Brain Drugs and my Quest for Sapho Juice

Does the idea of giving your brain a safe and effective boost as good or better than caffeine sound good to you? Are you a student or just enjoy using your brain all the time? "Well hell yea woaw!" is my answer for all those questions. It's all done using a newly emerging type of brain drugs called nootropics.

So I've been listening to a lot of the Dune audio books and fell in love with the idea of sapho juice. It's an imaginary tonic that the highly-trained mind-like-a-computer mentants would drink to improve their cognitive capacity. It was a bitter, cranberry-tasting drink that stained the lips. Anyway, I started digging around trying to come up with ideas for my own recipe and I found this post:
http://www.imminst.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=6018&st=0&p=56900&hl=sapho&fromsearch=1&#entry56900

I hadn't heard of nootropics but they seemed to be exactly what I wanted. Further Wikinvestigation turned up some valuable knowledge:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nootropic

Nootropics are a class of cognitive-enhancing drugs that are either highly nontoxic or neuroprotective. That's right. They're either really safe or good for you. Now, granted, we have to have higher standards of evidence to be absolutely sure, and it's not safe to just start trusting everything you read on Wikipedia. However, too many people are using this stuff and claiming to get real results and it's not obviously a scam. (I did some searches for that, too.)

I played around in the nootropic subform for a few days, getting some ideas. Then I went over to Ebay and purchased 60 grams of the most well known and widely used nootropic piracatam and 25 grams of the fat-soluble version called aniracetam, which some people claim is more potent. I figured I'd just mix them together and swirl 'em up. I also read you needed lots of choline to make the drugs more bio-available, so I tried to find a good source of choline. All of the supplements were too expensive for me, but consider the fact that I'm cheap and didn't want to go all out on some strange white powders I'd be buying online and ingesting. So I settled on lecithin, which is actually quite good for you and has been used as a food additive for a while.

Once everything came in, this is what I used for my first sapho juice recipe:
1 small cup of kombucha brewed with green tea and yerba mate (for the caffeine)
~1g piracetam
~400mg aniracetam
2 tea spoons lecithin

The flavor was.. terrible. I figured if I was going to have terrible tastes, I should mix them together and let them fight it out. The result was better than you'd expect, with the kombucha over powering everything else.

The results were quite good. Concentration was more intense and focus was easier. I'm quite sensitive to caffeine and this taken in the morning made me hyper productive until about 3 o'clock, which is when I normally start misfiring in my head. Coming up and while it was rocking my thoughts came quite easily and I was VERY chatty. It was QUITE enjoyable without being too enjoyable. The coming down was surprisingly mild. I just felt a little extra tired after work. Taking it in the evening was great. I enjoyed the extra desire to talk with my girlfriend and I slept just fine and woke up in the morning feeling normal.

All in all, with my dosages and tolerances it's about like half a cup of coffee or more with much less jitters and much less of the 5-minute experience of full-body-omg-I-can-FEEL-the-universe I get. The entire adventure so far has been about 40 bucks but I bought more and have played with different recipes which I'll write about in the future.
I'd also suggest playing around this forum for a bit to get some other ideas: http://www.imminst.org/forum/index.php?showforum=169

Building a Computer

My friend built what can technically be described as a computer. Check it out: Z80 Test Circuit

Even has a dimly lit video showing it off!

It uses a Z80 processor and he refers to it as Thomas Scherrer's testing circuit.

Dropping Replicated Columns For SQL Server 2000

I'm sure all of us have tried, at some point, to delete a column from a table on a replicated database in Enterprise Manager only to be greeted with an error message:

Error 5074: The object 'DF__SomeTable__somec__71CF15EB' is dependant on column 'somecolumn'.
ALTER TABLE DROP COLUMN somecolumn failed because one or more objects access this column.

So you figure, I'll just delete the constraint and everything will be OK. But wait, that constraint is on every single replicated server, so you'll have to delete it there too. If there is a lot of latency between you and the other node, it is like waiting for a Christmas that will never come. Oh yeah, spoiler alert: Added bonus - Each one is named slightly differently. So while you may delete it from your main server, none of the syncs are happening or at least the snapshots are failing because you're missing a constraint that everyone has but you. If only there were some way to programaticly determine the randomly-named constraint and delete it. That's where I was today, so I hacked this together for Microsoft SQL Server 2000:

Use YourDatabaseHere
GO

-- Ad-hoc queries require this because sysobjects is just that important.
SP_CONFIGURE 'ALLOW UPDATES', 1
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE
GO

DECLARE @parent_id INT
DECLARE @table_name NVARCHAR(255)
DECLARE @column_name NVARCHAR(255)

SELECT @table_name = 'SomeTable'
SELECT @column_name = 'somecolumn'
SELECT @parent_id = (SELECT sysobjects.id FROM sysobjects WHERE sysobjects.name = @table_name AND parent_obj = 0)

DELETE FROM sysobjects
WHERE parent_obj = @parent_id
AND (SELECT syscolumns.name FROM syscolumns WHERE syscolumns.id = @parent_id
AND syscolumns.colid = (SELECT sysconstraints.colid FROM sysconstraints
WHERE sysconstraints.id = @parent_id AND sysconstraints.constid = sysobjects.id)) = @column_name
AND xtype = 'D'
GO

-- Turn it off when we're done.
SP_CONFIGURE 'ALLOW UPDATES', 0
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE
GO

If you are not familiar with system tables, I heartily recommend you check them out and learn them. Very handy for doing tricky things like this and it will make the above script seem less like magic and will lessen the chances you break something.

For SQL Server 2000: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa260604(SQL.80).aspx

For SQL Server 2005: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms179932.aspx

If you ARE familiar with system tables, and you find an error in the above script, please let me know in the harshest way possible, so I wont forget (within reason).

Now to run this command on all subscriber databases... For more info on that, check out this link:
http://doc.ddart.net/mssql/sql2000/html/replsql/replimpl_5t9d.htm

Replication Procedures Accidently Added to Publication

We have merge replication configured for about 20 field computers, and 4 servers on our local network. While trying to fix a problem, all articles on the distributor were added to a publication. This includes about 700 procedures generated by SQL server. We weren't able to uncheck them once the changes were applied, probably because the snapshot was created and to uncheck them would invalidate the snapshot.

This caused a lot of problems because we couldn't create any more snapshots because we kept getting the error:
Cannot drop replicataed procedure 'sp_sel_BD87AFD5144A4C7FEE4B86FD60AC49F3_pal' because it is being used for replication.

So I had to write this script to remove them from the publication programaticly:

DECLARE @proc_name NVARCHAR(100)
DECLARE @pub_name NVARCHAR(100)

SET @pub_name = 'PublicationName'

DECLARE cGetRepProcs CURSOR FOR
SELECT ROUTINE_NAME
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ROUTINES
WHERE ROUTINE_TYPE='PROCEDURE'
AND ROUTINE_NAME LIKE '%_%_pal'

OPEN cGetRepProcs
FETCH NEXT FROM cGetRepProcs INTO @proc_name
WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
BEGIN
EXECUTE sp_dropmergearticle @pub_name, @proc_name,1,0,1

FETCH NEXT FROM cGetRepProcs INTO @proc_name
END

CLOSE cGetRepProcs
DEALLOCATE cGetRepProcs

Failed to enumerate changes in the filtered articles.

If you have Microsoft SQL servers setup for merge replication and you can't sync from the enterprise manager because of the following error:

Failed to enumerate changes in the filtered articles.

Then try syncing from the command line using replmerg. Not only does it, strangely, have a higher chance of working correctly, but it also shows you valuable information that can be used for debugging. To use replmerg, right click on the publication and go to Agent Properties. Then click the Steps tab and there should be a job called "Run agent.". Select that step and click Edit. There should be a long line of text in the command box. Highlight it all and copy it (ctrl+a, ctrl+c), then open a command prompt (windows key+r, cmd) and issue this command:

cd \Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\80\COM

Now type: replmerg and then right click on the command prompt to paste. If you can't paste, go to the command prompt properties (alt+space, p) and make sure Quick Edit is checked (q) then apply and try again.