Myself resolved to continue the website for another year.  Motion not seconded, not passed, ignored and the administrators have seen fit to reduce it to a two-sentence paragraph.

Myself resolved to uphold the standards of the website as in our appropriate rules page for another year.  Motion not seconded, not passed, and is off crying by itself in the corner.

Myself resolved that the primary purpose of this site is stil to provide a blogging tool with a humourous touch.  Motion not seconded, not passed, and is shaking its head in amazement at the lack of support it received.

Myself resolved that for the purposes of time management, spam and comments would still be ignored.  Motion not seconded, not passed, and this is beginning to get a little repetitive don’t you agree?

Myself resolved that future resolutions would be assumed seconded by Bob, the helpful pixel – check the About page for further details.  Motion seconded by the newly voting member, motion carried!

Myself resolved not to allow any posts which are of a purely view-grabbing nature by playing on the popular culture and keywords of the time.  Motion opposed by Bob, as he feels a need to exercise his voting rights.  N.B. If he’s not careful he’s going back in the damn cage!

Myself resolved that Bob was not permitted in future to oppose resolutions proposed by myself.  Motion not seconded until myself threatened that something would be carried, and if it wasn’t the vote, then…motion carried.

Myself resolved to restrict access to members who had not posted in a significantly long period.  Motion seconded, motion carried.

Myself resolved to not upgrade beyond WordPress 3.3.1 as the site runs perfectly on the current version.  Motion seconded, motion carried under the proviso that this decision should be revisited in a future board meeting.

Myself resolved to not care about the non-existent Google advertising revenue and post whatever the hell myself wanted.  All members were in favour and the motion was carried.

Myself resolved to publish the notes of this meeting online.  Motion seconded, motion carried out.

Little bit of background first.  I’m looking at writing some software with a payroll system hanging off the side, and came across the Australian Standard Business Reporting software online while looking at payroll info and thought to myself “Why not sign up, get the technical details and work out if it will add value to my software?”  The Standard Business Reporting software essentially lets you create tables that interface with government databases.

I signed up, put in my company information and personal details, sent it off and waited for the license application papers to turn up.  Instead, they call my phone to tell me they’re going on leave and could I contact someone else the next week.  I think to myself “WHY?”  Just send me the license papers.  Oh, apparently they “just want some information about the software you’re developing”.  Yeah, and I ask again “WHY?”.

I just don’t get it – all I want is the technical information on implementation to work out whether the costs of implementing it will provide enough benefit long term to outweight the cost of me just manually keeping it up to date myself.  I don’t really need to describe the operations of my software to a third party.  It’s not a secret, I’ve already got a website about it, but I dislike when their instructions state “Send us all your personal info to apply, make sure you fill in all the required fields” then they don’t send out what they promised, and “ring to confirm details”.

Long and short of it is, I didn’t bother getting back to them as I think they answered my question with their absolutely terrible first contact. “Yeah, I’m on leave next week so contact X”.

I’m an accountant, I keep up with crap like payroll/gst/etc just because that stuff is overall part of my job and I deal with it every day.  Customers keep me up to date with changes, and constant support requests on accounting issues force me to stay up to date or look like a fool.

Seriously? I mean, seriously?  They couldn’t even forward me the license APPLICATION forms? DERR DERR DERR BRAIN SHUTTING DOWN NOW

Whatever.

Come to think of it, this post wasn’t very funny was it.  I mean, on a scale of 1 to 10 it probably rates fairly low, heading towards dead boring.  I mean, really, it wouldn’t make a dead man laugh would it?  Probably wouldn’t even get a smile off a carcass.

With no further ado, I hereby present the funny version of the above:

“So I was on my holidays in Bundaberg and it was late, but I was still up looking at pictures writing software for the program I’m developing when I came across a website advertising a great opportunity for software integration with government databases.  Whatever that means.  My first thought was “Let’s see what this does” and it seemed legit so I went ahead and filled out my details (it was midnight) and sent it in.  The next morning I came out of the shower to a missed call where the lady left a message, “Without a secured deposit on your soul and two friends we can’t forward you an application form sorry, call me back when you’ve got a line of credit from You Know Who.”  I thought that was a bit creepy, so instead I ignored them.”

“What the hell IS that?”
“OH GOD!”

Generally that means something has just broken your programmers brain.  There are several outcomes though, the best of which may not result in death so it’s not all bad news:

1. The programmer could calm themselves and begin working on a solution
2. The programmer could self-combust from shock
3. The programmer could not so much self-combust as really setting themselves on fire because they no longer wish to exist on this planet
4. The programmer could dig the nearest sharp object into their eyes repeatedly
5. The programmer could become a Marxist revolutionary and begin the reign of the proletariat
6. The programmer could continue screaming and run from the office, never to be seen or heard from again – also, reports just in of a hole opening to the centre of the earth and strange unholy laughter and screaming coming from within
7. The programmer could self-lobotomize in an attempt to clear the incident from their memory
8. The programmer could delete/hang up and ignore the problem, denying all knowledge of the incident and claiming to have been out of the country when it happened
9. The programmer could pass the problem on to an underling/unsuspecting colleague
10. The programmer could log onto his private blog and compose a blog of the things he could do

Some of you may be wondering exactly what might break a programmers head.  In this specific case, it was a maths problem (Yes, it’s plural for me as there’s multiple formulae and calculations. Deal with it) – the problem began with a credit note printed on a receipt where none of the figures totalled correctly.  That is correct, an entire docket where not one total added correctly to the next, and the individual item totals weren’t calculating properly either.  I’d call this an achievement were it not for the fact that after discovering multiple flaws and testing the printout I found that the totals were now correct but all the intermediate totals had now changed to something completely different – and wrong.

I just looked at it and gasped

“What the hell IS that?”
“Oh god…”

And I am typing in a vain attempt to ignore the problem and hope it just goes away forever.  It’s a feature.  It’s supposed to do that.  It’s working as intended.  Our design team uses different maths to the universe.  The customers prefer it this way.  You’ve just done it wrong.  The figures on the screen don’t have to match what comes out on paper, just ignore it.  Have you tried kicking it?  What happens when you press the update button?

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=28618

This means that my previous post on this topic has been nullified by this recent news.  Originally I intended to just update it, but as at the time it was true and Bioware/EA had reneged on a promise I have decided to leave it up until Bioware/EA/Stephen Reid press charges, at which point I’ll transform into a giant sea eagle and throw them into the ocean.

See, I don’t fall for the “Head of customer relations doesn’t know about grace period” gag.  Doesn’t make sense, he had to know or he’s definitely a bad employee.  So what’s the issue, you ask?  In a post in August he stated, no ambiguity, that there was a grace period where people could play temporarily while they wait for their physical game box to arrive.

As of today, grace period is no more!  Those people who bought physical editions won’t be able to play after the 20th December until their boxes arrive (providing they get to play prior to the 20th December at all).  Ah, the rage was tremendous – roughly two pages of posts every 30 seconds, it hit 4000 posts in about an hour and a half.

Of course, there were the defenders who tried deflecting the blame to EA, and others who deflected the blame to Bioware, and even others who said there were no lies and things change.  Since this is the XD Project where we are right and the world is wrong I’m going to go ahead and state categorically that those people are morons.  That is all.

I’ve heard before the ‘myth’ about our accent – I work with Australians, talk with Australians every day, grew up in Australia, have given and heard speeches in Australia, and I can verify we do not have an accent – unless you come from Darwin in which case I guess it’s a fair cop.

Anyway, it’s the rest of the world that have accents, all us Aussies have no accent at all.

Yet another example of ATI’s continued inability to put out a decent product is their graphics cards not working with Star Wars: The Old Republic.  A real sock in the eye for all those people who thought, “ATI will be great!”.  Yeah, it’ll be great for watching YouTube.

Just to make sure I’m not misrepresenting anything here, let me put it out there in bullet point form:

• ATI
• Sucks
• A
• Lot

I hope that helps clarify things.  I have never installed an ATI in any of my machines and if Nvidia keeps up their awesome track record I never will.

NVIDIA4LIFE!

This weekend I set myself a small challenge – create a print window and display it to screen.  On Friday night I embarked on the project and subsequently spent the next two days totally bogged down while I created the window I wanted to print.  The window I wanted to print is the second most important window in my program, so I didn’t actually get around to the printing phase until Sunday morning.  This is where I’ll probably lose most readers.

I’m working with SQL databases via LINQ.

Lost?  I’ll come find you – I DID ask you to come along.  Essentially what happens is that I get a shopping list and I complicate it so much you don’t recognise your shopping list any more, then I unscramble your list back into a shopping list and you don’t know what the heck happened but it looked complicated.  I mean, really, that’s the simple side of it.  I get information, I run it through a ton of verification, modifications and conversions, then hand it back to you in a slightly different format.

“What purpose does this serve!?”  you may cry, but fear not – while your data was being manipulated it was also being recorded into a database for future retrieval and reporting.

No seriously, you’re definitely lost aren’t you?  I’m going to have to call in the Rescuers.

In the program I store thousands of shopping lists, so I need ways of knowing what shopping list to get at what time – hence the complications.  Not only do I have to store data but I have to store ways of knowing what data was stored and why it was stored.  I need to know who it was stored for, and whether it impacts on any other shopping lists.

After a series of tests I settled on creating my own DataSets to hold shopping lists and then passing those DataSets across to the printing window.  Having done that I worked through the report designer, ironed out the bugs in the implementation and eventually got the report working exactly how I wanted.

Not the easiest thing I’ve ever done, but I could’ve avoided a lot of hassle by checking my data before testing the program.  It’s always the way – if you check the data the problem will be with the program and if you check the program the problem will be with the data.

Down with the Empire.