this is really hilarious

just look here.

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the spam Google mail accounts attract...and bloody Hellsing

just wondering why the most common spam i get in two Google mail accounts is penile enlargement. must be pretty popular these days. on a far more interesting note, i've seen Hellsing Ultimate episode IV. as bloody and gruesome as the previous three - maybe even more so, with a scene in which Alucard pushes Rip Van Winkle's gun through her (yes, Rip is a girl...for some reason i always pegged her as a very feminine guy...) and start lapping up the blood on the floor of the ship...if you already read the manga, this won't be a spoiler for you...now where did i put that Hellsing manga again...?

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Flock 1.1 out - with webmail support

Flock 1.1 is out, and has webmail (Yahoo! Mail and GMail support!). i'm seriously loving Flock. grab your copy now!

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my boss better not be reading this!

i did it. i wasted today. i spent almost all day playing Rat Pack on Facebook. yes, i feel like a louse. but it was fun! i don't want to do it again, though - too risky to doing anything useful!

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xkcd strikes again - this time with fruity goodness!

f**k grapefruit. by the way, if you read xkcd, check the image properties. sometimes he puts the really funny stuff in the image title.

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On Creativity (but mostly a rant about Lifehacker)

as with email, subscribing to a feed, especially a very frequently updated blog like Lifehacker is a mixed blessing. you can get lots of 'spam' when you subscribe to such a feed ('spam' meaning things you're not interested in). or you can get some really cool stuff, like this article on creativity. personally, i think Lifehacker is really cool - but there's so much there, i have to train myself to ignore things or i'll never get anything done. that said, Gina and the Lifehacker crew do a great job. but when do they actually get round to doing anything else? :D

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As a man thinketh

Got this in my mail recently. Thanks to cable-t-y. PLS GET TO THE END of it! There are two nuns. One of them is known as Sister Mathematical (SM) and the other one is known as Sister Logical (SL). It is getting dark and they are still far away from the convent. SM: Have you noticed that a man has been following us for the past thirty-eight and a half minutes? I wonder what he wants. SL: It's logical. He wants to rape us. SM: Oh, no! At this rate he will reach us in 15 minutes at the most. What can we do? SL: The only logical thing to do of course is to walk faster. SM: It's not working SL: Of course it's not working. The man did the only logical thing. He started to walk faster too. SM: So, what shall we do? At this rate he will reach us in one minute. SL: The only logical thing we can do is split. You go that way and I'll go this way. He cannot follow us both. So the man decided to follow Sister Logical. Sister Mathematical arrives at the convent and is worried what has happened to Sister Logical. Then Sister Logical arrives. SM: Sister Logical! Thank God you are here! Tell me what happened! SL: The only logical thing happened. The man couldn't follow us both, so he followed me. SM: Yes, yes! But what happened then? SL: The only logical thing happened. I started to run as fast as I could and he started to run as fast as he could. SM: And? SL: The only logical thing happened. He reached me. SM: What did you do? SL: The only logical thing to do. I lifted my dress up. SM: Oh, Sister! What did the man do? SL: The only logical thing to do. He pulled down his pants. SM: Oh, no! What happened then? SL: Isn't it logical, Sister? A nun with her dress up can run faster than a man with his pants down............ And those of you who thought the ending would be dirty pray for forgiveness!

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Learning every day!

i consider myself a pretty good Windows user. i'm very conversant with quite a number of features of Windows, and have acquired a number of tricks. in fact, i had a pretty high score in the Brainbench Windows XP Fundamentals test. so i considered myself a bit of a sysadmin.

well, yesterday saw me back in school, and today saw me back in the cafe where i worked as a student (doesn't that sound good? heh). something that had always puzzled me was some computers just suddenly stopped showing the LAN properties, even to administrators. no user could access the network properties and configure them using the GUI. it had happened a couple of times and each time it happened, i would repair/format the computer. today, the same problem occurred - and the Windows XP CD was broken. so i had to try to find a way to configure the network card without formatting if possible, as there was not XP disc on hand. something made me feel strongly like there should be a commandline tool to configure a network interface on Windows. i got to Google, entered a query, and found out about netsh. using netsh, i was able to configure the network interface without a GUI. i guess i did learn something new today.

so much for being a sysadmin

bug in IDLE?

i play around with Python. i 've never done anything serious in it, but it's a very handy tool. it's saved my butt a couple of times at work, or at least saved me some nightmarish coding in C, C++, C# or Java. on most major platforms on which it runs, Python comes with IDLE, which comes with an interactive shell for quickly trying out Python scripts, as well as a 'real' editor for creating scripts.

i've used Python for about 2 projects since starting work - similar things, really...and i've noticed that when i'm writing output to a file and run the script using IDLE, more often than not, the file never gets written to the end. in the latest examples, i created a Python script to create SQL INSERT statements to quickly populate a database to test another application (i probably should actually populate the database directly from the script, but that will be a 'long thing'. besides, i already saved myself a little trouble entering the data myself ;)). anyway, the script includes a option to ask how many rows of data to create. i was expecting to see 200 lines of INSERT statements, but it stopped on the 182nd line. this isn't the first time. i ran it again and something similar happened. i had to open a console window and run the script to get all 200 lines written. i'm not sure if it's a Windows-only bug, but i'm going to report it as soon as i can

Update: i posted the problem in Freenode's #Python, and i was told that i should flush() the file. when i tried it, it worked!

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Saved by the connection string!

more like, saved by ConnectionStrings.com. i can't remember exactly how i got this site, but it must have been one of those days i was crawling...anyway, i was getting frustrated by trying to connect to SQL Server 2005. for some reason, i could not connect to a remote machine running SQL Server 2005. even worse, i was getting connection errors to my local instance of SQL Server 2005 Express! i got the idea of using ODBC as an interface, but i was still having issues, until i visited ConnectionStrings.com. now i have a completely different set of issues, but that's another story...

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seriously...

one of my friends described a situation: "Your life is over, and your problems just began". sometimes i feel like that on this job. i feel like i have very little free time. anyway, enough about my troubles. life goes on, doesn't it? i'm kinda stuck with over 1GB in Audacity data files, as i had to forcibly close Audacity once and had to manually search in my temp folder for the files, since the files are quite important to me. so i'm stuck as the data is in 1MB chunks, and i don't have time to listen to each part...

yes, you read right. i have to listen to each part. the trick i learned from the Audacity website was to arrange the files by date, load them into Winamp, and uisng the wave-out plugin, re-record them. it worked...but there was a problem. some of the 5-second chunks were repeated, so i have to remove duplicates from over 1.5 hours of audio. that may take up to 3 hours, time i'm not sure i have, as this weekend, even though i'm not working, is booked.

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stuff over the past few weeks

last monday, i heard a kettle whistle for the very first time. i'd heard about it, but never really believed it unitl then. so Enid Blyton wasn't lying after all. ah well.

it seems a new version of MapZone is out. still windows-only, though. i'm not sure just how well it would run using Wine, but you can give it a whirl if you're feeling bold.

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what's going on at Trolltech?

quite a number of developers will know Trolltech, the company behind Qt, the cross-platform framework for creating desktop applications (orignally in C++, and more recently, in Java). Qt has a long history and forms the basis of KDE.

anyway, Qt has long been a favourite of C++ developers on *nix systems. Windows developers weren't so lucky. Trolltech released a non-commercial edition of Qt, which i first learned about when Qt was in version 2.3. anyway, i never really used Qt then (even now, i just want to get started with it) but i did keep up to date with it. some open-source developers (originally behind the port of KDE to Cygwin) began an unofficial opensource native Windows. they succeeded, but they had to shut down binary builds because people (who weren't thinking of the implications of what they were doing) kept posting questions about the open-source Qt to the official Trolltech support team. and with the release of Qt 4, the team started creating (again unofficial) patches to the Qt opensource edition to make it build with compilers other than MinGW, which was the only system supported by Trolltech officially.

recently, the project has been closed. there are no new files because as the team says: "This project was closed because the goal to provide Qt/GPL on windows (inclusive msvc support) was achieved". more information can be found here. i guess that's because in the latest version of opensource Qt - even though Trolltech claims that Visual Studio support and integration is only provided with the commercial versions of Qt - you can build Qt and Qt-based applications using commandline tools with other compilers, including Visual Studio. but be careful, any commercial application you create must be completely licensed uner the GPL. as the Trolls themselves say, your product must be licensed exclusively under the GPL.

what i'm wondering is: why the change of heart? and Trolltech seems to have been bought by Nokia. so what happens to developers after this? your guess is as good as mine.

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my battery used to last longer!

i've noticed recently that my computer's battery isn't lasting as long as it was. i'm not quite sure why, but i think because i've installed quite a number of network applications (web server, at least 2 database servers, etc), my firewall program might just be the reason my processor (AMD Turion 64) is constantly running at top speed, instead of stepping down. so i'll do a format soon and change firewall programs, and find out how far.

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Design problems

i have to maintain a list of phone numbers. i also need to maintain the owners' details. but here's a problem: i already have access to the phone number data, but i'll fill up the owners' data as i go along. so here's the problem: how do i do this? quite a number of people have more than one phone number, so the phone number(s) cannot be the primary key. at the end of the day, each person whose data is recorded will have one or more phone numbers, but i currently have phone numbers but no associated personal data. how do i design my database so that i can fill in personal details when they come in, but i won't repeat any information and have a sufficiently extensible database design that can adapt to changing requirements?

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Enjoy your student days

leaving school and working isn't all it's jacked up to be. so many people just want to get out of school and begin their lives, but they're missing a single important thing: they're already living their lives. life started the day you were born, and continues till the day you die. somehow, we tend to miss that patently obvious fact and decide instead to wait for something or other to 'begin' our lives: "when i leave school, i'll really start living", "when i get my dream job, i'll really start living", "when we get married, we'll really start living"...please. you're alive, aren't you? life's going on all around you. assume today's the last day you'll ever live. do what you would if that were true today. then go ahead and do it everyday. each day is meant to be enjoyed to the full and maximized to the last. life is far too short not to be enjoyed; it's far too short for you not to make impact and influence your world. grow every day. hug someone you love. try to leave everyone better than you met them, and don't worry if they choose not to get better. laugh. cry. be human. for crying out loud, when did we become elastic plastic? we have fake eyelashes, fake fur coats, and we've become fake people (the fake fur and eyelashes are kinda okay - the fake people are a big no-no). make a kid laugh. tell someone you love them. there are so many things you can do, it's amazing we waste time with things that really don't bring us any fulfilment. and that's the main thing i want to say: make sure each day leaves you fulfiled. abayo!

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the dangers of copy and paste

copy and paste is dangerous. here's why.

a pastor was at a conference where the speaker said: 'the best years of my life were spent in the arms of a woman who was not my wife!' as the audience gasped, he continued: 'she was my mother!'. everyone clapped. the pastor decided to use the same thing back home. unfortunately he only remembered the first part, so he ended with: 'and i can't remember who she was!'

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mah first day at work

so i've been working. not quite what i'd imagined it to be. so far, it's been great. i was helping my boss with something, and i needed to use regular expressions somewhere down the line. here's the catch: i've never used regexes before. i was going to use Python to create a script to deal with the data, but then i switched to C++. for regex processing, i first employed the GRETA library, but for some reason, it didn't compile using Visual C++ 9.0, so i switched to Boost's regex. for a wonder, i didn't even need to download a pre-built jam executable - it compiled out of the box. Boost compiled, but since it was created before VC++ 9, it didn't recognize the compiler. it did build anyway, but i was getting puzzling errors about the regex library file missing. apparently, i didn't read what i should have - it assumed i build it with VC++ 8.0, and was looking for a library file with the version number embedded in the name - but my build didn't have a version number in the name. it basically amounted to showing the printer to the computer, but not actually plugging it in. ah well. at least i finally got it to work.

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my first day on the job so far...

i want to kill something. i want to rip flesh apart. i want to hit something and watch blood fly. why? i'm on the internet and using plain old Mozilla Firefox. i miss Flock! why should i login to Blogger just because i want to post on my blog? arrgh!

seriously, Flock has been cool...but i said this post was about work, not browsers. so, it's been good. so far. went somewhere with my boss and watched how business is done in Naija. ol' boy, e no easy o! met with an old friend i've not seen in over five years. maybe this is a month for old relationships...but i'll save that for later. anyway, i got to be called 'Sir' by someone older than me - which was quite embarrasing. i have to get used to it though - just not let it get to my head. if it does, maybe you'll do to me what Rooftop MCs have suggested: e la'gi mo! well, gotta go. see y'all later!

Back from school

got back home last night. whew! don't want to do that again. get home late, that is.

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