A Day in Paradise

Copying from a single source is called plagiarism, copying from multiple source is called research

Last Saturday, I splurged and bought myself a 19inch LCD monitor. I liked my old CRT but it was getting old, and taking up a LOT of space so I figured I was well over due for an LCD.

I got the and LG, it had nice reviews, specs and of the LCD monitors on display it was certainly the most pleasing on the eyes.

After hooking it up, adjusting all the color levels (these things are BRIGHT) I noticed a dead pixel in the central bottom section of the screen. I called up support and they told me that depending on the gaurantee of the individual monitor I could might be able to take it back under the gaurantee. Thankfully, here in Germany we have a 10-day, no questions asked return so today we drove the 40km back to the Media Markt where I bought the LCD and traded it in for another of the same LCD.

So I get home fire it up and this one also has a dead pixel, in almost the same position as the last one. When talking to one of the techs at the store, he said that most gaurantees only apply after 3 or 4 pixels. Are dead pixels something that LCD users just have to live with? or am I supposed to keep returning these damn things until I get one that I like?

Thankfully, the the good part of this story was that we decided to check out this wooden bar that we had seen and liked last week, and today they were having a 25% discount on all their furniture. So we went ahead and bought ourselves the bar along with a matching table and got shipping free

An client wanted to add an arbitrary ordering to a set of rows which were being displayed in some legacy code, I had this functionality in newer versions of the software that he was running but due to “technical issues” couldn’t upgrade the software at the time.

The correct way to do this would obviously to add a “weight” field to the database and use an ORDER BY to sort the rows, however this would mean changing code in the input/edit feilds which I didn’t have time for. My simplified 5-minute solution is as follows:


SELECT name, SUBSTRING(position FROM 3) as position, biography, image
FROM members
ORDER BY SUBSTRING(position, 1,2) ASC


Yes it broke 1NF and will probably end up on an SQLWTF some day, but it was a quick and easy solution which only required a change in the SQL string and didn’t touch the code.

Scott Sigler, the sci-fi/horror novelist who first revolutionized both podcasting and the publishing worlds with the release of his first free podcast novel has done it again and has put Earthcore back in the spotlight as the first paid-download podcast in the iTunes music store.

The unabridged 15 hour audiobook, published by Conquer the World Records, will be available on the iTunes music store for $9.99. The free serialized version will continue to be available in its original podcast format from Podiobooks.com.

Scott Sigler annouced to the members of his online mailing list that the model which he plans for the release of his upcoming books will begin with an audio podcast of the book, followed by the print release followed by a paid audio book download.

Since releasing EarthCore, Scott Sigler wrote and published his second novel Ancestor, which was delivered free of charge to an audience of over 11,000 internet listeners. His third podcast novel, Infection, is slated for it’s podcast only serialized release starting the 11th of March.

So after my brief encounter with the extremely web2.0ish Squible theme, my blog has regained its sanity and is back in all it’s colorful glory!

So what do you think? Does it rawk or does it RAWK!!!

This is a 5-minute review of “Whiteout” by Ken Follett, the whole premise is a spoiler so if you don’t want large portions of the story line revealed then stop reading now.

Firstly Ken Follett is one of my favorite authors, his stories are simple, focused and always a good read. I was hooked after reading “Pillars of the Earth” and while nothing else I’ve read from him has been quite as good, they are generally good reads.

Whiteout focuses on a high-security lab where (good) scientists are in the final stages of creating some kind of miracle cure for all disease. Obviously in this lab they also have some very nasty stuff, which some very nasty people want to use for very nasty purposes.

So the story builds up nicely, bad people use the professor’s disgruntled son (who also created the “inpenetrable” security system) to get inside. The son thinks that they are going to steal the miracle drug, not the apocalyptic virus, he needs the money to get out of debt hates his father and goes along with the scheme, and plans the heist.

According to to the plan, the drug will be stolen in such a way so that it just appears to disappear and nobody will know who took it. Obviously things go very wrong.

Kit (the son, and “mastermind”) discovers that they are stealing the virus, and that it will be used by terrorists. Through a string of events he and his fellow robbers, find themselves in the house of his father, with his family around them. Everyone knows that the 3 others are part of the gang, but nobody knows that Kit is helping them, and there comes a point where Kit has to decide whether to keep his cover and loose out on his paycheck or help the gang escape with the virus.

This is the point, where you take the gun from your pocket, shoot the three other guys in the gang. Switch the deadly virus in the perfume bottle with water make the drop, and collect ALL of the $1 million for yourself. I mean, how hard can it be to think of that… instead he decides that he would be better off betraying his family, unleashing a terrible virus, and taking the $50k that will be left over after his debts are paid and hiding in Italy.

Don’t get me wrong, the book wasn’t bad… just Kit’s thought process was very lame. I guess he wasn’t the brightest of the bunch to begin with, but still…

The syntax looks like what would happen if VB and COBOL had a baby, and it was born retarded.

Performancing for Firefox 1.1.1 | Performancing.com

Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox. Just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right to bring up the blog editor and easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger blogs.

Thanks to Marcus Whitney’s comment I’ve installed the Performancing Firefox plugin, and this is my test post. Let’s see how it works out!

I’m cross posting this from the discussion over at Marco’s blog, where he talks about how the PHP community has failed the PHP project… people love bashing software projects like PHPNuke, having worked with PHPNuke when it was the ONLY peice of software which did what it did, I like pointing out the other side of the coin.

As much as PHPNuke is bashed, the number of people who have been hurt by it is greatly dwarfed by the number of people who used it as a tool that made their internet publishing dreams come true. At one point PHPNuke was very innovative, I think this is clear through the fact that it was used by companies as big as Mandrake Linux, who also employed the author to work on PHPNuke for over 2 years. The problem with PHPNuke is the fact that it never stopped being a one-man-show, and never fully embraced the true open source model, which is proven by the 30+ forks which have come and gone.

I’m actually going somewhere with this.

Why do the masses know about Ruby? Do they know about it because of the cool OO syntax? More than likely they know about ruby because of a certain very innovative web building platform which, like PHPNuke, carries the name of the programming language in it.

You take the good with the bad. PHPNuke is a part of PHP application development history, and while it doesn’t seem that PHPNuke was able to learn from their own mistakes, the rest of the development community has. It’s easy to sit back and say “I wish PHP* was never written,” but would PHP, or your current business/salary/magazine be where it is without those programs having run their course? I doubt it.

Flame away

What I need is a firefox extension which will make a blog entry with links to all of my open tabs. THAT would be great for bloggers who enjoy doing “linkdump” posts.

Anyway, I’ve been up to my neck in Excel’s statistical functions the last couple hours and wanted to jot everything down before I forget them.

Using Excel Statistical Functions
Microsoft Excel Statistical Functions
Excel statistical functions: VAR
Description of improvements in the statistical functions in Excel 2003 and in Excel 2004 for Mac
Microsoft Office Excel 2003
Excel Statistical Functions: GAMMAINV
Problems vith Statistical Functions and Large Numbers in Excel

And finally, the Open Office source file with the source of just about everything I need! Christmas!!!

This audio blog post is my first soundseeing tour. Starting when I get off the Ryanair flight from Frankfurt, Germany to Stansted, London.

I’ve done a bit of editing to get rid of the 20 minutes or so that I spent standing in line. My iRiver also doesn’t seem to perform very well while in trains or cars, so I had to cut out a couple seconds of the shuttle ride.

Apologies for the broken sentances, several times I started saying something, then had to stop to avoid drawing undue attention to myself. While an “on-air” cavity search may have made for interesting listening, I was in a bit of a hurry to get to where I was going.

I talk about the “The IT Crowd” show from Channel 4, I’ve watched the first 2 episodes and they are just FANTASTIC. Very funny and full of geeky stuff.

At least this spam explains how these guys get my email address.

Greetings in the name of the Lord,

I am Bishop Andrew Wright. Before I contacted you, I fasted and prayed over it. It was through God guidance I was able to contact you.

Right now as I am writing to you I am in hiding because of the past leaders in my country hunting for my life. They pushed away through me $50m (Fifty million United States Dollars) cash which I kept in a bank in Italy.

What I want you to do is securing this fund and distribute it to charity because as I man of God I should not have involved myself in this type of mess. I am doing this so that I can once again find favor in the sight of God because I have really sinned against him. I should have not been involved in stealing from the treasury of my country.

As soon as I receive your favorable reply, I would then direct you to a consultant who would assist you with the security code that I am going to give you. Please do furnish me with your telephone numbers so that I can be able to talk to you and give you more details.

I am waiting for your urgent response.

Finally the success of this project depends to a great extent you’re keeping it secret between you and I and your confidentiality in this transaction.

Please reply me to my private email address biandrewXXX@hotmail.com

God bless you.
Bishop Andrew Wright.

It’s been brokeback everything this week, I forsee there being enough material in the movie to keep the jokes coming for quite some time still.

Especially inspired were anyone with a video camera and any video editing skills. First came Broke Mac Mountain, then Brokeback to the future (very funny), Brokeback Goldmine, Brokeback Fellowship, Top Gun 2: Brokeback Squadron and finally Brokeback Bush.

Related Info for: wormus.com/

I have no idea how this kind of stuff happens, but I clicked on the alexarank button on my very cool firefox toolbar and discovered that for some reason this blog has leaped over 345,000 other sites on the internet to become the most 126,789th most popular site on the internet!

According to Alexa, 8 out of every 1 million people using the internet come to my site!

I don’t know what they are smoking but I WANT SOME!!!

4815162342.com :: View topic - ULTIMATE THEORY [revised, expanded]