The Matt Faus Blog

Stumbled upon this today as I was working on my Database Design project. Thought it was pretty interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecimber

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/Calendar.html#UNDECIMBER

As I was working on my distributed agreement protocol project for my advanced operating systems class I wanted to see how many lines of code I had written so far. As fate may have it, it was exactly 1000 at that instant.

{net33} wc -l ./*.cpp
143 ./client.cpp
284 ./server.cpp
339 ./TVPLib.cpp
234 ./TVPMessage.cpp
1000 total

Recently, I was searching around for how to obtain the current day’s datetime using a SQL query in SQL Server Management studio. I know I had obtained this value from MySQL with NOW() function, but could find nothing of the sort for Microsoft’s SQL Server. After digging around in MSDN Library, I found this:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188383.aspx

SELECT GETDATE();

Hopefully this post will allow others searching like I did to find what they are looking for quicker.

While Googling around for the phrase “gcc thread sleep” to get started on my distributed operating system project I discovered that bird lovers also love their acronyms! I thought it was kind of funny.

Cuddly Green Cheek Conure

Nah, I’m kidding. I just think this mentality is hilarious. I was sitting in class this morning and one of my classmates stated that he could not open the slides that had been posted. After being asked for clarification, he replied in an ignorantly haughty tone of voice:

I have a Mac, and I don’t use Microsoft Office.

Luckily, a more astute Mac user from the back of the room ruefully replied:

OpenOffice.Org!

I’ve been moving into my new apartment over the past few days and I am now starting to feel like I’m back at home and settled.

For instance, I just now setup my brand new desk, which is 3′ by 6′. Then, on top of this desk I placed my dual 20.1″ LCD monitors and my 2.1 speaker system (the subwoofer went under the desk, of course). After booting up and tweaking the dual monitor setup a little I cranked up WinAmp and sat back to bask in the glorious sight and sounds I was beholding. Dual monitors are just so much fun!

And what a sight it is.

I actually wound up mounting my 2 front left/right speakers on the wall to free up a little more space on the desk. I’ve had these speakers for over 5 years now and this is the first time I’ve mounted them like that. It’s really pretty cool. It would be even cooler if I ran the wires through the wall, but I think I’ll wait until I get to a place I’m going to stay for longer than 10 months before I do that.

Well, after a really really long procrastination I finally got around to updating my blog software (i.e. this webpage). I am most happy to see the Akismet spam-detecting web service is installed by default with the latest version of WordPress. After signing up for an API key you simply activate the service in the control panel and it automatically deletes comments and trackbacks that it detects as spam. It’s a smart system so if anyone of the thousands (or more!) users submits a comment as spam that Akismet didn’t catch, it will learn by analyzing the content of the comment and start blocking it on other users’ blogs. Friggin’ awesome!

I had to delete about 800 old comments that were full of ads for every imaginable kind of porn, pills, shoes, identity theft, blah, blah, blah. So that was fun. Except not.

Anyway, I’m happy to announce that comments have been re-enabled, which will hopefully make this place a little more lively.

I want to work on updating my website, but now that I have spent my entire summer travelling and learning Spanish as well as working full time, there doesn’t seem to be much time left now that school is starting back up again.

Oh, and I just noticed that as I’m typing this post WordPress is automatically saving a draft every few seconds to make sure I don’t lose anything! Sweet!

I found this site that goes into a lot of detail on various ways to do this, but if you’re just debugging run this command:

mage -ClearApplicationCache

Mage.exe is included in the .NET Framework 2.0 Software Development Kit (SDK).

I have been working with ClickOnce a lot recently for work and one thing that comes in real handy when debugging deployment of your application (which takes way more than one click) is the actual location on disk of files that are downloaded from the ClickOnce server to the client machine. I knew that these files were downloaded and being run, but I simply could not find them in Windows Explorer. I tried all kinds of searches using both the indexed and non-indexed versions of Windows Search, but nothing came up. I don’t know why this isn’t more common knowledge, but here we go.

So, the first place you should look is here:
C:\Documents and Settings\_username_\Local Settings\Apps\_DotNet_Version_

However, since ClickOnce applications are not supposed to know where exactly the reside on disk (for a lot of reasons security and deployment considerations), the folder names get obfuscated from here. I would suggest just using the modified dates of the folders and files as clues in your search. Hopefully you don’t have too much stuff thrown in there. Another thought would be to explicitly add this folder to the Desktop Search index list (or maybe remove the explicity exclusion?), so then you could use good ‘ole search on it to find your files.

When I finally found the files I was looking for there were in this folder:
C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Apps\2.0\LCN10VZX.HD3\025C2B6R.1XJ\qdab..ient_f1fd3e157083502b_0002.0001_10859e55371bee77

Lame, huh? (and, yes, I know running as Administrator is stupid)

Everyone knows Wikipedia is edited by users around the world, but normally you have to have your changes reviewed by peers before they are made public. In the past few days, I have noticed other websites that allow basically anyone to edit their pages. Looking for an inline search mechanism, I found this page that you can edit by clicking the little edit link underneath the tab at the top. Thinking this was just some crazy kid who thought it was easy and cool, I just forgot about it. Then, today, I was searching the MSDN Library and noticed at the very bottom of their pages there is a Community Content section that anyone with a Windows Live ID can edit.

Crazy.

I guess they figure no one is desperate enough to spam the MSDN Library.