Just noted some comment spam with this in the name field:

online poker

which displays as

online poker

Sneaky hey.

From my limited testing (I had to find a workaround pronto) seems to be some kind of bug when using VB6, ADO 2.7, ODBC text driver to read from an Excel spreadsheet. Recordsets with date fields come in with the dates encoded as integers. This is normally no problem, as you can use IsDate to check if it’s valid, then CDate to convert it to a date.

But what I’ve found is that IsDate has stopped working… that is, it’s stopped returning True for field values that can be converted to dates, eg CDate works. Whether this is something to do with the new year, or a new version of something on my machine, I haven’t yet figured out, but I ended up writing a wrapper IsDate function that just tries the CDate regardless, and returns a False (eg not a date) if it errors.

An initial dig in the MSKB found nothing about it, but I’ll do some more exhaustive digging and try to get a definite answer later. The answer being, I suspect, “Switch to VB.Net, you luddite!”

For a while back in the 90s, it seemed like Java would be the last word in interactive web pages, animations, etc etc. Every second web site had some kind of irritating Java applet animated banner.

But it’s faded. In its place we have Flash. It’s not quite write-once, run-anywhere… but it is write once, run on PC, Mac, Linux and Solaris. Which anyway you look at it is just about all of the browser market.

Java still finds a home on mobile devices, and for server development, but is becoming less common on web sites, particularly since it stopped being bundled with IE/Windows.

Perhaps Flash has the upper hand because a lot of web development with heavily interactive content (particularly advertising) is driven by graphic designers and multimedia people rather than programmers, giving Macromedia an advantage over Sun.

Now, if only there could be a ban on developing complete sites in Flash.