As for motion sickness, I highly recommend the patch you stick behind your ear. It lasts around three days and is good for ships and planes. There are some minor side-effects, but worth it.

Time is closing in on my SQL “holiday”, and I’m still watching videos and reading. This is less exciting than cruising the Caribbean, but I’m still learning interesting things.

Both of these pieces are available on my Original Writing page. “The Kid” was the prepared piece.

1. The fattest knight at King Arthur’s round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from eating too much pi.

2. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.

3. She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still.

4. A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class, because it was a weapon of math disruption.

5. No matter how much you push the envelope, it’ll still be stationery.

6. A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.

7. A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.

8. Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.

9. A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it.

10. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

11. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

12. Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other: ‘You stay here; I’ll go on a head.’

13. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.

14. A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: ‘Keep off the Grass’.

15. The midget fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.

16. The soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.

17. A backward poet writes inverse.

18. In a democracy it’s your vote that counts. In feudalism it’s your count that votes.

19. When cannibals ate a missionary, they got a taste of religion.

20. If you jumped off the bridge in Paris, you’d be in Seine.

21. A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at him and says, ‘I’m sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger.’

22. Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One turns to the other and says ‘Dam!’

23. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can’t have your kayak and heat it too.

24. Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says, ‘I’ve lost my electron.’ The other says ‘Are you sure?’ The first replies, ‘Yes, I’m positive’.

25. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? His goal: transcend dental medication.

26. There was the person who sent ten puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.

His blog has a walkthrough in SQL Server Management Studio if you prefer the GUI.

[Note: If you copy and paste this code, please be sure to check the quotation marks. WordPress may change them to non-standard format.]

Using TSQL you can execute the following statement to increase to 99 files, simply change 99 to how ever many files you would like to retain.

USE [master];
GO

EXEC xp_instance_regwrite N’HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE’, N’Software\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\MSSQLServer’, N’NumErrorLogs’, REG_DWORD, 99;
GO

Last week I realised that twelve years brings with it a new era: the death of anything before Windows XP, and the rise of Windows Vista 7, with 8 on the horizon.

So I of course threw out a whole lot of compatibility code. A whole lot of Windows 2000 compatibility code. And that breathed some fresh air into my code. Why? Because obviously every single version of Windows out there (assuming it is reasonably up to date), comes with a command-line tool called:

shutdown.exe

And it’s built right into the operating system!

Ah, competition, I hear you cry. But no. I am of the firm belief that I can use this to my advantage. Instead of writing an entire command-line tool that does everything Windows does already (relying on the existence of shutdown.exe), I can leverage it (don’t you hate that word?) and simply tell my ShutOff 2000 graphical user interface to use that one instead of mine.

ShutOff 2000, I hear you cry? Isn’t that the venerable Visual Basic 6 application?

Why, yes, you hear me cry. Twelve years on, it makes sense to keep the name, instead of trying to chase the calendar. I’ve gone through a wide number of names for this tool: ShutOff MX, ShutOff NX, ShutOff 2004, ShutOff 2006, ShutOff 2007, ShutOff 2008, ShutOff 2010, and most recently, ShutOff 2011. As December drew nearer, I realised I was being foolish by chasing ShutOff 2012. It would be old in a year.

With ShutOff 2000, the brand is there, and comes with twelve years of history and nostalgia! It’s in search engines. Just bump up to a major version number and be done with it.

Users of the older software will have to manually uninstall it, but because of the magic of the compatibility code I left in the new one, it picks up the old one’s settings right out of the Windows registry. Oh, and because you need Administrative privileges to shut down a computer, this tool won’t run at a lower level.

The biggest failing of ShutOff 2000 as it exists today, is that it needs to be running for it to work. It can only run when you’re logged in. So no unattended shutdowns. That sucks.

But ShutOff 2000 version 3, in all its C# and .NET glory, is just a nice front-end for the Windows Task Scheduler, with a few neat features that you’ll miss if you don’t have them. The Task Scheduler just runs a series of switches behind the built-in shutdown.exe (or shutoff.exe if you choose my command-line tool for whatever reason). And that’s as simple as that. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I’m just reusing bits of Windows that are already there, to make your life a little easier.

Sure, you could write the same thing in your sleep, and it’s really easy to do, and that’s no lie, but the difference is that I’ve already done the work. All you need to do is download it.

Here’s some more news: as promised, as soon as ShutOff 2000 version 3 is released, the source code for ShutOff 2000 version 2 (written in Visual Basic 6) will become open source, under the MIT License, just like my other projects, NCANE.COM and SimplePHP ToWordPressConverter. There’s a special bonus in there too: I was working on ShutOff 2000 v2.8.7, which had an improved update feature, allowing you to choose where to save your files. Pretty darn cool, if I say so myself. Fresh code that I compiled this very evening.

I learnt long ago never to announce release dates unless I wanted embarrassment. So it’ll be ready when it’s ready. That said, however, I’ll be updating the page on itsol.co.za with the latest beta.

To save you from mocking me, I’m not posting the advert here. M took a video on his iPhone and posted it to Facebook. If you are in our respective circles, you can find it there.

(He also sent me to this Dave Coulier shrine.)