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The cheap-priced national airline Flying Finn is about to file its bankruptcy application tomorrow. Naturally, those 20000 tickets already booked are on shaky ground if the company operations are stopped abruptly.
What is interesting is that the Finnish Consumer Agency noted that if the plane tickets have been bought with credit card, the credit card company must pay back the price of the tickets. However, should the tickets have been bought with plain cash, then it is up to the buyer to claim his or her money directly from the company.
Personally, I would have thought that the CC company isn’t liable in this kind of situation, but apparently it is. Another reason to use plastic instead of cash.
Luckily, I don't need to drink all that booze I've bought over the last three days. Instead, the people attending my housewarming party on Friday will get their chance to destroy all the bottles.
But all this reminds me of how expensive all alcohol is. The taxes will be lowered in March, but that probably won't be visible much. And even if it would, I don't think I'm going to drink any more than I'm today (which isn't much).
NASA's second Mars rover, Opportunity, has landed safely on the Red Planet.
The first pics are available as I write this, and the views are different from those sent back by Spirit.
Good luck there, my boy!
The Mars rover Spirit has had its troubles communicating back to Earth. Luckily, at least some data has been retrieved today.
NASA's engineers think the problem could be a caused by a software glitch. Though this is only one of the possible reasons, I hope this won't be the real reason. If nothing else, I don't want to hear that a superb mission on another planet to crash because of software bugs!
Damn, Spirit, stay alive there!
I had the time to install and test the new Winamp 5 today. The user interface looks appealing at least to me, and the color scheme is easy to change.
However, I'm still missing the "Repeat This Song" feature. Sure, you can enable manual playlist advancing, but this is not what I want. I want to repeat one song forever until I choose another song.
Also, the enqueue feature could work the same as it did in Winamp 3. I would like to see the next-playing song, so that I could decide which songs play next without customizing the playlist all the time.
But one cannot get all. Winamp 5 is very nice as it is.
Too much is too much. Now the dieting frenzy has gone so far as to note that orange juice is bad for you because it contains so much sugar.
On what is one supposed to live, then? On water and salt, maybe? I soon start to become sick of all this weight loss thing. And thank God, I don't have the need to lose any weight!
I bought some PAR-38 spotlights from Eurolite and a fog machine from Acme just lately.
Today I placed some fluid in the fogger and turned the thing on. Then, I directed the smoke onto the lights. Visual, man!
Of course, I couldn't resist taking some photos as well. Looks like they are going to be groovy pics. Cannot wait to develop them.
Most of you know that I'm a Delphi advocate, but the most recent version of Delphi 8 for .NET is very buggy.
If nothing else, this lack of quality detoriates my feelings and makes it harder to believe to the future of the product.
For instance, I just installed Delphi 8 into one of my machines, started a WinForms project, and saved it. Next, I naturally tried to compile it. But this didn't work, and all I got was this error:
Access violation at address 0981C07B in module 'dcc71il.dll'. Read of address 0E628000.
Trying to compile again causes the compiler to enter an endless loop without the possibility to cancel the operation. The only way to stop is to kill Delphi using the Windows Task Manager.
Bad, very bad.
I recently needed to build a search engine using Delphi and InterBase 7.
At first, I thought I couldn't use the InterBase LIKE search method, since I had the impression that it was slow. It turned out to be the other way around!
Also, the new ROWS clause in the SELECT statement helps limiting the results of the query.
Two of my articles just got published in both Hardcore Delphi and the Finnish Tietokone magazine.
I today got my first chance to get in touch with Visual Studio .NET 2003. It looks very smooth, but I must say I'm already missing the refractoring features that are planned for the next release.
Compared to Delphi 8 .NET and C#Builder 1.0, the Visual Studio is ahead in the IDE area. That is sad, because I feel the IDE is the thing that is ultimately the most important.
The .NET class System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings seems to be interesting. Looks like this class gives one easy access to the settings in the application configuration file.
But the question is: can this class somehow be used in normal applications, say in WinForms applications. That question remains still open.
The Spirit rover has some very sharp eyes. If you go to the JPL web site, you can download the latest pictures.
For example, I downloaded a 24 MB TIFF image showing martian terrain in glorifying red. Makes a brilliant desktop background, I just changed mine!
I'm naturally very happy that NASA makes those pictures available to the general public in such high resolution. Good service!
It was nice visiting Linköping after a while, though it was pretty odd that you had to fly through Copenhagen to get there.
Borland Together seems to be a nice product, and very useful as well. However, I had the time to test Delphi 8 as well during the training, and I must say I'm depressed by the code editor's quality. Too many bugs in core functionality.
It is even more difficult to hold the candle high with this version.
Now, I bought a candleholder made of glass from the Copenhagen airport. It's lime in color and it looks very nice on black background. It would have made a great gift as well, so who knows?
The forthcoming release of .NET 2.0 (or whatever it will be named) really looks like a killer. Now, I'm pretty sure that you will also need the latest version of Visual Studio .NET to get your hands dirty with all those new features.
MSDN has an "peek" article about the soon-here release of Visual Studio .NET "Whidbey". It really looks interesting.
Borland, take note! I wanna see the same features in Delphi .NET and C#Builder.
Well, I found my old Synth Classics vinyl compilation from the '90s, and put one of the discs onto my Technics. As the needle hit Joe Meek's Telstar, I couldn't but just marvel. Just an awesome, happy tune with a capital T! Get thee a copy, I say.
Another hit pick for today is the "Secure Coding Guidelines for the .NET Framework", available on MSDN.
Finally some pics from Mars!
The pictures showing the martian soil remind me of those rocky deserts in Arizona and Nevada I saw last year.
According to the reports, NASA's Spirit Mars rover has survived the rough landing.
That is great news! I'm waiting for the pics to see what it's like in the Gusev Crater.
NASA's Stardust spacecraft made a great success yesterday night, capturing comet dust and taking awesome pics. I hope the dust container will safely return to Earth in 2006.
I cannot but just wonder the precision the craft was able to maintain during its five-year journey. Mathematics and engineering at their best, I reckon.
More pics should be available on NASA's web site soon.
Like Don Box put it, "I must be the last one to notice that the Longhorn SDK is available online."
Indeed it is. I must say I'm excited about WinFX and Longhorn, but it seems I have to wait until 2005 or even 2006.
While waiting for Longhorn, there's lot to study in .NET. All one needs is time.
The Borland Post-conference CD finally arrived by mail yesterday, and since it's a holiday today, I had time to browse it.
As I'm anxious to learn more about .NET, I went straight to the Proceedings page, and there clicked ".NET". To my disappointment, a blank page was displayed!
Indeed, the link:
file:///E:/borcon2003/bdn.borland.com/borcon2003/.net/0,1418,10104,00.html
...pointed to a non-existed file! Next, I tried to figure out other ways to get to the content, but each time I opened a .NET-related PowerPoint slide show, the only thing I got was script errors in my browser. Not good.
But, I finally figured a way to solve the problem, since everything on the CD is also available on-line, you just have to know where to look!
To fix all the errors, replace the URL part "file:///E:/borcon2003/" simply with "http://".
For instance, all the .NET proceedings are available here:
http://bdn.borland.com/borcon2003/.net/0,1418,10104,00.html
Mobile development seems interesting enough to study. If you know .NET, MSDN has a quick reference for you that shows what's different in .NET Compact Framework (CF).
Happy New Year 2004!
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