Execute a Teacher For Naming A Teddy Bear?

KHARTOUM, Sudan - Thousands of Sudanese, many armed with clubs and knives, rallied Friday in a central square and demanded the execution of a British teacher convicted of insulting Islam for allowing her students to name a teddy bear “Muhammad.”

The protesters streamed out of mosques after Friday sermons, as pickup trucks with loudspeakers blared messages against Gillian Gibbons, the teacher who was sentenced Thursday to 15 days in prison and deportation. She avoided the more serious punishment of 40 lashes.

They massed in central Martyrs Square outside the presidential palace, where hundreds of riot police were deployed. They did not try to stop the rally, which lasted about an hour.

“Shame, shame on the U.K.,” protesters chanted.

They called for Gibbons’ execution, saying, “No tolerance: Execution,” and “Kill her, kill her by firing squad.”

The women’s prison where Gibbons is being held is far from the square.

What in the name of everything holy is wrong with these crazy people in Sudan?  A British teacher working in Sudan allowed a student to name a bear Muhammad, and now everyone is going crazy, they have put her in jail, and there are protesters everywhere with knives, axes, ect, chanting for her execution.  I’m honestly surprised that these morons didn’t beat the child half to death for naming the bear that.  Its  ignorant governments like this that make me glad our military is far superior to theirs, else we might have some crazy rule like this.

I think we should all get teddy bears, stitch the name Muhammad on there, and mail them over to the Sudan government.  If they can protest with guns and knives, we can protest with teddy bears.  I understand the religious significance of Muhammad, and while I am a Christian,   I have all the respect in the world for them to believe how they want.  That right to believe the way they wish does not extend into the possible execution of an INNOCENT, person who allowed a child to name a teddy bear Muhammad.  Its a child! If you are not as outraged as I am by the way Sudan has handled this situation, something is wrong with you.

I say this to you government of Sudan, get over yourselves, show a little understanding.  Would your prophet want you acting like ignorant savages because a child named a teddy bear after him?  I think not.

World Of Warcraft Thoughts

I have recently started playing wow again, and it amazes me how easy ti is to get completely addicted to it.  WoW has an economy that rivals some small countries, and its really interesting.  I read articles before that they were using MMO games for research on economic properties, growths, ect.

Anyway, I had an old priest on my account, around lvl 37 or so, and I have brought him up to lvl 41 as of last night.  I did a run through RFD and I am amazed at how well I can deal DPS.  I was the number two damage dealer for our instance of 5 ppl.  I am not an expert player, and while many of you are, I prefer to just play casually.  This is a great game for either type of person, the only problem I have with the game is that its too addictive!

More info later, gotta run!

6 Things To Consider When Buying A Laptop

Many people are clueless around the holidays, and are purchasing a computer for a relative. I will try to briefly go over a few things you should consider when looking for a laptop to purchase.

1. New or Used? If you don’t know much about computers, and don’t know someone you trust who can help you, then I would advise you against buying used. While Ebay can be great, there are just too many things to consider for a novice computer purchaser such as yourself. You are much safer with your new computer that has a warranty, customer support, and has never been used, dropped, had anything spilled on it.

2. Processor? The processor is the brain of the computer, and can greatly affect the overall speed of the computer. At the time of this writing, Intel Core 2 Duo processors are probably the best choice for you, Although I would personally prefer one of the new Althlon 64 bit Core 2’s. The main thing is to really avoid the Celeron and go with a good core 2 processor, be it the Intel or the AMD. Typically, a processor a few notches under the fastest one available is the most cost effective per mHz. So shoot for something in that area.

3 . Hard Drive? The Capacity of the hard drive will be measured in Gigabytes (GB). This is important and what most people look for. I would personally want something at least 200GB. There are other things to consider as well though, the type of hard drive, be it IDE or SATA. SATA is more desirable. The RPM of the hard drive is a good indicator of performance as well. You will see something like “Hard Drive: 300GB Sata … 7200 RPM.” The higher the RPM, the faster the drive spins, and the better your seek time will typically be.

4. Graphics Card? To game or not to game, That is the question. If the person your purchasing the laptop for will be using it for gaming, then you should look for a good graphics card. If you can get something in the 256 MB range with the word NVIDIA, you should be fine.

5. Memory? This should be DDR2, and should be 1GB or more. That fancy super fast processor will be sitting still if you don’t have the RAM to support it. Its like taking a fancy corvette and putting watery gas in it, its just not going to run well.

6. Other? Make sure the screen is a decent size. Most of the new laptops will have good screens. You want a DVD / CD Burner, so make sure it has one. It should have integrated wireless internet, and most of them these days will. You may want to think about getting an extra battery as well. The average laptop today will only run around 3 hours on battery power alone. Make sure there is a good warranty with the laptop as well, and find out if something like spillage is covered.

There are many other things to think about as well, but I hope I have given you a few things to consider.

Review of Germ by Robert Liparulo

A book about a strain of ebola virus that can be genetically targeted to specific people based on DNA, what could be better?  This was a very good read, Although I want to warn you that the book is more about the potential of the virus, and about the main characters, and really follows their struggles more than it follows the virus.  The main characters are well done, and the assassin Atropos is so fascinating.   You won’t ever be rooting for the bad guys, but you do get a good understanding of them, how they think, why they do what they do.  The guy wears around a black gauntlet that he uses to carry out many of his assassinations,  he only watches TV in scan mode, where the channel changes every few seconds, because it keeps his mind sharp.  How is that not interesting?  The book is really well paced, and I never found myself bored or disinterested.   The CDC agent Julia has an amazing personality, and you cant help but be a little smitten with her.  I recommend this book to anyone interested in this type of subject matter, and I plan on reading some other works written by Mr. Liparulo.

Gas Prices At 5 dollars per gallon

With prices reaching nearly 100 per/barrel let’s think for a moment what this would do to the economy.  Since I am an average person I can tell you how I believe it would affect me.  I would cut back on the out of town driving trips, and the joyriding, and I would probably complain profusely every time I had to fill my little car up with gas and it cost me over 50 bucks…but thats about it.  I don’t believe it would drastically change my life, cause me to be homeless, or anything like that.  I might even start riding a bicycle to work and get more exercise and save money on gas.

But, not everyone is like me, not all of you live just a mere 2 miles from your place of employment, in fact, some of you commute for 60+ miles one way to go to work.  How would this affect someone like that?  I suspect that many of these commuting jobs would cease to exist amid an economy like that.  I want to know what you think…

Internet Providers Blocking Torrent Traffic

I dont’ know what is going on with the world today, or how much sway the MPAA and RIAA have, but apparently its quite a bit. I have been reading lately how certain ISP’s are attempting to block or cause problems with torrent traffic. This is totally unacceptable in my opinion. Its bad enough when they block certain ports, prevent web servers from running, ect. This is crossing the line in my opinion. To advertise things like “unlimited use” and “fastest internet” and then turn around and start packet sniffing and filtering is just bad business. I will not use an ISP that does this, and I hope that many of you out there will feel the same way. There are many valid torrents out there than do not violate copy write protection, like linux ISO’s, many of the files we share for projects ect, nearly all of the open source programs…the list goes on. I feel like we are a piece of stone that is just gradually getting chipped away, and I want to know if we are going to stand up and draw the line in the sand, or just keep letting things like this happen.

Check out this chart from azureus wiki.

http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs#United_States_of_America

Setting Field Properties In An Access DB

I came across an interesting problem the other day, and I thought I would share the solution.  I have a software that is publicly sold, that uses a VB.NET front end with an access back end.   I realize that I need to make an update, and that part of this update needs to involve me changing the field properties for a specific field.  Changing from an integer to a double is no problem, but I needed to change the ‘Format’ for the field from NULL to a percent.  There are no SQL commands that can do this as one might think.  UPDATE Table Update Column will allow you to change from int to double, but you can’t touch the ‘Format’ of the field through this.  After you do a little investigation as I did, you will realize that you must do this directly in the database file itself!

The microsoft documentation has the following to say about this:

Most of the properties you can set for DAO objects are DAO properties. These properties are defined by the Microsoft Jet database engine … Some properties that you can set for DAO objects are defined by Microsoft Access, and aren’t automatically recognized by the Jet database engine. How you set properties for DAO objects depends on whether a property is defined by the Jet database engine or by Microsoft Access.

The solution below is taken from an About.com article, that article can be found in its entirety HERE. This was a great solution to a difficult problem, and I hope this might help someone out in the future.

Format is one of the properties listed for a DAO Field object. That means it should be possible. So let’s get started.

The heart of the process of setting these properties is much like our initial assumption. The code looks like this:

obj.Properties(strName) = varSetting

In the specific case at hand, the object “obj” must point to the specific Access database field that we’re targeting. “strName” is the property we want to set. And “varSetting” is the value we want to give to the property. But it still isn’t as simple as this. Microsoft notes these exceptions that have to be handled like this:

When you set a property that’s defined by Microsoft Access, but applies to a DAO object, the Jet database engine doesn’t automatically recognize the property as a valid property. The first time you set the property, you must create the property and append it to the Properties collection of the object to which it applies. Once the property is in the Properties collection, it can be set in the same manner as any DAO property.

If the property is set for the first time in the user interface, it’s automatically added to the Properties collection, and you can set it normally.

When writing procedures to set properties defined by Microsoft Access, you should include error-handling code to verify that the property you are setting already exists in the Properties collection.

This means that you’re going to have to use some code that does different things depending on whether the property exists in the properties collection known to your VB program. In code, it looks like this.

  Function SetAccessProperty(obj As Object, _
    strName As String, intType As Integer, _
    varSetting As Variant) As Boolean

    Dim prp As Property
    Const conPropNotFound As Integer = 3270

    On Error GoTo ErrorSetAccessProperty
    obj.Properties(strName) = varSetting
    obj.Properties.Refresh
    SetAccessProperty = True

  ExitSetAccessProperty:
    Exit Function

  ErrorSetAccessProperty:
    If Err = conPropNotFound Then
      Set prp = obj.CreateProperty(strName, intType, varSetting)
      obj.Properties.Append prp
      obj.Properties.Refresh
      SetAccessProperty = True
      Resume ExitSetAccessProperty
    Else
      MsgBox Err & ": " & vbCrLf & Err.Description
      SetAccessProperty = False
      Resume ExitSetAccessProperty
    End If
  End Function

Note that error code 3270 tells you that the property has not been added to the collection yet. If this error code is encountered, the property is created with the CreateProperty method and then Append is used to add it to the collection the varSetting value you want.

Here’s an example showing how to use this function. First, assign an object reference to the database and tabledef in you Access database. Then open the database and Call the function. Using the Microsoft Northwind Traders sample database, it looks like this. The CompanyName field of the Customers table has been used because it doesn’t have any Format property in the original Northwind database and it’s easy to see if our program has worked or not. You also have to add a reference to the DAO object library.

To avoid making this an article about Visual Basic format strings, the very simple format string to convert a field to upper case (”>”) is inserted into the Northwind database.

Private Sub Command1_Click()
    Dim dbs As DAO.Database
    Dim tdfNew As TableDef
    Dim strTableName As String
    Dim strFilePath As String

    strFilePath = "{insert the path to your Northwind database}\Nwind.mdb"

    Set dbs = DBEngine(0).OpenDatabase(strFilePath)
    Set tdfNew = dbs.TableDefs("Customers")

    SetAccessProperty tdfNew.Fields("CompanyName"), "Format", 10, ">"
End Sub

Here’s the Customers table of the Northwind database before running the program.

After running the program, a check of the date of the Nwind.mdb file will show that the file itself has been updated, and the same view of the Customers table shows that the new Format property is in effect.

Heroes Episode Thoughts

Heroes really blew my mind tonight.  I loved how he put L in the bucket of water when she woke up and she shocked herself.  We learned a lot of important things in tonights episode, mainly that the person who has been killing off all of the group that heroe’s dad was in is adam (takeno kensai).

I really wonder how this will affect Mohinder’s morality in future episodes, as I think this will really change him.  I wonder if he will try to get away from the company or what.  And we know from the last episode that Adam and Peter became friends when they were being held, so thats why Hero had the sword to perter’s neck in the teaser for next weeks show.  I think hero is going to be wanting revenge for his fathers death.

WOW, this was definately a great episode.. What did everyone else think?

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Review of Confessor by Terry Goodkind

First of all I would just like to say wow! I am a big fan of epic fantasy, and have read nearly all the big ones, and have followed several of these to the end, and I have to say that Mr. Goodkind does a great job with tying everything together in the end. I won’t spoil anything for anyone, but some of the great things in this book are the new details about Ja La. You really get an insight into the game and how Richard and his team begin to play differently. Gratch is in this one! All the important characters, and we even get a confrontation between Six and Shota!

This was a great ending to an awesome series. I have to say though that when I finish on of these series that takes 10+ years to complete, I always find myself feeling melancholy. I develop a huge affinity for the characters, they almost become real. To me, that more than anything is the sign of a great writer. I salute you Mr. Goodkind, and hope you will continue to write more great works of art in the future.