Humour

There Will Be Code

David Totzke — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 03:42:07 GMT

Inspired via the Monkey. His Kung Fu is strong.

Ladies and Gentlemen if I say I am a SOFTWARE ARCHITECT you will agree with me. And I wish to speak to you today about DEVELOPING SOFTWARE. There are those who will say they can craft you an application, and that may VERY WELL be TRUE. But can they get you to ZERO BUG BOUNCE? Can they craft a decent USER INTERFACE. Can they craft a decent CONFIGURATION MANAGER? Will they rely on a creaky THREE-TIER ARCHITECTURE or have they mastered FIVE? It is these QUESTIONS you must consider.

I have applications running in the FORTUNE 500, you see. I have had meetings with executives both HIGH and LOW. You could go with someone from DEVRY, or someone who's developed an E-COMMERCE SITE, yes, for his UNCLE's fix-it business. But only I can have the FUNCTIONAL SPECIFICATION and the ARCHITECTURAL ROADMAP for your application by APRIL. I can do it, I can have it, and I can make it exciting, with an interactive help system and animated icons. YOU can GO WITH SOMEONE ELSE, that is your right. BUT you CANNOT say that you were not PRESENTED with the option to skip all that; to just DEVELOP WITH ME.

I await your decision. I will sit here and calmly wax my mustache. Please don't mind my son, D.W. He will be stepping out momentarily to procure a REDBULL.

NOW, what is for LUNCH?

Yes. There will be code. And there will be blood.

Dave
Just because I can...

SQL Query Performance And Data Types

David Totzke — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 15:44:00 GMT

Bruce Johnson of Object Sharp writes about a puzzling performance issue that took a little head-scratching to solve. In the end it came down to a data type mismatch between the parameter variable and the field definition. The parameter was nvarchar(40) and the field was defined as char(36). SQL was converting the field values to nvarchar(40) instead of converting the single parameter value to char(36).

It makes sense that it would convert the char(36) to nvarchar(40) because converting the other way would mean a loss of information not only due to the shorter field length but aslo in the conversion from unicode to single byte character data.

I faced a similar situation some time ago with a join. The join fields were both indexed and of the same data type and yet a query involving the join was very slow. Show plan (it was SQL 6.5) confirmed my suspicion that iterative table scans were happening but coulnd't figure out why. For some reason SQL Server was ignoring the index on the fields. We rebuilt the indexes, removed and re-added the indexes, did an update statistics (again a 6.5 thing) restarted the SQL service to clear caches, removed and recreated the join etc... Nothing had an effect.

After much head banging and hair pulling I discovered that the join fields were indeed of the same data type but of different precision and scale. e.g. FieldA was decimal(8, 4) and FieldB was decimal(8, 2).

Once we corrected the mismatch, the query sprung to life.

Dave
Just because I can...

Feeling The Love

David Totzke — Wed, 31 May 2006 09:35:00 GMT

Via Frank Arrigo

Recent Microsoft releases:

Longhorn Server
Office 2007
Vista
Exchange 12

Can you feel it?

Dave
Just because I can...

Help A Brother Out...

David Totzke — Tue, 16 May 2006 12:35:00 GMT

...or in as the case may be.

Ok, so you're a twenty-five year old virgin and a little hottie you know says that if you can get 5 million hits on a website in 30 days, she'll help you out. He's more than halfway there with half the month to go.

Check out his site and help this unfortunate soul. All he needs are hits. You don't have to do anything but hit it so that he can “hit it“.

Dave
Just because I can...(and he can too if you help him out)

WiFi Train Blogger

David Totzke — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 19:30:00 GMT

Ok so it cost me about 10 bucks to make this post but I'm doing it from a VIA Rail train in the middle of nowhere. (Brampton, ON) [grin]

How frackin' cool is that?!?

Actually, the cost isn't all that bad. The 10 bucks is for a 24 hour period during which I can surf to my heart's content. The train ride from Toronto to Kitchener is only an hour and a half, but if I wanted to, I could hang around the train station looking at pr0n and making people feel uncomfortable.

I don't have to go into the Big City^tm that often but the train takes about the same amount of time as driving without all of the stop and go traffic, high blood pressure and road rage. I can actually turn the 3 hours of round-trip commute time into billable hours. “Aha“, you say. Finally he gets to the point. I didn't start out to make a point. That was an accident. Sorry about that.

Dave
Just because I can...(assuming of course that this bridge we're going over doesn't collapse plunging us into the icy river below)

Programmer Humour or The Story of Mini and Micro

David Totzke — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 16:32:00 GMT

No idea who the author is, but it's pretty funny!

Micro was a real-time operator and dedicated multi-user. His broadband protocol made it easy for him to interface with numerous input/output devices, even if it meant time-sharing.

One evening he arrived home just as the Sun was crashing, and had parked his Motorola 68040 in the main drive (he had missed the 5100 bus that morning), when he noticed an elegant piece of liveware admiring the daisy wheels in his garden. He thought to himself, "She looks user-friendly. I'll see if she'd like an update tonight."

Mini was her name, and she was delightfully engineered with eyes like COBOL and a PRIME mainframe architecture that set Micro's peripherals networking all over the place.

He browsed over to her casually, admiring the power of her twin, 32-bit floating point processors and enquired "How are you, Honeywell?" "Yes, I am well," she responded, batting her optical fibers engagingly and smoothing her console over her curvilinear functions.

Micro settled for a straight-line approximation. "I'm stand-alone tonight," he said, "How about computing a vector to my base address? I'll output a byte to eat, and maybe we could get offset later on."

Mini ran a priority process for 2.6 milliseconds then transmitted 8 k, "I've been dumped myself recently, and a new page is just what I need to refresh my disks. I'll park my machine cycle in your background and meet you inside." She walked off, leaving Micro admiring her solenoids and thinking, "Wow, what a global variable, I wonder if she'd like my firmware?"

They sat down at the process table to top of form feed of fiche and chips and a bucket of Baudot. Mini was in conversational mode and expanded on ambiguous arguments while micro gave the occasional acknowledgements, although, in reality, he was analyzing the shortest and least critical path to her entry point. He finally settled on the old would you like to see my benchmark routine, but Mini was again one step ahead.

Suddenly she was up and stripping off her parity bits to reveal the full functionality of her operating system software. "Let's get BASIC, you RAM," she said. Micro was loaded by this his hardware was in danger of overflowing its output buffer, a hang-up that Micro had consulted his analyst about. "Core," was all he could say, as she prepared to log him off.

Micro soon recovered, however, when Mini went down on the DEC and opened her divide files to reveal her data set ready. He accessed his fully packed root device and was just about to start pushing into her CPU stack, when she attempted an escape sequence.

"No, no!" she cried, "You're not shielded!"

"Reset, Baby," he replied, "I've been debugged."

"But I haven't got my current loop enabled, and I can't support child processes," she protested.

"Don't run away," he said, "I'll generate an interrupt."

"No, that's too error prone, and I can't abort because of my design philosophy."

Micro was locked in by this stage, though, and could not be turned off. But Mini soon stopped his thrashing by introducing a voltage spike into his main supply, whereupon he fell over with a head crash and went to sleep.

"Computers!" she thought as she recompiled herself, "All they ever think of is hex!"

Dave
Just because I can...

Waterloo-Wellington Bloggers Association

David Totzke — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 12:59:00 GMT

James Bow has put together a site to aggregate content from bloggers in the Waterllo Wellington region of Ontario, Canada. This region is also known as Canada's Technology Triangle. It's where I started and continue to run Canada's Technology Triangle .NET User Group. Man that's a mouthful. Until now, there were just a few politically oriented bloggers over there.

But now...

The GEEKS HAVE ARRIVED!!

Well ok; A geek. It's just me right now. But surely, all of my many fans in the CTT will rush to list their blogs on the site. I hope that the infrastructure can support the crushing load. ;) (and don't call me Shirly)

Now if only my enormous fan-base wasn't just in my imagination...

Dave
Just because I can...

And The Most Succinct Comment Award Goes To...

David Totzke — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 16:39:00 GMT

...this guy:

Comments from Totzkeeeeee's Blog:

Sender: Vali
Url: http://vicnet_resita@yahoo.com
IP Address: 84.247.40.121
=====================================

re: HOWTO: Print to a USB Printer from DOS in Windows XP

i need

Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/dtotzke/articles/26204.aspx#67462

Don't we all Vali, don't we all.

Dave
Just because I can...

GPS Technology Gone Wrong

David Totzke — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 17:48:00 GMT

Or are we too quick to blame GPS and the mapping service? Blindly following the path the computer has laid before you is not entirely a wise thing to do. This is proved true by a couple on holiday in New Zealand when the GPS system in their rental car led them on a 10 hour journey through a mountain pass barely suitable for goats.

Rainbow Station manager David McEwen said the road could best be described as "a shingle goat track". "To say they're following their GPS quite frankly doesn't wash with me. They've gone past signs that said `Road Closed' that are 6ft high and 3ft wide and are illuminated."

Ya. Maybe the problem isn't GPS after all.

Dave
Just because I can...

BUWAHAHAHAHA...

David Totzke — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 12:06:00 GMT