Truffles replaces Emo Man

Over at crikey, I noticed they have started to call Malcom Turnbull Truffles which I think is worth around of applause. here here!

The announcement of the new Shadow Ministry is showing the lack of depth in the Liberal ranks at the moment. Julie Bishop as treasurer is a poor choice, she is such a dull and boring communicator at the best of times, making her talk about economics surely contravenes several of our human right's treaty obligations.

Helen Coonan, previously Minister for Communications makes for an interesting choice for Foreign Affairs, I will need time to develop an opinion on this one...

Poor old Tony Abbot, Religious Saviour of the Australia Parliament who is still the most fun character and my favorite interviewee on Lateline, missed out...



Meanwhile Kevin was on Rove, the moose comment is brilliant...

As Andrew Bartlett said, they should Give Petro a go!

I'm feeling all warm and fuzzy as well after the return of The Australian's liberal party cheers squad. As many have pointed out, statistical error is not momentum :)

Fighting page zoom with tiled maps

I like the automatic page zoom with Firefox 3, it rocks, for text. It kinda sucks with images as they get stretched and it looks rubbish and blurred. This is a problem with tiled maps, as they just shouldn't be scaled like that.

There are a few workarounds out there but none seem great. I would like to be able to disable page zoom, or even better would be detecting the page zoom and then maybe decreasing the tile grid size so that when the tiles are zoomed to match the screen resolution, they actually end up at the same resolution.

Can anyone shine some light on this issue?

New FusionHDTV release 3.68.04

I'm just downloading it now......

Lets see if it crashes less often.....

the release notes do mention other minor bugs, cough! :)

Bitten by Patch Tuesday

Well, thanks to the team at Microsoft, my laptop is screwed and needs a re-install....

It stopped booting properly after the recent batch of Microsoft Patches, grrrr

What i find really annoying is that system restore didn't work as this morning,
after a system restore yesterday, I find M$ has reinstalled the patches, despite
automatic updates being turned off......

Basically it hangs on the "Windows is starting" screen, safe mode still works

Please enjoy the lack of swearing, it took some self control...

Update: Coldfusion wouldn't start either and after the system restore, gdiplus.dll has been renamed.... more here

CFTREE Variable DEBUGGER is undefined. help!

I get this error working Coldfusion ajax tag CFTREE, i have googled around and looked thru the CF docs but I couldn't find the answer... anyone?

Does anyone have a working example of the error handler?

update:1 this url parameter causes it... "_cf_nodebug=true"

I also had cfdebug set as a url parameter on the calling page

update 2: I was looking at CFTREE and not the tag I was binding with which is
cftreeitem that has a onBindError parameter.

I can now nicely display "500 Variable DEBUGGER is undefined"...

The sheer irony of google chrome

Calling your speedy browser chrome is ironic, as most people seem to think the UI sucks

I'm waiting for Chrome-Tab ( like IE-tab ) for Firefox.

I like their browser engine, but lets face it, the overall experience is a
bit like couch surfing compared to staying in a 5 star hotel...

Google started Chrome because they could make drastic changes, more so that they could within the Firefox community... sometimes the community knows better!

Location bar addon for Firefox

If you want to make this



look more like this



or even this



then try out Location Bar addon for Firefox 3 with these settings

Double Dissolution Election Down Under?

With Peter "smirk" Costello releasing a book next week, some old wounds are going to be reopened and the world famous "Emo Man" Brendan Nelson is already in total free fall... and then this weeks events in the Upper House just raised the temperature a notch or two..

Once again Australia has a new Senator Fielding, who acting in a rather undemocratic fashion. He blocked the government's attempt to raise the tax on Luxury cars, citing farmers and tourism operators as being unintentional victims.

Bob Brown, leader of The Greens criticised his lack of flexibility in negotiating with the government.

On Lateline the same night, Fielding acted like a rich, little snobby private school boy, showing little political nous.

Every child in Australia deserves the right to be picked up from school in a luxury 4WD which only attacts a 25% sales tax

Source: Family First internal mission statement

Due to quirks in our electoral system a man who received 80,100 votes can hold the government to ransom. Sure it's his right, but after watching the guy on lateline, I don't like him. He's even almost making Brian Harradine look ok, almost....

So the government can submit the bill again next week and if it's knocked back, suddenly we are starting to get into the realms of a Double Dissolution election.

There's no point trying to fix the mess left by Howard et Al, if your going to be dealing with prats like Senator Fielding all the time. If he keeps acting like a spoilt child, just call an election Mr Rudd, go on, do it.

It would be a nice finger gesture to Costello, that way we can have seen both Howard and Costello personally loose elections on behalf of the Liberal Party.

The Coalition have been pretty petty, over the last few months, the journalists are starting to get a bit short with some of the their "antics". At the moment the Opposition can get away with blue murder, policy wise, as even Nelson admitted recently.

They aren't the government and their populist policy of the week are not being taken seriously or critiqued. Looks like a turd, smells like a turd, I'd rather not taste it personally, thank all the same.

Force a Double Dissolution election Kevin, it's would be the ultimate public dakking of the Liberals in front of the entire country!

They deserve it, plus a lot of people would just so love to see that horrible Smirk properly wiped off Costello's face...again!

Plus there will be fall out from the US elections for sure... I reckon G W Bush is feeling a little lonely at the moment in the big old white house, after McCain's abandonment of his administration's record...

who's missing their deputy sheriff now? ... now there's a good baby :) suushhh

Efficiently using Oracle sequences which have increment set greater than 1

Some application's create sequences which auto increment by say 200, Map 3d does this for example with the ENTITYID sequence. It means Map 3d reads the sequence once and then waits until it has used 199 values before grabbing another sequence.

This can be inefficient if you loading data via a INSERT into SELECT approach, each row will up the sequence by 200, not really what your after.

Oracle's PL/SQL functions to the rescue

CREATE SEQUENCE SEQ
  START WITH 1
  INCREMENT BY 200
  MAXVALUE 999999999999999999999999999
  MINVALUE 1
  NOCYCLE
  NOCACHE
  NOORDER;
  
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION getseq( rn integer, incred integer )
RETURN number IS
calc_seq number;
BEGIN
  IF mod(rn, incred) = 0 OR rn = 1 THEN
    select seq.nextval into calc_seq from dual;
     RETURN calc_seq ;
  ELSE
    select seq.currval  into calc_seq from dual;
     RETURN calc_seq + mod(rn, incred);
  END IF;
EXCEPTION
  WHEN OTHERS THEN
     RETURN -1;
END;
/

-- populate currval for the session so the next query doesn't error

SELECT  SEQ.nextval from dual; 

-- handy way to get 30 rows from dual, using 10 rather than 200 to keep it simple  

SELECT  rownum, zac.getseq(rownum,10) seq, mod(rownum,10) mod_result, seq.currval 
FROM dual connect by rownum < 31;


    ROWNUM        SEQ MOD_RESULT CURRVAL
---------- ---------- ---------- -------
         1        201          1     200
         2        203          2     200
         3        204          3     200
         4        205          4     200
         5        206          5     200
         6        207          6     200
         7        208          7     200
         8        209          8     200
         9        210          9     200
        10        401          0     400
        11        402          1     400
        12        403          2     400
        13        404          3     400
        14        405          4     400
        15        406          5     400
        16        407          6     400
        17        408          7     400
        18        409          8     400
        19        410          9     400
        20        601          0     600
        21        602          1     600
        22        603          2     600
        23        604          3     600
        24        605          4     600
        25        606          5     600
        26        607          6     600
        27        608          7     600
        28        609          8     600
        29        610          9     600
        30        801          0     800
30 rows selected

Chroming with Google's Chrome, my impressions

After chroming around with Google''s new Chrome browser for a few hours and I gotta admit, my head is spinning a bit...

1. It looks too much like Vista on XP, wrong..
   
2. It's fast, super fast, but Firefox 3 still ain't too shabby, 
3. Tab's on top annoy me, scanning over my address bar and bookmark icons each time, and it means to much mouse movement compared to them FF3 style.
4. As an IE user it would be more exciting, but I am now used to FF3
5. The new tab start page is very cool..
6. A problem for developers might be that some things run differently speed wise and might fall over as a result, just like with QBASIC back in the dos days.
7. Microsoft must be really, really worried to be thinking anti-trust
8. What will the corporates think IE6 is getting crufty....
9. Remember, this is only the first beta

Honest have I spent a lot of time with FF and I like the 'weight' of it's browser chrome. I know where the page ends and the browser starts. IE7 & IE8 look distinctly like they couldn't decide what to do with the browser asthetically.  Safari feels wrong to me, it's too light.

Consider holding a piece of 70gsm paper in your hand to read, and then taking some 180gsm paper, what feels nicer? for my tastes i like the solid feel.

I'm still waiting for someone to revolutionise the UI for these wide screens displays, asthetically I prefer full screen windows, it's less noisy.  There is usually whitespace either side of a page, but even the changes with Chrome, it fails to use that space and instead persists with gobbling up valuble vertical space.

even thinking about the word Sidebar give me shivers..