Well the holiday was fun. I got tanned and burned – silly me. The Cure was great, it was about 2.5 hours long, which made for a nice long concert (from 7.30 pm to about 3am). I’d recommend the ice cream and the crêpes.
Vac
Off on holidays to France today. I will try not to update this before I get back.
See ya later.
New Phone?
At the start of January I got a new phone. Less than a month later the phone, along with my jacket, was stolen in a night club – from the cloak room. After several weeks of to-ing and fro-ing with the phone insurance, they refused to replace my phone. Wasted money, that insurance policy I tell you. Apparently because it was within a month of having obtained my phone, it was far more than a formality. I’ll have to remember that in future.
On to new phones. I had a Sony Ericsson V800. Nice phone, but really bad battery life. I’ve been looking at the S700, which is a better phone (battery life-wise) but a friend was telling me of his new XDAIIs (an O2 phone). But you will lose 3G capabilities comes the cry. Lets kick in with a reality check here – 3G coverage in Ireland is cities and major towns only. Lets talk phone reception – I have virtually No coverage when I’m in the Castlegregory area with Vodafone. It has not improved in the last 4 years, while my little sister has had no issues with her O2 phones.
There is only one kicker. Calls abroad are covered in my minutes on Vodafone, which means that calls to the sister and others are significantly cheaper than they would be otherwise. If O2 would just stretch to that then I would completely swap over to them in a heartbeat.
Ah yes, geeks with their toys.
Reseat Everything
But it worked when I was at the office yesterday!
This is a typical lament from people who don’t understand the problems of loosely fitted hardware. Whenever my hardware stops working after moving the PC, the first thing I do is open up the box and reseat every piece of faulting hardware possible. This normally fixes the problem, and in her case it did too.
What’s on your desktop
It happens – the brother in law peers over my shoulder to verify that I’m not playing a game while I should be programming – like he could really tell the difference based on a lot of the games I play these days. In response, I decided to list what’s on my desktop, and the reasons for them being there.
- My Computer, My Network Places, My Documents – ease of navigation
- My Bluetooth Places – bluetooth makes me so happy
- Firefox, Explorer, Thunderbird – web, and email
- Skype – cheap calls
- w.bloggar – web logging
- PE Resource Explorer – occasionally my projects don’t compile so good
- Acrobat Professional – Lot of PDFs
- Nullsoft Install System – for making those all important installers (still learning this)
- Nunit GUI. One of these days I’ll actually write those tests I’ve been promising myself
- IDA. The intelligent disassembler. Really good disassembler. This one is old, but I can’t afford a new version (~€320 + vat at last check)
- Code-Work, my projects folder. Practically everything lives here. It’s not on my desktop, it’s a folder-link
- Visual FoxPro 8 – upsizing some code to SQL server. The venerable Fox needs to die, as it has not kept up with the times.
- Visual Studio.NET – I write a few bits and bobs in Microsoft C, C++, C#
- Delphi 2005 – Best Delphi yet, sadly it’s got the nastiest price tag also. God be with the days when pascal cost $60
- Netbeans 4.1 – the gui designer alone is worth the download
- Palm OS Developer Suite – I caved, cscope just didn’t cut the mustard – pocketcity
- Simcity 3000, UK Edition – reference for pocketcity
- Copernic Desktop Search – partial word search; ’nuff said
- El Bin of Recycling
Making virtual folders. When you create a shortcut to a folder the start menu do not expand them on hover. This is remedied by creating a real folder, then making a desktop.ini file containing the following:
[.ShellClassInfo]
CLSID2={0AFACED1-E828-11D1-9187-B532F1E9575D}
Flags=2
Follow this with a shortcut called target, which points to the real directory. You can place this folder anywhere. When it’s on the start menu you have the right pointing triangle, which indicates that it’s a real folder
Mmmmmm… chocolate
Went to see Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. Yummy; Johnny Depp was just creepy. I liked it a lot.
Quote from a page
“Is real life really stranger than fiction, or is fiction about real life being stranger than fiction stranger than real life being stranger than fiction?” Ow.
Dog day.
Bad syntax
Came across this one in a piece of C code.
(conditionflag & STATUSBIT) ? (KdPrint(xxxx)) : 0;
Edited [ 2005-08-04, 19:42 Pete ] There was no code making use of the result of the ?: operation.
This piece of code is terrible from both a readability and functionality perspective. If the return type of the function is changed to a void, then there won’t be a valid left hand side for the evaluation to function correctly, from a readability perspective the developer split the code over two lines, which made it ripe for the more legible form of:
if (conditionflag & STATUSBIT) (KdPrint(xxxx));
Ah well, you can’t boss everyone around all of the time I suppose.
Desktop search and code
It’s slightly frustrating when you are trying to find out what piece of code created what variable. Desktop search only goes so far, showing you all the references of the name of a variable. I need something along the lines of cscope, but over all my code – C, C++, Delphi, Java, FoxPro.
Does anyone know of something like this, or am I going to have to make one myself?
I.C.E.
Here’s one from the UK. When people have been in accidents one of the things that are found are mobile phones. Typically their small form factor makes them more survivable in a lot of cases. The suggestion is to put a number in their, listed under ICE (In Case of Emergency). It’s a realy simple suggestion, that helps people get in touch with relations and next of kin when something happens – as after all people can have huge quantities of numbers in their phone book, with no idea for the emergency services as to who is to be contacted.