David Grant's blog

Watching the short-track speed skating and figure skating at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver I was reminded of the sheer awesomeness that is Rod Black. Some love him, others want to strangle him (or maybe just hit the mute button). Throughout the Olympics I jotted down some of the most puke-worthy and groan-worthy things Rod Black said. Then I went to CTV's website and uncovered a few more gems. I'll leave the delivery up to you. Make sure to use lots of long pauses and think of Rod and his glorious mustache (which he unfortunately shaved off).

Short-version:
Use NX. VNC sucks.

So the other day the WiFi stopped working on my Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop so after a little bit of troubleshooting and assumed the mini-PCI express wireless card was fried and ordered a new one from Dell's website. The new one didn't work either. Then I suddenly remembered that there was some sort of WiFi switch on the side of the laptop. I felt the switch and moved it moved it in the direction of "On" and it clicked! So it had been turned off! We move our laptop around a lot and somehow the switch had been switched to the off position accidentally.

Doing development, or more specifically deployment in a Windows 64-bit environment can be a frustrating experience. Let's start with a simple example from MSDN about the File System Redirector:

The %windir%\System32 directory is reserved for 64-bit applications . . . Whenever a 32-bit application attempts to access %windir%\System32, the access is redirected to a new directory, %windir%\SysWOW64

Just bought some tickets on Ticketmaster and couldn't believe all the little fees that they add on. Why can't they just bundle these charges in to the ticket price? The "order processing fee", although it is added on to the "order" not the ticket, could also be bundled in to their overall costs. Make it a fixed cost per ticket rather than a cost per order. The "order processing fee" was especially annoying because when I was asked to select how I wanted my tickets (standard mail, express mail, pick-up, etc...) I chose standard mail because it said "Free." What is the "convenience charge" anyways? Just put everything together in to one fee and tell what it is up front. Break-it down later if you want.

I use 32-bit explorer in 64-bit Vista because of a few problems that use 32-bit explorer extensions and therefore don't work in the default 64-bit explorer. So I call the explorer.exe in the SysWOW64 directory (confusingly, the apps in the SysWOW64 directory are 32-bit apps).

%systemroot%\SysWOW64\explorer.exe /separate /n,/select,%HOME%

I accidentally hosed a post last night. I was trying to delete an attachment to a post but instead deleted the entire post. Luckily I have nightly backups, so restore was quick and easy. It was the first time in a LONG time that I've had to restore the database, but I am extremely relieved that my backup system is working perfectly. I also rsync the backups to my home computer they are stored in two different places.,

I just started using South and it is awesome. I tried django-evolution and dmigrations before but they just didn't cut it. I'm just working on a project by myself but I have it running on a slicehost server and I do development on my desktop computer or laptop computer and South has made doing data and schema migrations so much easier. I love being able to create migrations on my dev box and then try them out, make sure they worked, check-in the changed code and the migration files, sync the server's code and run ./manage.py migrate and I'm done. I used to do manual SQL operations on both databases, or just overwrite the older with the newer (if possible). I just did two quick model changes (first was adding a new field that I wanted to seed with the data from another field, and the other was just adding a new blank=True CharField) and I felt like it was an order of magnitude faster than before.

• "I see what you did there." - overused and now totally unoriginal.
• "Best. Comment. Ever." or anything similar
• "Win." Like this: "Old School Dancing + Daft Punk = Win" or "You win" or "X wins" or "epic win".
• "Epic".
• Using "sir" to address another commenter.
• Stupid equations, like "Old School Dancing + Daft Punk = Win"
• "FAIL." - annoying
• "FTW." When it's funny/clever it's ok, otherwise it's getting annoying.
• "Downvoted for vote up if you...' title." - just down vote it, don't tell us about it.

Update: Diapers Naturally now has a website!

Diapers Naturally is a Vancouver-based diaper service that has had absolutely no web presence. I found them in the Yellow Pages (the old-fashioned print one) and read an article about Diapers Naturally at mamatang.ca which I found by searching Google. The only other service I know of in Vancouver is Happy Nappy, which is considerably more expensive.

Since co.mments.com shut down I've had to find a new site to track comments to blog article that I have commented on. It turns out that the two alternatives both suck, for different reasons.

I just upgraded my mythtv backend's gcc from 3.4.6 to 4.1.2. It's still compiling all of world now and will be have been about 24 hours when it's all done. Then I did an emerge --sync and now there is a gcc 4.3! Arghh.

Travel to many cities in the world and you will find street food all over the place. Delicious street food. Walk in Vancouver and there is almost no street food. I can only think of 2 hot dog vendors on West 4th or West Broadway west of Granville St. The one near Future Shop just west of Burrard and the one at the corner of Graville and Broadway in front of the Chapters. You can walk a long time downtown before stumbling across any street food, and it's mostly just hot dogs or Crepes.

The state of Drupal audio files support in Drupal is a mess right now. The audio module, which is great by the way, has not been fully updated to 6.x. This effort has probably been hampered somewhat by the fact that "audio nodes" is not the way that most drupalers want to treat audio going forward.

At work I am modifying an existing tool to work from the command line instead of a GUI. Currently everything is a bit coupled to the GUI. On Friday, the next problem I encounted was a global variable in Common.py that was not initialized.

""" Common.py """
def initHSCM():
    global hSCManager
    ...
    hSCManager = win32serviceOpenSCManager(None, None, win32con.SERVICE_ALL_ACCESS)
    ...
 
...
def startService(service):
    """ function that uses hSCManager """
    # These functions don't work when hSCManager is set to None
 
def stopService(service):