There might still be one or two people still reading this journal.

I've released a public beta of my comic collection software, Comicster.

If you collect comics and you're looking for a simple, free program to catalog them, Comicster may be for you!

Give it a try and leave a comment here or in the Comicster forum.

Oh, and - Windows only! Sorry, linux folk! :)

Had a clanger of an email in my inbox this morning.

It was sent by the IT Manager to the half-dozen or-so of us who have company-paid mobile phones, asking us to cut down on 'personal' calls.

The journal-worthy part of the email was this:

After examining a number of the accounts, the majority of mobile calls (including SMS) are after hours or on weekends - obviously private use.

Now ... let's think about that for a minute. When we're at work, we have a phone on our desk. And even if we didn't, our offices are about 10km out of a small country town, and have little or no mobile phone reception!!!

It is next to impossible (not to mention impractical) for any of us to use our mobile phones at any time other than "after hours or on weekends"!!!

So how can the fact that most calls are made outside of work lead him to believe that they are "obviously private" calls? For all he knows we are legitimately calling each other to confer on projects etc!

I replied to the mail and let the IT Manager know that he sounded like the pointy-haired-boss from Dilbert. That went down well :-)

Last night I was watching Lateline on ABC, and I heard that imprisoned Indonesian cleric (and suspected terrorist) Abu Bakar Bashir had called the US "the enemy of Islam".

Now, I wasn't aware that a nation could be the enemy of a religion! In fact, I would have thought that the only real enemy of any religion was atheism. How wrong I was!

So that got me thinking: Who is the enemy of the other religions? Well, since no-one really knew, I decided to declare them myself! From hereon in:

• Iceland is the enemy of Buddhism!
• Tonga is the enemy of Hinduism!
• Tanzania is the enemy of Judaism!
• Greenland is the enemy of Shintoism!
• Antarctica is the enemy of Sikhism!
• Peru is the enemy of Confucianism!

and last, but not least,

• Norway is the enemy of Jainism!

So now you know! These countries are officially outed! If you are a member of one of the above religions, declare your jihad today!

Here at work, I've been playing with Microsoft's Reporting Services for SQL Server 2000.

For us it was a no-brainer: We already own licenses for SQL Server 2000, and we want to steer away from the performance- and money-vampire that is Crystal Reports.

There's a decent blog for MS-RS here.

All in all I've found it to be really nice to use. A different report-design metaphor than Crystal, but the end result is awesome. You can quickly and easily make very professional looking reports.

Anyone else out there playing with it? What do you think?

Just thought I'd write this here so it was available for my own reference in future.

Yesterday I attempted to upgrade my Debian machine to the 2.6.0 kernel, with catastrophic results. After installing the apt package (with aptitude), and rebooting, the system 'panicked' with a message about something being 'too big'.

I was able to boot the system from CD and 'rescue it' so I could back up my photo gallery (the only thing on there), then reinstall without formatting to get back to the 2.4.x kernel.

After some reading, I discovered that the 'initrd' ramdisk that linux uses to start was only 4MB, and the stuff that 2.6.0 needs to fit on there is just over 4MB.

So I added this line to my /etc/lilo.conf file:

append="ramdisk_size=8192" ... and did the upgrade again. This time, no hassles!

I don't even know if I need 2.6.0. It's just nice to be able to play around on linux (I have no other reason to).

It's amazing what can happen if enough people contribute to a site.

Consider: I was thinking about joing SlashDot under another user name, so I could post things that wouldn't get back to me. Rants and complaints about co-workers, friends etc.

I wanted a name that represented the fact that I was 'anonymous' ... so I thought, "how about something that sounds like 'Anonymous Coward'?"

After a few thoughts ('synonymous? no' etc etc). I settled on something that I considered pretty funny: Autonomous Howard.

The thing is: There is already an AutonomousHoward on SlashDot!!! He's user #157928.

Oh my god! Like the subject implies: Enough monkeys and enough keyboards, and pretty much everything gets typed in.

I thought I'd post this in an effort to see if other workplaces suffer from the same problem.

At my work, it doesn't matter how many hours per day you work: If you leave on time every day you're considered a slacker.

It doesn't (or wouldn't) make any difference if you arrived here an hour before start time every day, thereby working an extra five hours a week. The perception is that you're the guy walking out the door exactly at knock-off time, so you're the one not doing the work.

That's the 'Good Worker Window' I'm referring to in the title - you're a good worker provided you time your work hours to coincide with a certain window of opportunity; say (8am-8:30am until 4:30pm-5pm) for a standard 8-4:30 day.

The worst part about this is that you get home later every day, and it's the after work time that's most valuable - you don't normally get up earlier so that you can have recreation time before work.

Does anyone else get this problem? Am I alone?

I've been having a blast playing with Debian. I've set up NetJuke and Gallery, and it has whet my appetite for other web-based applications.

Something I've wanted to do for a while now is catalog my book collection. I have a few hundred sci-fi and fantasy novels, as well as some text-books etc. I'd love a web-based (possibly PHP/MySQL) solution to list these books.

Does anyone know of an application to do this? My searches on the net have proven fruitless - there are a few programs out there for Windows to do it, but I've yet to find any web-based ones.

Eventually I'd like to find something similar to do my CD collection, but I want each collection to be done separately, since a dedicated CD-cataloging program could probably use freedb to search for info, whereas a more generic 'inventory' program wouldn't be that smart.

I might have to write my own. I've been meaning to learn PHP, so this might be the reason.

I've been setting up a Debian Linux box at home, on an old Celeron PC.

My idea, apart from just 'getting to know Linux', is to have a mini web-server machine, from which I can play music, view pictures, etc etc.

Maybe one day I will go the whole hog and buy a decent video card with TV-out, and move this PC into the living-room.

In the meantime I'm coming to grips with Linux' idiosyncracies (is that a word?) (this guy is so right), as well as Debian's interesting 'apt' packaging tool (this guy is not far wrong, either, unfortunately). I have set up Gallery on it, and it's working really well! Next is Apache::MP3, maybe using NAMP.

If anyone has any interesting Debian tips or tricks, I'd be really glad to hear 'em!

In news that will interest almost no-one, I just completed Windows Minesweeper twice in a row, with times of 110 and 115 seconds. That's a pretty good record for me.

My best is double-figures: 95 seconds, but completing it twice in a row is a rare event indeed.

How does anyone find these journals unless you have fans on /.?

I only have one fan (Xandar01), who I contacted because he is unwittingly named after a planet in the Marvel Universe which has spawned several cosmic characters (eg Firelord, Air-Walker, Nova).

I also appear to have a 'freak' (ie someone who doesn't like me), but I'm yet to determine why he marked me so. I would have thought that if you were going to mark someone as a 'foe' then you'd let them know why and give them a chance for redemption.

Of course, for mundane journal entries I use my own site (Mad Props), but perhaps if I have something more technically-oriented I could post it here.

And me? Well, I'm a programmer by trade, and have been working at QAF Meat Industries for nearly nine years, which is a good stint by any job's standards. I code predominantly in Delphi, but I've done my fair share of C, Clipper, ASP and Lotus Notes development too.

What else? I read comics. I'm a big fan of Marvel's more 'cosmic' titles (currently Captain Marvel, and soon Silver Surfer once again). I have even written a little database program to keep track of my 460+ comic collection, which one day I will make a SourceForge project and kick off for real.

Well, that's my first Journal Entry ever. If anyone comments I'll be pleasantly surprised! Let me know what you're interested in, and I'll make other journal posts about people who comment! :)

Mab