Manda QoP

After getting my new phone last year, an HTC Desire, I’d been having great fun taking loads of photos with the camera, it rocks... I haven’t used my real camera since getting the phone, but then just before Christmas disaster struck.  Okay, maybe more of a minor inconvenience than a disaster, but I have a cure that others may not know about. The basic hardware layout of phones means that the camera lens cover is very prone to scratching whilst it’s in your pocket, and the phone is in my pocket all the time whilst walking the doggy duo.   And yes, I do have a scratch cover on my phone but for some reason, none of the covers go over the bit that really needs scratch protection, anyhoo.. one day I took a photo and oh noes, the image was in soft focus and somewhat blurry due to a scratched lens cover.  No more of the super clear, super resolution photos which look awesome.  I was sad.   L After a month or so of no more picture taking and quite a bit of...

Did you know, that in 2005 Volvo created a car for women, that was designed by women. What I want to know is, how they managed to find a group of women even more sexist against women drivers than most men are? The car has: No bonnet or any access to the car's internal workings (women don't need to look at all that scary stuff) An engine that automatically sends a message to the garage when it needs help (because we stupid, stupid women ignore those pretty lights on the dash board) Run flat tyres so you can get to a man to help you fix it (because we wouldn't want to break a nail changing a tyre now would we?) No water filler cap (because women don't like filler caps - something to do with nails again I think) - mind you, I quite like this feature as they put the water filler hole next to the gas filler hole - which is just  asking  for trouble now isn't it. Gull wing doors (okay, this is cool) Keyless, motorised doors so that when you have your hands full of sh...

If you tend to only read the local news, you may have missed the news that rhino poachers in South Africa are now being shot dead   This seems to be rather drastic but I bet it helps lower the poaching incidents and I think that this approach would work for recidivist drink drivers.  Here’s my plan (I’ll put it in place when I’m queen of the World): 1.      You’re caught drink driving.  Naughty, naughty.  You get a fine, a slap on the wrist, a GPS tracker and blood alcohol measuring chip implanted deep in your body where you can’t cut them out yourself. 2.      You don’t learn and/or think the rules don’t apply to you, so you go out for a few beers and drive home, maybe killing a few innocent people and lamp posts en route. 3.      Implanted trackers send signals to police that you are travelling at greater than 5km an hour (avg. walking speed) and your blood alcohol level is above zer...

Google, you rock!  The Navigation add-on on the Android is rather spiffing, especially now you've fixed it so that it works in NZ.   However, there is one wee bitty problem in the function where you can speak your destination, though it is proving somewhat amusing.  We've tried Kiwi, English, South African, Welsh and German accents, which all result in some interesting locations; only when we adopt a US accent do we get close to the right location.  Now as much as I enjoy playing around with accents, it can be pretty embarrassing in the car if other people are with you and you suddenly start talking like an American just to get your phone to understand you.  It just isn't cricket old chaps.  So any chance you could do a wee tweak to Navigation so that people can 'Speak Your Destination' in their own native accent?  That would be rather spiffing thanks.

DB2 is currently driving me insane. All the normal things you can do in SQLServer seem to be missing, PIVOT for example, which in SQLServer allows you to.... wait for it.... cross tab your queries, weird that eh?  Though if they'd been really creative about it then it could have caused your data to do a rendition of swan lake before settling down into a cross-tab; that I would pay to see.   Anyhoo, back to DB2 and the lack of PIVOT.  In order to achieve the same cross-tab result I have to jump into Excel, link my worksheet to a DB2 query, refresh the data in Excel, and then use Excel to perform the PIVOT.  How drawn out and painful is that?  Okay, whining over, back to the DB2 adventures.

Last week I trundled along to a full day event covering various aspects of Oracle DB schemas, indexing and database optimisation. Why did I do this? From a personal point of view I like to understand SQL from all the different viewpoints. I spent 2 years as a Sybase developer, I am currently studying for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 exams and have recently been focusing on performance tuning and maintaining indexes in MS SQL. I was curious what sort of differences, if any, there would be between the Oracle and MS optimisation practices. Quite a lot it seems. I was expecting to find more similarities than differences, so was mildly surprised by what I heard. For the intial stages, Oracle and MS devs are in agreement. 1. Before you start coding, implement a strategy for handling errors that all the developers/DBAs will adhere to. Try..Catches that developers add willy nilly are not a strategy. You need to ensure that errors are captured, reported, handled correctly, and tha...

We were having one of the usual random discussions at work today, you know the kind, conversations that start off relatively normally, degrade into utter cobblers and then go off at weird tangents and you end up discussing cycle powered internet. Overview In order to surf the Internet, staff members need to use the pedal attachment on their PC to generate surfing minutes. Plus points Less work for IT Support as they no longer need to monitor every little thing and add anything remotely interesting to the insanely restrictive proxy. You think I’m joking? I tried to open google.co.nz the other day and got a message about it being banned because it was Arms and Weaponry. What the ???? There are no restrictions other than for rudey and/or illegal stuffs, so staff can check Hotmail if they want to… woo hoo… Increases fitness Allows bosses to easily see who is surfing the internet instead of working through the following easy to spot methods:  Massive increase in calf mus...