It fell!

10 hours of serious warfare, and Antwerp falls to the Axis. But that’s by no means the end of the story: 

It’s on!

Campaign #50, Day 56. This campaign has been simmering slowly. Last night, Brussels fell and Antwerp has seen fierce, fierce fighting all day. Friday night. I’ve asked Killer to send ice packs down to the server farm just incase ;)

Infact, it’s been on since 11.19 this morning, but there’s no sign of a letup just yet. Sure, the Axis had to give up some hard gained towns in the south. But whether those are losses or not will depend on the outcome of the Antwerp offensive and the campaign.

Incidentally, after the week-of-wobbles we had last year with the 1.29 release, the servers have since been running continuously for 50 days with the highest populations for 3 years :)

In-place preview

Would love to see Vista/W7 do this:

Not going to be for everyone, but if you have lots of “activity” windows – Visual Studio doing a long compile, email, instant messengers, command prompts running long batch files … Instead of dropping them into the one-dimensional task bar, why not go 2D and allow the user to keep them as previews (not just icons) on the desktop? Shift-click on the minimize button and plop a sticky preview “icon” that can be moved around on the desktop until you’re ready to restore state…

I <3 7

Sure, there are a few minor things here and there such as the lack of a darn “parent folder” button or link and the default sizing of the search box in folder views (explorer) means that you can only see the name of the current level of directory and if you try to click it to get the drop-down you turn the thing into the path name (c:\users\blah), the odd crash here and there, etc. But for a beta it feels cleaner, faster, fitter, healthier, happier, friendlier … more buyable than Vista.

Posting will resume when power is restored to the other brain cell.

Did I mention that Adobe is evil?

From Things To Know about Windows 7 Beta:

GUEST MODE

If you do any of the following in a standard user account that has Guest Mode turned on, subsequent logins to the account will fail:

• Change any HomeGroup settings.
• Use CardSpace to create a personal InfoCard.
• Install Adobe Flash Player.

My suggested work around? Don’t install anything from Adobe :) Ever!

Relation Diagrams

Anyone have any particular recommendations for a good tool for building diagrams of MySQL entity relations? I’m looking for something that will easily let me denote field X in table Y relates to field A in table B. MySQL Workbench looked promising, but it only seems to be good for definining relationships between primary keys and when my database definitions didn’t always have indexes on the columns I was trying to relate (small, glue tables where an index actually reduces efficiency) it got buggy as heck.

I’ve tried Dezign, but I want something that’ll label the relationships with column names.

There are quite a few QT/GTK/ KDE ones, but frankly they look really, really awful. Am I going to have to use Access? :)

I can haz wryte permitsun?

No, I haven’t been hacked :) I’m just kicking it large with my current passion-du-jour, Playgate. I’m not going to post screenshots because it’s some of the worst coder art I’ve ever produced, but I’ve been fighting a running battle between two – what I am coming to realize are not quite compos mentis – installs of Visual Studio.