Archive for the ‘Not Nice Stuff’ Category

MS-SQL-Server 2008

Execute SQL Task: Executing the query "" failed with the following error: "". Possible failure reasons: Problems with the query, ...

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search… for human rights

Find the error in a picture taken from a 7-year old child who has the down syndrome while taking part in a local Special Olympics event. There is nothing wrong. The child just had some fun and a great day. Facebook said the picture (or merely the whole album) violates against the Facebook terms and has blocked the child mothers account. (In the meantime Facebook apologized this step.)

This story is just one of uncountable more ones and so I feel vindicated about not being at Facebook.

It reminds me on Pakistan having a word list to block Internet sites on mobile devices. It includes mostly sexual offending words but also some like “Budweiser”, “Jesus Christ”, “deposit”, “idiot” and “stupid”. Because it is a black list it is allowed to write the same word in any other language or to use other words representing a similar meaning. This is silly, asinine,… (You guess it… These words are not on the list… Shall I proceed?) As I have used some bad words words already – this page will not be accessible from Pakistan. D@mn Sh1t!

I am sorry for the offending words used in this text…

the perfect shot

Ahem… well,… this shouldn’t be there 😉

global warming bug tracker

Alexander found a BBC news about how bad skilled programmers can cause global warming. Obviously we need a global warming bug tracker!

Causality

In software an action results in most cases in a reaction. You don’t get a reaction on silent failing, silent success or just not implemented stub functions. If you get an reaction often you could guess the kind action you submitted from the reaction. To be concrete – this should be the case for error messages – but it isn’t always. As you may guess the following error message has nothing to do with a buggy JavaScript function:

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIDOMLocation.href]" nsresult: "0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)" location: "JS frame :: http://gengmf.randomice.net/wp-content/plugins/cryptx/js/cryptx.js :: DeCryptMail :: line 37" data: no]

In fact it was the mail protocol handler application setting. The automatic detection (which is the default and it was my setting) found – as expected – the kmail program. I needed to manual set the path to “/usr/bin/kmail” to make everything work.

Many thanks to charms who had the same problem.

ripcord

After one and a half day of a training about “SQL Server Analysis Services” (SSAS) which should have lasted for three days we (a group of five attendees) pulled the ripcord. The trainer did not seem to have a glimpse of didactic at all. He did not seem to have a glimpse about the course subject either. This was not only my impression – it were all of us. After we had a small chat with the chief about our displeasure, he offered us to get the training with an other trainer 5 weeks later – for free. So we canceled our hotel and made the tour back. HE (the trainer) has wasted a lot of our time. Never ever again!

Update: The second trainer was classes better than the first one, but still left some room for improvement.

scandalized

Some days ago I went to my dentist for the regular check up. They wanted me to sign a form about the transferability of claims to the mediserv GmbH and about inquiries about my credit score to rating agents. I declined my signature and put the blank form on the counter commenting that I will sign it on demand. They looked at me like I am the only one who cares about the wording in a contract. Maybe John Doe will sign it but that’s not my name…

communication vs. reality

I don’t have a working telephone since last Sunday.

I’ve called my telephone provider to make it work on Tuesday. They answered that they created a service ticket and will call me back later.

Nothing happened.

I’ve called again on Wednesday. They wanted to call me at least the next day.

Nothing happened.

I’ve called again on Friday morning. They wanted to call me back.

Nothing happened.

I’ve called again on Friday evening. (As a remember – I am waiting since Tuesday for a call). They wanted to call me back. While answering I may have spoken a bit to tartly, but…

I’ve got a call within two minutes.

In this call I’ve heard, that there is no ticket, so they made one (guaranteed). It is unlikely that I will be called back before the weekend, but…

About one week later I’ve got a call on my mobile phone. Everything did worked except that the calls didn’t come through. There was a bug in a dumb telephony socket (not really – but it just did not work)…

telephony socket

platform-independent

What I have learned today:

“platform-independent” is when two computers behave completely different using the same program.

C-Plus-Plus

It is amaising what horrorable error messages g++ is able to generate…

error: could not convert ‘((Parser*)this)->Parser::words. std::map<_Key, _Tp, _Compare, _Alloc>::find [with _Key = std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, _Tp = Word*, _Compare = std::less<std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > >, _Alloc = std::allocator<std::pair<const std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >, Word*> >](((const std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >&)((const std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >*)(& sval))))’ to ‘bool’

The code to reproduce it looks like
if (words.find(sval)) {...}
where words is a std::map<std::string, Word*>.

The correct code is:
if (words.find(sval) == words.end()) {...}

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