Latest postings for The Lounge

LAMP vs .NET

Rama Krishna Vavilala — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:12:00 GMT

At work, we have been interviewing several web development companies to redo the company's website. What is interesting is that most companies (9 out of 10) work on the LAMP stack rather than ASP.NET.

Of course the choice of technology for the company's web site is not a big deal, but I did find my observation interesting. I did expect the LAMP number to be high but not this high. It seems for content management LAMP is common where as for LOB applications ASP.NET is more common.

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Why being Christian Graus sucks

Pete O'Hanlon — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:09:00 GMT

... today, and pretty much everyday. Man, your life is one long series of cockups and disasters. Are you sure you're not living some form of Truman Show?

"WPF has many lovers. It's a veritable porn star!" - Josh Smith

As Braveheart once said, "You can take our freedom but you'll never take our Hobnobs!" - Martin Hughes.

My blog | My articles | MoXAML PowerToys | Onyx

DotFuscator??

Muammar© — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:10:00 GMT

Hi,
Continuing my yesterday thread, I used the dotfuscator shipped with vs.2008 but when my executable builds, it shows an error screen and when debugging, it tells me to make sure to embed all my resources and something about a manifest file!! For a different executable, I just had to check the library mode button to solve this issue but it just doesn't work for other executable..

Any similar experience??

We will either find a way, or make one!
(\ /)
(- .-)
C(''')(''')

Ripped off by Amazon

Christian Graus — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:02:00 GMT

Seriously. I am getting mails trying to work out this KISS scenario. And in the midst of working through that, I check on some cameras I bought on Amazon that were supposed to come with free accessories. The site shows that I was charged for only the cameras, but the amounts I WAS charged, include the accessories. Then I try to reply to an email they sent me about it, and it bounces back at me, I need to mail them through their site. What is that about ?

Christian Graus

Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista.

Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.

The good, the bad, and the ugly

Ennis Ray Lynch, Jr. — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:55:00 GMT

The Good: I got a phone call yesterday. Someone had purchased a motorcycle and afterward in their due diligence discovered it was my stolen KLR 650

The Bad: After calling the chain of sales to the current "owner" I discovered the actual thief is already serving hard time for, what else, Grand Theft Auto

The Ugly: The guilty party may have been a co-conspirator with my brother or is the type of person that might lie just to punish the innocent. So, reluctantly, I am going to assign the title to the current "owner" instead of taking the bike back from him. Because if I take it back the legal chain could implicate family whether deserved or not

Oh, well, at least I know. Now if I will only get the phone call about my GSXR 1000 (I loved that bike)

Need custom software developed? I do custom programming based primarily on MS tools with an emphasis on C# development and consulting.

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
--Stephen Crane

Eternal Wisom from Uncle Rob

Brady Kelly — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:30:00 GMT

"You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends".
- Robert Anton Wilson

Talking of smoking...Call to ban dangerous, trendy hubbly bubbly

Brady Kelly — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:10:00 GMT

[The coughing was from me laughing out loud, and coughing with laughter]:
Parents seemingly in dark over device stronger than cigarettes

THE Anti-drug group Westsiders Against Addiction and the Cancer Association have called for the seemingly innocuous hubbly bubbly to be banned.
The two groups are planning to lobby parliament early next year.

They say the hubbly bubbly, also known as a hookah pipe, is far stronger than normal cigarettes because it does not have a filter, has a far higher risk of throat and lung cancer, and is the gateway to harder drugs.

The hubbly bubbly is a device through which flavoured tobacco is smoked through an elaborately designed water pipe.

Over the past year, the hubbly bubbly has become trendy among teenagers and even young children, said Izabella Little, from the Life Talk Forum, a site that offers parents, teenagers and teachers advice.

George Pappas, from Westsiders Against Addiction, said this was a growing problem: "Every school - rich, poor, suburban, rural and township - it is everywhere. Even on the rooftops of shopping malls and in the parking lots you find groups of children smoking the hookah."

A disturbing new trend, picked up by both Little and Pappas, was for children to add harder drugs like dagga, nyope (a mixture of dagga and heroin), white pipe (mandrax and dagga) and heroin to their hubbly bubbly experience.

Little said the device can regularly be found at parties attended by teens from the age of 14.

And, she said, parents were buying their children hubbly bubblies, believing they were just smoking "fruit chips" or "molasses", and that it was a fun way for teens to enjoy themselves.

The reality is very different.

"In more affluent homes, you find at least one per home, but more often more," said Little.

"We have had stories where teenagers come home from school, and before they begin their homework, they sit in a circle and smoke their hubbly for an hour or so. It's becoming a norm in most households."

From the letters and e-mails she receives, Little is able to identify the latest trends.

Little has heard of children as young as three smoking along with their older siblings.

She has also received feedback from parents who say their children are coming home with red eyes and their personalities have changed after using a hubbly bubbly.

This is because many teens are not satisfied with just smoking tobacco.

Some teens are also smoking through vodka instead of water, inhaling alcohol fumes with the drugs - "a recipe for ICU (intensive care unit)disaster", according to Little.

A study in the Journal of Periodontology in the US found that water pipe smokers were five times more likely than non-smokers to show signs of gum disease, and had five times the risk of lung cancer.

According to the World Health Organisation and the American Cancer Society, an hour-long hookah session will result in the user breathing in smoke 100 to 200 times more, and nicotine 70 times more, than in one cigarette.

By Angelique Serrao
The Star 19/11/09e1

The final straw in the never credible anyway anti-drug propaganda designed only to fill US prisons with very hungry people.

Mortaility

Brady Kelly — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:52:00 GMT

mm from where I jam a plain stainless teaspoon into the toaster, to keep it going long enough to use as a lighter, inside said toaster, is a very impressive mains power arc between two somethings just once removed from my bare metal something stuck deep inside the bowels of The Toaster.

Victory.

Brady Kelly — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:48:00 GMT

I've made it as far as one or two psy, and death-metal albums before retiring early to resume another of an ever increasing series of very damn positive days, despite setbacks like being informed our agreement was around 1/3 less (I dare anyone to call be out on the difference between a 1/3 less and a 1/3 more. I know what carelessly throwing figures around a place like this can do to one's life, career, family, planet, TV, mattress, dreams.

[BNOTD] Man arrested for failing to tweet

Vikram A Punathambekar — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:11:00 GMT

Bizarre News of the Day

A music executive was arrested in Canada for failing to Tweet, after the police asked him to help disperse a crowd assembled to greet a teenage pop singer.[^]

I like the last lines of the article

We're now fully expecting a spate of arrests in Canada for such public misdemeanours as 'Not Poking back when prompted' and 'failure to correctly divvy up World of Warcraft loot'.

It sounds stupid though - the crowd was about to get violent, and the police thought a twitter message would soothe a bunch of unruly teenagers?

Cheers,
Vikram. (Cracked not one CCC, but two!)

Why the LHC doesn't suck today [modified]

Douglas Troy — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:31:00 GMT

Because the LHC saw its first collisions!

So we've all been sucked into a black hole, but not ... now, where's that cat.

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2009/PR17.09E.html[^]

:..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..

Bad Astronomy |VCF|wxWidgets|WTL

modified on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 12:00 PM

Smoker and a Mac user?

RichardGrimmer — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:54:00 GMT

Then don't expect to have your Applecare work for you....biohazzard!

http://consumerist.com/2009/11/smoking-near-apple-computers-creates-biohazard-voids-warranty.html[^]

C# has already designed away most of the tedium of C++.

Task of the day complete.

Brady Kelly — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:04:00 GMT

The stout is in the freezer until I finish my joint.

you know you're getting old when...

l a u r e n — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:34:00 GMT

you can remember when msdn help was actually... you know... helpful

*mutters obscenities as she takes it out back to put it out of her misery...*

"mostly watching the human race is like watching dogs watch tv ... they see the pictures move but the meaning escapes them"

Site title for official and non-official communication

Daniel Vaughan — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Is it The Code Project (like in the banner), Code Project or varient Codeproject (as in 'an article on Code Project').
I generally never use The Code Project, but prefer Code Project. Will the alien not visit me if I don't use the banner title?

I frequently use the initialism CP also.

Daniel Vaughan
Follow me on Twitter
Blog: DanielVaughan.Orpius.com
Open Source Projects: Calcium SDK, Clog
Organization: Outcoder of PebbleAge

Software Testing to IEEE829

softwaremonkey — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:21:00 GMT

Hi,

Does anyone have any experience in writing the software test documentation to IEEE829 for realtime systems. All of the examples I have seen are databases or algorithms where you can say "if this goes in - this should come out". This is OK if you have some code modules to test in isolation but almost everything in my system depends on something else so its hard (impossible?) to test the modules in isolation. I need to test the system as a whole, in the real world and in real-time.

If any one has any experieance of this or even some suggestions, it would be very useful.

TIA

Tony

My KISS ticket saga

Christian Graus — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:58:00 GMT

So, I've contacted the company that sold me the bogus tickets. They are saying that the supplier was someone who makes a living selling tickets and they are surprised they were fake. They asked for proof from the venue. I wrote to the venue, but it seems to me that any proof I could have taken away, would take the form of someone writing a note by hand, I don't see what that would actually prove. I am not sure if they are trying to dodge my refund, or if they are just stuck in the middle.

Christian Graus

Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista.

Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.

Visual Basic - I'm in Hell [modified]

John Simmons / outlaw programmer — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:08:00 GMT

I am about to start my first day at a new job doing VB.Net (I think I just threw up a little in my mouth, and I didn't even say it out loud). How do you guys work with this without going absolutely insane?

0) "Dim" - what you must be if you actually *like* VB

1) Specifying the type AFTER the variable name - the order of the universe should not be changed

2) Pointless sytax - "as", "of", "is", "isnot", "then", "end" - why did they omit the really useful ones, like "whetherornot", "notquite", "absenceoflogic", and "barf"?

3) If there's a "Dim", why isn't there a "bright" and "off"?

4) Why is there a solid line at the end of a source file? When it stops scrolling, I must be at the end of the file - I don't need a line to show that I am.

5) Explicit, strict and infer - three different ways to make your code as reliable as soggy bread.

6) Why? Just WHY?

I question my ability to survive in this kind of environment. I asked my wife to hid all of my pistols so I don't feel compelled to shoot myself...

The IDE just shut down with this message:

Visual Studio is busy.

We're trying to figure out where we went wrong. Seriously, we didn't think this Visual Basic thing would last more than a couple of months, yet here you are trying to make sense of something that makes none.  HELLO! IT'S 2009!  Get a real job, loser, and learn C#.

I hope I don't lose my Platinum Member status as a result of this job...

I will NOT be posting VB articles.

.45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
-----
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
-----
"The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001

modified on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 7:31 AM

JOTD

OriginalGriff — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:05:00 GMT

Two Mexicans are lost in the desert. They see a tree in the distance. As they get nearer they see its draped with rasher upon rasher of juicy bacon.
"Hey Pepe", says the first man. "Ees a bacon tree, we're saved!"
Then he runs to the tree but is gunned down in a hail of bullets.
"What happened?" shouts Pepe.
With his last breath, his friend shouts "Run amigo, ees not a bacon tree. Ees a ham bush."

(sorry, but coding round the bits of mono that don't work does that to me)

No trees were harmed in the sending of this message; however, a significant number of electrons were slightly inconvenienced.

This message is made of fully recyclable Zeros and Ones

"Rumour has it that if you play Microsoft CDs backwards you will hear Satanic messages.Worse still, is that if you play them forwards they will install Windows"

Battle of the root certificates

peterchen — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:18:00 GMT

Two versions of this update[^] currently seem to dike it out on my system - they come with different titles, but refer to the same KB article. A minute aftre one is installed, the other says it needs to be installed again.

(We have a local WSUS server running here, so that's why it might be that frequent)

Well, I've told one now to shut up - I hope it's the right one.

This post intentionally not titled "Why Windows Update Sucks Today".

Personally, I love the idea that Raymond spends his nights posting bad regexs to mailing lists under the pseudonym of Jane Smith. He'd be like a super hero, only more nerdy and less useful. [Trevel]
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