Yes. And you too.

Posted on December 31, 2006 by Arthur

We haveBrink been walking around a lot, cameras on our necks, reflecting on the last couple of days, from deathbed to funeral. Not all of it bad either: when people die, it appears that there’s a lot of catching up to do. Cousins, aunts, brothers and sisters. Friends, neighbours, relatives. And others. Sometimes I shook hands with people who forgot to introduce himself (or herself in one case). ‘And you are?’. Who knows.

Between all the walking, I found out that from everything I miss, I do miss ‘saucijzebroodjes’ the most1. And that only because I associate those snacks with visits from my grandmother when I was way younger: every time she visited our parental home she used to bring them with her. I assume she bought them at the railway station too.

In my logs, I noticed that the recipe for oliebollen is pretty popular too. Surprisingly, most of these referrers appear to come from Canadian IP addresses. You’re welcome! Since oliebollen are a typical Dutch treat for this particular day (New Years Eve), have another fatty one.

For the rest, have a safe New Years Eve and catch you around in 2007.

1 OK, Indonesian food I miss too.

Posted in xsamplex | 4 Comments

In Memoriam

Posted on December 24, 2006 by Arthur

In Memoriam

(1930-2006)

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So yeah.

Posted on December 19, 2006 by Arthur

It looks like it’s going to be a waiting game. If you work in the banking or insurance industry, the following products could be part of your 2007 products and services line-up:

  • Emergency Fly-Over Account: an account your customers can use in case of serious illness in the family. For each 100 dollar you save, you also get 100 Air Miles!
  • Family Bereavement Insurance: an insurance policy for 10 bucks a month which you can cash out (“use”) in case of illness in the family.
  • Air Miles Family card: a special Air Miles card that grants the bearer special priority in case of family illness. Guarantees seat during high-season and holidays.

Yes. Some airlines carry bereavement fares, something I was able to make use of, oh, 2 years ago.

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Frozen Etch

Posted on December 15, 2006 by Arthur

I just noticed that there’s a commit freeze for the Debian Etch branch (Debian admin), meaning that it’s slated to be released really soon now. Or from the Debian mailing list:

We just edited the generic freeze file, so that all packages now need to be
hand-approved in order to go to testing.

You can now throw your favourite Debian-based distribution (Ubuntu, Kubuntu and what not) in the bin. Well. Not quite yet.

  1. Earlier on xsamplex, the Sarge Freeze announcement.

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It’s like that

Posted on December 14, 2006 by Arthur

It strikes me as A T-Cell attempting an attack on a cancer cell ironic, that I’m trying to read up as much about cancer after finding out that another loved one has been diagnosed with the same disease as the one who succumbed to it a couple of years ago.This is so extremely sad, that the only thing I can think of that might cheer up my relatives closer to home, is by making a totally absurd statement, in the style you should be oh-so familiar with by now:

Hey! Maybe this thing will outgrow our family!

Having said that, the Wikipedia article on lung cancer is extremely well versed and highly informative. The state of cancer research? It’s the pits: if I have to believe the numbers in the news there is a greater chance of being killed by a terrorist (that other tumor as others call it) than being outrun by a virus, or, in this case, outgrown by malignant cells. In reality, of course, 7.6 million people died of cancer last year alone. According to my rusty statistics, that’s 1 out of 870 (world census).

Update: Wait, just today a study shows that breast cancer rates dropped recently because millions of women stopped or abandoned hormone treatment after a study concluded that the hormones slightly increased breast cancer risks.

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All things European

Posted on December 13, 2006 by Arthur

Via Flea, I found out that Dutch peanut butter is the best, or rather, (as this Wikipedia article says):

[The Dutch peanut butter] is very different from its international counterpart. It is sharp instead of sweet and most people say it has a similar taste to that of Satay sauce.

The only thing I want to add is that, Dutch peanut butter is definitely not sweetened. And that the most popular peanut butter (the one made by Calve [note: you need Flash!]) is definitely not good for use in satay/peanut sauce. Me and my family also have a patent on how to make a sauce out of peanut butter. There’s a trick for that and I’m not going to reveal that. Peanut sauce goes perfect with fresh veggies (see also ‘gado-gado’, Indonesian/Malaysia recipe). Hey, I knew people who put cucumber slices and sambal on their peanut butter sandwiches.

Via the Internationalist something about a food scandal in Hungary, which reminded me (in some way) of our Dutch relatives who visited us the last couple of years. To our surprise, my brother hesitantly ate a triple grade A piece of steak. I’m not sure why. The other shock was to see my dad literally clean out a Nova Scotian lobster1. His (nonchalant) remark (‘Yeah, we had lobster too when we anchored in Halifax, back in the 50s’) took us by surprise too. We also rekindled his love for A&W root beer, a soft-drink he hadn’t had for years either.

Earlier, we managed to get our hands on a box of custard powder of Koopmans. Do not follow the ‘how-to-make-vla’ instructions on the box. It doesn’t work. Try this one instead.

1 I was introduced to lobster for the first time in 2000 or something.

Posted in Truro NS | Comments Off on All things European

Lack-an-ODBCy

Posted on December 11, 2006 by Arthur

The silly thing of having out-of-date interface files + up-to-date SDK files is that nothing matches and that (generally) the next step is to ‘duke it out’ with everything, except for the compiler. Here’s what I was fighting out:

Using generic ODBC calls (ADO, actually) you can basically filter out the provider’s database types: in this case, I’m after specific Postgres datatypes, but the concept should be the same for any database/ODBC source. The API says the following: 

Providertypes:

recordset = connection.OpenSchema (QueryType, Criteria, SchemaID);

where QueryType = adsProviderTypes,
        QueryType = DATA_TYPE/BEST_MATCH (not applicable for Postgres)
        SchemaType = empty

To find a field’s datatype, you issue the same method with querytype of adsSchemaColumns and pass on the tablename as SchemaID. That particular dataset will return an ADO datatype for each field in a table (fieldname ‘DATA_TYPE’). Here’s where the confusing part comes in: there’s only one ADO type defined for string fields, namely DBTYPE_WSTR (well, not completely true, if your database doesn’t support Unicode, but I’ll leave that out for now). How to distinguish, say char(xx) and varchar(xx) fields? Or even, memo/text types?

The easy part is to tell the difference between, memo and varchar(xx) fields: varchar fields will generally have a maximum size (in case of Postgres, 254 characters). Memo’s generally don’t. So, to tell the difference between the two, do a crossreference on ‘CHARACTER_OCTET_LENGTH’ (remember octets!) and ‘COLUMN_SIZE’. For the specific char vs. varchar issue, you apparently have to see if bit 16 (DBCOLUMNFLAGS_ISFIXEDLENGTH) is set in the adsSchemaColumns dataset’s ‘COLUMN_FLAGS’.

Yes. Really. I’m not kidding.

Posted in Programming | Comments Off on Lack-an-ODBCy

Dancers.

Posted on December 10, 2006 by Arthur

I‘ve finally figured out what makes Windows XP Media Center unique. Or rather, what you get if you decide to buy Media Center1 instead of (say) Windows XP Home edition:

  • Dancers. I’m not kidding. It’s like the bonzi-buddy but then in “The One Microsoft Way”™.
  • A simplified front-end for Windows Media Player 10 with ‘Fisher-Price’-like buttons. You can’t miss it.
  • Windows Messenger. LOL! ROFLMASKHAIDO! (When Media Center starts, it automatically loads up Windows Messenger. I haven’t figured out why that might be necessary)
  • An extra Media Center theme that hurts the eyes.

All jokes aside, ‘Windows Dancer’ dancer Amanda is actually an amazing dancer.

1 Actually, I don’t think you can buy MediaCenter right off the shelves (It’s OEM-only, I believe)

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From databases to other bunnies

Posted on December 9, 2006 by Arthur

You may have noticed that the Postgres developers released a new version of the PostgreSQL database server. There are particular reasons why I like working with Postgres: trivial data import and export is one of them. Take for example the following command (issued in psql): 

COPY users FROM '/home/arthur/ascii_users.csv' WITH DELIMITER AS ',' 
  NULL AS 'null';

In case your ODBC driver goes kaboom, there you have the solution!

O M G.This week two other announcements stood out: First, OpenOffice’s OpenDocument format became an ISO standard. And then Microsoft Office’s Open XML, by way of the ECMA, made it to the ISO body too. Saillant detail is that IBM apparently voted against this: as a vocal supporter of the other format, IBM said that a vote for Open XML was a vote about the past.

I read that some US mapmakers, are planning to exclude communities with fewer than 2,500 people. I guess, there is always Google Maps or Microsoft Live Map Earth Something uh-huh to find these communities, provided that you have high-speed.

And then, I heard about some Hydro One problem, apparently related to a CEO overcharging a creditcard (his secretary’s) and I thought by myself “Hey, this Hydro One, it rings a bell“. And bunnies. Lots of bunnies, as you can tell from the picture above.

Posted in Ordinateurs | Comments Off on From databases to other bunnies

Huh. Huh?!?

Posted on December 7, 2006 by Arthur

While returning back to some older ADO/DAO stuff (earlier on xsamplex), I decided to take a look behind the scenes: the ADO/MDAC SDK comes -uh- with a set of tools to help developers find out problems with ODBC drivers and specific ODBC related functions.

One of these tools is (appropriately) called ‘ODBC test’ and running it on Windows XP, the program looks like the pinnacle of Windows 3.1 applications1. It does the job, though. That said, running the different functions that show the typical ODBC datasets (Schemas, columns and provider specific types), I noticed that the program doesn’t use the same field names constants as the ones shown in the SDK.

You’ve been warned.

1 Pre-ctrl3d stuff.

Posted in Programming | 2 Comments

Who’s blogging this?

Posted on December 6, 2006 by Arthur

This morning I read about that crocodile in Indonesia, the one they found human body parts in. What to do with a dead human-eating crocodile? Easy:

When the villagers recovered from the shock of finding human body parts inside the captured reptile’s abdomen — together with skull fragments, strands of hair and a pair of shorts — they cut the beast into pieces and divided up the meat to be consumed

Fried crocodile meat with French freedom fries sounds like the perfect Halloween meal to me.

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Dump, snow

Posted on December 4, 2006 by Arthur

Hee. We got Snow Dec 4 of 2006snow. It also looks like these were ‘remnants’ of the storm that blanked mid and eastern parts of the US. Or maybe it just grew worser because of cold air hitting warmer air above oceans.

You may have seen the announcements at the CBA page: Yes, xsamplex ended up trailing the other nominees, but hey, at least we were a finalist! Thanks for the votes and the nomination. And congrats to the ones that made it to the top 3.

Here at xsamplex, we’ll keep doing the same (since 2003!), that is covering the past, present, the next and the unexpected. Thanks for your support.

Posted in Truro NS | Comments Off on Dump, snow

Chaiyya, chaiyya

Posted on December 3, 2006 by Arthur

A couple Clive Owens and posseof weeks ago, we watched Spike Lee’s 4th movie, ‘Inside Man’. The movie was released earlier this year with reasonably good reviews. Albeit a heist movie, the movie features some of Spike Lee’s trademarks, like the tension and struggle of people from different parts of the NY society and how these tensions affect the main characters. All nice and well, this is a heist movie and it should come with amazing theme music.

It does, but unexpectedly, Spike Lee reached out to ‘Bollywood’: when the movie starts, the song “Chaiyya, Chaiyya” (1 minute fragment, mp3) (from ‘Dil Se’) guides viewers through the streets of New York. I heard that initial reviewers were blown away: Inside Man literally has nothing to do with ‘Dil Se’. Apparently, Spike Lee liked the music so much, he thought it needed it be in there.

That said, a clip from ‘Dil Se’ featuring that song1 can be found on YouTube, and of course, it features the typical Bollywood elements: overzealous dancing and singing, but amazing scenery shot on top of a moving train. No safety harnasses either. Hey, even Michael Jackson can’t beat this!

Update: Someone uploaded the whole intro of the movie of ‘Inside Man’. Judge for yourself.
1 Wikipedia on ‘Chaiyya, chaiyya’

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