Posted on June 26th, 2008%
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 via COM. This part works fine; the DLL is activated, properties are sent to it, and it runs… then crashes, with the following obscure error:
Error Number: -2147217887
Description: Multiple-step operation generated errors. Check each status value.
I searched, and searched… nothing. I recompiled, and checked settings… nothing. I prayed, and finally found this post: http://www.developersdex.com/sql/message.asp?p=581&r=4737805
. . . → Read More: Debugging ‘Multiple-step operation generated errors’ errors in VB6 and SQL 2005
Posted on June 26th, 2008%
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 to 2008. CSFBL was crumbling under its own weight — and popularity. A game that was originally designed to handle a few hundred users now had thousands. More users meant more teams; more teams meant more games simulated; more games simulated meant more server utilization… The 3+ year old server, once handling the every-three-hour simulation in an hour and a half, took four or more hours to get it done. People were frustrated; I was frustrated. Something had to change.
. . . → Read More: CSFBL find a new home
Posted on June 25th, 2008%
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 is to focus on green, renewable, carbon-free, Union labor for everything.
More interesting are the points the article didn’t make…
. . . → Read More: (Not) The Greenest Show on Earth
Posted on June 17th, 2008%
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 little extension called ImportExportTools. After installing it, I went to File / Save Selected Messages / EML Format and watched it do what I didn’t want to do, sixty times.
I won’t mention all the other export and import features. Just get it and install it if you use Thunderbird. You will use it at some point.
. . .
→ Read More: How to save multiple messages to disk in Thunderbird
Posted on June 12th, 2008%
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.
. . .
→ Read More: Bad Programming: How not to use try/catch blocks
