Work Related

Really annoying - my work machine

Moshe Eshel — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 20:18:00 GMT

My machine has been a loyal servant for the few last years, got it new, and it was fine. last couple of months it is giving me hell. long hangs with no apparent reason (I run AV, and constantly scan my computer for evil beings - not spyware).

The only indication for anything is given by the wonderfull Process Explorer which points that “Hardware Interrupts” are the ones giving me the grief. However, I have no special hardware connected anywhere, and no change has been made to my configuration before this horrible behavior begun.

Today it took me over 15 minutes just to restart my machine (after trying to get windows to even show the restart dialog).

I'm switching machines! a slightly newer with more and faster memory.

P.S. if anyone has an idea on those hardware interrupts, I'll be glad to investigate, as I'm keeping the old one “as is” for now.

USA Daylight Saving Time & Microsoft (continued)

Moshe Eshel — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 16:01:00 GMT

Finaly a reply from Microsoft...

They say that they will let us know what they will do later...

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/timezone/dst2007.mspx

The coming USA DST Change...

Moshe Eshel — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 15:59:00 GMT

I've recently been assigned the task of preparing our software to the DST (Daylight Saving Time) that is going to be implemented in the USA beginning March 2007. (link that explains the exact changes: http://www.energy.ca.gov/daylightsaving.html)

Our system (http://www.interwise.com) deals with event scheduling, so obviously such a change matters to us, and we have to at least asses what will happen when this change comes into effect.

As you probably already know, DST is a method in which during “summertime” the clock is moved ahead. This is done to “catch-up” with the sun, so that say 7:00 AM will always be in daylight. The main advantage of this system is that there are major energy savings, and that workers do not have to leave there house when it is still dark (biological clock is synchronized). This is good!

As you can guess there is also some bad news... like many other systems out there, everyone implements differently in this case each country (and sometimes each county/region) decides for itself, as with time-zone. And no one does it the same way. As far as I can tell the winners in the bizarre competitions (and it's almost tied) are Israel and Brazil where the system is completely abused. In Israel a law was recently passed that declares that DST begin and end time is controlled by TWO different calendars, the beginning is based on the Gregorian calendar and the ending is based on the Jewish calendar (until this law was passed every year saw a different definition of DST based on a government minister good only for that year and depending on his sole judgment)... In Brazil the system appears sane until you understand that it depends on a local holiday that doesn't have a stable date (and apparently relies on a different calendar as well). There are more oddities around the world - Australia with the Olympic Games specific change, USA with the state of Indiana in which different counties had there own definitions on both time-zone and DST.

This situation causes headaches for developers and vendors who have a reliance on this data (almost all software relies on TIME, although it is not always critical). I will not detail all the problems but you can guess that no software deals well with situations that the developer could not predict / pre-plan for. This situation practically forces patches being released. And currently it is causing me headache L

The funny thing for us (in us I mean vendors who are not Microsoft) is that Microsoft and such vendors (Oracle, SAP), are not releasing any information about what they are planning to do about DST changes in the USA in 2007, so we are kind of left in the dark. Obviously any change we make or not make is based on the platform we are using, and if we don’t know how the platform will deal with the situation – we can not plan ahead. So what is going on? Will anyone from MS please step up?

Some links that shed light on previous solutions for DST on Microsoft products:

http://www.petri.co.il/summer_clock_in_israel_for_2006.htm

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=317211

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909915

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/timezone.mspx

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=909933

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832869 (side effect on older data, search behaves differently than expected)

Update (21/06/2006): I have been informed that the Microsoft solution will be the standard one (a patch that updates the time zone information in the registry), also Sun has already issued an OS patch for the issue here: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/telecom?entry=new_dates_for_daylight_savings and here:http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-26-102178-1

I was mentioned by Scott, or XmlReader vs. Others...

Moshe Eshel — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 16:16:00 GMT

I encountered this post by Scott Hanselman (whom I of course read regularly), and was mentioned in his after-post - WoooHooo!!! I love attention, even got a link back... Just kidding, I feel unworthy, I just tried putting in my two cents, and didn't think it was such a contribution.

To the point, of course Scott is right, XmlReader is much more efficient than XmlDocument (I'm not going into this read his post), also I agree about the Nametable usage, I also wondered but I answered myself (and Scott explains it better) obviously comaring pointers is faster than comparing strings and pointers... By creating a dummy object with the needed information and comparing that - you let the faster comparison to work.

Anyway obviously using XmlReader correctly (as Scott suggests) is probably faster and more efficient than using XPathReader (since XPathReader is a wrapper around XmlReader, and it is not optimized for your query).

As usual it burns down to what you need your application to do, in the case described XmlReader is probably the best option.

Shameless try

Moshe Eshel — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 11:58:00 GMT

I recieved an email saying I could win a prize by just bloging about it... so here it is:
http://www.thinktecture.com/WSCF

Now seriously, I'm not intimate with the product itself, nor have I done much WS developement in a long time. I have, however, done web services programming some time ago, and read a lot of info about it. and it seemed and still seems logical to me to first define the contract - i.e. the interface, and go from there to defining and coding the actual implementation. This seems the closest to OO design, where the internals don't matter as much as what is public.

I won't blabber to much about it, go and check it out, if you like it - ~~buy it~~ keep it - it's free! (thanks for the reminder I missed that)

Database Change Management

Moshe Eshel — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 19:03:00 GMT

After a long time I'm back writing, mostly because I have something to write about - mostly time has passed by uneventfully...

At work, something has changed, actually two things. one is that we have moved to a new office building in a different area, this one is brand new, and has everything that was missing from the old one, especially the fact that I now share an office with a friend - opposed to sitting in an open-space environment, which in my opinion is unsuitable for developing anything but noise.

Another important change is that my boss for the last two years decided to manage no more, or at least until he thinks otherwise - and moved to a developer (senior) role in our team, and team leadership was taken by someone new. The team is now much larger (two different but close teams were merged into one). This is (I hope) the begining of some other changes as well, to do with the work environment and other issues.

As part of this starting change trend, we are looking at changing the teams work environment - programming development enviornment, and part of this mission is to see how to better handle the database change management. We have a pretty sophisticated product for managing the code-base (CM Synergy), but we have yet to understand how to control database developement using it. We are looking into ways to improve control and ease of distribution of the database scripts and changes.

Currently I'm researching DB-Ghost (http://www.innovartis.co.uk/home.aspx) which seems ok for some of our needs - build script management and cm intgeration (using the automation kit), but I have yet to see how it will help us for the Dev environment (the upper uses are good for install creation and such), and patching control. unless we buy a license for each user (~$400) and still have some problems, I'm trying to think of more solutions, but two other vendors in this area, Quest (http://www.quest.com) and Red Gate (http://www.red-gate.com/) can't seem to explain exactly what sort of change management tools they offer - I'm not much for slogans, I need to see the actuall feature to understand (or at least a video demonstration such as innovartis provides) to understand if it is good for me.

I would love to hear opinions and suggestions about how such things are implemented in other multi-developer environments... I know I can learn more... Oh I forgot to mention, this of course needs to support MS SQL server 2000 - thanks!

Interesting Bug/Feature of VB6

Moshe Eshel — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 12:45:00 GMT

Hi,

I haven't blogged for the longest time, me and my wife have been settling in into married life and our rented apartment. Much has been going on in my life in the last couple of months. for example I have married my beatifull wife, I have also gotten in to a new hobby - woodturning, which I really love (ranting - again it is proven that leaving in the USA is much more cost effective for me - imagine the cost of importing a wood working Lathe and tools - it is huge!).

Anyway, back to the main topic, VB6 and it's quirks. I have been programming with VB6 for the last 4 years at least, and this is the first time that I encountered this feature/bug (you decide, in my case it was a bug). I had a case where I test two boolean varaiables against each other (x=y) and both where True, but the comparison returned false!!! the result of the statement is that True<>True - you can agree that this is wierd....

After a lot of debugging work and a lot of help from friends here, we found the reason. when printing the Cint() value of the Booleans, one of them equalled 1 and the other equalled -1 (-1 is the VB value for True, however VB considers anything not 0 to be true). Since VB apparently checks the Int value of the Boolean variables.

Why did this happen, well, it turns out that if you send a boolean to a function byref, and the function interface is declared as Variant. When assigning “1” to the boolean inside the function and exiting. the boolean value is set to True (as should be) but it's int is set to 1 instead of -1. Here is a code example

Function First()
     Dim a As Boolean
     Dim b As Boolean
     Dim c As Boolean
a = True
b = True
c = True

MsgBox (a=b) ' will print True
MsgBox (a=c) 'will print True

Call Second(c)

MsgBox (a=b) ' will print True
MsgBox (a=c) 'will print False
MsgBox(a) ' Will print True
MsgBox(c) ' Will print True

End Function

Function Second(ByRef par As Variant)
par = “1“
End Function

Excellent Resource - HTTP Inspection Tools of Note

Moshe Eshel — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 21:56:00 GMT

Thanks to Port80 for providing these links, may I add a small contribution TamperIE from Bayden Systems a small utility that doesn't actually look at HTTP but at your GET/POST data and allows you to see and modify this info.

Microsoft's XML Team is asking you:

Moshe Eshel — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 23:07:00 GMT

I saw this in Signs in the sand blog I read from time to time, MS XSL team is doing a survey on their blog, first I want to thank Oleg for the pointer, second I want to say that this is a great idea in my opinion to ask the developer community on what features they need/want.

My own experience with XSLT is quite limited, I have worked with it a few years back, and did some things with it, but I feel a bit un-qualified to answer the questions - especially the size questions, since I haven't dealt with large size XML/XSL combinations. However, and this is something that I think was agreed in all the posted comments, when programming with XSL (and it is programming) there is often a need for more functions, string functions, math functions etc... but again, I'm not that knowledgable about the subject so I will let smarter people answer.

The great thing about this idea is that it is well trageted, as a software engineer working on our product I have three clients usually:
1. The end users - regualr people who get to use the applications
2. Integrators - 3rd party companies who want to use our product as a platform (API)
3. Internal - other products within the major product scope who need to work with the internal components.

The easiest of the three is the internal customers, I can always know exactly what they need and why, and usualy can offer solutions for them that fit exactly, since they are consulted and working with me.

The hardest are of course the end-users because there are so many of them and it is very hard to get a solid response. Need I say more?

The integrators are a mixed bunch, but also a solid one - they are technical people using your product, and using it for their own needs, if you do your job well they will have no complaints. it is easier with black-box components like the XSL component when there is a well defined spec that everyone understand - but still sometimes input on features is required - and the perfect thing to do is ask, and ask the ones using it - just like in this case. Up to this day, I've enjoyed working with the XML team's product, Keep up the transparency and interest in the developer community, and thank you!

Searching and Finding a new home

Moshe Eshel — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 22:41:00 GMT

Since our wedding (and before) my wife and I have been searching for a place to call home - for at least a year, maybe more. This made me think a lot about what kind of place I would like to live in, and I reached some conclusions - if I could I would like to live in the country - away from city life, not that I dislike the city, but that is what I prefer. I grew up in a small village and as a young boy, going to the city was a major hassle - in Israel nothing is far away, but the fact that there was close to no public transportation made it very hard to get there. So the city was always and still is facsinating for me. But I do prefer not to live there.

The trouble with moving out to the country-side is work, as sad as it may be, I still have to work, and my current line of work as a software engineer forces me to be close to the city, why? since the company I work in (and I believe most companies here) do not think so highly about Tele-Commuting. It is sad that the company I work for is that way - since our product is about Tele-Commuting (Remote-Collabortaion, Communication etc...) (check out http://www.interwise.com - disclaimer: I work for this company). Now that would be logical if the product wasn't that good, but the fact is it is really good (again, I work here, but I really like it and this is my opinion). Truth is I haven't pushed for this - but I think I know the answer I will get. I would love to be able to work most of the week from home and commute to the office 1/2 days a week (or maybe even less). The software we develop makes it possible to work with a team from home, and even join into meetings and be very productive. Even the network infrastructure here in Israel can already support high traffic easily (assuming I manage to reduce my downloading habbits :-)).

So eventually, after a lot of searching in the center of Israel area, we have come to settle on my home village, where we found a nice small house for a reasonable rent. This wasn't expected, we were looking in other directions when the offer came - and we were happy. The house comes with a nice garden, and we have to work on it to make it cozy - the house was built almost 50 years ago - and not in a high standard, so you can imagine - there is work to be done. However, it is not as bad as it sounds, and I expect to have a good time living there with my new wife and renovating a little in the house, gardening outside etc... Maybe even setting a small Wi-Fi network to use in the garden :-)

So we just finished ordering our new refigirator and oven and bedroom (my wife allowed no geekiness traits of mine to surface, and budget is limited :-( so currently I don't even have a place for my computer to stand... but we'll find something...). The trouble with a small apartment is that there is never enough space for everything you want.

I'm looking forward to moving in (in about two weeks when we finish cleaning the place up).