I went to the annual local airshow today, got to see some nice planes, got a great sunburn, and got another reminder that I am slowly losing my second language. From 1996 to 1998 I lived in southern Japan and became a pretty good speaker of Japanese. Not pretty good in the sense that a guy who watches too much Anime considers himself pretty good at Japanese, but pretty good in the sense that I spoke Japanese every day, did spoken translations at meetings, and on more than one occasion would get a good ways into a telephone conversation before the person on the other end of the phone would realize I was not my Japanese roommate. I was almost illiterate when it came to the written word, but at spoken language I was pretty darn good, all I needed was more and more words in my vocabulary (Japanese grammar is a breeze once you know the rules, and there are no exceptions to the rules).

So, I was standing in line to take a look through one …

Well, this review over at ZDnet seems to say that the Bose Quiet Comfort 2 Acoustic Noice Cancelling headphones have leather. The suck. Well, that strikes them off my list.

In case you didn’t know, I don’t do the leather thing.

There’s also a disturbing review over at Amazon from a guy who seems to know what he’s talking about (Grado make great ‘phones - mine are supurb).

So, the sound quality may not be all that great (although people rave about the …

Well, I can now sit down and do my tax. Urgh. Not looking forward to it.

Although… I wonder if eTax will work under qemu and wine…. sounds like a lot of trouble, maybe I’ll just do it the paper way until they come to their senses and have an eTax that works on more than win32.

While working on a new feature for my time tracker, I needed to be able to determine how long a user had been idle using VB.NET (so that if I walked away without punching out, the tool could prompt me and punch me out retroactively upon my return). There are a lot of convoluted ways to do this involving a lot of hooks, but there is a nice LASTINPUTINFO call in User32.dll that can be used to accomplish the task with a minimum of coding.

The only limitation is that the call is only available as of Windows 2000, but that is not a concern for me, and I can just disable the functionality for users of earlier versions of Windows.

I have posted a class I found that takes advantage of LASTINPUTINFO for VB.NET at http://www.vbmysql.com/samplecode/idle-time.html.

The dev.mysql.com site is still being updated, but you can now download MySQL Administrator 1.1 from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/administrator/1.0.html

The 1.1 version mainly adds in MySQL 5 related functionality, allowing you to manage privileges related to Stored Procedures, and supporing things like backing up Views and Stored Procedures.

So, aparrently our 7 year heater is really old and we shouldn’t expect much from it.

No, really.

A switch had broken. Again. The same one that was replaced less than two years ago.

So, I ask our Northern European friends - what’s a good brand and model for a natural gas central heater that’s not going to require fixing every year?

Every year our heating breaks. Every darn year. Aparrently the way to get a reliable central heating system is to have one that’s 15 years old. Ours is a bit newer and part of the series of heaters (aparrently all of them) that suffer from the Ministry of Crap Design getting involved (meaning they break every year).

It’s bloody freezing in here. maybe 12 degrees. It’s 10 outside.

Bloody miserable cold winter.

I almost feel like getting in my car where the heater works and working from there (wireless signal should be strong enough).

okay, when it’s family you can’t really say no. But it does seem a bit strange when you have no idea.

Problems getting new printer to work. My advice is reinstall driver, remove device, reboot. Some random stuff. Remove from device manager, plug in again, see if it changes.

That’s the total of my windows troubleshooting knowledge (hey, apart from all that stuff i know about 3.1 from back in the day).

I’ve done dev work here and there on the platform - inside more unixy areas (software that interfaces with unix, or has been ported from). In other words, no, I don’t speak Hungarian (nor have any wish to).

That said, I’m fully supportive of efforts to make sure our software runs well on the platform. If, for whatever reason (lack of enlightnment or lack of enlightenment further up the chain), someone has to use it, then darn well, our stuff should work well and as expected.

Also, being portable …

I’ve been a VMware user for years now (even remember hacking disk files in order to trick MS Cluster Server into running on a couple of VMware machines). There are other approaches to virtualization, and other products which compete pretty directly with VMware, but VMware has always been the easiest to use and first to arrive with features which made my life as a software developer easier. So, you can imagine why I’m so excited that MySQL is part of the VMTN (VMware Technology Network).

This means that software is now being delivered inside virtual machines! In the MySQL version, you can download a VMware machine image with MySQL pre-installed into a SuSE environment from here. This is a huge step toward isolating application and OS instances from each other in order to deliver a much more …

/me hits the developer who made AutoSave ask if you want to save.

Honestly, what the fuck is up with that?