Tuesday, December 20, 2005

ACME license maker
I always wondered how my nick names would look on a license plate, at this site you can create your own license plate on line for the state you live in (US and Canada) or any other state, the site has a preview image that you can save and put anywhere you want, i.e. your web site
http://www.acme.com/licensemaker/
the only thing the site doesn't do is to actually let you get the license plate, just the image =oP
but in case you wanted to get your own license plate, at least you would know exactly how it would look =o)

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Five day week, get prior day function


I wrote a program that requires to get the prior day, based on a five day week, so for :
Saturday..Monday, return previous Friday
Tuesday..Friday, return previous day

of course you could do it using if statements, or a case statement, but I wanted a simple and elegant, single line kinda thing, in other languages like C this would've been easier, because you can basically embed if statements in one line using ?, but in Delphi I tried different things and finally came up with this

//include DateUtils in the uses
function FiveDayWeekPriorDayEx(const theDate:TDateTime):TDateTime; const
ar:array[1..7] of Byte = (3,1,1,1,1,1,2);
begin
Result:=theDate-ar[DayOfTheWeek(theDate)]
end;

not bad, but I can probably do something with bits to come up with a shorter answer

Monday, December 12, 2005

DLL Help database
today someone was wondering where this dll came from, and I knew there was a site at Microsoft where you can find information about any (Microsoft) DLL, so I'm posting this here as a reminder for my self, and perhaps anyone who doesn't know about the site

http://support.microsoft.com/dllhelp/

you can enter the DLL name and it will tell you on which packages it was included, etc, so you could find other DLLs that might be related as well and avoid many headaches

I use this utility myself to find any missing references, there's no "it works on my machine" excuse

Friday, December 02, 2005

The power of a T-Shirt, check out this great story of how Trisha Weir made it to work at google
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/11/how-i-got-to-google-ch-2-tale-of-t.html