Skip to content

Monthly Archives June 2008

Debugging ‘Multiple-step operation generated errors’ errors in VB6 and SQL 2005

I just blogged about CSFBL moving to its new server. All was going well, until I tried to kick off the sim engine, a big part of which is written in Visual Basic 6.0 (cringe, I know, but who has time to rewrite legacy code?).
The sim engine is implemented as a DLL which gets invoked [...]

Posted 26 June 2008 § Technology ‡ Comments (3)

CSFBL find a new home

Nearly four years ago, on September 16, 2004, CSFBL - the Computer Simulated Fantasy Baseball League (the greatest web-based multiplayer baseball simulation ever made, in my opinion, despite the long name) was migrated to what was (at the time) a hot new server. Performance was spectacular, and things stayed rather well… for a while…
Fast forward [...]

Posted 26 June 2008 § Technology ‡ Comments (2)

(Not) The Greenest Show on Earth

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article, The Greenest Show on Earth: Democrats Gear Up for Denver, which highlights the attempts at the Democratic National Convention to run “the greenest convention in the history of the planet” (at least, at bequest of Denver’s mayor, John Hickenlooper).
Read through the article and you see how difficult it [...]

Posted 25 June 2008 § Personal ‡ Comments (3)

How to save multiple messages to disk in Thunderbird

I had a bunch of messages in Thunderbird which I wanted to give to a coworker. I didn’t want to forward 60 messages, so I figured I’d save them as .eml files.
Unfortunately, Thunderbird only lets you save to file one message at a time. Who wants to File/SaveAs/File/OK sixty times? Not me.
Fortunately there’s a great [...]

Posted 17 June 2008 § Technology ‡ Comments (0)

Bad Programming: How not to use try/catch blocks

I just stumbled across the following SQL 2005 code:
BEGIN TRY
UPDATE [tabProgramSite]
SET
[Name] = @ProgramSiteName
WHERE [ProgramSiteID] = @ProgramSiteId
END TRY
BEGIN CATCH
END CATCH
Nothing like catching an error… and doing nothing about it. I hope the user experience isn’t as robust.

var addthis_pub = ‘bdemarzo’;
var addthis_language = ‘en’;var addthis_options = ‘email, favorites, digg, delicious, myspace, google, facebook, reddit, live, more’;

Posted 12 June 2008 § Technology ‡ Comments (4)