Monkey Boy

My Career

Ever wish you'd chosen another career? If so what?

I wish I worked outside more...you know like a Sport's Illustrated Photographer!

Artificial Artificial Intelligence

It's been a long while since I have posted a Development entry. I had originally intended this blog to be about computer stuff and development but I was just not getting the therapeutic value out of it so I switched to personal drivel. However, this new offering from Amazon, has my little brain reeling, the opportunities it exposes and the underlying evil it could deliver are to put it bluntly, a complete mind fuck.

First the sales pitch techie stuff, and if your not into it just skip straight to the conclusions:
<techie stuff>Have a programming problem that cannot be solved by computer, for instance a web gallery that only accepts photographs depicting flowers? Well Amazon has come up with the concept of 'Artificial Artificial Intelligence'. It is called the Amazon Mechanical Turk and is a web service API where developers submit tasks, approve completed tasks and incorporate the answers into their software. The application sees the transactions as remote procedure calls while in reality the tasks are performed by a network of humans, for a fee of course. The system works on the basis of a small fee for a small amount of work. Say $0.03 to decide whether or not a photograph does indeed depict a flower. Pseudo code to illustrate:

 read (photo);
 photoContainsFlower = callMechanicalTurk(photo);
 if (photoContainsFlower == TRUE) {
   acceptPhoto;
 }
 else {
   rejectPhoto;
 }"</techie stuff>

In short a computer programmer issues an instruction, via a computer program, to another human to complete a task. The programmer does this because at the moment the task can either not be completed by computer or is too expensive to be completed by computer.

So...opportunities...3rd world sweat shops performing simple tasks for basic wages, piece work for students, housewives, pensioners etc who could knock off a couple of tasks a day in their spare time and moonlighting work for insomniacs who could take the 2:00am to 6:00am shift. It's even possible that clever people at some distance from the project, say in Nepal, could automate the task thereby cutting out the humans and in effect solving the original programming problem.

And now...dum...dum...dum the underlying evil...<whisper>...imagine a world where an intelligent banking application (which by virtue of it's position has access to unlimited funds) automatically generates arbitrary and endless tasks that consumes the entire working populations working output...</whisper> Impossible you say well what about Tetris (sooo last millennium) and blogging (soooo Now!)

Did you ever wonder what all the brackets <> </> mean…..well here goes:
An instruction in brackets tells your browser how to display text so <b>means display the next text in bold and </b>means stop displaying it in bold......so<whisper> which your browser doesn’t understand is an instruction to you to read the next lot of information in a whisper and </whisper> means stop….in effect <whisper>you’re already taking instruction, via your computer from me, a programmer..…we've got you whispering </whisper>…….BOO!

Which SQL Service Pack am I running?

There is an elegant way of finding out which version of SQL 2000 is running on a machine. I know this, I have seen it done but every time I am presented with the problem I can't remember how. Usually select @@version eventual drags itself to the conscious part of my brain and I type it in with a flourish. Okay which service pack is 8.00.2039? Let's crawl the web.

This is not very impressive if you have an audience so without further ado here it is the one and only.....

SELECT SERVERPROPERTY('productversion'), SERVERPROPERTY ('productlevel'), SERVERPROPERTY ('edition')

...tada.

(Of all the people involved in developing the SQL product I'd really like to meet the bloke who picked pink to colour the function names.)

VB .Net Web Dialog

My asp .Net projects are created using a single aspx web page which is used to host ascx web controls. This sometimes causes problems when trying to implement seemingly simple functionality. One of the features I struggled with was a popup web dialog that returns a result to the calling page. The examples I could find, yep I program mainly by example…does that make me an exampler, demonstrated this functionality using single web pages only.

So for other examplers I have created a solution that has a web control hosted in a web page calling a web dialog, which itself hosts a web control, and then passes a result back to the calling page. Download PopupDialog.zip

I don’t like long explanations so try the sample and if you can’t make it work drop me a mail, akmercer@gmail.com. Just be warned making this work in your own code is all about detail. To illustrate:

Preventing the web dialog opening another page when you press a button

 <base target=”_self”>

needs to be added to the header section of the dialog holder.

2. Changing the title on the web dialog requires

 <title runat="server" id="PageTitle">

in the header section of the dialog holder and

 Protected PageTitle As New HtmlGenericControl

in the dialog holders code-behind. The IDE will not help you with these additions in fact it keeps trying to take away the “runat=server” attribute.

If you have any comments on this article I would love to hear/read them ONLY IF 1) they contribute to the quality of the code or 2) they are praising the penmanship otherwise browse here -> Maddox loves abuse.

Test Driven Development

I want to get started with test driven development. I have read the article downloaded the essential utilities: NUnit and Testdriven.Net and I am good to go. So what's the problem.........

I am fiddling with weblog themes and schemes instead of doing anything productive.  So click my ads and links like a rabid octupus with an appetite for internet porn (I believe undressed shrimp salad is the latest fetish) and I just may be able to give up my day job and concentrate on the fun stuff.