expletive inserted

Great post over there today. My favorites have been the Every Turbo Boost in Knight Rider one and The Big Lebowski - The Fucking Short Version.

This Greenhouse business is ridiculous. Most downloader-type applications are. Do I really have to:

1. Download the Greenhouse installer (2.6M)
2.  Open the file only to have it immediately start downloading what I can only assume is the core of some bit-torrent-esque windows client (Indeterminate size)
3. Start the application to go download the FREE content I’m looking for

Has the world gone mad? I should be able to log on to a website, see a list of games I’ve purchased, and download them indiscriminately.

On the good side, it’s nice that they are thinking about OS X and Linux from the get go. Well, OS X anyhow.

My first programming internship used VB6 (1998), and it was great at the time. My first real job was mainly Classic ASP (2001), and I didn’t have a problem with that either. We just got back a proposal from a consulting company to revamp one of our aging CD-ROM based products and my jaw hit the floor when he suggested VB6 as the platform of choice. You have got to be fraking kidding me. Microsoft came out with the final version of VB6 in 1998 and is ending extended support this year.

This says a bunch of things to me about this guy. Mainly though it’s that he’s too damn lazy to learn anything new. Now, I must say, I’m not thrilled about keeping up with the changes in .NET that seem to happen on a daily basis, but most of the time these changes are meant to address some deficiency and it’s usually a fairly transparent process documented from a .NET team member’s blog.

What irresponsibility for the poor clients of yours that don’t know any better! I really thought this is was an April fools joke, but no. Sadly, it was a real proposal. One thing that I did notice from this was that MS has been pretty consistent about standardizing the naming of their products to include the year of projected release date. Office XP was really 2002 but since then it’s been Office 2003, Office 2007. NT4 gave way to Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003 and now 2008. Visual Studio 2003, 2005, 2008. Imagine if VB6 was actually named VB 98? Would anyone actually still try to sneak it into their client’s projects?

HPC: “Yeah, so we’ve determined VB 98 is the best solution for rebuilding this product.”

Client: “You mean VB 2008 right?”

HPC: “Nope, 98! I’m a fraking moron!”

Who knows though. I’m still wary about moving anything in our organization to Vista and XP is starting to show it’s age. Maybe someone will think I’m this big of an idiot one day, but if I ever get this lazy, someone should revoke my computing license.

“Hey guys, wouldn’t it be cool if people could put pictures of anything they wanted on the internet?”

Marc Andreessen is one of my heroes, but I realized today that he’s indirectly responsible for inflicting goatse and tubgirl on the world. I guess someone would have proposed this sooner or later.

Alt+Enter brings up the properties panel for items in Windows. I did not know this. Equivalent in most cases to right clicking, properties but much much faster.

Bacon flavored lollipops. Thanks Kaitlen.

Best car review.

This seems to be a fairly undocumented hot topic that I’ve been trying to find an answer to for the last couple of days. Let me preface this by saying I am not an expert in SugarCRM or LDAP, but I finally got it up and running. Here’s my settings for getting SugarCRM Version 5.0.0b (Build 3150) authenticating via LDAP to our Windows 2003 Server Active Directory Domain Controller. Sugar is set up on a RHEL box using apache and MySQL. Get this up and running on our SQL Server 2005 cluster is going to be the next challenge :-).

• Server: servername (Make sure the server your SugarCRM instance is on can ping your LDAP server.)
• Port Number: 389 (If you are using LDAP over SSL, the default is 636.)
• Base DN: DC=foo,DC=bar (If your domain is foo.bar. More normally this is probably going to be foo.com.)
• Bind Attribute: userPrincipalName
• Login Attribute: sAMAccountName
• Authenticated User: user@foo
• Authenticated Password: ********** (Password for user@foo.)
• Auto Create Users:
  
• Encryption Key: (Leave this blank)

Shout out to Softerra and their awesome LDAP Browser tool.

“We are where we are.”

This quote is John McCain. He’s used it on multiple occasions during interviews to dodge questions.

“We don’t know what we don’t know”

This I hear at least once a week. Both quotes mean nothing. Repeated use of them is grating to everyone that has to listen to it. Just say,

“I don’t know”

If you don’t know something, just say so. Everyone should really stop trying to be cute and start taking responsibility for your lack of knowledge - especially when you have the facilities at your fingertips to obtain it.

Here’s the interface for managing users in a version of postNuke that we are running on one of our websites:

40,000+ items in a dropdown box FTW! The HTML for this weighs in at around 2MB by itself. I hope this is fixed in a more recent version.