The Horrors

Posted on October 29, 2006 by Arthur

Yesterday, we watched ‘Contact’ (1997) and ‘Silent Hill’ (2006). Quite the combination to watch on a stormy Fall night.

Contact, starring Jodie Foster, is an adaption of a novel by astronomer Carl Sagan and features good effects and a compelling storyline about the struggle between faith and science (Wikipedia synopsis + trivia).

Silent Hill apparently is an adoption of a horror videogame (I’m joking) and features an almost all-female cast. I hear that many Silent Hill fans were disappointed about how the movie strayed from the games. As someone who hasn’t played any of the Silent Hill games, I was surprised about the movie: it’s actually well-shot (colourful) and has a fairly good storyline for a horror movie (without too much gore). Some ‘monster stuff’ was overdone and probably could have been left out.

Posted in The Chest Desire | 2 Comments

Dev-is-Duff

Posted on October 27, 2006 by Arthur

Maybe I missed the big announcement, but since when are Microsoft SDKs freely available? I needed the ADO/MDAC SDK (I get tired of reading stuff online too), et voila et la the SDK1. Not completely: it’s obviously hidden behind the Windows Genuine Advantage barrier. That said, apparently Microsoft got the hint: they actually produced a Firefox extension that does the WGA straight from within your favourite non-IE browser (see faq). But, that’s old news too! Yeah, yeah, yeah.

WordPress 2.0.5 is out. I can hear you: you already read that somewhere else.

Pumpkin templates at the CBC. I’d like somebody else to do me the CBC logo. This year no-nothing: we’ve started our annual high-tech warfare against fleas. I have this theory that the noise of my computer might scare some of the fleas.

We’ve got a weather (frost) warning in effect: it looks like we’ll get below zero temperatures tonight.

Update: How about a real Cylon pumpkin thing (via Literal Barrage)?

1 Yuck. Most of the API is described in Lingua Visualicus Basicus Horiblus. I just punched my nose.

Posted in Hyperlinks | Comments Off on Dev-is-Duff

Fire(not)Fixed 2.0

Posted on October 25, 2006 by Arthur

I downloaded Firefox 2.0 yesterday, but noticed that I still see the same problems: random hangups, most of time in the middle (or after) processing a recently clicked ‘hyperlink’ 1.

I don’t recall having problems like this bad in Firefox 1.5 (actually, I never had any problems in FF 1.5), so I might consider downgrading real soon now, particularly since the forums at Mozillazine are hardly reachable these days (I also noticed that there is apparently a trunk freeze).

So, what does Firefox 2.0 gives you? Shiny buttons, tabs, a restore session manager (which ends up being really handy with the 10 or more crashes I had today) and the Talkback manager as a plug-in. Huzzah. It’s like the SeaMonkey days!

Update (10/26/06): Finally able to go to Mozillazine and followed up on the recommendation to start a completely new profile (start firefox from commandline like ‘firefox -profilemanager’). So far so good. Though, before you do so, don’t forget to export your bookmarks first.

1 Mentioned earlier

Posted in Hyperlinks | 4 Comments

Duly Noted

Posted on October 23, 2006 by Arthur

I know Duly Notedof Google’s Notebook (Notebook), but I was obviously surprised to see it completely integrated in my search results (look for the Note This link).

I think this is new, because I never noticed it before. Plus, it does not yet show up when using other GMail accounts.

While this (adding notes) can be handy (I always say for ‘future reference’), I’d like to tell the Google developers that this obviously needs to be integrated into GMail. If not I’m not going to use it. Oh: and please add code syntax highlighting functionality too (for Object Pascal, C and C#). Thanks!

1. Even the president uses The Google to spy on us!

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Bullets and the revolution

Posted on October 23, 2006 by Arthur

EarlierRussian tanks take over the streets, I saw that the commemoration of the Hungarian Revolution of 56 (Excellent Wikipedia entry) turned into violent clashes with the riot police (BBC news). Even an old (Russian) tank made an appearance (briefly?) as you can tell from that photo at BBC’s. Excellent commentary (pictures/video/sound) at The Internationalist (for future reference, here be a permalink to the October archive)1.

Which reminds me that I should mention that both the Czech (1953) and Hungarian revolts (1956) made it into the Dutch history lessons for 12 year-old kids2. If I remember correctly, this was exclusively done because many Eastern Europeans who fled the violence ended up in West Europe, and indeed, a portion of them ended up in The Netherlands (link to UNHCR).

Update 10/24: Nu.nl carries a Dutch story about how the Hungarian revolution turned the tide for Dutch Communists (who were previously respected for the crucial role they played during the German occupation)

1 I just became aware that Blogger doesn’t support ‘daily archives’: hence the link to the complete October archive at The Internationalist.
2 I’m not sure if this still applies today: after all, back in the days, the Cold War played a bigger part in our lives.

Posted in We-reflect-news | 2 Comments

The tech and then that

Posted on October 21, 2006 by Arthur

Via That's too big of a laptopSlashdot (the thread) a link to a video at C-Net showcasing a Dell laptop with a 20 inch screen. That’s godawful laptop too, as you can tell from the faces of the people nearby the guy carrying the ‘thing’. Weren’t Osbornes this kind of heavy too? Some progress1.

I read that Internet Explorer 7 was officially released this week. What has changed? Too many things to list from the user perspective. Bar none from the Web designer’s perspective. Too many bugs2. It will be interesting too see how many existing software packages broke because of the upgrade.

The US elections are around the corner, and while that’s not so interesting, the problems with the Diebold voting are. Yesterday, someone sent a former Maryland legislator the original sourcecode of the Diebold voting machines. That Diebold apparently has contacted the FBI to check the disks out, so apparently this is a serious leak. Which reminds me: Just a week ago, the Dutch government apparently ordered all software to be replaced in voting machines after an independent group managed to ‘hack’ one of ’em. The group’s articles are interesting. If I’m not wrong, these are older machines that have been around for a while. And hey, they’re powered by the 68000 processor.

1 I guess the progress is in the 20″ screen…
2 Earlier on xsamplex.

Posted in Hyperlinks, We-reflect-news | Comments Off on The tech and then that

Wandle Band

Posted on October 21, 2006 by Arthur

Wandle Band
col. 1. A group of loitering people. or an organization or part of an organization that has no or lost focus and therefore is (and will be) rudderless.
ex – “After Pam left, the electrical dept. was nothing but a wandle band”

Origin: Comes from ‘wandelband’, a Dutch word that closely resembles (when translated literally) the English word of ‘treadmill’. Also compare with the other (Dutch) meaning of ‘wandelband’, the process of walking home after having a flat tire (either bycycle or car). Or, I think I made that up too.

Posted in Neologic | Comments Off on Wandle Band

You asked: Thanksgiving in SQL

Posted on October 20, 2006 by Arthur

From the logs: how do you calculate Thanksgiving in MS SQL? For that, first a background reminder from Wikipedia. There are of course two kinds of Thanksgiving: A Canadian one (which is the second Monday of October) and the US one (the 4th week of November). The good news is that I’ve got the queries right here, so you can copy and paste it right in your SQL code.

The Canadian one is the base query: basically, I pick out the first Monday of October first and add 1 extra week to it:

select DATEADD(wk, 1, 
    DATEADD(wk, 
      DATEDIFF(wk,0,
      CONVERT(datetime, '10/01/' 
       + cast(DATEPART(yy, getdate()) as varchar(4)), 
       101) ), 0
           ) )

The US query is based on the one above: First I get the very first Monday of November, I add 3 days to that, and add another 3 weeks to the last DateAdd function, et voila.

select DATEADD(ww, 3,
     DATEADD(
     dd, 3,
     DATEADD(wk, 0, 
    DATEADD(wk, 
      DATEDIFF(wk,0,
      CONVERT(datetime, '11/01/' 
       + cast(DATEPART(yy, getdate()) as varchar(4)), 
       101) ), 0
           ) ) ))

Mind the bad code formatting.

Posted in You-Asked | Comments Off on You asked: Thanksgiving in SQL

You Lock

Posted on October 18, 2006 by Arthur

I decided to give McAfee’s Online virus scanner (requires IE5 or higher because of ActiveX component) a run only because they have been pretty persistent with their ‘Please, we need your money to survive in this rocky business market of anti-virus scanning’ e-mails ads in my mailbox. During the scan it did find suspect files, in which I decide to use Fandro to find these supposedly infected files. The moment I started the search, McAfee’s scanner immediately decided to stop and requested me to stop any other running virus scanners.

While I’m not aware of Fandro’s anti-virus skills (and I can vouch for that, since I’m the programmer), I suspect it may have to do with the way how I load the files in memory (using CreateMappingFile). There was a particular reason why I was forced to use mapped files, but as far as I remember, this technique doesn’t (necessarily) explicitly locks files (The Win32 SDK files don’t mention any locking)

Maybe that means I’m doing something good.

Posted in Hyperlinks | Comments Off on You Lock

Knoppix 5

Posted on October 17, 2006 by Arthur

To celebrate Knoppix in 1024x768the 289128280th cakeday, I decided to load up Knoppix on the P100 laptop.

There were a couple of issues, right at startup (where I had to add a couple of commands to skip the ACPI functionality). After detecting everything nicely, I was presented with a 1024×768 resolution, instead of the preferred 1440 one. Bummer.

For the rest everything seems to be working, including networking and sound (for a change: see earlier Ubuntu live-CD experience).

Posted in Ordinateurs | 8 Comments

You asked: most difficult shoot’em ups

Posted on October 17, 2006 by Arthur

Without a doubt, that would be Salamander, a Konami game released in 1986 (wikipedia). I played the game on an MSX-2 home computer and I actually tried to beat it last year (that older entry has a screenshot plus original sound!).

There are a couple of reasons why I think that game is so hard:

  • The game can be played with two players simultaneously, which shows: there’s so much action going on all over the screen that it is sometimes impossible to break through stages without any help.
  • The game features multi-directional scrolling in all stages.
  • There’s a frequent change of view: in most stages, you ‘fly from left to right’, however, there are 2 or 3 stages that shows your ‘ship’ from a birdsview.
  • ‘Yo Save Games are for losers’. There are no save games in Salamander. You’re supposed to beat the game. And you start with only 3 lives.

That said, I beat the game: However, if you plan to play it (there’s plenty of MSX emulators around nowadays), make sure you buy the right joystick. The game is all about counting.

I read that the Wikipedia article states that the MSX version contained way longer stages. Yeah: like if I didn’t know.

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The bulge, huh?

Posted on October 15, 2006 by Arthur

Last night, The History Channel showed ‘The Battle of the bulge’, a typical 60s/70s war movie depicting the 1944 hard fought battle in the Ardennes. Typical, because it features many big screen stars in a story that is not soo close to the truth. Obviously, back in the days, most of the effects were filmed in the studio using miniature models and that.

Maybe the essence of these kind of Hollywood movies is to have people look up the actual stories behind the film (Wikipedia).

Which reminds me that Eastwood’s war movie (‘Flags of our fathers’) is supposed to be in theatres really soon. ‘Flags’ tells the story of the soldiers that raised the flag on Iwo Jima. Eastwood also directed a movie telling the other side’s story (which is now in postproduction).

Posted in The Chest Desire | 3 Comments

Holy Cows!

Posted on October 11, 2006 by Arthur

So,Hey, I like Int64s! a question programmers (the Earthly types) should be able to answer:

How many cows can you store in a genuine Int64?

If you’re a smartass, take it away!

Posted in Programming | Comments Off on Holy Cows!