Gale Force

According to Wikipedia (and we know it’s true if it’s on Wikipedia):

The creator of the original ASCII emoticons : ) and :(, with a specific suggestion that they be used to express emotion, was Scott Fahlman; the text of his original proposal, posted to the Carnegie Mellon University computer science general board on 19 September 1982 (11:44) …

Well, after a tip from my crack investigative team (thanks Atticus), I found this reference in the New Testament:

More specifically, the reference is from the KJV Bible and can be found in Acts 10:36

I argue that this is the earliest use of the smiley emoticon and was indeed used as an expression of emotion — in this case: Glory, Hallelujah, Praise the Lord type of emotion. It is generally believed that this text was written between 60 and 80 A.D. which precedes Mr. Fahlman’s post by about 1900 years. There is some debate as to who authored the Acts but evidence suggests that the author was Luke the Physician. Therefore, let us attribute the modern day smiley emoticon to Luke rather than Mr. Fahlman (sorry Scott).

Did you?

I run Apache on my local machine so I can develop web applications in a self-contained environment.  I encountered a strange problem the other day when tried to start the Apache service:

First of all, what an incredibly un-helpful message.  The details also proved less-than-enlightening:

Mmmkay.  Thanks for that.  I know exactly what the problem is now and I can easily go about fixing it…NOT.  msvcr71.dll is the C++ runtime library so it’s not like that narrows down my problem at all.  I do know however…that it has something to do with the C++ code.  Gee thanks.

Well if anyone is experiencing the same problem, let me save you the hours of fruitless Googling that I had to endure and just tell you what the problem was.  I had a VirtualHost whose DocumentRoot pointed to a networked drive that was not currently connected.  All I had to do was re-connect the network drive and bingo! Apache started up without a complaint.

A plea to application developers everywhere: Please, for the love of Blaise Pascal, write more informative error messages!  How hard would it have been to say: “Hey idiot, you’re trying to use a network drive that isn’t currently connected!”.  Instead I get all sorts of useless (but awesome) information about ModVer’s, AppVer’s and Offsets!  I love geeky error dumps as much as the next guy…but for crying out loud…toss me at least one piece of useful debugging information along the way.