Why do we hate?

I came across this website: http://www.godhatesfags.com and I laughed. What delightful satire! I mean, it’s so black, so cutting, so realistic, you could almost be forgiven for believing…

Hang on…
Oh, I see…

Why can’t God speak for himself? Why would he choose to speak through people like this?

Beginning WMI

Ok, I have just recently discovered the inherent coolness that is the WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation). I whipped up this example to show some of the random stuff you can retrieve with it (be sure to “allow” the activeX to run, you trust me don’t you?).

Here be the sample

Isn’t that cool? Imagine what a hacker could get up to if they could just execute whatever old ActiveX they wanted on your local machine, hmmm?

Anyway, I hope to write a few more interesting examples in the near future. Hmmm, Imagine being able to turn on / off services or kill processes using nothing but scripts in a web page?

Update:

Ok, I couldn’t help myself, I whipped up this web based service manager (requires admin access of course): Service Manager.

Susan’s wedding

At long last I have managed to get my hands on some copies of my sister’s wedding photos. I am resisting the urge to post a picture of the cake first.

So first, here is a picture of the happy couple: David & Susan Simpkin. I find it difficult to disagree with my father on this one: this is definitely the most beautiful bride I have ever seen or will ever see.

And at last, the picture you’ve all been waiting for, here is a picture of the cake on the left. I made it myself. It’s three layers of chocolate mudcake, covered in white fondant. The little blue shells and seahorses are white chocolate which I have coloured.

Oh and the top layer is gluten free (Buckwheat flour) it worked out reasonably well 🙂

69er

You know how it is. As software developers we all know how dodgy software can be. There’s always the registry setting containing the admin password (yes, I’ve see this, but not at Beca), the hard-coded string required to get a particular component to work (seen that too), the thing that Allen does every morning to keep the web servers going (he used to run a batch file, bless his heart). I discovered another one of these today when diagnosing a problem in one of our vital systems.
Continue reading 69er

Alton Gladding

I just had a conversation with Alton. The quiet old guy in the corner of the office. He’s close to retirement (65, I think). I used to consider him the “access guy” because he was the only one who would willingly work on the Microsoft access projects.

My how my opinion has changed.

Continue reading Alton Gladding

Oh the humanity

The image on the right is what a developer workstation looks like. Lookie, it’s got them new fangled flat screens and there’s two of them to boot! Yee haw, what will these crazy computer geeks think of next eh? Mice with lazers in them, I’ll bet. Or holographic screens I’ll wager.

Now I know it seems petty and unrealistic. I mean, I have a perfectly good 17 inch CRT at work, the refresh rate doesn’t give me a headache and it complies to OSH standards. I am even getting a brand new chair any month now, so as I can hold my mouse in the right position to appease the gods of occupational health and stave off the end of my career from carpal tunnel syndrome a few years more.


But.. but… It just doesn’t feel the same. I’m not asking for much, it’s not like I want two screens or even three. I would just like a single LCD screen to call my own. The image on the left shows three screens, but it’s not really fair. The third screen belongs to Andrew’s other computer. So I suppose you could say he only has 1.5 screens per computer and he has to use two keyboards which I suppose could be confusing. Yeah, confusing.

I guess you’re right. I suppose I’m just being greedy. I mean no one really uses LCDs, they’re far too expensive, aren’t they? Aren’t they?