Songs of the Day

Song – Artist (Album)

• Balad Of The Beaconsfield Miners – Foo Fighters (Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace)
• Suadade – Barrio Chino (Putumayo – Mediterranean Odyssey)
• Bhodlumlilo – African Jazz Pioneers (The best of African Jazz Pioneers)

Documenting Stored Procedures

I’ve been creating and modifying a few stored procedures for a ‘debt history and future payments’ report in a VS.NET app using SQL Server 2005 for the past days. Quite a bit of a task to be honest, but I have found something very useful while developing large stored procedures. Some times they can get out of hand, you know, with virtual tables, views, massive calculations involving aggregate functions and loads of inner joins.

Document everything! Changes, current status, this way you’ll have a clue on where you stand and what you must achieve, so even if things get out of hand this is always a good reference, and gives you a great focus. It’s also a very good guide when you finished it, and several months later your customer calls you nagging that it’s not working anymore. You go back, read all you wrote, and get a full view on it’s current status and what you must do to correct the mistakes.

An example of my style of documenting stored procedures is as follows:

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Autorun.inf “Virus” on your USB memory stick?

There is a number of viruses that create autorun.inf files on all writable drives, as soon as you stick any USB or memory stick in your computer it creates it. Some of the viruses display corrupt right-click menu’s, stop allowing direct access to c:\ through “My PC”, and cause other irrational behaviour.

The best solution I’ve found so far is to simply display all hidden files and folders in the USB Memory stick, delete the current autorun.inf, create a folder named autorun.inf, this way the virus can’t create or replace the file as it is really a folder. I haven’t been infected since, and it’s good protection if you are moving the memory stick around from pc to pc.

A friend of mine told me about this procedure, so I verified it on internet and I found a bit more information that might be helpful if you’ve got one of these viruses:

http://bleuken.i.ph/blogs/bleuken/2007/06/29/viruses-that-uses-autoruninf/

New Design

I was told already by 2 people that my new design looks terrible, so I’ll probably be fiddling around with the graphics and stuff on the page for the following weeks. Any comments and critique is accepted. Thank you and excuse me for the poor visual performance.

Mad Business

This was one of the first games I ever finished… it’s terrible, it barely works, it flickers a hell of a lot (I used VB4 without BitBlt), it has a bad plot and theme, it is boring as hell, but it brings back a few memories *sniff*.

If you’ve got time on your hands and want to check it out go to the following URL, the download is available on the main page: http://www.citiria.com/mb/

I think the major achievement I had making this game was learning TCP/IP packet transmission. The game was supposedly multiplayer, I never really tested it out thoroughly though. Give it a try and tell me what you think (I might release the source code for it one of these days, as soon as I find it heheh).

* Update: Removed the game from the website because I had to reorganize quite a few things, if you are interested in it just email me.