Ok so who has held down a job the shortest length of time? :) Anyone got a record in hours?

Thinking about the subject of providing state information to an AI agent, I thought back to the days when text based games were all the rage like Granny's Garden "You are in a room, it has four walls, your are facing North etc". I remember that this was available for the RM Nimbus (great machine) and the Acorn BBC. First question, did the BBC (and variants of) make it across the pond to America? Secondly, what is the wackiest and/or most ingenious use anyone can remember that was made of the superb user port? I will never forget the time I watched an episode Blue Peter (UK Kids TV programme) that had a toilet which prompted you to close the lid/flushed for you etc. Best thing was, when the camera panned back, you saw two school kids sitting behind the toilet, controlling it with a BBC Micro..... :omg: Best thing I created was a BBC controlled converybelt, filled up cans moving along and had a little GUI showing status on the screen... Anyone better it? :-D

I have to agree with Ted, we are also a relatively new/small company (3 years trading now) and got badly burned. Like you, I would probably claim to talk the talk etc but the chap we hired knew his stuff and had some good experience. Trouble was that when we gave him a problem to solve he would make a start and then quickly get lost and give up with it ending up me holding his hand. It happened time and time again, wasting my time and his time. In the end he decided to go but I think the moral of the story is that even if someone can program it doesn't mean they can problem solve "wider world" problems. I am now all for doing an Apollo 13 "round peg in the square hole" test! :-D

Have you tried www.freevcs.de? Made for Delphi but we use it with out commercial VC dev work. It's free, and works very well without being intrusive. Cheers, James.

Got a team of programmers working on a project? Are you someone who thinks source control is for those who can't copy files between machines without losing work? We did and then found FreeVCS. We tried sourcesafe, CVS and a host of other commercial solutions but this little freeware source control program is superb! Unfortunately, the developer seems to have stopped working on it now, but the software is in excellent shape and is far less intrusive and easy to use than many products out there now. Just thought people might like to know if, like us you are struggling to find something decent. http://www.thensle.de/index.htm Hope it helps. James.

Hi, Can anyone put me on the right road to sending messages over the msn network, either by using the appropriate protocol or manipulating the client? Best of all, does anyone know of any APIs that have been developed for the purpose? Cheers, James

Hi all, I know this is probably a stupidly simple question but if anyone can give me an answer or point me to a tutorial I'd appreciate it. I have created a COM object that plays animation files. What I need to be able to so is talk to the object from the server to play the next frame etc. How do I reference the COM object so I can use one of it's methods? Am I looking at this all wrong? Cheers for the help. James.

Hi all, I recently wrote some code for a company to import contacts into Outlook from an access database. This cannot be done via Import. My problem is that with the VBA code running at a stupidly slow speed through a macro I decided to use Visual C++ and automate Outlook. It runs much better but I have one problem, how do I add extra user properties to an outlook contact? The code in VBA is: Set Prop = c.UserProperties.Add("Yours", olText) How do you do it in C++ though? Any help appreciated. Cheers, James.

Hi all, I recently wrote some code for a company to import contacts into Outlook from an access database. This cannot be done via Import. My problem is that with the VBA code running at a stupidly slow speed through a macro I decided to use Visual C++ and automate Outlook. It runs much better but I have one problem, how do I add extra user properties to an outlook contact? The code in VBA is: Set Prop = c.UserProperties.Add("Yours", olText) How do you do it in C++ though? Any help appreciated. Cheers, James.