There is a corresponding quote, Danish I believe, which says: If you're cold, wear a hat. Having said that, it's 2.30 am here and about 25 degrees celsius. My winter woolies are firmly locked away for at least the next 6 months.

Woo. I like your viewpoint. Yeah, we're cool, got hobbits and gay wizards and dragons. I never heard of the fog on thing, but do wonder if you need to cut the channel tunnel off for a bit. I'm sure you know what I'm getting at. I used to play Doom, Heretic and Hexen. Actually, revealing my true age, Wolfenstein and anything I could get to work under MAME.

that just made me laugh out loud

Thank you so much - I thought it was just me. It's a bit hard down here at the bottom of the world - We here in NZ are so isolated it's hard to know what to do

Ok sorry. Im more used to venting on alien/ufo/conspiracy forums, so I got that wrong. I do apologise. Offense was not my intent. I was merely trying to convey my frustration at something dumped in my lap beyond my control. I'll just hold back in future.

oops. A thousand apologies

(This will probably result in a ban, but whatever) So bizarre, so obtuse you just can't see the answer? I got blindsided and walked into a legacy project I swear was written by Martians. We have such gems as magic numbers: return code 97. WTF? Or let's change the code based on the return value of a frick'n button that you just changed the text on: Ok becomes Done, for no reason in the thinking universe I've been banging my head against the wall for the last 6 months over a damn print routine, which is called all over the place, but is rewritten 3 different ways. And don't get me started on the database side of things. It's possible, and happens on a daily basis, to enter a completely illogical combination of products, suppliers and customers and insert that into the db in such a way as to f*** everything over for the next thousand years. You'd have to be a floating database guru clad in a white toga and ghandi level of sereneness to fix this [redacted] fustercluck. Edits: [Bertschi]Redacted swearing [/Bertschi]

It's not big, but it involves lots of db reads/writes. Nowhere is the opportunity to roll back anything. Original developer took their final check and buggered off to the opposite side of the country to become a truck driver. (I wish I was kidding) Source code had almost zero comments and major variables like "ip" - that particular one was central to accumulating orders onto a pallet of goods. Super helpful. So there's who knows how many people depending on this crud to hold it all together, there's a deadline of course, and my boss, bless him, pays me what he can but it's nowhere enough. I'm personally looking at living out of my van, Boss makes shitloads, and the Customer makes enough to pay 500+ people each month. Why am I in my van eating noodles?

Last time I looked seriously .net 2 was the new thing. I guess I have some catching up to do. Now I have a vague, open-ended brief to do programmery stuff and make [client's] error messages go away. Ok, well, my fee includes your first-born child (for trading purposes), a spot to park my hippie van, and unlimited google access, as I really have no idea and make it up as I go along. Oh, and alcohol. And chips. :)

Yeah, it does. My programming box has been isolated from the net for about 8 months... roughly 135mb of updates on a dialup, and I just know that when it's finished and rebooted that there'll be more. Yay!

Nice fake, but interestingly (or sadly) such things have actually happened. In a previous life as a photocopier tech, I have heard of a skinned mouse coming out of the end of a copier. If you know anything about such gadgets, you'll know that anything going through the paper path from the in-tray will be firstly squashed flat going in, then subjected to extremely high voltage as it passes under the drum (A.K.A. electrocuted), then fed along a conveyor belt across another set of earthing electrodes (normally used for separating the charged paper) and finally fed into a high-pressure, very hot fixing roller as it exits the machine. I imagine it was as it entered the hollow rollers heated by hot lamps at the exit is where the skin came off. Yech.

This link may or may not be of help: http://www.realtimesoft.com/multimon/programming/basics.asp

I run 3 lcd's. My preference is to have my current app jump to the left screen so I can see what it was doing as I hit a breakpoint (no more white screen leaving you guessing what was going on at that point), my main monitor holds the ide so I can see the code at that point, and the right-hand one usually holds the webpage I'm referencing. It costs a bit more to get set up, but it is sooo worth it.

I must say, the bit about the steak knife made me twitch. :omg:

Erm, so what's your point exactly? That the US is the big bad wolf or what? What are you trying to tell us?

Dude. Read some books. Think. Learn. There are no shortcuts.

I'm currently in the middle of a pdf project, and have found that this http://itextsharp.sourceforge.net/ does everything that I could possibly need, including reading/filling out form fields forms and whatnot. Not very tricky at all, as the clever blokes who wrote it have already figured it out. Hope that helps...:)

Hi all, I have a cosmetic problem which is that whenever I get an email from my boss, it's always in capitals. I personally was brought up to believe (or at least I grew to learn) that such a thing is akin to standing 1 meter away from someone and spraying spittle all over them whilst shouting as if they were deaf. What do I do? This guy pays my wages, and I have tried subtly numerous times over the years to correct the behaviour, but to no avail. We can't blame lousy screens, as he also has a thing about getting the latest and greatest gadetry in, so we generally have multi-monitor setups to rival your average sci-fi hollywood movie type of thing. I've tried to explain many times that CapitalisingEveryOtherWord works well in source code, but generally get back a comment which says THERE MIGHT BE A PROBLEM IN CAPITALISINGEVERYOTHERWORD . Dunno about you, but my mind wants to go on holiday when I see that. Is there anything I can do, or is it a lost cause. (Btw, he should wear glasses, but generally doesn't) Aha. We have found the end of the world. Um, actually no, it's New Zealand on a sunday...

Proxomitron is really nice, but it's lacking in certain areas. A better one IMHO is Privoxy http://www.privoxy.org/[^] To me it seems much more customisable, and the advantage there is an open browser interface, which allows easy insertion of special rules. If you couple that with Firefox http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ [^]and the Adblock extension https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=10&application=firefox[^] you'll be able to reduce the noise level down to nearly zero. You can also chain Proxomitron and Privoxy together, which makes the internet look like a text page (mostly) if sheer speed is what you're after (without resorting to lynx http://lynx.browser.org/[^])

Thanks everyone, I feel much better knowing I'm not abnormal. I guess I can call myself a programmer now. It's hard being stuck out all alone in an obscure corner of the world, not really knowing what direction I should take, but thanks to this site, and the wonderful people who make it what it is, I feel as if I'm making progress. Thank you all!:rose: