Output Stream of Consciousness

If you're considering using uniqueidentifiers on your tables, particularly as primary keys, then you might want to upgrade your SQL Server or just check your SQL carefully if you're still running SQL Server 2000. In particular, doing a COUNT(field) on… more »

I have been using Rossen Assenov's pseudo-generics in Delphi for quite a while now to great effect. (See here for downloads) In an effort to more properly ".NET-ify" things, I have been converting Delphi unit names into namespace-scoped unit names. For… more »

XSL or Extensible Stylesheet Language can be a bit mind-bending. I have essentially come up to speed on it in a week to use it in the generation of migration scripts. It is essentially a big list of rules, calls and writing commands for matching XML. It… more »

My software turned ten today. I had mentioned that my software would turn ten this year to a coworker of mine, and he watched the date listed in the header of my oldest source code file like a hawk, or an egret, and sent out our traditional birthday… more »

It's been a while since I've run a forum. I used to run a gardening forum, a couple of hosts ago. I ran the forum under the fairly popular phpBB forum software. It was pretty easy to install, but some of the features made it hard to maintain. A dearth… more »

I'm making a card game - a physical one, not a computer one, so I decided to give myself both a learning experience and a tool to help print out the cards by pulling down Turbo Delphi for .NET at home and try to program the entire thing with the… more »

I was helping a co-worker puzzle out an algorithm or two today, and he got me to go back through the steps I took to come up with an appropriate algorithm. It's a skill I have that comes from the combination of experience and a little bit of ability,… more »

I'm quite a fan of the open source version control system Subversion (tastes particularly good with TortoiseSVN if you're using Windows), so it was interesting to get this passed along. It's quite a widely-dispersed network of people, many of whom have… more »

Delphi (now available in free 'Turbo Delphi Explorer' editions for old-style Windows coding and new-style .NET coding) has a pretty good migration path from regular Windows to .NET. Unlike Managed C++, which is one of the very few things that can mix… more »

October 1, 2006, there will be no more worldwide patent impediments to using the GIF format for pictures. People making their own gaudy animation software for MySpace users heave a global sigh of relief :) more »

Sometimes, there are sites that bring back waves of memory to crusty nerds such as myself. There is a site, which I believe has been around for quite some time, giving code examples of how to count down "99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of… more »

Ran across some trouble the other day. We've allowed embedding Internet Explorer windows in our solutions, which is great for linked portals, intro pages, etc. Things were going great guns, but on some particular web pages, things would go into a… more »

A coworker of mine brought something to my attention. We were informed of trouble in testing one of our pieces. Funny... it had always been working. The test was construction related, and our tester had put in "con" (short for "construction") as a test… more »

There was something that happened in a security patch Microsoft put out that was wrecking our clip art objects that we store in databases. Since more and more people were applying the patch, we were understandably worried. It was, albeit harrowing at… more »

While I was chatting away in World of Warcraft, while I was on one of the interminable transport rides, someone asked exactly what computer programming was all about. It was an intriguing question to try to answer in a non-trite manner. So, before my… more »