Want your android phone’s alarm to wake you in the morning? Don’t kill the “clock” process.

I thought that process was just the front-end bit. It seems not. Thank goodness Willow was there to remind me it was time for walkies…

They’ve basically written up alarmist crap that’s worthy of the Daily Mail about the fact that if you use what’s essentially a test program against a single not-particularly-stable server it doesn’t work very well. Big surprise.

Does anyone really use ntpclient like that on a critical production server? I’d have thought configuring ntpd with a few ntp servers wasn’t exactly hard – there’s even a pretty noddy Redhat howto for it. And yet the title of the article (and especially the introduction) suggest that they’ve uncovered a fundamental problem with ntp.

I’m left wondering if timekeeper is a Dr Dobbs product, to be honest.

SELECT x'1fb5';

if you have the hex string stored in a field you can’t do that.

The answer is to use CONV()

ie

SELECT CONV(myhexfield, 16, 10);

It’s that simple.

Edit: they’ve since spotted this, and have made the juice more expensive (it’s now £1.35 or 3 for £4). I’m not sure that was quite what I was hinting at when I posted this…

I guess it’s intentional but I don’t care: these free bet offers are great – I won £120 on the National this year risk-free and haven’t used my account since except for their free bet offers, and yet they keep on sending them to me

Lots of stuff on the internet about this, mostly suggesting hardware changes or faulty hardware. No-one mentions the virus scan. It turns out the reason is one of the files deleted by the virus scan is loaded during early boot.

I went through the list of files loaded by the machine (I was lucky that this page showed the list of files Windows loads on the machine – a Dell Dimension 2400) and checked the file existed on the target – the only one that was on my working install and not on the target was atapi.sys; copying this from the working machine solved the problem instantly.

I guess the sensible thing to do was to keep a track of the files deleted by the virus scan… but if – like me – you were too blasé to do something so sensible, I hope this helps some.

Edit: Note that on vista (unlike XP) you can run sfc /scannow from the recovery console

Nice bit of understanding for your fellow man, honey, it’s not my fault you can’t drive well enough to go up and down on the dropped kerbs…

It occurred to me that this might be because the parser intercepts the “-0″ and goes “don’t be silly”. So I tried this:

SELECT -COALESCE(null, -COALESCE(null, 0))

and – genius! – it works!