How consistent should a blogger be?

I recently got back to reading Jeff Atwood's blog, after a long pause on my part. I was very surprised to see advertisements there, especially since I remembered him discussing this issue in the past - opting for the negative. Of course, one can always change his mind. But still, I find it quite funny. Reading the last few comments on that post you can read him agreeing that advertising on a blog is "like advertising on your business card".

Apparently he now doesn't mind advertising on his business card ...

By the way - I found Jon Galloway's comment hilarious...

VB Grrrrrr...

Yet another MSDN and .NET WTF:

I'm currently implementing some temporary code that was written in VB into our C# infrastructure (let's skip the details). Anyway, there are parts in the VB code that I would like to group because either they are currently not being used, or for some reason I want to hide it from view and get to it at some later phase.

Obviously, a #Region directive seems like the best solution.

My VB is quite rusted, but using common sense I tried using  the same syntax I'm used in C#. But alas - it didn't work. So I searched MSDN - hey, it should work! Well, VB have this little difference that the identifier_string MUST exist and it must be surrounded by quotation marks. OK, no biggy, I usually put it there anyway.

But why doesn't it work?

Well, there is this tiny little limitation, hidden from you if you rely solely on MSDN, that "'#Region' and '#End Region' statements are not valid within method bodies."

Which raises two questions:

1. Why, in Heaven's name, should there be such a difference between C# and VB. It's just a freaking compilation directive!

2. Assuming there is some justified reason for that (which I doubt - I guess it's just a non-implemented feature) - would it hurt someone to put this info in MSDN so I won't have to get crazy trying to figure out why it doesn't work?!?!

And now to a personal to-remember note:

I relied solely on Intellisense and Resharper to know the code is wrong. I'm using the C# only version of Resharper, so I have no idea whether Resharper would have been more helpful. Anyway - had I compiled from the beginning (or at least looked at the message Intellisense gave me) - I would have seen much sooner why it doesn't work...

Could the World become a Better Place?

Shai Agassi is a person who doesn't have to prove himself - he's done it 400,000,000 ($) times and much more. I had the chance of working for him at TopTier, though at the time he was mostly in the US and I don't think he'll remember me.

He's now investing all his power in the Project Better Place, with the goal of transforming our fuel-based cars into electric-cars, by providing the necessary infrastructure and business plan.

Will he succeed? I sincerely hope so. I am also willing to be one of his first customers for a pilot plan in Israel. If anyone is to succeed in such a project - it's him.

Some say his real goal is to own the software that will handle the whole system. Well, I think that if he succeeds in this project, it makes complete sense and there's no harm about it. If making this world a Better Place means Agassi will own the most important software in history - so be it!

In any case, I admire him for being ready to risk his most valuable asset - his reputation - for this huge and very risky project.

If you want to keep track of what's going on, I suggest you read his blog.

Good luck Shai!

Citations of the day

By Henry Kissinger:

• Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.

• If everybody is your enemy, then you are not paranoid.

• Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

• Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad.

Source: Wikipedia

XP Printing issues - Grrrr...!!!

D., my colleague came to me today asking for help with printing problems. At some point I decided to log off, but then I couldn't log on again. The machine kept saying that the current time is different than the network time. I couldn't log on with any of our domain users (including Administrator), so I had to log on with the local Admin user. Looking at the time, it looked fine. After digging and searching for 15 minutes, we discovered that the date differed - running some simulation D. had to move his clock one day ahead and forgot to move it back.

Once we moved the clock back to the right day, he could print flawlessly!

Things gives rise to many questions:

1. Why couldn't he print when his day was wrong? I understand there are synchronization issues involved - but in 2007 (almost 2008) these things shouldn't happen! Sometimes you really can not have all your computers synchronized. That's life!

2. Why did the error talk about time and not date?

3. Why couldn't we even log on with a domain user?

Grrrrrrrrrrrr........!@#!@#!@#@!@#!@#!@#

Supermarket 2.0

A paraphrase of Web 2.0 to real life - GREAT!

Parameterized SELECT TOP

Just a small tip:

Say you want to run a query that returns the first @X results of some query, such that @X is a parameter.

The simple "SELECT TOP @X ..." statement doesn't work. I found this weird, because I know for a fact that SQL 2005 supports using a parameter in the TOP clause (as opposed to SQL 2000 where you had to use either dynamic queries or the SET ROWCOUNT statement).

Solution - surround the parameter with parenthesis as so:

"SELECT TOP (@X) ..."

Something to remember...