Any software developer will be able to tell tales of bug reports that don’t give enough information to reproduce the problem. My all-time favourite said just this: “When you take off from the aircraft carrier in the F4 Phantom, it crashes.” Not an unusual scenario - a complex flight-sim written entirely in 80×86 assembler tends to either work perfectly, or crash.
Why are hardware manufacturers so incompetent when it comes to software? The wonderful message below was followed by three more equally insane error dialogs.
This excellent piece of work raised a smile - the first level of Super Mario Bros implemented very neatly in Javascript. It’s 35K for the whole lot, compressed down to 14K. For comparison, the small screenshot in the article is 24K!
How do you make web browsing faster on a GPRS connection? The answer seems to be by injecting huge blocks of javascript into pages, turning 6KB of well-formed XHTML into 23KB of junk that refuses to render because it’s invalid.
It turns out I was wrong about the annual day of snow, as we had some proper snow today complete with snowballs and a snowman. Only the chickens failed to get into the spirit of things, refusing to come out of their house.
If the image looks odd, it’s a result of me inexpertly playing with multiple exposures to create an HDR image using qtpfsgui.
Phil Wilson’s Venus cache browser, aka wxVenus, shown here running on XP after a bit of tweaking. Specifically, in CacheMunger.py, s/planet_http_status/http_status/. The only other step necessary to get it to run is to set VENUS_DIR, CACHE_DIR and SOURCE_DIR appropriately at the top of MainFrame.py.
Appropriately, the screenshot is showing the cache of Sam’s post which interrupted my previous thought process by informing me about wxVenus via XMPP. Back to work…
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I managed to catch up with a few requests for Hardwar technical information this evening. Various updates can be found in the usual place. I still have a few in the queue, so if I didn’t get round to yours, send it again. More than once if you’re in a hurry!
As the screenshot (click for full size) shows, I’ve also managed to compile a working version of RefMax, which was used to edit the 3D models, terrain, etc. Although progress has been made before editing and creating models without this by converting the game data to different formats, several people expressed an interest in getting hold of ‘the real thing’. It seems to work fine with the data you can extract from the game resource files. I’ll upload a copy when I’ve put together some basic instructions for setting it up and using it, but if anyone is keen to try it, let me know and it will encourage me to get round to it.
Technology issues at the National Grid web site, it would seem, according to the 60 second page load times and resulting SQL Server/ASP.NET errors pictured right. (Click to zoom)
A point worth repeating from Bill de hÓra’s recent post is:
“This is not an architecture thing, but please don’t use primary keys in URLs. Doing so fails to encapsulate the implementation details of the software/persistence from the web; pks aren’t a basis for stable URLs.”
Read in conjunction with Noah Slater’s comment at the end, and don’t overlook the irony of the primary key in the URL of my own post. 
Just a few notes from personal experience rather than any attempt at a formal (or fair) comparison. I’ve been using VMWare Server fairly extensively for a while for various tasks, including quick and portable server provisioning, repeatable testing and general virtual machines for experimentation. Although I’ve had a few minor issues, in general it’s been a rock solid platform for me. Recently I was forced to use Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 for a particular task, and I’m not quite so keen on that.