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Common Table Expressions, or CTEs as they are often called, are an area of SQL which can by some be considered to be no different than magic. This is because few of us use them, and even fewer of us use them regularly enough to make them like the familiar of some powerful wizard in some book. And just like those familiars sometimes do in the books, they can give us great frustration or even turn upon us like some demon or Djinn who has escaped the bounds we thought would control them.

In my previous post, I unloaded on Chrome's crappy handling of expired SSL certificates. I had to work around the fact that when trying to connect using HTTP with its FQDN (e.g. http://host.subdomain.ka8zrt.com), the browser would itself switch to HTTPS, and then refuse to let me connect due to the SSL certificate having expired. And so, I instead had to connect using the IP address.

As a developer, it is not often that a developer or developer team makes me go WTF, and has me envisioning conducting a test of both electromagnetic repulsion and the Pauling Exclusion Principle using their head and an available desk or wall, but today, the Google Chrome team has done it twice. Congratulations to them for setting several new records (minimum interval between occurrences, and the more than once in a day).