Convert to Pastafarianism (no, it's not Italian)

Reading this article on digg, I began searching the web for this very cool religion called Pastafarianism and I feel that it relates to me in a very spiritual way. In other words, it makes me laugh my ass off!

As you can read in the Wikipedia article, the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the world (or is it the other way around?) in order to prove to idiots that you either think or you believe. There is no middle ground. Thinking requires trusting your observations, emitting theories and then validating them by using observed data. Believing doesn't require anything, therefore being easier to do, and can (and most of the time will) deny your ability to observe, your capacity to reason or to grasp reality and look down on your desire to understand anything that is believed.

Well, seriously now. One cannot believe the world was created by the Spaghetti Monster... Or maybe one can, as long as they accept the obvious fact that the Spagetti Monster was created by the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

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Copying a database from Sql2005 to Sql2000

You sometimes need to copy the exact structure of a database to an Sql2000 server, even if the source server is 2005.

Follow these steps:

• open 2005 Sql Server Management Studio


• right click on the offending database and go to Tasks -> Generate Scripts


• do NOT check Script all objects in the selected database


• click Next


• set Include if NOT EXISTS to False


• set Script for Server Version to SQL Server 2000


• try to check only the objects and types of objects you actually need


• create the script


• delete all occurences of "WITH (PAD_INDEX = OFF, STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF, ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS = ON, ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS = ON)" from the generated script

Now the script should work on an SQL 2000 Server..
For the copying of data, the Server Management Studio has an option called Copy DatabaseExport Data, also in Tasks, that now accepts an Sql 2000 Server as destination.

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Slave culture

In the Romanian jargon there is an insult: slave. It appeared ten years or so ago and it stuck. It probably came from Gypsy talk, probably holding more meaning to them, since they were liberated from slavery and into the worst social problem Romania has. But at least the cool ones are not slaves anymore, even if they recreate daily the hated cliche of the typical Gypsy Roma and are stuck in the mentality that work is somehow a shameful act.

But the word is also used by Romanians. You might see young people that have a little business or a scheme to get money quickly use it to refer to the people that are employed somewhere and go to work every day. And they are somehow right, since a lot of the rich people in Romania, business owners, top managers, land owners, etc. are uneducated folks. Instead of going to school, they chose to fight, risk, learn in the school of life. And it shows. They have a lot of money and no manners. They have a lot of opportunities, but don't really use them. They are no longer rude people with no money, they have money now, but are stuck into being the same people they started with. Kind of like the joke where the anus wanted to be the manager of the body.

How about the slave, then? The guy that goes to school, goes through all the (mechanical) motions of learning, passing exams, getting a job, living a "normal" life? Well, we are mostly wasting our time. The money we get are what we need to live, maybe even enough to get a car or, if one is lucky, an apartment. People like us spend their entire lives surviving and dreaming about what we would do if we had more money. Meanwhile, we lose 8 hours a day working, 3 preparing and going to work, 7 sleeping, 1 or 2 eating and are left with 4-5 hours in which to do "what we like". If that isn't slavery, I don't know what is, but in all that time we make the system work.

Slimy manager types that themselves work for uneducated bullies that somehow got into fortune work in the system as well. Poor 'unslavy' thieves occasionally steal something, thus making policemen work all day and accept bribes. Businesses run into the political framework maintained by corrupt politicians who themselves obey the laws of economics, which are heavily influenced by the people from other countries, who themselves are only cogs in this great machine we call humanity. And of course, all those good managers that work for great people and all the Gypsies that go to school and work and all those politicians who actually want to make a difference, too.

This is no freedom, we are all slaves. We allow ourselves to be blinded by a value system, be it invented by us or just stolen from someone else, and we live by it. We all choose our swords and then we let ourselves die by them. True freedom is inside, not outside, it's in the dreams, not in their realisation. I might even venture on saying that it's in the quantity of the dreams, not their quality, because that is what enslaves us, dreaming of a single thing, being desperate to achieve it and then to hold on to it.

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Changes to the blog...

I need your input, readers dear! I've changed the blog so that when you double click on a word a google window appears that you can expand, close or scroll at your leaisure. Do you like it? Would you like to dblclick and search this blog instead? Or maybe digg or something? Do you hate it? You want it removed? Does it hinder you in any way? Thanks.

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Simplify Programmatic File Access - by John Cronan

I've found this interesting article by John Cronan about using the Abstract Factory pattern to access files, no matter if they are on FTP, HTTP or the local or networked file system. Basically he uses WebRequest.Create rather than any *Stream* class.

Interesting enough, he seems to be the only one providing a solution to the problem of accessing local file system resources when the default access rights do not allow you to, even if the logged on credentials would normally give you the access, thus solving an issue of the FileWebRequest class. Unfortunately he uses P/Invoke, which kind of contradicts the whole "more flexible than thou" approach of the article.

Overall an interesting read which gives you flexibility of file support, while taking away some of the specific advantages like seeking or appending. It's a definitely better approach than StreamReader and the ugly "URI formats are not supported." error.

A bonus for using this method is that it is compatible with the Office 2007/Vista Open Packaging addressing model, by way of the PackWebRequest class.

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Free energy?

I've just finished watching "Free Energy - the Race to Zero Point", which is a documentary of sorts listing ideas of ways to produce free energy with open systems, or getting a lot more efficiency than present systems. The speakers are authors of controversial books and editors at magazines names as crackpotty as possible. The narrator himself looks like a Hitchcock wannabe, presenting the end of the world. Heck, the film is not even listed on Imdb, therefore this blog entry.
But, even if I am mostly convinced that this is a piece of sensationalist propaganda and not true science, I am left wondering how much (if any) of this is truly real? Did Moray have a device that lit up light bulbs without fuel or batteries? Are the numerous inventors presented there just crackpots or do they have something? I find it difficult to believe that all video proof that was presented in the movies was faked. Why would they?
Yet most of all I resonated with the idea that is, unfortunately for this movie, presented by all featured people: economic interests reign supreme and devices that don't need to be connected to power grids, use oil or that can be regulated by established industries are not only avoided, but actively attacked. It does make sense, doesn't it?

So, without further due, here are some start up links from Wikipedia to help you make your own mind:
Zero-point energy
The Casimir effect
The Hutchison effect
Thomas Henry Moray
Cold fusion
Electrostatic levitation

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Do you know what a flu pandemic is? Do you know how many and when did they occur?

Well, I don't. I was first shocked to find out that the 1918 "Spanish" Flu pandemic killed 50 million people and I found out about it only in my twenties. Now I see that the pandemics are recurring events, there are lists with the virus strains and where they originated, while information from before 1900 is unreliable since medicine was not really.


Check out this link that shows a history of flu strains and the three flu pandemics from the last century.

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