New Pope Mobile...
Thursday, January 20, 2005, 06:57 - Humor


For the more serious people: What kind of car is the Pope Mobile?

Rule of twelve bonks
Wednesday, January 19, 2005, 07:43 - Books
This rule states that one needs to sleep with twelve people before one can choose his or her partner to spend the rest of their life with. Scientists have shown this with computer simulations based on an old mathematical problem: Sultan's Dowry Problem.
Premarital sex therefore is statistically very wise!

This is one of the mathematical formulas Australian mathematician dr. Clio Cresswell has collected in her book Mathematics and Sex. It may sound weird, she says, to use mathematics to find a lover. But it would be very helpful to know what's available on the market when deciding on how much to compromise...

But then again: "mathematicians do it in theory".



Are you at twelve bonks yet? Keep in mind that men tend to estimate the number of women they slept with higher (by a factor of two to four) than the other way around, while statistically the average numbers should be the same.


TOP 10 Famous last words
Monday, January 17, 2005, 20:19 - Top X lists
1. This can't go wrong
2. Hmm, it never did _this_ before
3. Trust me, I know what I'm doing
4. This won't hurt a bit
5. I've done this a million times before
6. Hmm, that's weird
7. Even a 10-year old can do this
8. I wonder what this little thingy is for
9. This has no impact on production systems
10. I love bungee jumping!
11. Just one more won't make the difference


How weird are you?
Sunday, January 16, 2005, 12:05 - Humor
My weird quotient = 110. Of all the weird test takers:
18% are more weird,
6% are just as weird, and
76% are more normal than me!

What is your weird quotient? Click to find out!


How nerdy are you?
Saturday, January 15, 2005, 22:51 - Humor
I am nerdier than 74% of all people. Are you nerdier? Click here to find out!


MSI installer troubles...
Saturday, January 15, 2005, 02:56 - Programming
The customers of my Outlook Addin had difficulties getting the buttons visible in Outlook. They do not have local admin privileges so they could not install the addin themselves. After an admin installed the addin the buttons still did not appear. In the COM Add-ins overview within Outlook it showed that the addin could not be loaded.

In the end this turned out to be caused by the fact that the addin was added to the registry under HKEY_CURRENT_USER. After changing this to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE in the installer project the installation went fine.

The MSI installer created by Visual Studio .NET 2003 allows the user to choose whether to install for the current user only or for everyone on the computer. I spent quite some time trying to figure out how to read the chosen install type to use it in conditional registering of certain keys in the registry. It turns out you cannot get this property and I wonder why Microsoft includes that choice at all at run-time.

Only today I found out that when you create a new Addin in Visual Studio, the wizard gives you the choice to install the addin for the current user only or to install it for everybody. Very weird that you have to make that choice when you create a new project and not when the end-user runs the installer.


Solutions for TOP 5 personal traffic irritations
Thursday, January 13, 2005, 20:31 - Top X lists
I
1. regularly overtake on the right-hand side
2. will drive closely behind them or raise my headlights a little (I can adjust them while driving)
3. same as 2
4. give a good honk after about 1 second of green
5. overtake them as soon as possible

Although the above may suggest differently I'm hardly ever a danger on the road. I don't cause to much trouble for other drivers. Sometimes I really can be a gentleman and I nearly always give way to others where I'm supposed to. I just drive a little faster than allowed most of the time.

The only car damage I had in the last 7.5 years was someone who rear-ended me when I stopped for a orange traffic light....



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