Sunday, November 22, 2009
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I labelled this as Part 01 because who knows, I may do a running series.
Just came from a 'pot luck' -- I hate pot lucks, but that's not part of the reason to write.
My wife gives me a hard time for not entering into conversation with people and cites that as a reason I never have a good time at such events.
So tonight, I decided to 'enter in'.
One of the guys that I DO know said something about Silverlight, mentioned I was involved with it and asked the guy he was introducing to me if he was familiar with it. All his 23 years of work and social skills came into play as the first thing out of his mouth was "I hate everything Microsoft does".
Alright... now there's a conversation starter... sorta like a turd in the punch bowl.
I asked what OS he used every day at work. He said Windows XP. I nodded my head and told him that I'd rather spend my time programming for something that had a larger probability of being sold or used than for some niche market.
The conversation was over at that point because I truly would rather count the holes in the ceiling tile until it's time to go home and get something real to eat than to waste any more time with such a social idiot.
Color me pissed.
Monday, November 16, 2009
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With everyone talking about their flights to LA to go to PDC, I'm feeling a little under-appreciated here. I remember a couple years ago I saw a T-Shirt that read "PDC - because I'm worth it". So does that mean "Not at PDC - because I'm not worth it"? -- lol
It's just one of those days/weeks/months ... is it the whole year?? But sometimes the weight of 'producing' every day can get to you. Engineering, for me, isn't like a job that I learn a task then do it for 30 years, go home, put my feet up on the coffee table and have Princess bring me a beer. So you chase down the technology, and sometimes you guess wrong and chase the wrong thing. It may be fun, and even fulfilling, but not lead toward a good career choice.
There's only so many hours in the day, and only so many things you can cram into that, and when 7AM to 6PM is involved with transit and the work that keeps the roof over your head and allows you to eat, that only leaves (for me) from 5:30 AM to about 6:30AM, and from maybe 7 to 9 or 10 PM, ocassionally midnight, and that assumes no time spent with family.
I tried to find the peanuts cartoon for today. The online one is not the one that was in the morning paper. I don't know the characters but the one is telling the teacher:
"No, Ma'am, I'm not happy.. I feel ignored."
"I raise my hand, but you never call on me, Don't I mean anything?"
"What am I, the two of clubs?"
The two of clubs indeed!
OK... particularly fugly code... wow.
I'm about 2/3 of the way refactoring this huge beast of an application. I'm pulling SQL out of the code behind and putting it into the database layer. I'm using StringBuilder to avoid the loooooong chained together strings they used. Anything possible, I'm pushing to Oracle.
But some of the worst is the client-side code. Multiple times I've found 60 or 80 non-breakable spaces to move something to the right! Data entry forms with 6 rows of data to fill out, and when I try to fix up the UX, things blow up and I find a label that's only in there to space something out... sigh.
I've mentioned some of this before, but today's challenge is a 6-row form that's not-exactly orthogonal in it's layout. Of course I didn't really notice that until I started working on it. The reason it's not lined up both horizontally and vertically is because it's a table cell of a set width, and all 6 display rows are just non-breakable space-separated elements that wrap and make up the display ... seriously!
I missed out on classic ASP, and came in on the tail-end of .NET 1.1, but I'm pretty sure this wouldn't be advisable in either of those, and it's a total Pain in the A$$ to straighten out.
Just thought I'd share ... at least I know what I'm going to be doing all morning!
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
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I wrote about monitor problems on-site on October 30. Let's see.. by the big calendar on the wall, that is 8 workdays ago. I wasn't going to say anything more about it... was just going to wait for it to die
So here is the actual email transaction this morning:
Admin: "Just get the approval from [snip] and let me know what size you want. The choices are 19" and 20" aspect (this one is wider)"
Me: "I'd say the 20" if I have a choice, thanks!"
Note I avoided being sarcastic to either her or in this post about why would I choose a 19" given the option and um... do some of the people not realize a 20" monitor is wider? But I digress, and her next response is the killer:
Admin: "Is this OK with management? "
Now where is the sarcasm font when you need it? How do you possibly answer such a question??
Me: "Well, I sent email to [snip] and [snip] and [snip] called and told me to contact you about it.
If it's not good with management, I'm not sure how to do my job without a monitor :)"
Admin: "I will get it ordered for you :)"
Thank goodness... I thought for a while I was going to have to get that messy implant and plug the video cable into the back of my neck every morning... either that or figure out how to write .NET web apps with pencil and paper!
yes, they walk among us every day... and their vote counts the same as yours and mine... scared yet?
Thank You for Your Service
I got out of the Army in 1973 and didn't hear those words from anyone until 1998, so I just wanted to say that to all the people serving or who have served.
I was in college in 1970, and that was the first year they did the lottery for draft numbers. Everyone that was of service age got dumped in that pot in 1970. My number was 35, and if I remember right they took 60 numbers in January, and they used up all the numbers by the time the year was over.
I knew I passed the physical, so I scooted back to the draft board and asked when I might hear. She pulled up two cards on me, looked at one, and said "two weeks". I asked what the other card was and she said it was my draft notice. I asked the date on that and she said "two weeks after the other one". Yikes... 4 weeks to figure out what to do!
I made the rounds of all the recruitment offices, but in 1970 everyone had a waiting list... all the reserves, AirForce, Navy, you name it. The only branch that didn't laugh at me needing to get something arranged in 4 weeks was the Army. I took all the tests, was offered the Army Security Agency, and signed myself up for 4 years.
In 1968 when I had my first physical, I was ready to roll. I wanted to jump out of airplanes with a knife between my teeth, but luckily that didn't happen because I probably wouldn't be here to write this now! By the time 1970 came around, I was 22 and had figured out that 'Nam was probably survivable if approached correctly. Being 3 floors underground in a Comm Center for at least 8 hours a day sounded like a good idea. As it turns out, I never saw 'Nam, but at least I had a plan.
Note that my plan included giving 4 years of my life up to the service of our country. None of my plans included packing my guitar and Engineering texts up and driving to Canada.
My father was a U.S. Marine on Iwo Jima. He didn't help put up the flag, but he was close enough that he saw the first one go up, not the one for the picture. He worked with the code talkers and told me all about it when I was old enough to understand. He should have known better, but he sat me down one night and told me "I know there's a lot going on in the world, and a lot that I don't understand. I know that this is all happening in the middle of your education, and I know you have choices and decisions. I just want you to know that your decision is yours and if you decide to go to Canada, that's your decision to make. But... if you do that, make sure you take everything you want out of this house before you go because you're not coming back"... wow, thanks Dad :)
But... that was never even a remote thought. Years later my Mother suggested that she wished I'd have gone to Canada, and I told her that she obviously had not discussed that with Dad :)
So here I am 39 years later on Veteran's Day thinking about all the above. Three veterans affect my life: My grandfather was a tanker in WWI, my father was a Marine in WWII, and I wear a POW/MIA bracelet for Capt. James W. Herrick who was shot down October 27, 1969 in Laos. I proudly served during the Vietnam Era. I didn't have a choice or thought in the matter. It was my duty. I was proud to serve, and I'm proud to have served.
Thanks to all of you, and thanks Dad for bringing me up to respect my country.
Friday, October 30, 2009
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I've been on a contract in this facility for over 4 years now. That's actually a good thing considering my age. I wouldn't be disappointed if I could stay here until I went out of scope. But that can't stop me from complaining... that's just the nature of the beast. In my first letter back home from basic training my Mother worried that I was ok. My Father told her "He's complaining, he's fine!" ... so I guess 39 years later things haven't changed :)
Logic tells me that if a company is paying a LOT of money for someone to be working for them that they'd provide them with good tools, but as a contractor, that ain't the case...
I'm sitting in front of two monitors, on two machines. One is a Win2K box that has just enough cajones to be turned on with all the monitoring software my client has running.
When I got here, there was a 2nd machine that had never been used that had XP on it. My predecessors had originated all the software on the Win2K box circa 2002/2003. Somewhere along the line, an employee got a new monitor, and one of the team members suggested I could grab the 'flat panel monitor' that was taken offline. This is a ViewSonic ViewPanel170 circa 2001.
I've gradually moved all the software to the XP box which got upgraded a couple years ago, and then about 4 months ago when the lease rolled, I was able to score a dual quad-core "Engineering" machine. But I'm still running the same monitor.
The Win2K box is still here and has a monitor on it that I'd have to strap on my truss to pick up.. a ViewSonic Graphics Series G800. I wanted to show a picture of it but it's so old, I couldn't find one with a quick Google search. The screen has a hellofa curve to it. Just picture one of those monsters that people throw out windows in YouTube videos.
IT wants to 'sundown' the Win2K box and I've got everything off it that I need, but I'm wondering what it's going to take to get another graphics card for the beast so I can run both these crocks, and after querying my local manager 2 weeks ago I haven't heard anything yet.
Then this morning, either my glaucoma is acting up or this flat panel is going out. The color is shifting at random intervals and rates, and although I really like blue, this is getting tough on my eyes.
Remembering that it took 3 months and about $500 worth of various people's time to get a $178 download license for a piece of software a year ago, I hesitate to think how long it's going to take to get this monitor replaced.
Unfortunately they have asset tags on them, because I could walk almost anywhere in the building and grab one and the user wouldn't miss it. Almost everyone has 2 20-inch monitors (employees of course), and on the second monitor is a static picture of: 1) Their car, 2) The car they'd like to have 3) Their kid, or 4) Their grandkid. I figure if I just dump one of those pictures to a good quality color printer, and replace their 2nd monitor with a picture frame, I'd be happy and they wouldn't notice!
Meanwhile instead of doing fun Silverlight stuff, I'm working out how to do "are you sure" buttons in .NET 2.0 ... but I'm working :)
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
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Yeah... you know who you are. You risk my life every day that I have to be in traffic with you!
And that's not anything new, but this goes out specifically to the 30-something lady in the brand-new (temp plates) little white rat-car on the 101 South about 7:40 this morning. Any car smaller than the engine on my truck is a rat-car.
I'm car-pooling now with my daughter, so we're rolling at the speed limit with cruise on in my 3/4-ton Ford V-10 and I'm watching the lane next to me pretty darn close.
At about Shea when the road is bending so I can just barely see her and she probably couldn't see me at all, about 3 or 4 car-lengths ahead of me, she got bored driving (solo) in the lane she was in and pulled out in front of me at about 45 mph.
I laid on the horn and brakes at the same time, and pulled as close as I could to the barrier
assuming that when she saw me coming, she'd pull back in, and I could get around her without killing anyone... but nooo... the dumb a$$hole stayed in the diamond lane doing 50 mph while I'm almost turning her into a hood ornament... WTF was she thinking??
So she moseyed along in the diamond lane for about a mile then unsafely pulled in on someone to her right. I slowed down enough to salute her on the way past, but I'm sure she wasn't looking. I just hope she has a wet spot on the seat.
My daughter's comment was "good thing YOU were driving, in my car, we'd probably have not stopped fast enough".
On that note I'd like to tell all you crappy drivers out there "Thanks for nothing!"
Dang the things you have to go through just to GET to work!
Friday, July 24, 2009
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I'm a big fan of being a self-starter, always learning, and trying new stuff. A big percentage of what I've learned in the software biz has been ratting around in other people's code...
I had one Fortran IV class back in '67 and I sucked at it. I had some 1-on-1 help from a great guy teaching me BASIC in '68, and since then it's been Assembly (how many people bought their own copy of MASM?? -- twice??), Pascal, C, C++, C#, various databases, and forgetabout all the OS versions from mainframes to 8086 BIOS code and then out to Silverlight 3.
And I had to learn all that on my own. I'm not complaining, I'm just sayin'...
But apart from a few things, I did NOT learn them on forums. Well, forums didn't exist for half of that, but you know what I mean.
I particularly hate asking questions on forums and avoid it at all costs. And why? Because of the people that troll the forums to respond to questions to get their 'stats' up.
Case in point... I need to read a Word doc. NOT a docx, We're talking Office 2003 (in 2009). More specifically, I've got a doc that has a bunch of fields the user fills out, and I need to import that data from a web page and populate a web form then push it into the database.
In writing code 42 years, I've not had to become an Office Interoperability expert, and I have no need to do so now.. I just need to read this freakin' form.
So I spend a whole bunch of time in search engines seeing other people asking for the same information and getting a lot of the same answers:
- A two-liner instantiating a class with no other explanation, and HTF is that supposed to help
- A link to MSDN -- geez that was the first stop and got me part way
- Code that is obviously broken -- don't bother downloading
- Code that doesn't work when you try to run it
And my favorite(not):
- The guy that decides it's his job to make the questioner 'learn how to do this' rather than 'give him code' -- I've seen them actually say that.
Hey AHole... go back to WOW or whatever it is you did before you became a computer guru in HighSchool. If I wanted to LEARN Office Interoperability, I'd dig into it. Meanwhile I've got a manager standing in my cubicle waiting for this code.
Yeah I know, push a button and go on, but there are a LOT of those folks out there, and I don't understand what it is they think they're accomplishing other than driving away people that are trying to pick up some knowledge.
I tried for a while to answer questions on the [...] forum, but unless you camp out on the forum hitting F5 every 10 seconds, it's impossible to respond to someone without overwriting someone else's post. I don't know what some of those guys do for a living, but I'm sorry, I have to get product out the door and don't have time to try to race someone to answer every forum post.
My hat is off to all of you that persevere and post thoughtful helpful responses on the forums and take time to actually read what the questioner writes before you post an answer.
And as long as I'm posting this, I will say that UtterAccess.com has the highest signal-to-noise ratio of any place I've ever been.
OK now back to trying to read FormFields. When I figure it out I'll post a solution here.
Friday, July 17, 2009
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I can go a long time without time off, or at least time away from the office, but I hit tilt today.
It started early with not being able to find the code for the book to upload. Then when I did, I realized I hadn’t tracked chapter changes in the code so although the code was good, naming was wrong… fail!
Then at the office trying to finish the latest refactoring effort I got to the point of adding Help files and wanted to add a Help button in a new column in a couple places.
Things just looked hinky and man I liked how this was working and did NOT want to dork around with the html on this sucker.
But I did, and was just killing myself trying to figure out WTF… it seemed like the one and only column was over 700 pixels when everything was less than 550. I’m adding crap up with a calculator even just for sanity’s sake, and can’t find it.
So the next best thing is to pull tr sections out with my editor, refresh the UI in VS and if it is still 700, put it back in and go to the next.
There are maybe 8 rows and number 7 was it. But I’m still not seeing it. So line by line I start taking it apart and wait a minute… what’s that label… oh crap… my predecessor stuck a label in as a spacer to get a line to wrap instead of a break and that’s my 700 pixel line… $%&**#!… ok… replaced that with a br and wow… things are swell.
Saved that all out, picked up my toys, turned in my time sheet and status report, and hit the air… I’ll put the button in on Monday.
This is just the latest and I can’t believe I didn’t think of it. I’ve had 60 non-breakable spaces in multiple forms, and labels as spacers isn’t new… I just thought I’d cleaned this one up… sigh.
Note to self… assume nothing, expect nothing, do it your own darn self.
Monday, June 29, 2009
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I had an interesting revelation last week that came to mind just now when I cranked up my Zune.
All the way through High School in the early 60s and college in the late 60s I could NOT listen to music while studying. Leave that for when I get out in the working world and find myself in a 'ballroom' of people in little boxes called cubicles.
On this contract it's possibly the worst-case scenario because I'm in a small room, facing into a hard wall. The wall echoes and it's like being in a fishbowl. I can generally distinctly hear 3 conversations. Right after the latest move, I actually had someone in the cubicle to the East of me yelling over the top of my cubicle to the person in the cubicle to the West of me ... geez...
So a set of Bose Acoustic Noise Canceling Headphones (yeah those!) are my saving grace. And I pump 50 to 80 tracks of 60s jazz through them every day.
So why 60s jazz... and that gets back to the revelation ... see you thought I was losing my train of thought didn't you??
Last week the song "Gloria" popped in my head, so I went to the Zune marketplace and went looking. I couldn't remember who did it. I just remember it. I ended up pulling down a bunch of Doors and then came across something like "Biggest Rock Hits of the 60s" that was apparently done by DJs and I thought hey... that might be good. I mean, that's the music that was playing when I first started making money standing behind a guitar... that's my roots, so to speak!
Dang... I didn't realize until it started that it was 261 tracks of music. Holy cow... I tried listening to that the next day and that's when I got the revelation... I realized why I'm a Jazz Guitarist and why I stopped listening to the radio for a while back then. What a bunch of crap that was... Most of the Doors albums sounded like they were done in someone's garage, and the rest of this stuff was either by artists I chose not to listen to or had never heard of in my life because they came and went while I was jamming out with Herb Ellis, Joe Pass, Charlie Christian, Howard Roberts, Tony Motolla, Grant Green, Kenny Burrel, Jimmy Smith, etc.
So when I think of the music of my High School years and early college ... it really is the stuff by those guys ... the Jazz greats of that era, not the popular 'top 40' stuff.
Personally I prefer to listen to music that challenges me to be better. I don't get that while my ears are bleeding :)
So that night I nuked 330 tracks off the Zune. I kept a few things, and a couple things I actually had already on CDs I own that were on there, so I'm not a total 60s rock luddite... I just like my music to be something I can listen to without being in an altered state :)
Here's to 60s Jazz... currently listening to Jimmy Smith on the Hammond B-3... very cool!