Output Stream of Consciousness

You know how you can - for just about every HTML tag - combine the start and end tags, XML-style, into just one node? For example, you need not go <img src="mypig.jpg"></img> - you can simply go <img src="mypig.jpg"/>. It turns out… more »

Few things are more dreadful for an application than a recurring "out of memory" error. You ask for memory graphs for the past hours or days and scan them... and you don't find anything untoward. Now, you're really confused. One thing about the memory… more »

It's not straight-up obvious how to convert the Borland and Microsoft formats back and forth in code, but it does end up being pretty easy. TDateTimes are in "OA" format, which is OLE/COM-compatible. The functions that convert back and forth to the OLE… more »

There are few things more fun than topping off a righteously sweaty code refactoring session with a particularly rare and un-to-underdocumented linker error. I ran into this in CodeGear RAD Studio 2007 on the Delphi for .NET side. It was different than… more »

If you are using one of the CodeGear Delphis for .NET and are using an assembly made elsewhere, perhaps in C#, and something in that assembly has changed, say the visibility of a method, you may occasionally run into a case where no matter what you do,… more »

Eight or nine years ago, I embarked on a small project to make non-blocking concurrent programming easier. There was a fair bit of code out there on semaphores and mutexes and getting threads to just wait, also known as blocking. The threads in this… more »

This is a quickie. I was having one heck of a time trying to figure out what was going on with a legacy service an old coworker had written in Delphi. It kept saying "{X} service on Local Computer started and then stopped". There seemed to be nothing… more »

This is pretty simple to accomplish, though how exactly to do it can be hard to find. Quite simply, you add OUTPUT to your parameter lists, on both your procedure definition and your actual call, like so: Defining: CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.TestValue… more »

We had one big hiccup moving from IIS 6.0 to the 7.0 version. In the Web.Config, IIS 7.0 no longer likes to have an httpHandlers section. We had: <system.web>   <httpHandlers>    <remove verb="*"… more »

For a fan of biology, as well as of puzzle games in general, this is one of the most amazing things I have seen in a long time. Now, we already have things like Folding@Home, which is a distributed project that attempts to find low-energy conformations… more »

Imagine this scenario: you have downloaded a particular project that has source code, and it's almost exactly what you want, but it's missing a few things, and it's not under version control (for example, the projects on SourceForge) So, you go off and… more »

I took a half-day holiday to go to the Calgary Zoo with my wife, my baby and some friends. At the gate, when I presented our three membership cards, I and I alone was hit with my card 'coming up with an error'. Apparently, when the zoo switched its… more »

If you go throw a function into Oracle, and it's wrong, e.g. CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION Banana IS -- Oops, no return! BEGIN RETURN SUBSTUR('Banana',2,5); -- Oops, misspelled! END; You will get no warnings about this in most tools until it comes… more »

If you are trying to get a time into a DateTime from a string, it's relatively easy: DateTime dt = DateTime.Parse(inputText,CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, DateTimeStyles.NoCurrentDateDefault); The NoCurrentDateDefault is pretty important. Otherwise,… more »

I wish I had an original cite for this bit of Javascript that my wife found posted in a Fark forum, but it's fantastic fun, so I'm posting about it regardless. To operate it, you copy the entire paragraph below, navigate to a web page (Fark works… more »