old skool fun

20 years of outgrowing Moores Law and what do we end up with?

Web pages with Java Applets that emulate ZX Spectrum games:

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/bestgames.html

Hurrah!

Many, many wasted hours :)

puerility...

The dodo died
Then Dodi died
Di died then Dando died
Dido must be shitting herself...

Rather Useful Links #1

The same buddy then found

http://www.skyzyx.com/downloads/

Which is truly useful - packaged downloads of older browsers that you can run without affecting any later versions on your system.

Nice!

Utterly Useless Links #9261

A buddy was looking for a version of IE5 for testing and stumbled across....

http://www.dejavu.org/emulator.htm

Anyone for IE2?

Or Netscape 1?

Not-So-Hot-Mail

Dear Hotmail,

I have one of your free email accounts.

I'm not proud of this but I thought it was necessary to get an MSN Messenger alias when I first signed up for that. I've since discovered that you can sign up for Passport with any old email address.

I also have a Yahoo account, which I use quite a lot. You could say it's my primary personal account.

A while back, those lovely people at Yahoo upgraded my service and I now get 100MB of storage space instead of the 6MB I used to get. This was great as it was often filling up and now just seems to sit at a nice steady 4% full (or 96% empty, depending on how you look at it I guess).

This was shortly followed by a veritable flurry of emails from you guys, claiming that you would be upgrading soon too and that I would be entitled to 250MB of storage space and all sorts of other goodies.

I read, I digested, I understood and I stored away the information. However, I have received this same email on an almost weekly basis since then.

This morning, you had the brazen cheek to email me and tell me I was running out of space!

a) All the space is taken up by your emails telling me I'm imminently about to get loads more space
b) The promised new space has not materialised, if it had...well...I think even you can work that out for yourself

Yours faithfully

Exasperated of East Barnet

Down on the farm...

So Tom and I got to chatting last night, as the day came to a close and we both became increasingly demotivated about the various projects we'd just spent another day slogging away on. We both work from home (not the same home, mind) and were talking about how nice it would be to have a shared-office type arrangement with a shed load of like minded people.

Tom says "perhaps we should each save up 10k or so and setup TechBARN (TM). Wouldn't it be great though to have a Barn full of Tech? Could cram in loads of companies and provide a room for their development servers, a cushion area for smoking weed and throwing around ideas and an accounts department for all of the companies. Leave the day to day shit to what would just be support services"

My response? "sounds like Cloud 9 mate"

Hence, Barn9 is born....when do we move in Tom?

All we need to do is "...scruff ourselves up so we look really geeky and see if we can get £200k off some dumb VC"

Potential location?

SQL Server Language Settings

Just had a query from a mate about dates in SQL Server.

If you're reading this in the States, or anywhere that uses mm/dd/yyyy date formats, don't bother reading on. If, however, you're in a dd/mm/yyyy region then you may well find this helpful.

I was working on an application recently that worked just fine until I made a copy of the database on the same SQL server. The new copy wouldn't work and I couldn't see what had changed. Where I was passing dates from ASP to SQL in a string format e.g.

exec sp_analysis '04/30/2004'

it was falling over with the dreaded "Syntax error converting datetime from character string.". The date you see there is in mm/dd/yyyy format because I use a nifty little function to switch it round before concatenating it into the string. I fixed the problem by changing that function to return the date exactly as it was passed in, without doing the switch.

But that still didn't answer the question of Why Did It Do That? When I finally realised, I slapped my forehead with my palm and cried "Of course!" and "You donkey!". When you create a Login on SQL Server (before you assign them permissions for any databases) there is a Language setting. Previously, this has always defaulted to English which, as we all know, is American English. When I copied the database, I created the user from scratch and assigned them British English...as you would. This caused it to treat all dates as dd/mm/yyyy instead of mm/dd/yyyy, which the application had been used to!

Anyway, you can do it through Enterprise Manager, under Security > Logins or you can do it using script (of course!), instructions here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/tsqlref/ts_sp_da-di_2tk5.asp

i'll never understand women

How many times have you said that this week (today?!) lads?

Admittedly, on the face of it, it seems like quite a negative, defeatist attitude. I've been doing some thinking about it recently and I believe it's a bit more complex than that.

Us guys tend to do OK with the "what" of keeping women happy - you know...

"if i go to her mothers with her"
"if i send her flowers to apologise for a row that wasn't even my fault"
"if i don't get caught in bed with her best friend"

Whether or not we conform, of course, is another matter. The point being, we understand the logistics of it all.

What we really struggle with is the "Why?!"

"why is it ok for her to do that but not for me?"
"why does it make a difference?"

and, the all time number one...

"why does she react like that?"

I put it to you that womens reactions, feelings, nay, their whole psyches are a curious hotchpotch of instinctual desires and learned behaviours. Their natural hormonal balance is enough to clearly express, as well as achieve, their desires. Combine this with the army of glossy magazines and TV programmes constantly telling them what to do/think/see/feel and us poor guys don't stand a chance. Most days, they're not even sure what is missing from their lives but those magazines are sure as hell telling them there's something!

"So what if your man is the perfect gentleman, does he give you 90 orgasms a night?"
"Eat eat eat but be slim slim slim"
"Longer eyelashes WILL make you more successful"

I'm not saying that guys are much better - that's what people are, an icky mess of instinctual territorial and reproductive desires, combined with some sort of crazy belief that we're way above all that now. A wise man once said "It's a wise man who knows that he knows nothing". I think the sooner we accept that our desires/instincts are really not that far removed from our base, animal ones, the sooner we can recognise them for what they are and try and deal with them. Instead of denying them.

So come on girls, next time you feel jealous about some other female, examine your feelings closely. Have we actually done anything wrong or is it an instinctual "protect my mate" feeling? And next time we fart in bed, we'll carefully examine if it's designed to drive you away in favour of a more virile partner...

Don't work too hard now....

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”

- Brian W. Kernighan (C programming language co-inventor)

if i never have to build another javascript hierarchical menu.....

...you know the ones, Category, Subcategory and maybe even Subsubcategory...ad nauseum.

If you've ever had to do something similar, you'll probably know what i'm talking about - to submit or not to submit, that is often the question. Category ID's and Subcategory ID's and...."surely this could be recursive?" all lead to a bit of a headache sometimes.

So, imagine my delight when I get sent a link to a rather cool piece of Javascript to take care of it all.

Although I've not used it yet, I've read it over and it seems like an excellent tool, easy to use whilst remaining very flexible and recursive to your hearts content.

Just asked the colleague who sent it to me if he'd actually used it. His response?

"yeah it's the f**king daddy"

An example of his work is here

Looking forward to using it, nice work Matt Kruse.

Oh, you'll be wanting the link won't you...

http://www.mattkruse.com/javascript/dynamicoptionlist/