So, apparently there is some silly thing going on with people turning off lights and what not for 5 minutes sometime this week. The idea came from some French environment organisation. Now, I'm not really bothered with it all (I myself will not participate because I think it is an outright silly idea that will not accomplish anything), but according to a spokesperson from a large Dutch power company, "there can be power outs when 1 in 3 households turns off the lights simultaneously."

 

Huh?! Someone please explain to me how turning off things can cause power outs. Really. I don't get it. Now if they said turning things on simultaneously I would have understood, after all, that would kind of cause a major increase in demand for electricity for a very short period of time. But how can turning off things be a bad thing? There is no extra power usage (on the contrary, there will be less).

 

Seriously, is there someone out there who can explain this to me?

I've been using Vista for a little while now on several PCs, and every time I notice that there are some issues with the sound cards. Most of these PCs have AC'97 Realtek chipsets. My laptop, for example, has the right drivers installed (Vista default drivers), but no sound comes out of my speakers when playing a song.

 

Figures.

 

I recentely found out why. In Vista, when you go to the sound mixer settings (right click on the sound icon in the tray and select Mixer Settings or something similar), most PCs have multiple playback devices. My laptop for example, has three: Analog, Headphones and S/PDIF. If you are having the same problem as I had (no sound) and have multiple devices, try this:

 

1. Start Windows Media Player (or a similar application) and start playing a song.

2. If you have no sound, open up the mixer settings, select the next non-default device and set it as default.

3. Restart WMP and play the song again.

4. Rinse and repeat until you have sound (make sure you restart WMP every time, otherwise the new default playback device will not be applied to playback in WMP!).

 

My laptop has to have the device set to Headphones, for example, to get correct playback.

When a user has just signed up for a new passport, it is possible the address book for that user does not yet exist. If this happens, the ABCH servers (both the ABService and SharingService) will throw a "Address book does not exist" (or "ABDoesNotExist") error. Then it is up to you to create the address book with ABAdd.

 

Here's a quick dump of how what the ABAdd SOAP call looks like. The rest is all universal (headers, etc.) so I won't post those here.

 

 

 The return value of the ABAdd method is a single GUID (Guid.Empty). After that you can continue with ABFindAll, etc.

Recently I installed a clean copy of Vista on my parents PC, along with Office 2007, Windows Live One Care, etc. It's all in Dutch now as well (instead of English which I favoured), seeing as it's really their PC now (seeing as I now have my own laptop I hardly use it anymore).

 

Anyway, we also have a Pinnacle PCTV 110i TV card, which of course I wanted to use with Media Center. Pinnacle actually offers BETA drivers for Vista, as well, so that's all pretty cool. However, upon installation it prompted me for my product key, something I think I lost a while ago. Anyway, I figured there must be some way around it. There is.

 

First, get a decent InstallShield unpacker. Simply searching on Google for "installshied unpacker" will probably give you some good results (I think I actually used the one from the first result). Unpack everything somewhere. Now, go into the directory Pixie which was just unpacked, and rename PixieTool.exe to PixieTool.bak.exe (or something similar). Then, copy a harmless EXE (I used the Windows calculator, as a matter of fact) to the Pixie directory and call it PixieTool.exe. Now start the installation by going into the Disk1 directory (which was also unpacked) and selecting setup.exe. Continue with the installation. It will then boot your harmless exe, simply quit it. The installation will now continue without a problem. I'm not sure the actual media center software which comes with the installer works with this hack, because I just installed the hardware drivers.

 

Have fun!

 

Oh and, XBOX 360 + Vista == Hot.

I thought the "5 things you don't know about me" tagging thing was strictly a Microsoft blogger thing, but apparently it has spread and grew significantly within the blogosphere while I wasn't looking. Today Danny Thorpe tagged me, so here goes.

 

1. We got our first computer when I was 6, or so. Unfortunatly I have two older sisters, and so I was not allowed to use it for the very first time the first evening. As revenge I got up before everyone else the next day, and started playing around. I didn't blow anything up, however, by which I am still surprised to this day because I had no experience using computers whatsoever before then. The first game I played? Commander Keen.

 

2. I have (or maybe had) the tendency not to listen to my parents when it came to electronic devices. An example would be our new VCR. My parents had expliticely told me not to play with it in the morning (I usually got up before everyone else in the weekend). Of course, by the time they woke up and stumbled into the living room I had already programmed all channels (and sorted them properly) and had been fiddling with the settings. The same goes for our TV, etc.

 

3. I can be very impatient when trying to teach someone something, especially in real life. I have the tendency to go *sigh*, take the mouse and keyboard from the person and just do it myself while the other person watches. Of course I usually do it with such speed that the other person learns nothing in the process. I would like to teach, but for this reason I'll probably never be a good teacher and thus I opted to go for a regular programmer job (instead of teaching programming somewhere).

 

4. I'm a bit of a Microsoft fanboy (for lack of better wording). Ever since I used Windows 3.1 I wanted to work for "the guys who made that". I own a ton of Microsoft SWAG (possibly more than any sane person should have), which I got at various events (visit to Microsoft Netherlands HQ, TechEd, etc.) but also from my first internship at Microsoft in Redmond, WA, USA. I have a Messenger bag, Visual Earth umbrella and Microsoft t-shirts I actually use/wear. Beside those basic things I have a ton of frisbees, stuffed animals, key rings, emoticon key rings, mugs, etc. You name, I probably have it. Oh, and speaking of internships, I have been offered another internship at the same team I was working for last year! :-)

 

5. My favorite artist would probably be Weird Al Yankovic. His geeky/funny lyrics to popular songs always give me a laugh. Another advantage is that they never bore me. You can ask some of my friends, they'll tell you I can sing along to almost every of his songs, and I listen to them regulary when I'm doing work on my laptop. I have all his albums, which amounts to roughly 9 hours of music.

 

There you go! My small list of things you probably didn't know about me, unless you are a very close friend. I am tagging the ever mysterious Mr. Dwergs.. and remember kids, no tagsies-backsies!

Actually it's closer to 40,200 .. But either way, I've reached 40,000 visitors on my simple blog. Not bad for a blog that's pretty much mentioned nowhere except for Google and via the gleam functionality of MSN/Windows Live Messenger.

... Is when they start to say "Ja" instead of "Yes". A lot of people do this, actually (you'd be surprised).

 

Similarly, almost every person I know that comes from southern Europe (Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, etc.) always puts ", yes?" or ", no?" behind their sentences/questions. This is probably because in their native language this construct is used quite often. In English it's not (to my knowledge anyway, mind you I'm not a native speaker of English either, but as far as I know most people would use ", right?" or something similar).

 

Have you noticed any other silly things English speakers (non-native) do/use?

Hmm.

 

I'm looking into dedicated hosting at the moment. I haven't really found anything for a suitable price.

 

I'm mainly looking for a reasonably beefy machine, it has to have a pentium or equally good CPU (not Celeron!) with at least 1 GB RAM (2GB preferably). I don't care much about HDD, I doubt I will be using more than 10GB or so anyway. Also, it needs to run Windows 2003. This probably makes things more complicated/expensive, but I cannot run my stuff on a Linux machine. Of course it has to have remote desktop as well.

 

Suggestions are welcome.

The Departed

Open Season

Casino Royale

Thank you for smoking

Crusade in Jeans ("Kruistocht in Spijkerbroek")

Most movies with Silent Bob in it (Kevin Smith)

The Fountain

The number of ways to express time or a date is mind boggling. This I think is definitively a problem when working with user input, and especially with input you cannot force into a format. For example, compare asking the user for a date (where the user just types down the date) and a web form where you put up three boxes (month, day, year). The latter is much easier to control, for obvious reasons.

 

The former, however, is not. Granted, time should not be too hard. Either it is 24h or 12h (in which case there also has to be AM or PM in the string). Unless you want a more sophistaced system which can also parse other forms of "time". Think timestamps, Swatch(?) beats (@0-1000), etc.

 

Parsing dates however is much harder. The most important difference is the use of the short notation. Americans like to use mm/dd/yy(yy), where-as Europeans are more comfortable with dd-mm-yy(yy). Which will you parse when you encouter raw input from a user? If you know the users locale, that might be easy (you simply check the date format most commonly used in the country the user lives). However, when you are a bot, such as BOT2K3, that get's much harder: you simply do not know where the user lives! One might say you put up a message saying "input date according to <date format>". But how will that work if you are trying to build a smart robot which should be capable of making an educated guess at what the user really means, rather than relying on the user to obey?

 

The second option is to parse it according to the PC the application is running on. This results in another problem however where the majority of the users might not use the same format as the OS is (for example, BOT2K3 has a lot of users from the UK, while the application runs on a US version of Windows).

 

The best way for the user to input dates (besides the geeky timestamp way) would perhaps be using a format such as "x January xxxx", "January x, xxxx", etc. This prevents the previous problem, but creates a new one if your bot is also expecting (or supports) non-English input. How many languages should you support for the months? 5? 10? All? The latter is probably an impossible task (think of all the minority languages!).

 

Of course then there's the different calendar systems as well. What if you are dealing with dates before 1582 (the year the Gregorian calendar was introduced, the most used calendar to date)? It might very well be that the date the user is trying to input is in a Julian calendar format. If so, you have to detect this, and automatically correct. Or did the user already compensate? How would you go around detecting such a thing?

 

Timezones are lovely as well. This was especially a problem for BOT2K3 when it was first launched with more sophisticated features using time/date. The user would input a date and time for their timezone, however the bot was running in a different timezone, so differences of several hours would start to occur. We mostly compensated for it by always trying to use UTC (which is based on GMT, but has no daylight savings time). This would sometimes still bugger up, though.

 

Daylight savings time is another cool invention as well. North America generally switches one week later than Europe (European countries switch the last sunday of month x, whereas NA switches the first sunday of month x+1). Australians have "opposite" DST: when it's DST in Europe or North America, it isn't in Australia and vice-versa (same goes for New Zealand). Most countries below the equator or in Asia don't even have DST.

 

The solution of course would be for everyone to use one date and time format. Preferably something geeky like a timestamp. But humans are not computers, and you cannot force 6+ billion people to use it. Sigh.

01) The bandage was wound around the wound.
02) The farm was used to produce produce.
03) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
04) We must polish the Polish furniture.
05) He could lead if he would get the lead out.
06) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
07) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
08) A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
09) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
10) I did not object to the object.
11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
13) They were too close to the door to close it.
14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.
15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail
18) After a number of injections my jaw got number.
19) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.
20) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.

 

It's almost 5 am. I just got home. I just got home from my best friends place. Had some beer, watched some TV, laughed a lot.

 

I just walked home.. and the first thing I notice as I walk along is the wind. There is a small storm blowing over the Netherlands, luckily no rain, but still hard winds gushing over the land. And it's quiet. Very quiet, there are no cars, no more fireworks. Everything is quiet.

 

And I as I walk along I notice there are no lights lit anywhere. Except for the street laterns. They are lit. There are no lights on in the houses I pass, everyone already asleep. Sound asleep after a lot of alcohol, TV, fireworks (the deamons scared away), the phone calls from friends and family, the chat with the neighbours. Asleep. Dreaming of the year 2006, and the year ahead.

 

And I walk along, I hear the wind blowing, trees bowing to its mighty force. The water in the streets quietly swooshing from left to right up and down in the rythm of the wind... And it's still quiet. Well, almost quiet. In the distance I hear the sounds from one of those bamboo things you hang outside, and a flock of geese flying over, probably still scared from the fireworks that were shot into the sky this year.

 

But I hear something else. I hear, I hear the sounds of my own footsteps. My own footsteps as I walk along from my best friends place. And at that moment I realized 2007 will be a quiet year. An uneventful year, a year of peace. Less war, less terror, less suicide bombers and needless deaths. And I also know 2007 is going to be a spiritual year, a year of revelations, a year of discoveries.

 

And as I enter home, I know I have to write this down, before I forget. Because I don't want to forget the string of throughts crossing through my brain. I don't want to forget because for some reason the thoughts while walking home motivate me, energize me, as if in complete synchronisation with the global conciousness. The conciousness of the world, hoping for a better year.

 

This year I have no special resolutions. Not for myself. No goals to achieve, no special ambitions. I just want the world to be a better place for everyone, and something tells me that 2007 is going to be that year. As if the quietness, the wind, those geese, or perhaps even that silly bamboo thing far in the distance whispered into my ear, 2007 is going to be the year of the turn around, the year peace will be formed, of all people of the world being reunited.

 

That is my wish for 2007.