Nice touch of humour in VirtualBox’s Clone Dialog

Oracle may have taken over Sun, and with it, the excellent VirtualBox. But it looks like the VirtualBox team, at least, have managed to retain their sense of humour.

if (DateTime.Now.Month == 8 && DateTime.Now.Day == 25) { age++; }

It’s OK! I’m not old yet – 1 year to go till the big Three O.

I have to share with you the birthday card my wife drew for me. It depicts an essential tool of my trade – Seagull Surfer 2010 (aka 2008 R2!)

Flattery (almost) works

I checked my email using my smart-phone the other night, and found this:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "I'll be speaking at PDC 2008...":

Masters thesisI have been through the whole content of this blog which is very informative and knowledgeable stuff, So i would like to visit again.

How nice. I'm always chuffed when somebody takes the time to leave an appreciative comment on my blog. And this one stoked my ego. At a glance it seemed that Mr (or Ms) Anonymous was likening the quality and content of my work to a Masters thesis; though the wording of the message was a little strange ... perhaps English was not their native language?

Ever polite, the next time I went to my PC I fired up the browser and found the appropriate page on my blog with the intention of thanking Mr (or Ms) Anonymous for their kind words and inviting them to visit as often as they liked.

But the browser revealed what my phone's mail client had concealed. The words "Masters Thesis" were underlined in blue - a hyperlink to a site whose page rank I will not promote by repeating the link. Cue sound of hissing steam as ego is rapidly quenched.

Out of curiosity at the wares being peddled by these flattersome spammers, I followed the link, and found offers of written-to-order essays or Masters Thesis - guaranteed native English, and plagiarism free. The kind-hearted scholars at the site will also undertake to complete assignments and exams for online courses and can guarantee to ace them all - for a small consideration of $2000 plus $300 per exam.

Needless to say, I put my blog's trash-can button to good use.

Googling a tribute to my Grandfather

My Grandpa, Dr R.A.F. Jack, passed away a few months ago, aged 89. It was a comfort at his funeral to see how highly regarded he was in the community and beyond: as well as being the village doctor for close to half-a-century, he was a respected and well-loved elder in our church, and he was known in the medical field for his work with homeopathy.

Though he pre-dated the internet by many years, when I googled his name, I turned up several references. Admittedly, these results were somewhat drowned out by pages referring to a certain aviationary body born two years before him. But once I’d filtered those out, I found a few gems.

I discovered that Amazon stock his book, Homeopathy in General Practice, currently number 1,252,945 on their Best Seller list. I found a bibliography of his other published works. Then there was a magazine article about his work written by an appreciative patient. She records his unorthodox method of checking that she wasn’t suffering from a trapped nerve – putting a sandbag under her knee, and bouncing another on top!

And finally, in the Letters page of the British Medical Journal from June 1955 I found this:

Redundant Circulars
Dr. R. A. F. JACK (Bromsgrove) writes: My young family have
helped me to-deal with the surfeit of advertisements that daily
swell my morning post. The elder two, who by now have lost
all interest in opening them, content themselves with collecting
the stamps and bemoan the fact that so many envelopes these
days are franked. -They then pass them on to the younger two,
who, armed with a pair of scissors each, cut out patterns or any
interesting figures or illustrations that take their fancy. They
preserve all blotters for me; and all large white envelopes that
can be ungummed are put aside for subsequent painting practice
or for conversion into paper darts. The result is that my wife and
I get an extra quarter of an hour's peace each morning, so that in
one way or another we all benefit from the unremitting onslaught
of the various drug houses.

The eldest of the two stamp collectors mentioned is my Dad, now himself a GP, and semi-retired!

How wide?

A flier came through our door this morning from a new dental practice in the town. Next to a mug shot of two grinning models with impossibly white teeth, it itemises the services provided by the dentists:

• Zoom tooth whitening
• Air Flow Stain Removal
• Gum Disease Treatment

then

• Wheelchair Access

That would make me think twice when the dentist says “Open wide”.

Magnetic Personalities

A friend of ours happened to be listening in as a primary school teacher was giving a lesson on Electricity and Magnetism.

“What M picks things up?” the teacher asked the children. Then, choosing a child from the bunch waving their hands in the air, “Yes?”

“Mum!” replied the astute scholar of human nature.

Are Biology Students devolving?

As if she wasn't busy enough bringing up our daughter, and growing the new addition to the family, my wife is a part-time private tutor to several A-Level Biology students (A-Level, for those not from the UK, being the final hurdle students have to clear before University). These students must all have passed their GCSEs before being accepted on to A-Level courses, with exams including core subjects like English and Maths. But you'd never know it from the answers they give as my wife goes over practice exam questions with them.

Take percentages. One question involved converting a percentage to a frequency: if 5% of the population have the recessive form of gene X, how many is that out of 100? Blank stare.

Then there was a question about interpreting Echocardiogram (ECG) traces. You’ll have seen one these in the movies if ever there was a hospital death scene. As the patient breathes his last, the camera invariably pans to an ECG monitor at his bedside. The sound-track turns somber, the sun is blotted out by a cloud, and on the monitor the peaks and troughs of heart activity subside to the infamous flat line.

On an ECG, the trace shows activity up the vertical axis and time along the horizontal, so to calculate the heart rate (as the question required) you begin by measuring the distance between peaks on the chart to get the duration of each beat. The student could do that - counting blocks was within her skill set. But the next step was to convert that to a rate in beats per minute.

"It's not fair that they ask Maths questions in a Biology paper!", complained the student. My wife was taken aback for a moment – the girl apparently wasn’t joking.

"So what do you do now?", my wife prompted once she’d recovered.

"I don't know", began the student; then with sudden inspiration: "It's got something to do with 60 hasn't it?".

"Well, yes, it has,", my wife said encouragingly. "You know how long each beat lasts. Now you need to work out how many of those beats will fit in a minute. So what do you do?"

"Ah, I've got it now". The student's face lights up. My wife smiles hopefully. "You divide the time by 60!"

Leaky Abstractions at the Petrol Pump

Even as a software developer, I'm still ocassionally surprised when events remind me that Spolsky's Law of Leaky Abstractions applies to hardware as much as to software.

Here's an example from my holidays last year, when I went to fill up with petrol (how can you Americans call it gas when it's clearly a liquid?):

Any non-technical motorist who peered at the tiny writing on that blue screen and read "DRIVER_ERQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL" would surely feeel that he's being blamed for the failure, but what did he do wrong? Sounds like he failed some important existential test.

I'm clearly not the only one who enjoys spotting BSODs in the wild: Miguel Carrasco has put together a Blue Screen of Death Top Ten. And on Gizmodo they have a snapshot of a BSOD that appeared in the Stadium during the Opening Ceremony at the 2008 Olympic games.

Happy Holidays

How will you be celebrating square root day?

Observing a bug in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

Just occasionally the self-censorship feature in my wife’s brain malfunctions, with amusing consequences: it kicks in the instant after she has spoken, so that her next words are “don’t tell anybody I said that!”

But I’m sure she won’t mind my sharing a few choice moments with you.

First I should point out that my wife graduated with honours from one of the top medical schools in the UK, so there’s clearly nothing lacking in the rest of her brain. I speculate that Auto Update got turned off in this one area.

The most recent example was when we were discussing a diagram of the solar system with our daughter. “So did the Greeks and Romans know what the planets are called when they named their gods?”, my wife asked me – then immediately put her hand over her mouth in embarrassment.

But the funniest was a few years ago as we were driving through our neighbourhood at night, after there had been a power cut. The houses on either side of the road were eerily dark, and we were suddenly dazzled as another vehicle went past us in the opposite direction. My wife piped up,

“So how come that car’s headlights are still working?”

The most frustrating “feature” in Visual Studio…

… is the “Waste 1 minute of my life” command – otherwise known as “F1”.

You know how it is: you’re in the zone, refactoring merrily – finger reaches instinctively to F2 to rename a variable, but misses the target, hit its left-hand neighbour, and … Visual Studio hangs. That is, it refuses to respond for a period of time that’s long enough to derail one train of thought, but too short to board another.

Come on Microsoft! If you can’t make Help load faster, at least do it asynchronously. Don’t slap my fat fingers!

Nothing new under the sun

With a new member of the household arriving mid-year, we’re in the process of re-purposing the room in our house that, outside of the family we call The Study, but between ourselves we refer to as The Junk Room. Our daughter is looking forward to a pink-themed makeover, with Fifi stickers on the walls; she won’t appreciate sharing with the quantity of books that we have in there.

As we were discussing where we could re-house our mini library my wife had sudden inspiration.

“Why doesn’t someone start a book rental service, like Love Film do with DVDs?”

A pause.

“Ah – that would be a library!”

Scary MSBuild log

This is not what you want to see in your MSBuild log:

This unwelcome tale appeared in my log because I had this Target in the project file:

<Target Name="DeleteOldResultFiles">
 <ItemGroup>
         <LogFile Include="$(ReportsDirectory)\*.*"/>
   </ItemGroup>
   <Delete Files="@(LogFile)" TreatErrorsAsWarnings="true"/>
</Target>

Unfortunately, I had miss-typed the $(ReportsDirectory) property as $(ReportDirectory), and said miss-typed property did not exist, so MSBuild was defaulting to the empty string. Thus the LogFile Item was being populated with a list of all the files in my C:\ drive, and the Delete task was obediently purging them.

The moral of this story: don't run MSBuild as Admin - or if you're as foolish as I was, make sure you've at least got a cloned Virtual machine (as I had) from which to copy any files which might get trashed.

New syndrome identified: Pre Posting Tension

A little while back, I wrote that a beloved member of our household is suffering from a rare and incurable condition: Sudden Onset Digital Amnesia. Now I have diagnosed that I myself am afflicted with a syndrome previously unknown to Medical Science: Pre Posting Tension. As my contribution to the greater good of mankind, I will, in this post, catalogue the symptoms of this condition. If you recognise yourself as a fellow sufferer, please get in touch: we may be able to form a support blog.

A cycle of symptoms

First, realise that the symptoms come in cycles. The trigger seems to be the discovery that somebody, anybody, has linked to an article on my blog. This produces a feeling of euphoria. If the link is from a high page-rank site like DZone (thanks mswatcher!) the euphoria is elevated to near ecstasy, increasing with every up-vote received.

The excitement is short-lived, however. Soon after closing the Feedburner Site Stats window bearing the good tidings of incoming links, a great wave of worry and doubt sweeps over me. Will I be able to find material for a follow-up post? Can I again craft new and interesting phrases to describe my future subject matter? Will the visitors return? How many of them will subscribe, and how soon will they unsubscribe if the quality of posts diminishes?

Then the nervousness begins, increasing with every hour that passes unblogged. Glimpsing Windows Live Writer in my Start Menu, or the Blogger icon in my Favourites list causes me to tremble with anxiety. Every line of code written is scrutinised for post potential, every fleeting thought examined for article-worthiness.  Then a plateau is reached when inspiration dawns: my mental state stabilises as words and phrases begin to congregate together in my mind.

Once fingers begin tapping keyboard, tension eases somewhat. But woe-betide anybody who interrupts, because this is when irritability sets in; concentration is total and all else is forgotten as words bed themselves into the page. If body is dragged away from the keyboard, mind remains at work - resulting in responses even shorter than the usual, manly, grunts when questioned. Internal pressure again builds up until the words get a chance to escape onto the page. Then, disaster. My train of thought comes up against a red light: the flow of words dries up. Writer's block has set in. Panic takes hold: visitor numbers will surely be dropping off by now. Only fresh content can restore them, and fresh content is held up in the sidings of my mind.

I fumble for words, and gradually the stream of thoughts begins again. The post rumbles on to completion. I check it over and over again, trying to winkle out the obvious errors that I no are lurking their^[1]. Then fresh doubt springs up. What if readers don't like it? What if I've written something senseless? Maybe it doesn't hang together. More often than not, I answer my self-doubt with Pilatean response: "What I have written, I have written", and hit "Publish", before I beat myself up any further.

Relief comes flooding over me, as the post flashes up on my blog. But what's this on my Browser Toolbar? A shortcut to Google Analytics? I wonder whether anybody's read that article yet...

Afterword

My wife proof-read this, and commented that it would be amusing if it wasn't true. My protest that it was all exaggerated for effect met only with a dismissive "Puh"!

Footnotes

1.  Sic - in case it wasn't obvious from the context!

What Daddy does at work - the family's view

My wife overheard somebody asking our three-year old daughter about what Daddy does at work.

"He eats his lunch, and fixes bugs", was her reply.

Mind you, my wife's view of my work isn't much more exalted. For a long time she was under the impression that I worked with a product called Seagull Server!

Marketing Mashups

From  the SD Times today, in an article entitled "Business Mashup Suite seeks to aid agile developers":

September 10, 2008 — Serena has focused its efforts on mashups and agile offerings, and nearly one year after creating its Business Mashup suite, Serena made the mashup building box available on demand today, letting users build and deploy mashups without the need of an IP infrastructure.

Serena executives said this makes mashup deployment significantly simpler. The company has also created what it calls Rich Interface Mashups, which tie widgets, RSS feeds and Flash components into Serena mashups. As more tech-savvy workers enter the workplace, Serena said it has seen more work happening outside of traditional application development circles. Rich Interface Mashups let users coordinate activities like business meetings and development projects without having to write code, according to Serena.

Now I'm pretty keen on coding, but I'd never have thought of trying to schedule a meeting with my boss using C#, or even VBA (which he'd understand better!); Outlook usually does the trick for me.

I'm a dab-hand at TLAs and Internet jargon, but to me, this reads like high-tech marketing gobbledygook: what's an "IP infrastructure" got to do with mashups? I wonder what they really meant?

Are your projects like this?

One of my regular readers emailed me a geeky cartoon which I'd not seen before (thanks Karl!). You're very lucky if you've never worked on a project like this:

I googled around to find the original source of this cartoon, but drew a blank. My searching did, however, uncover an article by Alan Chapman who has looked into the history of the Tree Swing drawings and found that it goes back aways - at least to the 1960s, and possibly earlier. He cites several appearances during the last forty or so years from many different constituencies in the working world, including an early version that apparently circulated through the British Civil Service in their internal newspaper (aptly named "Red Tape"). It seems the developers are not alone in feeling the frustration expressed in these pictures.

A micro-industry has grown around these cartoons. There's now a website devoted to them: The Project Cartoon.com (a Web 2.0 site, trendily in beta). You can buy the cartoon on posters or T-Shirts, or even create a customised version with your own captions, in myriad languages.

Here are my favourite additions:

Pre-boarding IQ test

I've not seen this before: requiring passengers to solve a Linear Programming exercise to determine whether they and their buggies are allowed to board the bus:

Unwanted Hero

My wife and a friend went on a little excursion to a children's playground the other day - my wife took our daughter, and the friend took her three to make it look proper. The friend happened to notice a little boy climbing onto the outside of a tubular spiral slide and, inevitably, begin to slip off. She rushed over, arms outstretched: but she didn't catch him. His clothes had caught on a screw in the side of the slide; and so he hung - upside down - some distance above the ground.

The friend looked around, expecting to see some parent or guardian come rushing to the rescue. But the relevant parties obviously weren't paying any attention, because no aid was forthcoming. So our hero had to hoist the little chap down herself.

Most interesting was the reaction of the friend's oldest daughter.

"Mum's always doing that. Last week she saved a boy from drowning. It's so embarrassing!"

Inadvertent MSDN Humour

I just came across this whilst looking up the documentation for the WCF <dns> config element on MSDN:

 

I'm guessing that this is the work of an overzealous link-shortening script. The links actually point to www.microsoft.com and msdn.microsoft.com. I wonder how long it will take Microsoft to dehumourise this?