What is more difficult - to think or to do something?

I always ponder what is more difficult? To think of solving a problem or dealing with a situation or simply doing something to attack the problem or situation.

I have observed over several years when I worked with developers of different levels and come away with a view that is more difficult to get someone to think (as in an analysis or design). It seems most developers are only too happy to do something whatever comes naturally, which may or may not produce the best solution.

Why is it harder to think? I wonder.

Recently, I come across an article which reports some experiments to study what is habit and how it influences one's action. Perhaps this is the answer, to think requires more mental activities and needs to overcome habits, which may not directly applicable to the task in hand (close but not exactly). Allowing the brain to select the right chunk reduces the brain activities and put oneself into an almost automatic mode.

But like many things in life: it is much easier to form bad habits than good and this increases the chance to apply bad habits than good resulting in inferior performance.

LibreOffice Base 3.5.0 fixes MS Access Connectivity problem

It is nice to see LibreOffice Base version 3.5.0 (Windows Edition) has fixed the MS Access Connectivity Problem reported previously.

Faulty LibreOffice Base MS Access Connectivity

Further to my last message reporting the bug in connecting LibreOffice Base (ver 3.4.5) in Windows to MS Access database, below are screen shot showing the bug.

For demonstrating this bug, I have created an very simple MS Access 2003 database as with a table called ListOfNumbers containing 20 records (numbers from 100 to 119) as shown here:

Having got the MS Access database, I then create a LibreOffice Base using MS Access connectivity as shown here:

 

Opening the ListOfNumbers in LibreOffice shows the missing first record showing only from 101 to 119, reporting only 19 records - one short! Notice the record that is missing.

The record is actually retrieved in the recordset, only not displayed. If you sort the record set in descending order, you will now see the missing last record (value 119) and the first record (value 100) is now displayed, as shown here:

That's the missing record is always the first record. This causes me to suspect that LibreOffice code fails to reconcile the differences in the bases of two different array convention; the Ole Automation Collection starts with 1 while the other more conventional one starts with zero.

Just to prove the MS Access is not faulty, I have created a different LibreOffice Base database but this time using ODBC connectivity with the MS Access ODBC driver and the result shown below reports no missing record.

 

Hence the only conclusion one can draw is a fault MS Access connectivity support from LibreOffice Base.