Eric Sink has a post up titled “A sad tale of technology dependence.”
It’s a pretty funny read and anyone who’s ever used a modern gadget that you’ve come to rely on every day knows what it’s like when it goes wrong.
Category Archives: Computers
A fun little brain teaser – try do this…
How do you swap the values of 2 int variables without using a third variable?
Extra points if it’s a bit obscure…
Now don’t cheat and look at the comments, once you got it post it as a comment.
Bug in VBA in Excel?
I’ve been spending a lot of time in Excel’s VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) editor and I’ve found an odd bug. In the main code editor window the scroll wheel on my mouse won’t work. I didn’t realize how much I use that scroll wheel while I’m coding, until it didn’t work.
I’m also pretty sure that the intellisense is buggy or perhaps just not that intelligent.? That’s the problem with getting so used to IDE’s like Visual Studio 2005 and the new Netbeans, is that you come to rely on intellisense and auto completion and those cool drop down box’s too much. Maybe I should go “hardcore” and use emacs or VI or cat, mmmh would have to be notepad on windows…
This is all in Microsoft Excel 2003.
RSS Traffic Feeds
Wouldn’t it be really cool to have a RSS feed that gave you information about current road traffic, what roads were closed, which were open and where there were accidents? So here’s my idea for a RSS Road Traffic information system.
The value of a qualification.
Partly because the company I work for is looking for new developers and partly because I?ve been thinking about getting some kind of piece of paper that says ?I can do what I say I can do.? I?ve been looking at training and certifications available in IT and in particular in software development.
Too many files open…
I’m not exactly sure what my computer was up to while I was at work today. But when I arrived home today I couldn’t get the screensaver to bring up the login screen, but the machine was responding to pings…
So I CTRL+ALT+F1 to get a console and try login, and I get the error on the right…
“Cannot execute /bin/bash: Too many files open.” which basically means I couldn’t login at all… so I rebooted and everything seems to be ok now.. weird.
Blogroll’s and Friends who blog…
So I enabled the Blogroll thingie side bar on the right.
And I’ve added links to my friends blogs/sites.
Memento Mari – A reminder that you must eat marie biscuits!
Richard’s “blog” where he talks about all kinds of “stuff”, always a good read. He’s just moved over to a different host and started using WordPress.
Looking out the window – It’s a crime to be indoors on a day like this.
Rachel’s “blog”, lots of photos and stuff. Recently met her on a trip to George and she seems rather cool…
Wifi Speed Spray!
Generics, Reflection and Threads in C#
So I’ve been messing around with Generics and Reflection in C# this week. I’m busy writing something that’s going to support a plugin system so that the same core can be used for multiple clients.
But my question is where can I learn more about this kind of stuff? While the basics can easily be picked up from the net and through a bit of experimentation. (I’ve found the best sources of info to be many of the msdn blogs…) I’m not sure how to solve weirder issues in my design like what happens if certain parts of the application become multi-threaded? I’ve got to come up with a way to process more things “at once” in the system so a multi-threaded solution seems to be the best way to go. This is very hard when you have a 40hour time scale to complete and test the whole “core” system.
So any suggestions of where to look for more info would be greatly appreciated along with any hints on slowing down time and no sleep less is not a good enough as
Edgy Eft (Ubuntu 6.10)
So 1000 and something packages and about 900mb later I have a completely uptodate version of Ubuntu my upgrade to the new 6.10 version of Ubuntu finished late Saturday night and I sat tweaking things until early Sunday morning.
I had hoped things would go smoothly, but they didn’t. I had to fix plenty of odd dependency problems by hand but eventually it installed everything and I had a working installation of Ubuntu again.