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Nino
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I just read this post over at the Spurious Pundit and had deja vu the entire time I was reading it. As is said near the end of the post “This metaphor may be starting to sound particularly fuzzy, but trust me - there are very real parallels to draw here. If you haven't seen them yet in your professional life, you will.”
I had this experience with two junior developers on my current project… so, so true.
-Nino
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Nino
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I have received a bit of feedback in response to this post (from July 2004) about a WM2003 upgrade ROM for the Motorola MPx2003. In the post I linked to msmobiles.com, who have since removed their link as I’m sure the bandwidth consumption was horrific.
Let me be clear: I do not have it. I do not know where to get it (I have some guesses – they involve places where questionable, if not nefarious, goings-on occur). Sorry folks. It’s the Internet; links die. :-/
I would suggest to ping your mobile service provider, but since the MPx220 is out, I think it doubtful that they would expend the resources to offer a WM2003 upgrade.
-Nino
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Nino
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I saw this gem last night on the BugTraq list: http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/385571/2004-12-26/2005-01-01/0
There is also this link from the Cincinnati Post.
From the BugTraq posting in reference to the Cincy Post article:
“According to the article, Comair is running a 15-year old scheduling
software package from SBS International (www.sbsint.com). The software has
a hard limit of 32,000 schedule changes per month. With all of the bad
weather last week, Comair apparently hit this limit and then was unable to
assign pilots to planes.
It sounds like 16-bit integers are being used in the SBS International
scheduling software to identify transactions. Given that the software is 15
years old, this design decision perhaps was made to save on memory usage.
In retrospect, 16-bit integers were probably not a good choice.”
Update: The Cincinnati Enquirer ran this piece on Sunday (January 2, 2005) as a follow up.
-Nino
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Nino
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My Christmas present? My wife and I being alive and uninjured (amazingly). We were involved in an auto accident Christmas day on the way to see family in Cleveland. Two words: Guardian Angel.
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-Nino
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Nino
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No witty comments today (..as if) – just working away, trying to not have to shovel the driveway too much.. I think we’ve gotten something like 10” 12” of snow so far..(and lovely topping of ice last night).
Oh, our new digicam showed up yesterday (Merry Christmas to us) – a Canon A95. Hits most of our requirements, easy enough for her to handle, and, most importantly, it fit the budget. Kudos to Canon for making the connection cable USB – on both ends – but, I’ll probably just use my CF card reader and not futz around with the Canon software, doing any image editing in Paint.NET 2.0
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-Nino
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Nino
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Hey all you FeedDemon fanatics, Nick has released v1.5 beta 4 Release notes.
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Nino
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After spending some time today purging my blog of the latest round of comment spam, I decided to implement CAPTCHA images for comments. I did a quick Google to see if anyone had created a control or something I could implement pretty painlessly. I found an example by Dave Burke based on work by Chris Kunicki (which, in turn, leverages the CAPTCHA Image project from codeproject.com).
Implementation was very straightforward: I pulled down the source to .Text, pulled down the CAPTCHA Image code from CodeProject, and followed the write up on Chris Kunicki’s blog (actually done by Jesse Kunicki), implemented the changes, recompiled .Text, and …voila!
So I have CAPTCHA.. swell (and a full moon to you comment spammers).. but I’m not 100% on the implementation (no digs against Chris, Jesse, or Dave for any of the bits they provided – heck, it saved me a few hours of writing and debugging). It uses cookies, which will work fine now; however, some spammer might figure this out (particularly if they actually _read_ my blog) and simply grab the cookie value and plug in the number. One of the comments to the post by Chris discusses this issue, and offers a possible solution. The solution would work; however, I think a better [cleaner] approach is out there. I haven’t dedicated any brain cells to thinking about that better implementation – I’ll leave that to the subconscious and come back to it in a few days.
-Nino
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Nino
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I happened to hit the .NET CF Blogs page on the OpenNETCF Wiki tonight and who do I see listed there … me! Wow! Thank you, OpenNETCF folks. :-)
-Nino
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Nino
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Sue Loh’s blog RSS As she says: “ I am a developer on the Windows CE team at Microsoft. I work on system performance and tools for diagnosing the sources of performance problems.”
Not too many posts, but good stuff (and hopefully more to come)!. I got the link to Sue from Sarah who I got the link to from Neil
-Nino
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Nino
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No, not that little friend (oh.. some Tony Montana PPC themes for those interested).
What I’m talking about is my new Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse. I love this thing! :-) It is just a smidge bigger than my Notebook Optical Mouse (in all dimensions), works better over difficult [for an optical mouse] surfaces, and the receiver snaps into the bottom of the mouse when not in use (thereby turning off the mouse, saving battery).
Overall, it feels pretty good in my hand, although sometimes the compound curves seem a bit, er, off for it to be completely comfortable to me. Then again, it pretty much sits under my fingers and only hits the first half-inch or so of my palm (my glove size is XL (US), if that helps), so I may not be a candidate for ideal fit. One thing I do like about the Notebook Optical Mouse over the Wireless Notebook Optical mouse is that it is flatter – it just feels better to me.
Nonetheless, I don’t think I’ll be going back to the wired mouse anytime soon.. I like wireless freedom too much.
-Nino
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Nino
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…the last bit of catching up.. until I get behind again ;-) I’ll be blogging from home (and various familial locations) for this week and next as my project has “shut down” for the next two weeks (translation: Nino gets to work from home), so this ought to help my quest to regain my blogging regularity. Let’s see.. all I have to do is make some significant functionality changes to the synchronization engine, add a bunch of stuff into our build process, tweak the notifications stuff, update the custom config section handlers, and, oh yeah, help find a particularly naughty memory leak. Cool.
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Nathan Arora points out a quote from Mike Zintel’s blog.. so true. Absolutely true.
-Nino
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Nino
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Yeah! Blockbuster drops late fees on January 1, 2005 Aye! ..but not without a new deal in place:
From the CNNMoney article:
The world's largest video rental company will still have due dates for their rental products -- one week for games and two days or one week for movies, depending on whether it's a new release.
But customers will be given a one-week grace period after that to return the product. After that grace period ends, the chain will automatically sell them the product, less the rental fee. If the customers don't want to purchase the movie or game, they can return the product within 30 days for a credit, less a restocking fee.
-Nino
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Nino
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I’ve seen quite a few links to this recently, and I always enjoy watching it, so I thought I would (what else?!?) post the link:
http://www.steelcitysfinest.com/HondaAccordAd.htm (Flash required)
And for those that didn’t get the Rube Goldberg reference…
-Nino