Joey Gibson's Blog

Archive for January, 2006

I discovered today that Microsoft had released a public beta of IE7 so I decided to have a look. It only runs on XPsp2, so I applied sp2 to an XP image running under VMWare, which only took an hour and 400 reboots. Anyway, once I got the OS to the proper level, I installed the IE7 beta. The first thing you have to do is prove to Microsoft that you are running “genuine” Windows software. I have no idea what got transmitted to Microsoft when I agreed to do this, but apparently it was enough to convince them.

The thing installed in about 10 minutes and then ended with… wait for it… a required reboot! Who would have guessed? Not me… So after rebooting again, I see a nice shiny new IE icon in my quick launch area. Running it brought up the new IE, fairly quickly. I don’t like the new interface at all, and I’ve found a few quirks (just try adding a new search provider by clicking on the “Settings” button next to the description that says “Add or remove search providers” for an example). But the thing that really stuck out for me is that IE still forces you to enter the http:// protocol when the website you want to visit needs a port number. In other words, instead of being able to just type this

www.mymachine.net:8080

I instead must type

http://www.mymachine.net:8080

which is insanely annoying since I never type that anymore. (Nor do I ever type “www” unless I absolutely have to because the site in question hasn’t bothered to setup their DNS properly.)

Could someone please explain to me why IE still can’t handle this properly? Firefox can. Opera can. Even Konqueror and Safari can. Heck, even Lynx understands it for Pete’s sake. Why on Earth, with all of the development resources that MS has, can’t they fix this?

As a kid I used to hate it when the President would be on TV because it interrupted my regular viewing. And when you only had 10 channels or so, and they all showed the President, there weren’t many options. As I got older I realized the importance of addresses like the SotU, but now I’m not so sure this address is useful or relevant any more. Fifty years ago (or 100 years ago) information and news were not so easy to come by as they are now. An address by the President was actually a vehicle for him to inform the public of his goals and accomplishments. But with the Internet and 900 24-hour cable networks, what’s the point? I guarantee you that President Bush will say nothing tonight that 90% of the public doesn’t already know. It will be nothing more than a pep rally, a 3-hour address with about 1.5 hours taken up with meaningless applause by people who don’t really mean it (on both sides of the aisle). In other words, I think the SotU has outlived its usefulness and become a relic of a time when information was not so readily available.

Having said that, if W used the SotU as an opportunity to heap scorn and shame upon Congressional Democrats, then it might regain some relevance… heh heh heh… I don’t look for that to happen, though…

Alito: 58 – 42. Confirmed. Done. Over. Democrats looking like complete ass-hats. Big smile on my face. If you could see me, you’d see it.

I was really worried about game 1, but it improved. Game 2 was good and so was game 3.

I don’t know what happened, but last night was really bad.

The league took two weeks off for Christmas, so this was our first night back in three weeks. I did a lot better than I was expecting.

Everyone knows that 666 is, according to the Bible, the number of the beast. But this list of other numbers of the beast cracked me up.

My favorites

• $769.95 — Price of the Beast with all accessories and replacement soul
• DSM-666 (revised) — Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the Beast
• 668 — Next-door neighbor of the Beast
• 333 — The semi-Christ

I was doing some JDBC today and I forgot that column indexes are 1-based instead of 0-based. It took me a while to figure out what was wrong since the exception message I kept getting was

java.sql.SQLException: Column Index out of range, 0 > 11.

Despite the fact that zero is not, in fact, greater than 11, I checked to make sure I had used < and not <= in my loop because I thought I was going beyond the maximum index... but I wasn't. The problem was that I wasn't even getting to the first index! Then I remembered that I started my loop at 0 and that JDBC ResultSets start indexing at 1. Changing it to 1 fixed the problem, but the error message is wrong. It should have told me that 0 was less than 1 or, more helpfully, that ResultSet indexes start at 1...