I am Joe Blog’s Left Ventricle

Tue February 28, 2006

What the Customer Wants #2

Two weekends ago, I made a decision.

Instead of downloading (pirating) rome total war + barbarian invasion, and playing it that very evening, I chose to buy it legitimately online. Since you cannot download the game from the vendor, I purchased it online at an online games store here in Australia.

It arrived yesterday in the mail. The delay was somewhat aggrivating. Legality and morality aside, I’m paying $68 for a >2 week delay. Bear in mind I’m paying in advance - the money was taken from my credit card the moment I hit “submit” on my purchase.

So, I unpacked the box, put the DVD in my drive, and installed it.

Once installed…

…it refused to run.

“insert the correct CD/DVD”

ITS FUCKING IN THERE!!!

Maybe it insists the drive be D:? (my DVD drive is E:) So I swap drive letters around.

“insert the correct CD/DVD”

So…… in order to get my $68 game purchase working, I downloaded daemon tools, made an image of the DVD, mounted the image and told daemon tools to emulate all copy protection types.

The game now loads.

In case the above is all gibberish to you: in the end I basically had to circumvent the copy protection, which I would have had to do with a pirated DVD image, in order to get my perfectly legitimate software working.

Had I just decided to download the fucking game, I would’ve been playing it two weekends ago.

This is not how to encourage legitimate purchases.

Tue February 28, 2006

Order a Sandwich in SQL

pete: I’m going next door, to order a sandwich using only SQL

hicks: I fear this will only exasperate existing language barriers there

pete: let’s see… select lettuce, tomato, ham, cheese from refrigerator_one where lettuce=’crispy’ and tomato=’juicy’ and ummmmm….

thunder: that won’t do. You need to do an inner join.

pete: an inner join?

thunder: Yeah, if you only want lettuce that is also crispy, and tomato that’s also juicy, you need to do: select refrigerator_one.lettuce,refrigerator_one.tomato, ham, cheese from refrigerator_one join crispy on (refrigerator_one.id=crispy.id);

thunder: That way, you only get the lettuce that’s both in the fridge, and considered crispy.

hicks: limit 1

thunder: what?

hicks: you should say limit 1, so you only get one serve of each filling. Otherwise you’ll get ALL the crispy lettuce in refrigerator_one, and ALL the juicy tomato, and ALL the ham etc. Should be limit 1

pete: what if I want two serves of ham and one of everything else?

richard: well now you need a stored procedure

thunder: can’t you specify limits on each component of the join, like select refrigerator_one.lettuce limit 1,refrigerator_one.tomato limit 1, ham limit 2, cheese limit 1 from refrigerator_one join crispy on (refrigerator_one.id=crispy.id);

hicks: I think it depends on the version of the SQL standard your cafe supports

pete: I think these guys are compatible with more than one standard

hicks: That would explain why when I order a cappucino with two, to go, I sometimes get two small late’s and a bagel?

thunder: I think two small late’s and a bagel is error code for “what the hell kind of query is that?”

richard: what stored procedure languages do they support?

hicks: broken english, misinterpreted C, compiled gibberish, and the Disconnected Network Protocol, I feel

pete: you’re just pissed off because they gave you the bagel. FUCK!

richard: eh?

pete: It’s 5 now, they’re closed. No sandwich for me.

thunder: I guess that one will get rolled back now. I wonder how many sandwiches fit in the transaction log…