Monthly Archives: May 2008

What’s in your phone number?

Recently I’ve been entering a lot of phone numbers in a database. This is dull. Phone numbers do, however, open up a load of (slightly) interesting geekery. One of the problems I had was with the London dialling code. Numbers in London tend to start with 0207 or 0208. I decided that this seemed like […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Link of the day

MSDN: All print providers must export the initialization function, InitializePrintProvidor. Pointers to all the other functions must be supplied in a PRINTPROVIDOR structure. (Note that these two names are misspelled, but are consistent with the names that appear in the header file, winsplp.h.) Of course, one can’t correct the spelling of one’s functions, else one […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Open Source Software – a Chink in the Armour

The collective wisdom of the Internet states pretty categorically that Microsoft is evil, Google is never evil, Macs are cool and Linux is best of all. Of course not all of that is true, and you can’t always believe what you read on the Internet. Google isn’t evil but colludes with dictatorships to oppress freedom […]

Posted in Computing | 1 Response

Is the Network Timeout Dead?

Computers are quite good at waiting. My computer spends a substantial proportion of its day in an idle state waiting for me to do something. It also spends time waiting for network resources, and it makes me wait too. When I go to a webpage or request something online the computer needs to download everything […]

Posted in Computing | Leave a comment

Misinformation on the Internet

Recently I’ve been writing code to produce a database of Alumni in the University’s Architecture Department where I work. Somewhat irritatingly the servers all run on IIS which required me to learn how to talk to SQL Server with ASP. The irritating part being that I’ve only just learnt how to talk to MySQL with […]

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Response

WordPress

I was amused to have finished migrating this blog over to WordPress to read this article on Coding Horror: I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the community around WordPress, and the software itself is remarkably polished. That’s not to say that I haven’t run into a few egregious bugs in the 2.5 release, but on the […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Further reading – Godwin’s Law

Having recently discussed the strategy of comparing one’s antagonist’s actions to those of the Nazis, I was amused to notice Dr Crippen referring to a similar technique: Over the years, I have seen far too many women who have been raped. There will be others, patients of mine, who have not sought help from me […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Nazi Germany: an argument technique?

Comparisons to the holocaust seem rife today. Any attack on civil liberties is compared to the way the Nazis treated the Jews. Another example crops up today via the UK’s leading anti-vaccine site, JABS (no link love, search for it yourself). The government is considering making vaccination compulsory for children as a way of improving […]

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Response