Category: Uncategorized

Well, no, I’m not going mad….  and yes, I do mean it. (and no, I haven’t had that confirmed by an unbiassed observer, neither do I have any form of certificate to either prove my sanity, or my ability to make such statements about my sanity…. but lets get off this side track an onto the main point of the post which (i hope) will make the title more understandable)

The short version: Sunday was my birthday.  But on Friday night, I had my cellphone stolen from my car while I was in it. (It was a “smash and grab”)

The long version: Well, where do I start… You know that a while ago I hinted that I’d really like somoene to buy me a GPS for my birthday?  Well, since nobody seemed to be taking me up on the subtle hint, Charlie, Sean and I decided to buy one for ourselves.  So we got a Geko 201, which I purchased for us on Friday.

On the way home (around sunset), I drive along the N14 from Centurion and take the R511 past Diepsloot.  So I took the R511 offramp and, at the intersection, I stopped.  I’d just SMS’ed Sean (who was coming to have supper with us that evening) and I put my cellphone back in the cradle of the car kit.

Anyway, to cut it short… I saw a gap in the cars a little bit away, so I started to do my checks around the car to see that I could pull off without killing pedestrians, or damaging other cars. As I looked over my left shoulder, I saw a guy duck down… I realised what he was doing, checked in front to see if I could pull forwards yet (I couldn’t), looked back and he was about to smash my front passenger window.  The window was smashed.  He grabbed the phone.  I tried to grab it too – which knocked it out of his hand and onto the floor.  At which point I realised that our brand new (still unopened) GPS was on the seat next to me, as was my bag with ID book, and various other important items. So I pulled them into the back of the car while he groped on the floor to find the phone.  I had about 3-5 seconds where I could have done something, like hitting the stupid twit, or trying to wrestle the phone away from him, but I thought it would be better to just let him have it, and be gone.  (I didn’t know if he had a “friend” nearby, a gun, a knife, or some other weapon)

I drove home as fast as I could (while being safe and obeying as many traffic signs as necessary) so that I could cancel the phone.  I didn’t want him calling too many people (especially since my sim card is unlocked for international calls)… (Fortunately it looks like he didn’t make any calls.)

So that was my frustrating Friday experience… I’ll write about the good stuff later. 🙂

I have the following code:

PropertyDescriptorCollection myColl = myObj.GetPropertyDescriptionCollection();
PropertyDescriptor pd = myObj.GetOneOfYourPropertyDescriptors();
if (myColl.Contains(pd))
{
    myColl.Remove(pd);
}

For some reason, when it runs the line “myColl.Remove(pd);”, I get an exception thrown that says:

An unhandled exception of type ‘System.ArgumentException’ occurred in system.dll
Additional information: Source array was not long enough. Check srcIndex and length, and the array’s lower bounds.

   at System.Array.Copy(Array sourceArray, Int32 sourceIndex, Array destinationArray, Int32 destinationIndex, Int32 length)
   at System.ComponentModel.PropertyDescriptorCollection.RemoveAt(Int32 index)
   at System.ComponentModel.PropertyDescriptorCollection.Remove(PropertyDescriptor value)

If I do:

PropertyDescriptorCollection myColl = myObj.GetPropertyDescriptionCollection();

PropertyDescriptor pd = myObj.GetOneOfYourPropertyDescriptors();

bool found = false;

foreach (PropertyDescriptor currentPD in myColl)

{

  if (currentPD.Equals(pd))

  {

    found = true;

    break;

  }

}

The variable “found” ends up being true. So I know that the collection definately contains the item.  So is this a bug in the framework?  Is PropertyDescriptorCollection.Remove(…) not written correctly by Microsoft?

Well, on saturday we did our first GeoCaching.  For the geeks among us, the image on the right will have an impact. 🙂

I could repeat what we wrote on the GeoCaching website, but that would be a waste of bandwidth. So here are links to the caches we visited: JHB’s Best View, Message In a Bottle, Reporters Riddle #1.

We also collected a Travel Bug called Lightening Bug.  I can hear you saying “Ok, so I kinda get GeoCaching, but what on earth is a Travel Bug?”… So I’ll tell you. 

A Travel Bug is a metal dog tag that you “attach to an item. This allows you to track your item on Geocaching.com. The item becomes a hitchhiker that is carried from cache to cache (or person to person) in the real world and you can follow its progress online.” A sample of the dogtag is on the left.

Lightening Bug is racing with 4 other bugs placed by “The Four T’s”.  There are 2 ways to “win” the race.  The first is to get back to Sacramento, California (one of the bugs has already done that), the second way is to go through as many caches as possible before heading back to Sacramento, CA.

Anyway, we now have the bug and are going to try and move it around a few other Cache’s in SA (assuming we can’t convince a friend of ours who’s going to the USA in the next few weeks to take it with him).

Oh, and if anyone REALLY wants to be nice, you can consider sending me plenty of cash for my birthday (coming up soon) so I can afford a GPS system. 🙂  (Or if you have lotsa cash, you could buy me a Garmin Geko 301, a Garmin Rino 110, or a Garmin eTrex)

(found via a Channel9 – in this post)

By installing this software you agree to:

– all your base arnt belong to us

A cool link from Rory, about a really stupid HR complaint.

Some Wired news articles I’d really like to comment on:

1. How Info-Overload Experts Unwind (this is something I don’t do that well, but I’m learning (I hope))
2. Designer Virus Stalks HIV (cool, but scary… The guys who made it talk about how scary it could be that anyone could start creating “designer virii” – at least this virus is a “good one”)
3. iPod All the Rage in High Fashion (I *WANT* an iPod, preferably an iPod mini – coz they look cooler.  Although the full iPod seems to have a lot more add-ons/gadgets to make it even cooler)
4. Browser Hijackers Ruining Lives (This happened to my cousin a long while ago when he first joined IS – he went to a site and installed some software (he was kinda new to the internet back then) and promptly found his PC randomly opening up his browser and directing it to various porn sites – NOT good)

There are more, but I’ll leave that for now.

Other arb thoughts – I *REALLY* want a tablet PC, especially after these blogs. (Scoble keeps mentioning them both there and on the Geek Aggregator, too often to link to each post)

Oh yeah since shout outs are “cool” in the blogging world, here’s one to Charlie (the coolest guy in my homecell to be blogging – ok, I admit, he’s the only guy in my homecell who’s blogging, but that doesn’t make him any less cool :)), Quixilver (who’s blog’s hosted on my site, has some really interesting blog entries, and has a cool style of writing)… All the guys at dotnet.org.za (generally they’re some of the more active members of SADeveloper.net, who have some cool blog entries about .Net and about life)

I’ve handwritten a few BLOG entries that I really must post some time – we’re house sitting (and child minding a 16 yr old (well, she’s actually a bit younger than that, but she’d be really happy to know that I called her a 16 yr old and didn’t reveal her actual age – which is marginally below 16)) for a few weeks so I’m without a PC at the moment (yet another reason why a Tablet PC would be awesome) So I’ll try get around to posting them some time soon…

This weekend, my church ran a course called “Marriage Enrichment”.  While Christie and I were waiting for it to start Ashley (our lead elder) chatted to us and made a comment along the lines of “You guys are luck to have a course like this so soon in your marriage.  When we got married we didn’t have this”.  Its one of those statements that almost requires a response from you like “Yeah, we are.” or something similar.  But really I hadn’t thought much about it and, not knowing the course material, I couldn’t honestly agree that we were lucky to have the course.  But his comment did get me thinking.

You see, the course was excellent and while I hope to apply what we learned, I’m sure I’ll actually only apply 1/2 of it (if I’m lucky).  At this stage in my life, I probably won’t see the fruits of what we learned and later on in life I wonder if I’ll be able to remember the course and see what good fruit it produced.  I’m at the age where I don’t really know too many married couples well (who have been married for 5 or more years).  So I don’t have any practical comparrisons to make… for example, I could see the benefit if I could say “WOW, now I can see why James and Sandra have been struggling”, or even if I could say “Gee, THAT explains why Christie and I don’t communicate well” or something like that.  You see, I’ve only been married for a month and a half.  So its giving me good pointers for the future, but I don’t know what I’ll need to apply and when in the future I’ll need to apply it.  And I’m certainly not going to learn the entire course so that I can at any stage recall the “correct way to do things” and act on it.  That would be both highly time consuming (of which I don’t have much left to consume) and verging on a “robotic” existence – “Keep all the rules constantly at the ready so you never make any mistakes”.

At the same time I started to think about how if we got our marriage right, had kids who grew up in the church and married someone else’s kids who had similarly “good parents”.  They will have practically seen “good” husbands and wives interacting, so will they even realise the benefit of such courses, or the importance of passing on these values and lessons?  If they do manage to pass the values on, will they really have a practical understanding as to just how bad it can be if these things are not in place?  If we turn the tide of divorces in the country, will our future generations keep it?  Or will they not learn from the mistakes of the past and be doomed to repeat them?  Its all fine and well to talk about history that way – great leaders, wars, plagues, etc.   But do people keep account of social trends in the same way?  I guess that’s what the disciplines of sociology and anthropology are about, but does the “population in general” learn about these things?

Even in this morning’s sermon there were two examples of this.  The one was Ashley talking about the relationship between David and Jonothan… He said something similar to “When David said he loved Jonothan, it wasn’t in an erotic/homosexual way… but it was merely as one would have a deep bond with someone who saved your life in many battles.”  He then referred to the guys and basically said “like when you were in the army, fighting – your buddy who watched your back and protected you.” But anyone born after 1975 would not really understand that analogy – we weren’t forced into the army.  We don’t practically understand that as he does, or as people from the generation before us would.

My lingering question is this: How do we pass on our values and lesson’s we’ve learned to the next generation effectively, and how do we ensure that they’re learned to the same degree and will be passed on effectively to the generation after that?

Two slightly different rules… I think they both show a lot of truth about the industry as a whole… Check out this (found via Ryan Farley), and this and this (by Rory) 

Today I got a “be my friend” type request from one of the guys on SADeveloper.net on Orkut… so I added him as a friend, and found that there are a good few South African’s there… Very soon I found a group for my old university, and I soon found some of the matric (grade 12) pupils that I’d taught for a year while I was studying.  I found out that one of them is doing her MASTERS in computer science and education, and has become a bit of a (self proclaimed) “linux geek”, who’s currently tutoring Computer Science 3 students.

Its so cool to see someone you “helped out” in learning something going so far with it… 🙂

Hrm… I don’t think I’ve found any really useful SMS applications for windows. (or any other OS for that matter)  Usually the 1/2 good ones charge an arm and a few legs to run.

What my ideal sms app would do:

• Import and Export contacts and contact groups (at very least to CSV)
• Provide an API (preferably SOAP based – and give us a WSDL for crying out loud) <rant>One of the better looking providers in South Africa has this nifty “XML over HTTP” API.  BUT they provide a bloody DTD, no WSDL file – VS.Net doesn’t do DTD’s.  As far as I know WSDL’s are the standard for SOAP services, and SOAP is THE standard for “XML over HTTP”.  What the heck were the developers at that company smoking when they released that product? (or maybe the managers were being all “pointy haired” (that’s a Dilbert reference, for those who don’t get it))
• Let me recieve replies to the messages I send (both in the app, and via the api)
• Have a decent UI (I don’t want to spend 5 minutes trying to get the thing to add people to a group, I just want to “drag and drop” them or something similar)
• Give me feedback as to the delivery status of the message (both in the app, and via the api)

That’s probably the basics – I’d really like to get hold of the source to the UI too, so that I could change it as required… but then I guess they’d want to sell the UI to me.  Its kinda odd that – its free, so what harm would it be to hand out the source.  But the corporate mentality is to charge for it because its an extra service… How about helping out the developers you give the API to, by giving them a sample app (with source) so that they don’t have to re-invent the wheel every time… To me, that would be a major selling point for using one providers SMS API over another.

Oh well, I guess I’ll have to build my own and post the source – then anyone can modify it to work with any SMS provider they like.  Code re-use… I’d build it for myself, and not be able to sell it, I can save someone else time by giving them a base to work on.  I guess I might have a problem if someone made millions off my base of code… but then I guess that’s what the GPL and such are out to protect you from.

I just thought I’d add a quick image to the blog, to see if BlogJet will upload and display it correctly.  For those who don’t know, BlogJet is a really cool app that lets you create and edit your blog entries on your PC and upload them when you’re ready.  It works on most blogging engines, and is really easy to use.

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