http://www.nintendowiifanboy.com/2007/07/17/sarcastic-gamer-parodies-wii-fit/
This is hilarious.
Archive for July, 2007
Wii Fit Parody
Thursday, July 26th, 2007Windows 2003 SP2 Breaks Session_OnEnd Event in Classic ASP
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007We have a lot of tickets from clients complaining that our Web App is suddenly slow. The process has to be restarted nightly. It takes so long that some pages error out. Etc. In a nice twist, this is an IIS 6 Windows 2003 defect and can’t be reproduced on IIS 5.1 on Windows XP.
It seems we have isolated the problem to a bug introduced into IIS in Window 2003 SP2. The Session_OnEnd event in Global.asa does not get called. If you have any memory cleanup operations when someone logs out or the session times out they will not happen. The IIS process, w3wp or inetinfo, builds so much unreleased memory it gets really slow and starts failing.
My first few Google searches didn’t find anything. Then a co worker took some of my keywords and found a blog entry from an MS engineer which points to an MS article. The good news is that there is a patch to fix this problem. It took us ~24 hrs to get it after we diagnosed and found the problem.
I’m posting this blog entry to raise the profile of this problem on the search engines. It has been a very time consuming and frustrating issue here. I feel this absolutely should have been pushed out in a nightly hotfix from MS and it should have been shouted from the rooftops.
Chris n Staci Pics on Flickr
Tuesday, July 24th, 2007Catching up on Michael Kaplan’s Blog
Tuesday, July 24th, 2007Language Translation of Plurals
This is a good post that underscores the difficulty in translating one language to another.
One Hippopotami
One hippopotami cannot get on a bus,
Because one hippopotami is two hippopotamus.
And if you have two goose, that makes one geese.
A pair of mouse is mice. A pair of moose is meese.
A paranoia is a bunch of mental blocks.
And when Ben Casey meets Kildaire, that’s called a paradox.
When two minks fall in love, with all their heart and soul,
You’ll find the plural of two minks is one mink stole.
Singulars and plurals are so different, bless my soul.
Has it ever occurred to you that the plural of “half” is “whole”?
A bunch of tooth is teeth. A group of foot is feet.
And two canaries make a pair–they call it a parakeet.
A paramecium is not a pair.
A parallelogram is just a crazy square.
Nobody knows just what a paraphernalia is.
And what is half a pair of scissors, but a single sciz?
With someone you adore, if you should find romance,
You’ll pant, and pant once more, and that’s a pair of pants
Sorting It All Out : Don’t let commas distract you from the big money!
And this post is good one talking about the variable use of commas in numbers. In some countries, where numbers are 123,456,789 money might be in the format $123456,789
She typed in ‘God damn clippy’
Remember the Clippy paperclip help from Office. It’s off by default, but if it’s on you can find out how to turn it off by looking for ‘God damn clippy’. Help will be displayed on how to turn him off. These are the little things in programming that go unnoticed every day.
Hallway Painting Update
Monday, July 23rd, 2007I have almost finished the ceiling. Just need one more quick coat and hit the edge again. Earlier, I had picked the color, but coming home from work one day it reminded me of pink way too much. After 6 more colors, 9 in all, I found one that would work. It’s not pink, but has the same softness. It’s a light orangish-yellow. My brain keeps trying to make it pink, but when I look at it close there’s no way. And then it catches me off guard again later.
This has been very difficult, because the light in the hallway has like 8 different moods. Some filtered through the front door, then you round the corner and it’s much dimmer filtered through the rooms. At night there’s no light from outside it’s all the interior lights. Exterior light is very different when sunny than cloudy.
There were 3 original colors. Two of which almost got selected. Then 3 awful colors. Finally, 3 good colors. Ivory peach, which I picked. A white that was hardly different than the primer, really. And Birch Bark, which is oddly attractive in it’s grey green dullness.
The primer was laid down almost as good as the color, two coats I think. That mustard yellow was hard to hide. The ceiling was done in Anthem White like the master bedroom. The leftover almost covered it. If I had watered it down in the beginning it might have. I used a 1 1/4″ nap roller with color on the walls. It laid on really thickly. Some of the deep crevices from the sanded faux finish still show yellow, but there’s no need for a second coat. A paintbrush or foam brush can finish those.
The next big surface area are the doors. They get the same color as the bedroom trim. That trim color for the whole house same as the Anthem White for ceilings. Then it’s all slow tedious detail work. The baseboards still haven’t got a complete coat of primer. The floor has to be taped off.
I can tell I learned alot doing the bedroom. Prime everything. Start at the top and work down. If you lay your colors down in the right order less taping is needed. For example, who cares if you accidentally get ceiling white on the walls if they are covered in primer. And who cares if you get a little wall color on the trim if they are covered in primer.
Two hallway doors haven’t been painted. I plan on replacing both with solid core doors from MRL for privacy, the master bedroom and the hallway bathroom. Little details. At the old dorms at Texas Tech the girls have hollow doors with vents and the guys have solid doors.
Since everything is already strung out, I’ve been playing with the idea of repainting the washroom with the hallway color. It would look sunny, especially with a replacement half-glass exterior door. The view is onto the sunflower and watermelon patches, once I remove the fence panels. And this is where I come into the house. The room is small and it would look much prettier. I can work it into the existing job without much trouble.
Futures in Biotech 19
Monday, July 23rd, 2007This is a great interview. He talks about the human as huge anchor site for massive numbers of microbes. This affects us in a lot of ways in which we don’t think about. One example is the discussion of gut microbes as a factor in obesity. The microbes in the guts of obese mice are more efficient at breaking down food and harvesting energy. Similar bacteria have been found in humans. Mice can lose weight by transferring microbes from thin mice into the fat mice. And how are other food related problems like malnutrition related to gut microbes?
Vista as a Noun
Thursday, July 19th, 2007It’s official I’m nominating Vista to the status of noun. As in, “Your computer has been Vista’ed” or “That’s so Vista”. Vista of course is synonymous with fucked.
I have found yet another fucked up Vista driver. Thank you Epson. I didn’t really want to use my scanner. For regular use like document it’s good. The key feature, the 35 mm auto film loader, well that’s a different matter.
As with all drivers, it’s not Microsoft’s fault. Trust me you’re still better off with XP, 9 months after Vista’s release. Even if the manufacturer has a Vista driver it’s probably buggy. Maybe on the one year anniversary Vista will be a useful purchase.
Jung Typology Test
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007What kind of person are you? My personality leans towards INTJ.
Flickr vs ?
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007When I decided to move to Flickr for photo management it was the only website I was aware of. Time has moved and and I’m wondering if Flickr is still the best. I have need of an online site again for a special project.
Without spending hours on this, it seems that Webshots is bigger by far with millions of users. Flickr gets more modern press and is the #1 latest photo sharing site. Zoomr is #2. Picasa is a Google product centered mostly around program that you install.
For now, it seems that Flickr has the lead in easy of use and widgets. A strong note about Flickr is their absolute refusal to move your data to direct competitors such as Zoomr. In my mind this is a major strike against them. It means you should maintain your own copy and do not use any features like tagging that will be lost
Flickr
Zoomr
Picasa
Webshots
Zoto
Flickr vs Zoomr
Flickr Vs Zooomr Vs Bubbleshare
Flickr and Webshots – A classic web2.0
COM/Interop Issues Update
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007After the last patch, all was quiet for two months. Then some complaints started coming in. One centers around Oracle drivers. This was the classic failure. A memory leak in a closed ASP session caused a Catastrophic failures around the Oracle drivers. Don’t get me wrong, these drivers can cause their own problems too. The other problem is a general slowness after time. Where the app takes 5 times longer to use. Restarting IIS restores the speed, but repeating this every day it far from an optimal solution.
Since the version 1 patch there is a new version of the app. It has the same fixes as the patch. In fact, it was the test bed for the code that was moved into the patch. The enhanced code started in version 2, copied and modified to a patch version 1, and then copied back to version 2. It was further modified in version 2 to remove lots of common COM calls.
The fix for the patch was to abstract the COM objects into a .Net object. Where a COM object was created, used, and discarded a .Net object is called, which makes (if necessary) a single, reusable COM object, uses it, and discards it when the app is disposed. Instead of 50 or more create/dispose commands there is 1 pair. I highly recommend this practice when accessing COM objects from .Net.
There are some differences between the patch and version 2. I don’t remember them all. As with most patches the attention was on making only the necessary changes to resolve the defect. Version 2 made additional changes for ease of maintenance, readability, and completeness.
With the slowness issue around the patched version. Version 2 has been receiving performance measurement attention. And it seems to have similar issues. At 1.5 hr it begins slowing. At the end of 10 hr it is 7 times slower than when it started.
Something happens during the running, which acts like sand in the gears. Nothing in the standard IIS/Machine metrics stands out. Memory holds steady, disk usage holds, processor usage holds, blah-blah-blah holds. Perhaps an additional test with .Net metrics being recorded will detect something.
I’m exceedingly pleased that the previous errors no longer occur. If we can just jostle .Net the right way to knock the sand loose, new patches can be issued and both versions fixed.
Bush Test
Monday, July 16th, 2007from Christopher and Staci
Grandma’s Cookout Pics..
Monday, July 16th, 2007are here. The pictures or her yard without people are here.
These are some of my favorites.
Patience Sleeping
Jessica Patience
Patience
Red Dragonfly
Blue Dragonfly
Stanley’s Pumpkins
There are several group pictures
Optimus Prime Gets a Letter From Geico
Friday, July 13th, 2007Swedish Grandmother Has the Fastest Internet Connection in the World
Thursday, July 12th, 2007From CrunchGear
Although likely 39.99999 Gigabits more than she actually needs, Sigbritt Löthberg now has a 40 Gbps internet connection. She’s never owned a computer until now but she did give birth to some famous Swedish internet guy.
How fast is the connection? She can download a full high definition DVD in two seconds. That would take many, many, many seconds (minutes or hours, even) over your typical broadband connection. And get this – her house is over 1200 miles away from the connection’s original source.
In comparison, most of us with DSL have 1.5Mbps. She gets 40,000 Mbps.
Goodbye Pandora
Thursday, July 12th, 2007It looks like I’ll lose my Pandora in three days. On July 15, they will be expected to pay new royalty rates backdated one year that will likely bankrupt them and just about every webcasting radio station. Congress has three days to enact legislation to replace the Copyright Royalty Board’s decision with their own. I will sorely miss Pandora. The record labels that pushed for this can suck on it. I have as much respect for their interests as they have shown for mine. The destruction of an entire industry for what?
See also Pandora Rocks