Hasta La Vista, Vista!

In one of the most inept acts in the history of software engineering, the buggy Microsoft Vista has caused a giant uproar in the business community as they struggle to un-install Vista.


Vista - A festering pile of dog vomit

But it's not just Microsoft Vista that is profoundly buggy. Please read this report how massive SQL injection attacks hit over ten thousand web sites running Microsoft SQL Server.

It's incredible to many professionals that Microsoft can make billions of dollars via their stranglehold on the free market, while providing software that cannot be safely used for the purpose for which it was intended.


SQL Server injection attacks are epidemic

Vista has cost American consumers thousands of man years in lost productivity. The Raleigh News & Observer notes that smart corporations have stayed away from Vista:

"Forrester Research noted that by the end of last year, only 6.3 percent of 50,000 corporate users surveyed were using Vista, with the market share of Windows XP hardly dented in the process (the defections came from users of the older Windows 2000)."

The report says that the Gartner Group has labeled Microsoft as "Collapsing", great news for the victims of Vista:

"With Microsoft making $15 billion a year on Windows, consumer and business software profits are key to future success.
Thus when Gartner analysts recently described Windows as "collapsing" and the victim of an increasingly unadaptable code base, the alternatives before the company seemed stark."


An actual Vista error!


I have come to believe that Microsoft is about as inept at developing software as it's founder was at getting girlfriends. The world's richest man, and he could not get a date . . .


I just got done spending over $250 to a PC technician to wipe my brand new laptop clean and install Windows XP, the lesser of the two evils. For reasons that are not completely clear, Vista would eat-up four billion bytes of RAM with the simple acts of web browsing and e-mail.

Read my notes on why Microsoft Vista is the greatest software engineering disaster in the history of the world.

Conducting pre-employment background checks

In this day and age of rampant resume fraud, savvy employers must carefully verify the background and credentials of all job applicants. Resume fraud is not a criminal offense, and resume fraud has become an epidemic, with professionals posting fake degrees, false experience.
In the computer industry, trust is the single most important issue, as it can be a disaster to give someone with honesty issues access to confidential corporate data.

See my notes on “Are you Trustworthy”, and how to get a security clearance.



However, this Businessweek article notes that background checks are not perfect, and that the hiring manager needs to re-verify any negative results.

The article also notes the top firms that conduct background checks.

- ChoicePoint – Georgia
- USIS – Virginia
- First Advantage – California
- Kroll Background Screening – Tennessee

“For $60 to $80 per applicant, ChoicePoint and its rivals assemble digital dossiers of educational degrees and credit histories as well as interviews with friends, past bosses, and colleagues.

Call-center workers wearing headsets inquire about work habits, personal character, and drug or alcohol problems. Just by dint of their heft and permanence, the proprietary data caches they compile can seem authoritative, even though the information sometimes contains errors, innuendos, or outright falsehoods.”

One of the best screening techniques is old-fashioned employment verification, and every prospective employer is allowed to as “Would you re-hire this person”. The answer to that question can be very revealing . . . .

National TV story on Seeing Eye horses is now on YouTube!

Last month, I documented our last trip to NYC with Scout and Cuddles!

http://dba-oracle.blogspot.com/2008/04/scout-cuddles-on-live-tv.html

Here is the TV show from YouTube:



Here are some of our pics from the trip. This is Jen3 and Dan practicing in Times Square:





We also got to meet some celebrities. Can you guess who this fellow is, standing behind me and Janet?

Hypochondriac medicine

For nearly 100 years, physicians have been treating hypochondriacs with Obecalp (the world “placebo” spelled backwards), tasty sugar pills what have worked wonders for a variety of imagined ailments.

This vendor now sells Obecalp for kids! It’s online, no prescription needed.

Speaking of physician acronyms, this article on abbreviations that doctors use to insult fakers and hypochondriacs is quite revealing and funny:

- Fecal Encephalopathy – Poo for brains
- PRATFO - Patient Reassured And Told to Flip Off.
- GOMER – Get out of my ER
- CCFCP - Coo Coo For Coco Puffs. A patient with a mental disorder
- Brothel sprouts – Venereal diseases
- OGK - Only God Knows, common with the really strange cases.
- TUBE - Totally unnecessary breast examination
- JMI - Junior Mint Inside

Also, see this list:

http://www.messybeast.com/dragonqueen/medical-acronyms.htm

But some, such as CTF “Cletus the fetus” and TNT just pain mean:. Some doctors think that they are Gods . . . .

Burl Stump cutting

This web page shows how to slice a stump to extract the burl. To slice such a large stump to maximize burl, we will rent a 36 inch bar length chainsaw which will cut 72 inches, a seven foot swath.



The trick is to minimize the lossage from the chainsaw kerf, and this is achieved by dissecting the stump into pieces that can be milled with a standard vertical bandsaw (usually 24 inches).

It appears that a stump is sliced as a face cut, “vertically”, parallel to the trunk:



Rather than build a chainsaw mill, we can make face cuts, two feet apart, small enough for the mill to process thinner slices.



Once the stump is dissected into two foot high chunks, the mills precision saw can cut them into half inch face cut slices, and after drying, they can be planed into 3/8 inch panels.

Building a chainsaw mill

Another approach is a chainsaw mill, but it’s wasteful because of kerf lossage. You start with a single chainsaw cut to get a level surface. Once a flat plane is achieved, these experts built a chainsaw jig to slice the stump into level pieces.

BC woodwork shows how to create a chainsaw mill:

The Face Transformer!

This web site allows you to upload a photograph of any face and transform the face:

http://morph.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Transformer/

You can see any face as a baby, a teenager, different races, and as a caveman, quite funny!

Flavor Tripping!

UPDATE: See our full notes here on our experiences with Miracle Fruit.


$40 worth of Miracle fruit berries

There was an article in the NY Times this week about the "Miracle Fruit", a west African cranberry with psychotripic effects that make everything taste sweet!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/dining/28flavor.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

"Albert Yuen, drizzled Tabasco sauce onto her tongue. She swallowed and considered the flavor: “Doughnut glaze, hot doughnut glaze!” . . .

limes were candied, vinegar resembled apple juice, goat cheese tasted like cheesecake on the tongue and goat cheese on the throat."

They are not cheap ($2 per berry), but flavor tripping has the promise to be far more than a flash in the pan.

Miracle Fruit "numbs your sour and bitter tastebuds for a couple of hours after eating it. That means that everything that used to taste sour now tastes sweet . . .

after eating one stout beers taste like chocolate milkshakes, grapefruits taste like pixie sticks, cheeses taste like frosting, it will make even the crappiest tequila taste like lemonade "

Miracle fruit is expensive and hard to find, we got ours from Thomas Vu Enterprises at http://www.miraclefruittab.com/ forty bucks for a handful of berries.

Now I ask you, how rare is this?

I got this e-mail from my son Andy Burleson today:

"I have all three coldplay albums if you want to borrow them, although i can't ethically let you burn them for copyright reasons."

Now I ask you, in this age of Pirates Bay, how often do you see young people with good ethics?

Great fleas have lesser fleas

I love this poen by Augustus DeMorgan, all about orders of magnitude:

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.

Memorial Day reflection

The true meaning of Memorial Day is in danger of being lost. This is a day to pause and reflect upon those who have suffered great hardships for the freedoms that we take for granted.

It’s sad that many Americans think of Memorial Day as just a day off from work, a day to relax and picnic.

Memorial Day is so much more than that. Most Americans cannot even imagine the hardships these brave people endure, every day.



Memorial Day is not only about those who made the supreme sacrifice, it’s also about the living and their families. It’s about the true patriots, people who endure great personal hardships in service to our country:

- Memorial Day is about the wives to give birth alone while her husband is half a world away.

- Memorial Day is about those who live in constant fear of a visit from the base chaplain.

- Memorial Day is about the child who has not seen their father in over a year.

- Memorial Day is about the soldier who will spend his life in a wheelchair

- Memorial Day is about those veterans who endure ridicule and discrimination from liberal hippie scum.

- Memorial Day is about those who gird their loins and charge into danger.

- Memorial Day is about those who take-on cowards who fight while hide behind the innocent.

America is the greatest nation in the history of the world, and let’s all take a moment to remember why . . . .



GOD BLESS AMERICA