So I was 30 on Thursday. I had a nice quiet day and got taken out for a family meal in the evening. All very nice.
Oda had asked me way back in August to keep this weekend free, so I did. She didn’t, however, give me any idea what she had planned. So when I was bundled into a taxi on Friday having followed orders to get showered and dressed up, I had no idea what to expect.
I have Man Flu, the worst ailment in the history of ailments. Its symptoms are much like regular flu, but it’s far more debilitating and painful than anything apparently experienced by women, who largely just get on with it.
It’s quite interesting though, because I genuinely haven’t been this ill for ages. Most fun symptoms include: vision-blurring fever (not sure if vision is really blurred or my brain is just overheating), weird inside-head pains, constant muscle and joint aches all down my right side and traditional-style hot and cold flushes.
Love it.
Mac!
24″ iMac
Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme Edition 2.8GHz
4GB RAM
750GB HD
My god, it’s full of SHINY…
Anyone know of a decent Jabber client for Windows? I’m looking to replace our horrible Microsoft IM with something a bit more open (and platform independent) but it seems all the Windows clients are hideous. Anyone have any ideas?
The publicised symptom of Tourette’s (ie, uncontrolled spouting of obscenities etc) occurs in less than 15% of sufferers. The condition itself is called coprolalia. Yes kids, that’s literally greek for “talking shit”.
I love Wikipedia.
I just came across a really, genuinely useful call in Java:
Runtime.getRuntime().halt(0);
Die, VM, die quietly.
Drool drool, slobber drool, gasp shudder drool. Not quite done justice to by the phrase “rather good”.
I just realised (after daily use of OSX for over three years) that the Mac OS X Dock is the same as the NeXTStep/GNUStep dock. Like, it does exactly the same things. Which is why it was so familiar.
Um. That’s all.
We’ve recently installed Microsoft “Dynamics” CRM. Like many Microsofty things, it installs groups in the active directory to track who can do what, sort of thing. Unfortunately it was installed 3 times in the process of making it work, and the AD groups were put in a different location each time. The most recent install was performed by a colleague, who apparently thought a good place to dump the CRM data was the AD root. The fun bit is where I didn’t know that, and assumed those groups in the root were leftover junk.
So CRM stops working. I can’t reinstall it, because it says its groups haven’t been created. A bit of investigation reveals that the database contains the GUIDs of the groups. Not the DN - that would make way too much sense in an LDAP database - no, these boys store the GUID. The row can’t be deleted because of foreign key constraints (of which there are many), so I can’t trick it into reinstalling. Might not work anyway.
So I did what any sensible person about to be stabbed to death by an army of angry salespeople would do. I hacked up a bit of C# (about 4 lines, as it turns out) to grab the GUIDs of the relevant groups for me and manually injected them into the SQL table. This didn’t quite do the job, because for some reason the table also stores the names of two of the groups. Those grabbed, it reinstalled with nary a whinge and started up perfectly.
So, yeah, not all that dynamic. At least it was hackable. I’d wager MS support would have told me I had performed an illegal operation and would be shut down, or at least that I had to lose all the data. Full recovery from accidents is satisfying indeed!
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Oda exists. She would like you all to know that she exists. She’s also wonderful, lovely and teh sexeh, but no, she doesn’t care about any of that nonsense. Just that she exists is enough.
So now you know.