There is still a *lot* of activity around version control these days. And there should be! These tools deserve just as much attention as web browsers and email clients - those of us writing code, web sites, and documentation certainly use version control all day long.

Arjen put out a plug for Monotone today, and the support for enforcing QA procedures is definitely interesting. Personally, I think support for cherry-picking changes during a merge is a much more important feature, which it seems like Monotone doesn’t have. Speaking as someone who has worn both manager and developer hats, support for cherry-picking which changes to merge is a feature that will benefit the people actually writing code every day, while …

So, someone walks into your office and asks “What is the deal with MySQL and Toast”? Being a responsible and caring human being, you know that you should search bugs.mysql.com to find out if there are any bugs related to Toast that are open now or fixed in the past. Or perhaps someone just sends you an instant message “Need your opinion on bug#2″.

While the search page for bugs.mysql.com is fine, opening up a search page and then then finding the search box and then clicking and wheezing all around is just too slow. Firefox makes it really easy to streamline these kind of searches with what it calls “Quick Search” bookmarks. Firefox comes with quick searches for stock quotes, google, wikipedia, dictionary.com, and more. Yes, other browsers support this kind of thing too, but Firefox works on my Mac, Windows, and Linux boxes, so that’s what I use. You can make your own QuickSearch bookmarks for almost any web search page, with a …

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 …