Monthly Archives: January 2007

Earth-Destruction Status

I think we can all agree there are many issues with life on earth. A solution that may not have occurred to many of us is total destruction of the earth.

This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.

Current Earth-Destruction Status

Please insert the Visual Studio .Net Prerequisites disk for visual studio.net

I’ve done this before, it should work: I’m running .NET on this box. I was installing .NET onto our build box here, and I kept banging my head up against step 1:

You have inserted the incorrect disk. Please insert the Visual Studio .NET Prerequisites disk for Visual Studio .NET

Hmmmm says I, it certainly seems to be labelled “Visual Studio .NET Prerequisites disk for Visual Studio .NET”. Oh, hang on, it says “Visual Studio .NET 2003 Prerequisites disk, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Tools for the Microsoft Office System 2003”. Surely that’s the same thing? I’m installing off the “Visual Studio .NET 2003 Enterprise Architect” disk, they’re both yellow, this all seems right.

But it was not right. What I instead needed to do was grab the DVD that has all this stuff on it: it’s version includes the prerequisites right in the VS2003 install directory. Silly me. I should have known there were many versions of VS.NET. Some of them will install.

Apple iPhone

Apple has announced the iPhone — which at first glance looks like an iPod (with video) combined with a phone combined with an internet browser (a version of Safari).

Of course, most phones now have similar functionality. This looks like it’ll have a bigger screen (with a soft keyboard — byebye click wheel) and of course Apple’s nice design should mean it’s easier than most phones to use.

With past false-starts like WAP, and the constraints of most existing mobile phone internet browsers, and the cost and geekiness of PDAs, perhaps this will be the thing that brings mobile internet into the mainstream.

And if you’re wondering if it’ll work outside North America, well apparently it will be GSM quadband, so my guess is it’s only a matter of time before it’s widely available throughout the western world.

PS.: Apple’s press release mentions availability: iPhone will be available in the US in June 2007, Europe in late 2007, and Asia in 2008 …

Update Friday: Cisco’s Mark Chandler blogs about the trademark infringement suit

Your host for this evening

Ages ago I had meant to post some old articles from 1997/98 that I’d found on a floppy disk. For some reason I only did two, but I’ll resume re-posting, as some of them are mildly interesting and/or entertaining.


The field of computer systems development always involves decision making. To make a decision requires discussion, postulating, debating, and yes, arguing. And there is one issue in the field that is probably subject to this process more than any other. Although it may arise in less than half of the system development projects that run, I suspect that most computer professionals have at one time or another found themselves sitting in heated discussion around a table trying to answer the question:

“What are we going to call the box?”

There is no more thorny issue than this. A new computer has arrived. It’s a server, so practically everybody will need to use it. It has to be installed, and somewhere along the line, it has to be named.

Naming children is easier. Trust me, I’ve been through both experiences. At least when children are concerned, you’re limited by their sex, and generally by social considerations, such as giving the poor kid a name they’re not going to hate, and that people know how to pronounce and spell. Plus there’s usually a maximum of two people who really have a say in the decision.

But naming a computer is much, much harder. Everybody wants to use their favourite cartoon or sci-fi character, or their favourite planet, or their favourite name from some obscure piece of mythology. Apart from four letter words (you know the ones I mean), just anything goes.

Sometimes, just sometimes, it’s easy. This is when some boring corporate standard comes into play, and the project manager decides that he or she is too gutless (or at least, lacks the political clout) to buck the corporate standard, no matter how boring it is.

It’s during these times that new computers end up with boring names like “nus202” and “vax24”. And while they may be lacking in personality (and they are often almost indistinguishable from their siblings in the computer room), at least they’re usually easy to remember and spell.

But if upper-management doesn’t dictate something, what do you do? I’ve been on projects where just about everyone had their opinion, and we ended up having to do a kind of informal vote. It was either that or a pie fight, and a pie fight would’ve left the conference room in a less than ideal state.

Some organisations have a series of machines to name, and so they work out a theme. Planets is popular (though people tend to shy away from Uranus), and I’ve also encountered fish. One place I worked, we used characters from The Simpsons (Homer is common), but we got bored with it after a while, and switched to other cartoons.

In the end it doesn’t matter. But it definitely helps if everyone knows where the name comes from. Once the mail server I used was called “Banjora”. I still don’t know what that one means.

The joys of the Loewe TV service menu

I’ve got a Loewe Profil TV. A few years old now, but going pretty well. Apart, that is, from some scan line thingies appearing at the top of screen when it’s in 4:3 mode. It started happening when the TV (and I) moved house some time ago. I assume it got a bump.

Finally I’ve got into the Service Menu and adjusted it so they don’t appear anymore. Some people give dire warnings about the Service Menu — that you can seriously screw-up your TV if you mess with it too much.

With that warning in mind, I’ll document how to get into the Service Menu so I can remember it for later, as it’s fairly forgettable.

  1. Press the Menu button on the front of the TV (not the remote)
  2. Use it to scroll down to the Service Menu option
  3. Press the Menu button on the remote (not the TV)

Voila, you’re in. From there you can adjust all sorts of settings. Me, I fiddled the Geometry settings. It’s a bit like all the stuff you can do with a computer monitor.

I bumped up the Vertical Amplitude a bit, and lowered the Vertical Position a tad, and it appears to be gone. (Touch wood). Certainly easier to fiddle with it yourself than have to call Loewe’s support line and organise a technician to come out and do it.

Counting things in WordPress

A couple of MySql queries to count up your 2006 blog stats (as I did on my personal blog).

Count the number of posts since…

select count(*) from wp_posts
where
post_status = ‘publish’
and wp_posts.post_date >= ‘2006-01-01’

Count the post with the most comments since…

select wp_posts.ID, count(*) as wpc, wp_posts.post_title, wp_posts.post_date from wp_comments, wp_posts
where
wp_comments.comment_approved = ‘1’
and wp_comments.comment_post_ID = wp_posts.ID
and wp_posts.post_date >= ‘2006-01-01’
group by comment_post_ID
order by wpc desc