Exold - article

Survey: Are you House or Wilson?

David — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:30:00 GMT

"WingStreet" Slogan: Terrifying?

David — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:09:05 GMT

Am I the only person in whom the slogan of Pizza Hut’s “WingStreet^®,” viz. “You Are Now Entering Wingfinity!” induces a sense of dissociated terror? Every time I encounter said phrase, my mind irrepressibly spins off into an imagined universe of meat, bones, and sauce, swirling about in a postmodern space-time goulash. I’m then forced to consider the composition of such a carniverse — what fills the meatus, so to speak, of the meat, in which visitors must presumably subsist? Are we, by “entering Wingfinity,” condemned to immediate death by drowning in 8 bold sauces? Does the carniverse still have, or need, dark matter, given the filling of space by the saucy, cleft rudimentary flight appendages? Where are all the chickens?

Online dating: sample first contact letter (statistically AWESOME)

David — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:22:06 GMT

Background: OKCupid recently published a blog post, “Online Dating Advice: Exactly What To Say In A First Message.” I recommend reading that first .

How’s it going?

I noticed that you mention your favorite movies in your profile, and they’re pretty much awesome, LOL. Your good taste in cool video games is also fascinating!
Anyway, my name is Zeus, and I’m in a metal band called “Vegetarian Zombie Physics.” I’m an atheist — I noticed you didn’t mention your religion in your profile, so I’m kinda curious what you think about it (sorry if that’s too personal, no offense intended).
Anyway, I hope I hear from you, though I understand you’re probably pretty busy and may take a while to get back to me (this online meeting thing is so awkward sometimes!). I’ve got to get back to grad school now. Take care!

P.S. What’s your name?

OLE DB fun: Mute IErrorInfo and date-time parameter overflow.

David Pickett — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:58:30 GMT

Here’s some useful, hard-won info.

Scenario:

You are using OLE DB.
You are trying to call a stored procedure to which you provide more than one parameter.
Your return code is DB_E_ERRORSOCCURRED.
Consultation with IErrorInfo provides no additional information.

Course of action:

The first things to look at are the status codes for each parameter (you are using status codes, I hope!). If you see that one or more of the parameter status codes are DBSTATUS_E_UNAVAILABLE (i.e., “8”), that says that those particular parameters were not the cause of the error, and you can disregard those.
Look for the parameters that have a different error code. If you find a parameter that has a datetime type (DBTIMESTAMP on the OLE DB side, datetime on the SQL Server side, may not extend to other DBMSs), and it is marked DBSTATUS_E_DATAOVERFLOW, this means that the DBTIMESTAMP has a value that is not within the range of the datetime value, to wit: 1753 A.D. to 9999 A.D. So, for example, if you start out with an empty filetime, which has a range dating from 1601 A.D., and you stuff it into a DBTIMESTAMP value, you will end up with this overflow error.

The Top 10 List of Numbers. Srsly!

David — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 23:45:00 GMT

Feel free to argue with me in the comments. I bet you’re wrong, though.

3
2
π (that’s “pi” in case your browser or eyesight are insufficient…as mine were)
5
42
i
0
1
ϕ (phi)
108

Related around the web:

The Ten Coolest Numbers (so-called)
David Letterman’s Top Ten Numbers from One to Ten (video)
Top Ten Single Digit Numbers