Tile Invaders

I got me some tiles on the weekend, and drew up some plans. Cause I love space invaders!!!!

Andornot Developers Receive 2nd Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence

Denise I have figured out what the problem is for WPP on the server. It is not the latest version. I now remember that I did not install the latest version. I expected them to and I told them that they had an old one installed. Ted I'd laugh, but I was thinking that might be the problem, but kept thinking just as I was about to check, "no, that wouldn't be it". Denise Sometimes it pays to check the obvious... in cars when you see the record results all we needed to do was view the source and there it was looking at us... v.1! Peter Gargle!!! Ted HORK!

Stop the Safety Dance, I want to get off

We can dance We can dance Everybody take off your pants. Men Without Hats. Not actually the actual lyrics. But can't. Get it. Out. Of. My. Head.

Zamboni

I confess... I have always had a desire to drive a Zamboni. I'm not sure if this stems from my love of skating and the fact that I learned how to skate on a quintessentially Canadian back-yard ice rink in Saskatoon or from playing road hockey with my brothers and all the neighbourhood boys where I grew up in the frozen north. Maybe this desire is deeply rooted in the hilarity of seeing those Shultz cartoons of Snoopy driving a Zamboni on the frozen bird bath for Woodsock and his buddies or perhaps it is just from watching those wonderful machines doing their so incredibly specialized duty at the ice arena. When I was a girl there were no ice hockey teams for girls; at least not in my small community. The closest I came was teaching all the little hockey-playing boys how to skate and specifically how to stop before crashing into the boards. I did play on a women's hockey team in New Zealand, but I had to laugh when I was asked why I kept calling it grass hockey; they asked what other kind of hockey was there, anyway? Oh my goodness where have these people been? They kept referring to Canada's national sport as ice hockey. I had to ask why add the ice! Just think what a different person I might be today if I had been a member of the Canadian Olympic Gold medal womens hockey team! Anyway, I had my Zamboni driving (actually more like riding) desire fulfilled just the other day in the most unlikely of places: Salt Spring Island, British Columbia. We were on a family holiday and the temperature was hot: 30 plus degrees. We were driving along a nice country road heading towards a park for a bit of a hike when on the side of the road I saw a sign reading GOT ICE? Well, that caught my eye on that hot day and especially what was behind the sign… any guesses? Yes, a Zamboni! Imagine a Zamboni on Salt Spring Island! What was it doing there? How in the world did it get there? What were the people thinking when they brought it there? I convinced my husband to pull over on the return trip past it, which he did without hesitation, as he knew I had this deep down obsession with Zambonis and my daughter took photos of me on the big blue machine. It was a beautiful thing! At last a life long dream partially fulfilled! Now I just need the ice.

Legitimate News

Scientists develop pee-powered battery Technology ushers in a new Golden Age. Laptops spark sale stampede "...with people being thrown to the pavement and beaten with a folding chair. One woman wet herself rather than surrender her place in line." Probably planning to power her laptop with the aforementioned. And by the way, they were 4 year old iBooks. Wtf?

What I reads

What I'm reading right now. And reviews. A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram Brain say ouch. Smoo stars. Farmer Giles of Ham, J.R.R. Tolkien Haven't actually started. Due back at library soon. Probably... not going to get read. Uh... no stars yet. Eric, Terry Pratchett A book I'm almost finished but am not going to finish because frankly it sucks. I've read a lot of Terry Pratchett (by which I mean all of Terry Pratchett) and this one should be avoided. Can't believe I bought it. -1 stars. That's minus one. The Pinball Effect, James Burke More goodness from Mr. Burke. The best part about reading him is that he writes like he talks. Ace stars. Gardens of the Moon, Steven Erikson Sigh. I tried this once already, but Dana said I should try it AGAIN, so I promised him I'd make it through 200 pages before giving up. I'm on page 50. It had better get good FAST. 50 stars. One for every page I've suffered through.

Inmagic date formats and regional settings

Okay, I did some tests and this is the conclusion: in v7 of dbtext anyway, the dbtext.ini file can be given a short date format, BUT this is very misleading because although dbtext uses the dbtext.ini format to *stamp* the date (when automatic), the dbtext.ini format is completely ignored when the date is indexed. And when indexing, dbtext indexes the date as an unambiguous absolute. What does this mean? Let's say today is Feb 10, 2005. My machine's regional settings are M/d/yyyy. To my machine, Feb 10 2005 reads 2/10/2005 in short format. If I don't touch the dbtext.ini, any autodate in short format in dbtext is going to be stamped in as 2/10/2005, and that date string will be indexed as Feb 10 2005. All good. As soon as you try to *overrride* Windows regional settings with dbtext.ini, problems arise. Let's summarize in shorthand, assuming the new record date is Feb 10, 2005: Trouble shows up when dbtext.ini is set to the Windows regional settings' opposite. The autodate gets *stamped* according to dbtext.ini, but *indexed* according to Windows regional settings. Remember "today" is Feb 10 2005 so the date should be getting indexed as Feb 10 2005. Wherever you see Indexed As Oct 2 2005 (Case 2 & 4) it's because dbtext.ini is set to the reverse of Windows regional settings. The take-home message is: do not assume that a date format setting in dbtext.ini overrides Windows regional settings, because it doesn't in all actions. Also, because the date index is never subject to reinterpretation, whatever absolute date was laid down at the time of the orginal indexing (usually when record was saved) is the absolute date that remains, *regardless* of whether the textbase is moved to another machine where the regional settings differ, and regardless of whether the machine the textbase resides on has its regional settings changed. You must re-index the date field to pick up on a different regional settings environment. The consequences of this legacy index behaviour are not at all clear in the Inmagic kbase article 2606 Troubleshooting when the Date format changes after upgrading operating system, nor are the risks of setting date formats in DBTEXT.INI discussed in Inmagic kbase article 2122 Date Formats Supported by DB/TextWorks. In the case of the former, there should be instructions to re-index after the Windows regional settings change, and for the latter, it should be made clear that DBTEXT.INI date format settings do not override Windows regional settings when indexing.

Tyrrell the Spaz

Alright, just because who wants to read about scripting with Inmagic WebPublisher sort keys, I include a readable shorty. When I was of grade school age, I had a small problem controlling my temper. It was extremely short, and I would explode as easily as a Mexican cliff diver wearing a nitroglycerine bathing cap. All my enemies at school knew this, and delighted themselves in baiting me until I blew my stack. Then they danced about and sang a little tune they made up, the lyrics of which I am happy to repeat, today, just for you. (Rock aficionados will note that my schoolyard foes based their chant on The Rolling Stones' Down in the Hole.) Tyrrell the Spaaaaazzz, He's down in the Gutter, Beggin' for cigarettes.... I can't remember if there was more to it than that, because right at at that point a red mist would come down and I would attempt to kill them. I never did, much to my dismay, and it probably has a lot to do with the fact that I weighed in at 60 lbs. and was built like a wire coathanger.

Sort keys and see-also links

Trying to decide whether to post something that might be useful, or to just spaz out completely. I guess it's time for an inform-o-post so as to retain justification for this blog being on the And-O-Not web-o-site. Um, okay. <rustle> Sure to be something back here. <squelch> Ew. Not that. Alright, so you're using sort keys with WebPublisher and you want them sort keys to be see-also links. But what's this? WebPublisher just don't do that!? No prob, Bob. Wrap the sort key in a div tag. Give div tag a unique ID (use RecordID, for instance). Call the following from a script block immediately following the div tag: <div id="SeeAlso[RecordID]"> [SortKey:Level1] </div> <script> GetSeeAlso('SeeAlso[RecordID]', '[FieldName]') </script> Reference the following javascript from the page: function GetSeeAlso(TargetID, Field) { var Target = document.getElementById(TargetID); var CleanValue = Target.innerHTML.replace(/<font>]+>/, ''); CleanValue = CleanValue.replace(/<\/font>/, ''); var SeeAlsoLink = CreateSeeAlsoLink(CleanValue, Field); Target.innerHTML = SeeAlsoLink; } function CreateSeeAlsoLink(value, field) { var str = "?AC=SEE_ALSO&QF0=" + field + "&QI0==" + value + dbtw_params; var link = "<a href='" + str + "'>" + value + "</a>"; return link; } And that does the trick. A see-also link built from a sort key.

Blogger Jobber

Even though keeping a blog on a static page was really fun, really, it's been ported to Blogger now. I had tried earlier with dasBlog - oh, how I tried - but couldn't reconcile its behaviour and expectations with the user control and page layout approach used on the Andornot website. So whatever. Blogs away!

Zone Alarm Pro gets the shout 'n' toss

When I was 18, I joined the Army Reserves for one summer. I learned many things, one of them being how to stand very straight while being shouted at in the face and simultaneously having my mattress tossed out a second floor window for the heinous crime of showing a wrinkle in one corner. I was able to apply that valuable lesson this very day. Except this time I was the shouter, and Zone Alarm Pro personal firewall software was the shoutee. And the tossing was metaphorical, though I did in fact DELETE EVERY SINGLE VESTIGE OF THAT BUGGY MOTHER from my machine. It hasn't played nice with Visual Studio for about a year, ever since Zone Alarm 5 was released. Aggravating in the extreme. It would randomly lock up all internet traffic after a compile, and various sundry annoyances. The thing is, I had paid in advance for two years of updates, and I was going to get my money's worth. So I just upgraded to the latest release, Zone Alarm 6. Maybe this latest would solve all the earlier problems. Maybe I could run VS and Zone Alarm and they would become the best of friends. It could happen. Updates are supposed to fix bugs, solve issues, make IMPROVEMENTS, right? When the first Blue Screen O' Death occurred while using VS, I thought: "A random BSOD. How random. Ha ha!" When the second BSOD slapped me about the jowls with its kid leather glove, I swallowed hard and looked up the offending driver. It belonged to Zone Alarm. My jaw set. On the third BSOD, I screamed an infuriated mountain gorilla scream. And beat my chest. And then I ripped Zone Alarm out of my system, tracking down every single file and yelling "DELETED!" with every deletion. It felt good. And I turned on the Windows firewall.

With Age Comes Wisdom. And With Wisdom, Cantankerousness.

Scene at the gym this morning: two elderly men squabbling over who had sign-up rights on an exercise bike. There were other bikes free. Yahoos.

Back

Sometimes one gets back from vacation and one just doesn't update one's blog. One says, "let me get through my email inbox first" or "one can't think of what to say at this precise moment" or "stop using 'one' as a personal pronoun before one gets one's nose bridge shattered with a buffalo-nudges-peach-tree flying forehead smash."

That's my excuse. Believe it or don't. Mum never did. She went straight for the kitchen drawer which housed the Wooden Spoon, which she then applied vigorously and with malice aforethought to my aft quarters. Until it broke once. I love my Mum. I never told her until much later that the Wooden Spoon treatment was about as deadly as a damp noodle wielded by a paralytic tree. "If only we had spanked him more" is a lament that was oft heard round the house when I had done something moronic, but was too big to suffer corporal punishment. Too true.

Some tales I always enjoyed were those of Emil, the unrepentantly high-spirited lad who would inevitably, after a caper, be caught and sent to the woodshed, there to await punishment at the hands of his father. He would always carve a wooden figure while waiting, the woodshed eventually becoming filled with row on row of these small witnesses to the many futile attempts at correction. Good old Astrid Lindgren.