX(’ ‘, @text, @pos)
SET @j = CHARINDEX(’,', @text, @pos)
IF @i > 0 OR @j > 0
BEGIN
IF @i = 0 OR (@j > 0 AND @j < @i)
SET @i = @j
IF @i > @pos
BEGIN — @i now holds the earliest delimiter in the string
SET @s = SUBSTRING(@text, @pos, @i - @pos)
INSERT INTO @words VALUES (@pos, @s)
END
SET @pos = @i + 1
WHILE @pos < LEN(@text) AND SUBSTRING(@text, @pos, 1) IN (’ ‘, ‘,’)
SET @pos = @pos + 1
END
ELSE
BEGIN
INSERT INTO @words VALUES (@pos, SUBSTRING(@text, @pos, LEN(@text) - @pos + 1))
SET @pos = LEN(@text) + 1
END
END
RETURN
END

Originally published at From the Land of Meh.... You can comment here or there.

Here’s a revised version of the trailer for Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse, which explains the show’s concept much more clearly and features a lot more ass-whuppin’. Plus, parachuting and assassining. The show’s central conceit — that these “Actives” are blank slates who can be programmed to have any skillset or emotion — comes out really clearly. Plus it gives a hint of one of the show’s main sources of conflict. Those of you who had a tepid response to the first version should check this one out. [Whedonesque, via Damon/Zeitgeist]

Originally published at From the Land of Meh.... You can comment here or there.

A while ago I’d gotten to catch a movie that I wanted to recommend but then hadn’t gotten around to doing so. That movie is the 2007 release of “The Man from Earth” - a science fiction film in the purest sense, and without a single special effect. A great ensemble film that effectively takes place in a single living room while at the same time covering most of history.

This one, if you like films that make you think about, and open up for great conversations afterwards, give this a try during your next netflix order.

Here’s the trailer:

So, I'm watching this video and it's a great discourse on religion and the US. Even for non Obama fans (which I'm not particularly a massive fan of thus far), it's got some really good points in it for both sides. Give it a try, would be interested to see what others think.

That while I've been posting more recently of things found on the web, rants about faire, chatting about work and travels, there's still very little that I ever post about myself personally. Trials, tribulations, or things that make me happy for that matter. Friends, Relationships, etc.

I hereby make a new year's resolution retroactively to work on that and be a bit less of a black box when it comes to those topics and let a bit more light in on what's going on in the live and heart of Da' Bill.

So there.