Belfry Images

Carrie got me this great little espresso cup yesterday and this morning I made a macchiato. It was good

Slashdot has linked to an article Jeff Vogel has written on developerWorks called Six ways to write more comprehensible code. It’s focused on C++ and uses variable names with underscores and global #DEFINEs etc that I personally hate, but the ideas are spot on.

I just had a spanking new Dell start crashing. svchost.exe kept giving an application error on bootup:

svchost.exe … the instruction at “0x???” … the memory could not be ‘read’

In the application log & finding the error report for svchost.exe it reports that msi.exe (the Windows installer) was faulting.

This is an issue with an automatic update breaking the Windows installer. There is an update available from microsoft (I think it’s this one) but the page I found (Tech Blender: Windows Update Broke My Machine (svchost.exe — application error), and How to Fix It) gives a solution that works:

1. Turn off automatic updates (right-click on My Computer & go to the Automatic Updates tab)
2. Reset the computer
3. Go to Windows Update (in the Start menu or go to update.microsoft.com), use Express Updates and install the fix
4. Reset your computer again once the update is installed

From the looks the machine is working now. Thanks, Microsoft

Sun has introduced the JavaFX platform, which looks like a bit of fun. It’s declarative, statically typed, and uses embedded HTML, so it seems to be a lot easier to develop than Swing. The openjfx community site has some interesting examples, but none are based in the browser (all in window forms), so I’ll have to have a play. There are some demos on the main page of the community site as well.

The wedding went extremely well, no major disasters We even got married. Here’s twenty pictures: