.: Archives :.

Saturday, January 18, 2003

Natural Born Blogger - [1:32 PM]

I agree with Robert, Maryam Scoble needs her own blog. She's a natural. Come on Robert, hook her up!

Blogger trouble? - [12:40 PM]

I've posted a few items this morning, since I don't have much to do until my installation and builds are complete. But I can't publish them. I've gone through the recommended steps to fixing the problem, no luck? I tried publishing to my other site with a different tool and it's able to push stuff to the server? Weird? New publishing engine troubs?

We'll find out soon enough, I'm sure.

Mark that calendar! - [11:59 AM]

I think I'll be here June 20th around Midnight, I'll let you guess why...

Trials and tribulations - [11:29 AM]

The last week has been very frustrating for me. We're pushing hard to complete a new release for everyone and we've had some network troubles all week; minor outages, hardware fails on occasion. This week has been exceptionally frustrating. Due to minor outages my build failed on Monday night and it couldn't have happened at a worse time in the build. Needless to say I had to restart a full build which took the better part of a day to complete. Ok, I got a working build on Wednesday morning, yippee, back to work! I decided not to do a build that night since I had a good working build and wasn't really in a place I could check-in code anyway. I was able to be very productive on Thursday so I thought I'd do a full build overnight so I could be confident my changes blended with the other check-ins over the past couple of days. I came in yesterday morning(Friday) only to find my build failed, again! This is enough to drive someone completely mad! I never did get a good clean build yesterday and I've had some issues with my "administrative" box, my laptop is only good for reading e-mail anymore. OK, call Helpdesk to get some help. Play phone tag with the guy I'm working with, get handed off to another team, work with that guy for a while and come to the conclusion I need SP1 of XP for USB 2.0 support. OK. Only problem is I don't have enough drive space on the system drive to install it. Fine. I'll burn the drive to the ground create one large partition and re-install everything. No problem. So I copy everything that I need to another box here in the office. Great, went like clockwork. Pack up for the night and go home. No build, laptop in a bad state.

I arrived this morning, docked my laptop, inserted the Windows XP CD, booted the box, held down the F1 key to boot from the CD and I'm off! I decided to check my e-mail from my dev box so I switch over to it while my installation is getting started. I type in the URL to Scripting News, old habit, no site? Hmmmm, what's going on here... Reboot the box, still not able to see outside, that's strange? I finally looked at my router, only two of the three connections are working and my dev box is the one that's down. GREAT! That's the box I did the backup to and now I can't see it! I'm going to see if it's the cable because device manager says the card is functioning properly, here's to a bad cable.

Neat - [11:14 AM]

Jesse Shanks: Using OmniGraffle as an RSS News Reader with Applescript. [via Scripting News] - This is cool! I've had thoughts along those lines as well, maybe Jesse could run with the blogroll idea I was thinking about. Of course Visio is a perfect tool for doing this as well but I just haven't been able to find the time to do anything about it! DRAT!

Great idea Jesse, and keep the diagrams coming!

Friday, January 17, 2003

Potter Mania! - [3:25 PM]

CNN: "New Potter already No. 1 seller" - Somehow this doesn't surprise me in the least. Our household is very excited about book five and we're fighting over who gets to read it first.

I was introduced to Harry Potter during a trip from Seattle to Exeter almost two years ago. We listened to Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban. If you haven't listened to the tapes I'd say go to EBay and find a copy, they're wonderful. Jim Dale is the narrator and does a marvelous job! He brings such life to each character. I hope he's signed up to do the fifth book?

Movie line of the week answer - [9:33 AM]

Well I've blown it again. A repeat, and it wasn't that long ago! If I keep this up I think I'm going to have to stop Movie line of the week because I just don't like the idea of repeats! I'm going to have to get my crack research team to help me by sending e-mail because I can't remember what they recommend the day after they recommend it, DOH!

Anywho, on with the show. Our winner is Ben Padilla, congratulations Ben.

The answer to yesterday's repeat movie line is...

The Shining

I'd like to say thanks to everyone that played. And thanks to Steven, Robert, and Tyler for pointing out the repeat. I'll try not to let it happen again guys, really.

Thursday, January 16, 2003

Movie line of the week - [9:25 AM]

Good morning movie liners. It's been a crazy week around this place, very busy. I hope this one doesn't disappoint.

HERE'S JOHNNY!

Ok, quick, what movie! Send your guesses here.

Come on, you know this one!

Wednesday, January 15, 2003

I'll be darned! - [9:23 AM]

The release date for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has finally been revealed!

Last year... - [9:14 AM]

On this day last year I was in rainy Seattle. Lots and lots of stuff going on, I played XBox for the first time and had what I described as an "XBox hangover", and Radio was making a HUGE splash on the web.

Today I'm home in my office. Still lots and lots of stuff going on.

Speaking of Radio?

Is there a way through Radio's support of the Blogger API to route a post to a category and include a title? Thanks for any info!

Tuesday, January 14, 2003

.NET and Visio? - [5:34 PM]

If you're developing add-ons to Visio you should very seriously consider using VB.Net or C# for your next project. By selecting File > New > Project... and expanding the Other Projects folder you should find a folder called Extensibility Projects. If you click that folder and select Shared Add-In on the right hand side of the dialog you're on your way to creating a managed COM Add-In for Visio, or a number of other products.

Give it a try! You'll be glad you did.

R.O.B. - Rob's Other Blog

I've been working on a new look for my other blog. This new blog is going to be updated less frequently and hopefully feature more article length stories.

The look is inspired by the blogs of Paul Wolpe and Dave Rogers! They're clean, super clean, and simple!

Thanks for the inspiration guys!

Getters, Setters, and C# - [12:00 PM]

If you're a C, or C++, developer you've probably written code like this...

int GetAge();
void SetAge(int age);

In C# getters and setters are as easy to call as they are in VB, all you have to do is define a get'er and as set'er.

public int Age
   {
   get
      {
      return age;
      }
   set
      {
      age = value;
      }
   }

Kerpow! Now you have an easy way to get, and set, the age property of the class. Here's how...

// Set the age.
person.Age = 35;

// Get the age.
age = person.Age;

I know, I know this isn't magic and many languages have operated like this for years. But for those of us living in C/C++ land it's really nice to be able to write code like this. At least I think it's nice. I'm noticing that I'm very productive with C#. Sure I still stumble on the syntax once in a while but that's coming along and in a while I'll bang it out like it was as natural as C++ is today.

One little note: Does anything about the set'er strike you as odd? How about age = value;? Where does value come from? It's just one of those things you'll have to get used to. In a nutshell it means "Hey Age property set yourself to the value on the right of the equal sign".

Monday, January 13, 2003

Mornin' Y'All - [10:05 AM]

Well, well, well, another weekend spent, time to get back to business!

I have to apologize to my wife. I kept her awake far too long on Friday and Saturday night. Friday night we managed to get totally wrapped up in XBox and were up until 2AM Saturday morning. Kim is usually in bed between 8:30-9:30 most nights. Saturday night we visited with my brother and his family, had dinner, then Jay and I disappeared for a while to work on our little Pharmacokinetics Calculator assembly. So my poor wife is exhausted this morning, sorry honey.

The Pharmacokinetics Calculator Project

Like I said above my brother and I worked on the PK Calculator a bit Saturday night and boy-oh-boy was it reworked. The calculations were way off so we fixed that and managed to sneak a bunch of stuff down into the BaseDose class which is really wonderful. A lot of the initial calculations are shared between dosing types so it made sense to do those in a common place. I need to do some cleanup because of our code session but things are progressing nicely. We now have two of five tasks completed and all the work focused on BaseDose will make the remaining three tasks a whole lot easier. On Sunday I eliminated the BaseRegimen and derived classes all together because they were NOT necessary. Two new methods, EstimateLevel and AdjustmentDosage, remove the need for a separate Regimen class. There is still a gap between Jay-speak and Rob-speak so this could change again.

Once the three remaining tasks are complete I'll begin doing some fit and finish work and Jay will start working on the web page and VB.Net versions of the application since all were doing here is creating a .Net Assembly to do all the grunt work calculations. Since he's the target consumer of the assembly he needs to put it to work to make sure what we've done is correct. I think we'll work together on the service code, SOAP and XML-RPC based, since I've never done either on the server side. My biggest fear is making sure the exposed service is secure and doesn't eat the server alive when it's invoked, I'm not too worried about the PK assembly because it's small and should be fairly efficient. State management will be an issue I'm sure. We'll see.