Comcast offers 50 Mbps...for an hour and a half a month.

Let me preface this by saying I hate comcast. They don't show up for apointments, don't respond to emails, and just all around suck. Problem is they don't have any competition where I live (oh please FiOS...please!!).

So Comcast has been running ads on tv around here lately offering service with up to 50 Mbps for $99 a month. But this made me think of a few years back when people accused Comcast of throttling their speeds, which Comcast denied and eventually conceded "yeah maybe but but... 9/11... AMERICA... Terrorists!". Anyway, that'll never pan out because Comcast spends more on lobbyist than you or I do, but I digress.

So what meaningful came from the throttling incident? Well, as of Oct 1 2008 Comcast limits your monthly incoming traffic to 250 GB per second. But whats get me is this, you can pay extra to get 50 Mb per second, but only get 250 Gb a month. 1 Gb = 1024 Mb, so, if you were to sit on some traffic that heavy, you'd run up your limit in 85.33 minutes. Stupid Comcast.

cl.exe results in mspdb80.dll was not found error

cl is the Visual C++ Compiler that comes with Visual Studio. So today I needed to compile me some C code. Ok, lets do this. Path not found. Easy enough, add C:\Dev\Tools\VisualStudio\VC\bin to my path. "mspdb80.dll was not found" error. Bullocks.

Most of the internet chatter was about running vcvars32(which calls vsvars32) or vcvarsall which SHOULD HAVE set the environment variables, but did not. Maybe it was a bad install or maybe maybe maybe. Too much work. Don't need another rabbit hole.

So all you need to do is set another path var to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VSA\8.0\VsaEnv (or wherever your mspdb80.dll is located). In like Flynn.

So you wanna use cl? To sum it up set two new path vars
C:\{visual-studio}\VC\bin
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VSA\8.0\VsaEnv

Vignette, Ahh Poor Vignette

Man. I really don't like configuring and implementing COTS software. Its usually sold to someone who thinks it'll solve problems A, B and C when in fact they're only real problem is X. And they spent half a million. Or more. A lot more.

Well, I had the privilege of vomiting for 6 months working with Vignette products (although, I'll admit it was work). Now, Vignette products aren't terrible. At one time they could have been called cutting edge. Too bad that time was circa 1993. And the coding concepts are good. The code isn't. God no. The code is the definition of spaghetti code. See, Vignette bought up a lot of little chunks of code and then tried to play God. The kind of God that made the Platypus. And they did.

So, what made me have these flashbacks? Two things. First, my co-worked pointed out to me a few weeks back that someone had actually purchased Vignette. Oh boy. If you own stock in OpenText...hmm. If their intention is to 'cherry-pick' through Vignettes code they might as well have purchased a JDK 1.0 for dummies book and gone through the code in the accompanying cd. Then they should have gone looking for code in a dumpster behind a Taco Bell. But eh, at least they didn't buy AOL.

But thats not what rubs me. What really did it is again today I got another spam mail from Vignettes Education Services. From which I've already tried to unsubscribe. Months ago. See, I got a similar email a while back which prompted me to hit the handy unsubscribe link at the bottom. That tried to send an email to unsubscribe_me@marketing.vignette.com, which of course is an invalid email address. So I sent an email to their general support saying essentially 'wtf mate'. The lady said she unsubscribed me. Which I believed. Until today. And yes, the unsubscribe link in the email is still set to unsubscribe_me@marketing.vignette.com.