The funny thing though is that if I was so much out of ideas to complain about things, and decided to pick on these lines, there are a few valid (but not necessarily significant) problems with it that I can see :p
NorseLaQuet
@NorseLaQuet
Best posts made by NorseLaQuet
Latest posts made by NorseLaQuet
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RE: Bad practices that have their roots back to VB - code review
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RE: What are your server names like?
Our older servers are named after cool North-West stuff: Baker/Baker2/Aspen/Whistler/BigWhite/Rainier. Newer ones though are a bit lamer (Meta/Nexus) and so on. There's a few more randomly named ones... There's never really been a naming scheme used to identify them by function before. At home it's just "nelson-7-desktop" and "nelson-7-laptop" because I'm so incredibly imaginative. Oh! I have an XP VM I keep my development server on named "localdev-nelson"... probably the most exciting one.
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Seattle gun ban WTF
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004468024_guns10m.html
OK, I know this is a tech related forum but this article made me go "WTF." This topic isn't about weather gun control is right or not - it's about a law that mandates law-abiding citizens who have gone though background checks and the like to be told that their concealed weapons permit isn't valid on public property.
Now, first WTF: regulating _concealed_ weapons is like regulating underwear. You can't enforce it without taking everyone's pants off at the park entrance.
Second WTF: is a criminal really going to look at a "no guns allowed in park" sign and say "gee, I guess I'll have to put off my planned shooting until they remove this law"? No. The aren't. If anything they will think "gee, now I guess I don't have to worry about the chance of someone else having a gun to stop me!"
Again, gun control or no gun control, this law is stupid. Fortunately, a Seattle lawyer who happens to have a concealed weapons permit walked into a park (after informing officials he would be carrying a gun) so he could be kicked out and have grounds to sue the city.
On a side note, this does have a slice of relevancy in the tech field as the head of the web department I work at has a permit himself.
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RE: Entity-Attribute-Value model
@newfweiler said:
Design 1: Find out all the attributes in advance and design a proper schema for this. This would allow me to query for instance how many people like Italian food, but if a user wants to add "Last book read: SQL and Relational Theory by C.J. Date" and I don't have such an attribute, he can't do it.
Too inflexabile
Design 2: If the user adds "Last book read: Antipatterns" then just ALTER TABLE and ... uh, no.
YUK. NEVER!
Design 3: Every night, redesign the schema properly to accomodate new attributes and allow new queries about books or whatever.
Just as bad
Design 4: Have one table with primary key = user and attributes "Attribute" and "Value". Then just add the row ("Bill", "Last book read:", "Antipatterns"). My gut tells me this is useless for querying; my research tells me this is the notorious Entity-Attribute-Value antipattern. I agree that it's no good trying to get any meaning out of a table like this.
Is there any good theory behind the "Entity-Attribute-Value model" and should I study the Wikipedia article on it? Or better yet, has someone somewhere done this the right way and can I do it that way, whatever it is?
(I'm not actually building such a site, but I am looking for an appropriate model for something more or less similar to this.)
This is what you want. Why do you call it an antipattern? It is very common and powerfull enough for what you need. Here is a basic idea (GODFUCKINGDAMNIT I AM GOING TO KILL THIS MOTHERFUCKING WYSIWYG)
User Table
Contains user info that is shared between all users
Users Profile
uint - user_Id
varchar(64) - attribute_name
text/blob - attribute_value
So then you just insert a new row into users_profile as such:
(<user id>, "Last Book Read", "A book")
Then query it like
SELECT attribute_value, user_id FROM attributes WHERE attribute_name = "Last Book Read"
You may want to also normize the attribute_name by running it though some basic text cleanup (so that "Last Book Read" is the same as "lastbookread" and so on)
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RE: Error'd from Embedded Systems Design
The true WTF is that, by the looks if it, they are probably using ColdFusion.
Or perhaps it's that I actually can identify coldfusion code...
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RE: How long is a string?
@Carnildo said:
@BlueKnot said:
I'm trying to workout both what this answer means and how Wolfram arrived at it...
That's actually very easy: it identified "capital" and "Chicago" as the significant topics in the sentence. Since none of the other words in the sentence can be used to relate any of the topics named "capital" to any of the topics named "Chicago", it discards them as meaningless. It then selects a "capital" topic and a "Chicago" topic of the same type (in this case, periodicals) and does a side-by-side comparison.
You can see this in action if you change your question to http://www08.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=who+is+the+capital+of+Illinois%3FSo the fact that it still fails at a question that makes sense "what is the capital of Chicago?" and returns the same results means that.... its still garbage?
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RE: Jack Thompson Disbarred
@morbiuswilters said:
I don't like the guy, but what illegal activities did he engage in? He made several filings against the Florida Bar and various Florida judges that alleged some dubious things, but it seems like this is just retribution by the Bar for his campaign against it. Is there actually any legal reason why he should have been disbarred?
This guy is just crazy. From what I heard - he frequently submitted porn as evidence and was repeatedly told to stop.
You just have to ask yourself: should a crazy and arrogant man be allowed to have a voice in our legal system after blatantly and repeatedly disrespecting the rules?
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RE: 365 jobs for you
@Flatline said:
@NorseLaQuet said:
What an aweful scam. I wonder how many people this has caught... I mean, it is a bunch of slave labor anyway, and anybody with half a brain who does not already know that it's a scam by its poor grammar and aweful site should be able to figure it out pretty damn quickly...
It's unfortunate that we live in a world inhabited by plenty of people with less then half a brain.
BTW: This WYSIWYG gives me a headache...
Anyone with half a brain, eh? Obviously not the half that knows how to spell "awful".
If that was the only word I missed, then I did pretty well. I'm not all that good at spelling... escpecally when this WYSIWYG has no intilisence..
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365 jobs for you
I found this on the RSS feed for the forum. Apparently, somebody posted this as spam - but I got quite a few laughs from the site and recommend you check it out:
http://www.365jobs4u.com/
Here are some highlights:
"<font style="font-size: 11pt;" color="#797979" face="Verdana">You'll be given all the database details, from where you've to copy the text matter. Its not even time consuming, like you've to spend hours in searching the content. With just a click, in milliseconds text matter will be in front of you. Just copy it, and paste it on our server."</font>
Text matter... nice.... "paste it on our server..." even better :D
Here is some more from the FAQ for the "Copy Page Job:"
<font face="Verdana"> [4] What Exactly I've to do in this Copy-Paste Job?</font>
<font style="font-size: 11pt;" color="#797979" face="Verdana">You'll get Queries in the form of keywords or phrases (means a combination of 3-5 words). All you've to do is input the keyword or phrases inside the database and with a single click within milliseconds you will get the result. Just copy the text matter and paste it inside the server box.</font>
<p style="margin: 0pt 5px;"> <font face="Verdana"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; color: rgb(0, 148, 212); font-weight: 700;"></span></font></p><p style="margin: 0pt 5px;"><font face="Verdana"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; color: rgb(0, 148, 212); font-weight: 700;">[5] Will It going to take time in searching the matter from database?</span></font></p> <p style="margin: 0pt 5px;"> <font style="font-size: 11pt;" color="#797979" face="Verdana">As said, above it will not <b>take more than 1 millisecond.</b> So nothing to worry like you've to wait a long in <b>searching the matter.</b></font></p><p>Or, on the "Offline Data entry:" FAQ<br></p><p><font size="2" color="#0094d4" face="Verdana"> </font> <font style="font-size: 11pt;" color="#0094d4" face="Verdana"> <p style="margin: 0pt 3px;" align="justify"><b>(2) What will be the Format of Work? </b></p> </font> <font style="font-size: 11pt;" color="#797979" face="Verdana"> <p style="margin: 0pt 3px;" align="justify">We Will Provide you a .JPEG (Image File), Which You have to Convert In MS-word File by typing only. </p></font></p><p> <font size="2" color="#797979" face="Verdana"> <font color="#797979" face="Verdana"> <p style="margin: 0pt 3px;" align="justify"><b> <font style="font-size: 11pt;" color="#0094d4" face="Verdana"> (5) Can I Use Software for this work? </font></b></p> </font> <font style="font-size: 11pt;" color="#797979" face="Verdana"> <p style="margin: 0pt 3px;" align="justify"> No, You are not allowed to use any software for converting image file to MS-Word. If found we will terminate you. Because when you use software's it changes the Ms-Word file codes which is not visible to us. Also these files will be immediately rejected by company systems. </p> </font> </font></p><p style="margin: 0pt 3px;" align="justify">
<font size="2" color="#797979" face="Verdana"> </font>
<font size="2" color="#797979" face="Verdana"><font color="#797979" face="Verdana">
<font style="font-size: 11pt;" color="#0094d4" face="Verdana">
(6) After submitting the work in time, When I'm
going to get Accuracy/Checking report & Payment?</font></font></font>
<font style="font-size: 11pt;" size="2" color="#797979" face="Verdana"> After submission of your work within 10 working days
you will get the Accuracy report to your Email
Address & payment if any, will be sent to your
address.</font>...oh, also, they require an 8-22 dollar entry fee...
What an aweful scam. I wonder how many people this has caught... I mean, it is a bunch of slave labor anyway, and anybody with half a brain who does not already know that it's a scam by its poor grammar and aweful site should be able to figure it out pretty damn quickly...
It's unfortunate that we live in a world inhabited by plenty of people with less then half a brain.
BTW: This WYSIWYG gives me a headache...
<font size="2" color="#797979" face="Verdana"> </font> -
RE: Windows XP RAID and USB installation WTF
....I don't get it; that has to do with floppy drives, not USB keyboard/mice. The keyboard and mouse work great until the "installing drivers" section after the first reboot.