Chris Szurgot's Blog

When tracking down a thorny bug, (you know, the one where everything appears to be working, and the data appears to be right in the database, but the output just isn't want your expecting) Do not, under any circumstances, listen to Ministry. (Psalm 69 was the choice of the day) It is doubtful that you or the comptuer will survive. The bug won't either because the code and repository will be thrown to the ground as well <grin>

Less than 5 min after putting on some trance from http://www.digitallyimported.com/, the answer was immediately evident, and the code is resolved.

On the other hand, you can crank out some serious code with Psalm 69 in the background....

I'm going to go ahead and ask a stupid question... Why does Virtual PC/Virtual Server have a 2.2 GB limit on DVDs?

All the VS.NET downloads are on DVD, and the program that is perfect for testing them on, can't natively handle them. I know there are work arounds, but you'd think that after a year or more of having the product, someone in MSDN would go over to the Virtual PC/Virtual Server group and tell them to fix the issue <grin> Or at least build one of the work arounds in, so it's seamless.

Update: (12/31/2004) From Ben Armstrong (Program Manager for Virtual PC)

Unfortunately we do not really support DVD images at all.  We only support the CD ISO image format.  It turns out that this format can support up to 2.2GB.  In order to support higher we will need to add native DVD image support – and we have not yet done that.  It has only been recently that people have actually started using ISO images that are over 2.2GB in size.

So, it's not a case of the system being able to handle regular to large DVDs, it's that it really doesn't handle DVD's at all, and it just works with small ISOs of some DVDs.

Of course, it would be nice if the program told you this when you tried to mount a large ISO <grin>

Ok, off topic, but it's a holiday week so everybody can be lenient... <grin>

Just picked up The Neverending Story by Michael Ende in hardcover. (Gift Cards are great) I've seen copies of it over the years, but not like the one I first read many years ago. This one is printed in two different inks, green and red. Everything that takes place in "reality" is printed in red, while everything that takes place in Fantastica is printed in green. It's a novel presentation of a wonderful book, and really makes the tale truely enjoyable. (Not that plain old black ink could do it any injustice, but still...)

The first movie covers the first half of the book. The second movie is the second half of the book, but since they really screwed up the transition (the second half of the book is truely wonderful, so just forget about that movie)

Stupid english trivia. I needed to look this word up today, and according to Dictionary.com (Ref: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language), the word Terrific is it's own antonym. Whenever I don't want to tell my stepson how I really felt about a movie, I can just say it was "terrific" <grin>

ter·rif·ic   (t-rfk) adj. Very good or fine; splendid: a terrific tennis player. Awesome; astounding: drove at a terrific rate of speed. Causing terror or great fear; terrifying: a terrific wail. Very bad or unpleasant; frightful: a terrific headache. [Latin terrificus : terrre, to frighten + -ficus, -fic.] ter·rifi·cal·ly adv.

Just a comment about my last post... VS.NET December CTP - Man, what a wonderful, frustrating Christmas Present

The Intellisense bug makes Intellisense pretty much unusable by default, but you *can* turn it off. Just uncheck "show completion list..." then uncheck "Place code Snippets"  under Text Editor/C#/Intellisense, and you can go back to the old behavior... (Ctrl-space)

I must admit, I don't know why you can't just turn of "Code Snippets" and leave "show completion list" on...

Here's the bug if you want to vote on it <grin>

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackid=8c6eab30-28f1-4996-8376-18978c436e4d

Update: I went into the "Code Snippets Manager" and removed all but the "refactoring" snippets, (if you remove those, the IDE crashes), and turned everything back on, and everything seems to work, so it must be a particular snippet. I'll let someone else figure out which one. <grin>

Ok, Mr DailyWTF decided to start up an I-Hate-Oracle Club. There's lots of reasons to hate Oracle. There's also lots of reasons to like Oracle.I'm not going  to go into that....

I cut my teeth on Oracle. Used it for about 10 years. Only been using SQL Server for about 4. Sql Server is great. It's fine. Runs pretty fast, and I can optimize it well, but it's got some idosynchrosies that don't make a whole lot of sense.

And the ones that's killing me right now is Date handling!!!! Why is it so hard to work with dates???!!!

Why doesn't GetDate() return the date at midnight?

Or why isn't there a separate function to return the time now and the time at midnight

Or why isn't there an easy way to get the time at midnight on any given day?

The Sql Server 200 Resource Kit says that Date Round and Date Truncate functions are handled by CONVERT, which means if I want to get midnight, I have to do this: SELECT CONVERT(datetime, CONVERT(varchar(10), getdate(), 101)) You tell me that's intuitive? Convert to a character string to truncate the time portion, then back? I found a web site that displays this method, that makes a little more sense SELECT DATEADD(dd, DATEDIFF(dd,0,getdate()), 0), seeing that there's no conversions involved, just calcuations, but it still seems counterintuitive to have to do calculations on a concept so common it should be a native part of the story.

Ah well, enough ranting. I can't create a GetTodayAtMidnight() Function because it would be nondeterministic, but I could create a GetDateAtMidnightFunction(Date) which would be close enough, so that's what I'll do.. Wonder why I didn't think of that before.

(And I still think Date handling should be expanded in SQL. It should be easier to truncate dates without having to resort to conversions and manipulations)