Kikkoman

I have had occasion recently to focus on my deep and abiding dislike of SQL and (databases in general), and have determined that there is actually one thing SQL could do that would “make it all better”.

That would be: give me nice, easy, standard way of generating a pivot table / query where I don’t need to know all the columns I want back ahead of time.

Please, for the love of … whatever … make it so.    We all know the database can do it and do it reasonably efficiently, cause we’ve all spent days fiddling with frustratingly obtuse queries to trick it into doing it.

Hence you can imagine my surprise to find out that Access already has this all figured out.  Behold, Access’s TRANSFORM statement. Which pretty much does exactly what you want.

The kicker is that, it has been around and in use for a long time.

Can you imagine the billions of dollars wasted around the world writing stupid pivot table queries in SQL when companies have upgraded from Acess to a “real database”?  OMG.

Interesting things I have learned about java recently.

Recursive Generics
Initializing your member variables to null is bad.   Because if you then add in lazy initialization and contructor chaining, you could lazy init twice.
String.intern()  been there since at least 1.2.

Being detached with hope is opposite from being invested with expectations.  -Tseric

http://www.acc.umu.se/~zqad/cats/index.html

Heard this clip long ago, and via the power of YouTube have found it again. Its about the women’s movement, but the following part is apropos to software development.

‘WE WANT THIS! AND THAT! WE DEMAND A SHARE IN THAT, AND MOST OF THAT, SOME OF THIS, AND FUCKING ALL OF THAT! LESS OF THAT, AND MORE OF THIS, AND FUCKING PLENTY OF THIS! AND ANOTHER THING, WE WANT IT NOW! I WANT IT YESTERDAY, I WANT FUCKING MORE TOMORROW, AND THE DEMANDS WILL ALL BE CHANGED THEN SO FUCKING STAY AWAKE!’

Praise be to YouTube, 1:30 into the clip.

VPNed and RDCed in to my work computer, and I go to shut it down.   I just submitted a big changelist and my work computer has been on for at least a week.   Time to give it a break/reboot.   You know how touchy windows gets when it doesn’t get its beauty sleep.

Lo and behold, the shutdown menu when accessing the computer via RDC is replaced with “Disconnect”.   You can’t shut down the computer.

After poking around somemore trying to find a way to turn the computer off or reboot it.   I give up and do it the “hard” way.

Kill “lsass.exe”; the computer pops up a nifty dialog saying that “lsass.exe died unexpededly, rebooting in 60 seconds.”  It even gives you a countdown, which is great in a Bond villian sort of way.

OooO

Gmail has POP access which you can setup Mail.app to pull from.

Tycho at penny arcade had a rant on the Zune I particularly like. ‘He turns some good phase.’

“It’s always the wrong time to buy an MP3 player, always, which is what kept me from seriously investing in one until 2006. But I didn’t just purchase the wrong one, at the wrong time: I purchased it virtually on the brink of its dissolution. I can hardly look at it now, it’s like holding a dead squirrel. On its 4:3 screen - the exact ratio of obsolescence - I can see destroyed futures. I don’t have to tell you that the iPhone is the future of that platform, as opposed to an aberration.”

“the exact ratio of obsolescence”, wow, good stuff.

Meanwhile … there is no denying the sexyness of the iPhone … tho for $500 / $600 dollars and a contract with the devil Cingular AT&T Wireless, it can bite my shiny metal ___. It has been the topic of many conversations over the past 2 days, sufficed to say I have mixed feelings. I think it great, and I am glad I own some Apple stock, but as it stands now, I won’t be getting one.

I have an iPod mini that works great for the two “times” i use it. 1. At the gym, where I specifically won’t want to be scrolling my music with sweaty palms and potentially drop/crush/lose my device that costs as much as a PS3. And 2. sometimes in my car to listen to the NPR MarketPlace podcast. And I certainly don’t need it to play “videos”.

Remove the iPod from the iPhone and drop the price $200 and we might have a deal. Depends if Apple opens up the “platform” to 3rd party development. Signs point to No, which leaves me with of an aftertaste of Betamax that is distinctly Apple. Simultaniously, fantastic, “innovative”, “open” & …. stupid, stubborn, and “closed”.

Its like Apple has a fear of success. Like if it actually made stuff that people really wanted and that was decently affordable, they might get too much marketshare and then have to deal with the unwashed masses.

I am an individual, just like everybody else…..

Saw this site a long time ago, and just “found” it again.

I am happy to say that my personal style of cargo shorts, nice t-shirt, and then a long sleeve overshirt is not profiled.

Tagging this so I can find it later.

Ironic that I get a list of possible movies to see in an article is bemoaning the lack of good sci-fi movies.

As part of our new product release celebration, my company took the dev and consulting teams out for some paintball. Very fun.

We played about 10 games of various styles and on various fields, but my favorite games were “Normandy” and “Trenches”, the notable feature of all of those games played on fields that offered lots of sneaking possibilities.

In the “Normandy” game, 6 guys were the Germans and were stationed up on top of the field with good cover. The rest of us, about 15, were the allies, and had to go up the hill.

“Trenches” was on a lovely field with lots of berms, trenches, trees, and undergrowth. That game I took out 3 or 4 players.

Overall tho, I think I only “survived” 2 of the 10 or so games.

We had a good crew this year.

What amused me, was the post Trick or Treating candy bargaining process. The kids dump out their take, do a quality check, and then begin trading. Eg, ‘I’ll trade you my chocolate tootsie rolls for your orange tootsie rolls’.

A css file that blocks adds in Safari

The awesome Firefox Flashblock extension and AdBlock

Normally I love chuckling at the absurdities of daily life, but this one is just stupid.

I switched from cable modem service and the cheap $15 a month Vonage service to DSL and a regular phone line which is $16.
Why? Well at this point I need unlimited local calling more than 500 mins long distance on Vonage, and I want a phone that works regardless of what the network is doing.

Unfortunatly, having been spoiled by Vonage for several years now, I didn’t realize that CallerId isn’t a “standard” feature, and we need CallerId. It is an extra $10 a month.
So at this point, the stupid “regular old phone line” ($16 + $10) now costs me more per month than the DSL ( $20 ). Which is just Absurd.

The net result is I am paying just as much as before but:

1. I get a “stable” phone line with unlimited local calling.
2. Any long distance we need to do will have to go on our cell phones, which most of it was anyways.
3. My downstream bandwith is the same, but I do get another 15 kB/s upstream, which is nice.

Test post from Writely.
Lets change some text size on the fly.

1. Dude

1. duude
2. orly?

• nnn gooooal
• cornholio

And now for some Squirrel Fishing!

OMG, What a nice hack. I spent alot of time at the prior job making rounded boxes with images. Granted those had drop shadows and these dont’ but still.

The key “hack” here is to use a regular old HTML bullet, but make it appropriatly sized, colored, and positioned.

Origional “hack”.
Polished version.

1. Enable the Nvidia binary kernal driver.
2. Enable a decent resolution for the vga command line
• vga=794 works nicely for me (1280×1024)
3. Create a swap file instead of buring a partition as swap
4. How to setup Ubuntu to talk to a Microsoft PPTP Vpn server

Its back up. Moved off the little linux box in the apartment up to the big hosted server.

Picture of the kitty to test image uploading.

Listing of processes in the Windows Task Manager and what it is that they do.
clicky

Damn funny comedy clip about being a help desk person. clicky