The Blog of Lucien Stals

So tommorow, we will be meeting in BA912. That's on the 9th floor of the BA building. I think the escalators only go to the 8th floor, so you'll need to use the elevator.

Sorry about the last notice.

I also want to mention that tomorrow will be open to any ICT student that wants to come along. No need to be a ByteClub member to join in the fun.

No Train No Gain, has the following quote:

“ACS president Edward Mandla says …He is concerned that many academics still think the technology sector is all about programming “and it really isn’t - it has moved on, and our industry is rapidly moving towards needing emerging technology skills and needing soft skills”.”It staggers me that students are leaving university without security skills,” Mandla says. “It’s absolutely mind-boggling but they’re coming out not knowing much about emerging technologies either.”"

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read this. The issues quotes above are exactly what we have been trying to do with the PSD course. It really comes as no surprise. I guess we can now take the moral high ground, blow a big raspberry, and say “I told you so”.

ByteClub end of year bash (movies and trivia quizz, with cool prizes) this Thursday (1st December) at 12:00 (noon) in IR212. IR building is on the corner of Henry St and Burwood Rd. Maps available on the Swinburne web site.

Spread the word!

Venue is to be announced, but keep watching this blog for updates.

At 3 pm (aprox), we will have a trivia quiz and awards presentation which hopefully will include some cool prizes. There may even be a small gaming comp, if we can organise it

I will be sending out a bulk email to all registered ByteClub members (hence the playing around on the database. I had to find everyones email addresses) to advise them of this plan.

I always though databases were one of those necessary evils. Something that I didn’t enjoy, but couldn’t ignore. But I was just playing around with the database onTyler (yes, but affraid. But I haven’t droped anything yet) and I’m actualy able to don some pretty cool things.

I was concerned that the db structure I had created, so long ago when Tyler was first booted, was a little lacking, and I wanted to clean it up a bit. In particular, I wanted to move some data from one table into a new table.

INSERT INTO newTable (col1, col2, [coln])
    SELECT col1, col2, [coln]
    FROM oldTable;
ALTER TABLE oldTable DROP col1, col2, [coln];

Works an absolute treat

(Except the extra brackets I had. Removed now. Works better )

really want to get as many people together as we can. What about Pimasters original suggestion of Tuesday or Thursday next week? (29th or the 1st). I think Tuesday is a little too short notice, so how about we shoot for Thursday the 1st of December?

It looks like Wednesday the 7th is better for people so far. Do we want afternoon (3? 4? 5?) or evening (6? 7?). Id prefer earlier rather than later so we can watch a decent length movie and still do a geek trivia quiz with prizes. BTW, I'm trying to see exactly how much money is in the budget so we can get cool prizes!

I was thinking about something in the evening (or afternoon) of Monday the 5th of December. It's not too far off, and is just two days before results are released.

Apart from fun stuff like watching movies (Pimaster has suggested FutureRama. I would like to suggest Star Wrek, in the Pirkinning) and a little awards ceremony, I would like to discuss the future of ByteClub and what we plan to do with it next year.

Please let me know what you think about the date/time.

Also, let me know if you have any suggestions for categories which we could award prizes. Most controversial blogger? Most prolific blogger? Best hair of a ByteClubber (Xavier already won the one and only DHTML challenge). Go crazy! I think we still have a little money in the ByteClub budget, so I may even by some actual prizes

I'm back to using Opera for now. I have been unable to get the Flash plug-ins to work under Firefox 1.5, and it's amazing how many sites I visit that use Flash. I never notices, until it didn't work. Also, some of the plug-ins, like the spell checker, don't seem to be working either. At least with Opera, I can check my spelling (and I need that).

I have subscribed a bunch of our blogs to a tagging service, and placed the resulting cloud on the main blog page. This should give us another way to index/find content. The service takes a bit of time, and it has it limits (I was not able to add everyones blog since there seems to be an undocumented limit to the number of feeds you can add.) If it looks like something that is helpful, we'll look at implementing a local service. That should make it faster, and keep it under our own control

I was having trouble with one of my other blogs. I wanted to update it to the latest version of Wordpress, and the update instructions simply say “Delete your old WP files, saving ones you've modified”. But for some reason, I couldn't delete some of the old files. Several files were locked by another user (in my account?), and I didn't have permission to delete them. So Clinton suggested I write a script and see what kind of permission that ran with. So in about 2 lines of PHP, I managed to delete the whole lot! I guess it's called security

But the upgrade is done and seems to be working fine. I'm keeping an eye on the Wordpress.mu project and think we may move these blogs to wpmu when it matures a bit more.

“Sony BMG, after announcing a recall of some 4.7 million CDs sold with the software, said consumers could mail their CDs to the company, and they would receive a new, unprotected CD in return.” from The Australian

But are they going to release an uninstaller for the spyware they installed? Or is that a “feature” now?