Ah the Sensless Sillyness of Work

Before Halloween there was this rather long email chain broadcasting through the team, of people reporting that they would be getting off work early on Halloween day to avoid the Traffic congestion that tends to swamp Microsoft campus on that day, with parents bringing in their costumed kids to collect candy.

Well one of the people who replied in the chain said he was going to stay just to pick off the chocolate, then a few seconds later the same guy emails again only this time with some SQL code involving Lambdas. It was quite the strange response to the topic of candy and taking off early. But one person on the team had an idea of what it must mean, so he replied back saying that "Lambda expressions are chocolate for the mind..."

A few days later another email was sent out announcing an anniversary of one of the team who works off-site. He wanted to continue the tradition of providing a pound of chocolate for every year he had been employed with Microsoft but being off-site he couldn't put the usual bowl out, so he sent "virtual chocolate."

Well, one of my Managers has quite the sense of humor, so he found that Lambda expression and replied back with it. Someone asked if it would become the next team T-Shirt. Of course I got the idea to see what it would look like as a T-Shirt. So I created a Zazzle account and whipped out a quick design. Ah, what fun.

Do For Fun?

There is a new guy at work, and over lunch on his first day he asked what I did for fun. One of the things I said was play on my computer. He said, cool, what do you play? I had to look sheepish at this point, I actually don't play many games on my computer, so I said, HTML, javascript, a little C# and VB.Net, moving files around... Yeah, okay, I'm a Geek!

How A-Mazing

This has been an interesting week. Monday was good with FHE and all, Institute on Tuesday, And then trying to get myself to do homework has been a pain. I biked to and from work on Monday through Wednesday (Boy was I sore on Thursday!). I also found all the ingredients to make Southern Biscuits. Mmmm. They were good, I think I will make some for tonight.

On Wednesday my Team, at work, went to a Corn Maze as a morale event. The surprising thing was that I, as a contractor, was actually invited along. They even got Volt's blessing for it!

On Friday Volt had a Fall event at the On-Campus offices So I enjoyed a free hot dog lunch and took home a portable speaker.

Conference has been good as well. I almost slept in through the first session however but I watched on-line anyway, so I just watched at a delay. The speaker I picked up on Friday came in handy. I hooked my old Laptop up to the big TV and set it up so I could watch Conference on the TV. But the sound from the Computer was hard to hear from across the room so I plugged in the Speaker from Volt and everything was just right to enjoy Conference. Hopefully Sunday's session is just as good.

Hmm. I wonder what we will be doing for FHE on Monday?

No Hard Drive Swapping :(

I decided to see if I could try an old hard drive in my new laptop, but when I opened it up I was disappointed with what I saw. HP is using a new quick swap hard drive caddie system which requires an extra purchase of a caddie with the special plug in order to install it. Sigh, oh well I will have to come up with another idea, or fork out the money. I need to be cheep right now so I will likely find another solution, somehow.

New Computer

woo! Hoo! My new computer arrived today! And so I get to go through the experience of getting a brand new computer again, complete with all of that wonderful junk installed. That experience I don't get at work, because working at Microsoft, the first thing I do at when I get a new machine, is boot up the Network Installer and install a fresh OS from the network.

The first thing I have to get used to here however, is the shift key on this new keyboard is smaller and gets interfered with by the up arrow the ?, and the enter keys. The Touch-pad is a little weird too, it feels more like a space bar than a touch pad button.

Ahrg! I did it again, I pressed the up arrow instead of the right shift key. Good thing it is talk like a pirate day today! This little flyer has been floating around the kitchens at work so I thought I would capture it.

The first thing I had to do once the machine started up was connect to the Internet, that was the painless part, then I had to enable the antivirus, fun; it's Norton! I will be replacing that soon enough. Then came the torrent of updates after updates, first Defender, then Norton, then Windows, then HP, then Java... At least that didn't take overly long.

While I waited I decided to try to document some of this on ye olde' blog here and make some smores. Mmmmmm. Smores! I think I will make another...

So the first thing I see when I open IE makes me cringe, No! not the Yahoo! tool bar!!!!! I will be un installing that now! Ah! much better, all gone. Next, there is some sort of weird side bar installed into IE called the "HP Clip Book" Weird! It sure takes up a lot of real estate. It has a close button but tells little of what it does. Oh, wait, there is a new button on the toolbar which has something to do with it. I think I will keep it for a little bit but it will likely go shortly, I like my Browsers in narrow windows but not that narrow.

Let's see, Oh yeah I got it with a web cam, now why did I do that now? I don't remember anymore. I think I will play around with it and see... Ah! there we go! Now I don't have a head! Ah, more fun to go...

Bumpersticker for tailgaters

I thought this would be a funny Bumpersticker...

hulu

Nice! One of my Cousins pointed me to http://www.hulu.com. It is an online video service which plays Movies and TV shows. Best of all it is free. Maybe it will keep me from going to the video store every week or so... Although I still want to pick up the last two seasons of Bablon 5 if I can find them.

Ooh. Dilbert...

Computer Forensics

With the hard drive crash I have been scouring the Internet looking for data recovery options. My Brother mentioned an 8 gig USB memory stick he had bought for less than $30.00 and is smaller than a stick of gum. It was too tempting of an offer, I got one for myself. Now I'm trying to figure out if it is possible to use it as a boot option for data recovery setup.

I would love to learn Computer forensics and data recovery. I have run into enough occasions where I wish I knew how and what to do to get data off a dead drive. Well back to the research...

IE 8 Beta 2 is Out

Nice! IE 8 Beta 2 was relesed today. I'm thinking of waiting till the VPC hvds are avalible since I don't want to muck up my general OS with a Beta browser right now. But I'm excided with the new features.

So the Command-line Continues to Live

I can remember carefully crafting AutoExec.bat and Config.sys files to get certain games and programs to work in ye-olde Dos 5.0 days. Days of the old Dos command which I knew and used much, were: DIR /W /P, CD /D, CD.., DEL, MOVE, COPY, DELTREE, DOSSHELL. I really didn't have much of an idea of what most of the commands in AutoExec. bat or Config.sys did or meant, but if typing "SET SOUND=C:\CREATIVE\CTSND" and "SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 T2" would get me sound, or If I was to set the right amount of memory to HIGHMEM I could play Betrayal at Krondor I would mod it.

It is kind of strange how things have progressed in the realm of the Computer. The old Apple2 was command-line, it wasn't until the Macintosh that GUI was to be the new interface and command-line was supposed to be outdated. Microsoft followed suit by trying to eliminate anything DOS like Windows until Windows NT. Anyone remember the days of "There is no more DOS," from Windows 9X days?

But the command-line is back with full force. There is an install mode for Server 2008 where only the minimum complement of Windows gets installed, and it is all command-line. Even Apple has a command-line in their Unix based OS.

Lately I have been finding myself digging into the Command-line more and more, writing batch file after batch file. It started at home when I went searching for a program which would converter .cdr files to .svg; I eventually found one but it was command line, so I had to  come up with a batch file which would recurs a directory converting any compatible vector images to .svg.

Then I decided I wanted to see if I could reduce the footprint of some of the folders on my hard drive, so I went searching and found pngout to compress many types of images to smaller lossless pngs. It even compresses most pngs around 75% of the original size. But again, the free version is a Command-line exe, so I built a script which would recurs a folder and compress the images inside.

As I started using my scripts I discovered that some programs choke on spaces even when quoted, so I searched and searched until I found a batch script which would remove spaces from filenames.

As I learned I found better ways to do some of the tasks, little little known flags which could be set to do useful things like get only a file name minus the extension so I could then change the extension rather than append the new one like I had been doing converting to svg. With this one I then needed to come up with a script which would delete the old files then create the new.

And so it goes with work now as well. Many of the internal tools are command-line driven, even the automation harness. So I have been trying to figure out ways to accomplish rather convoluted tasks all from batch language. It's a fun challenge, and make work more interesting. Now if I could just keep what I learned from writing a script for the next time I need to write something similar, rather than having to go back and look at my old code, I might actually be more productive.

But good times.

Sandals Without Socks?

It's kind of odd. Socks and Sandals are supposed to be a fashion faux-pa. Around here however they are so common that, the other day, when I saw someone wearing sandals without socks it just looked plain weird.

Who Says Space Quest is Dead?

Nice! It looks like Akril is back to writing her WSSQID comics again (http://sq7.org/wssquid). She has two new comics in the past week.

Lights Out?

My Uncle noticed this today. It is an interesting approach to saving energy. It works for CRT's, but not LCDs(http://www.google.com/intl/en/earthhour/), Still cool, just don't try to print pages like this with Background printing turned on.

Software Complications

I think I finally understand some of the strange things which complicate the creation of software.

I was involved in testing a small piece of internal software written by one person then handed over to a small group to finish. It mostly worked when he handed it over but was missing some stabilization and fit and finish. Being handed over it fell into a strange mix of complications.

Number of coders When there is one coder, there is one opinion and one style. The program should theoretically be consistent. Adding other coders throws a wrench in the works. Each coder has a different style and a different background. Not to mention they aren't familiar with the other coder's code.

Language complexity The complexity of the language can make things more difficult by hiding useful elements of the language in places some programmers wouldn't think to find or wouldn't know it even existed causing programmers to wrap their own solutions to things which already exist.

Language stability The stability of the language helps quite a bit. If a language is a type-safe language with garbage collection it is more difficult to have more disastrous consequences. Where in a language like C++, if you are not careful the program can leak and corrupt memory.

Project Complexity It is impossible to write a program which does not have errors. There will always be bugs in any program. Even a simple program will have some kind of way it can fail. The more code a program has and the more pieces it accumulates the more bugs it is likely to have. So the number of possible bugs is somewhat proportional to the complexity of the program.

Coder's Programing skill No two programmers have the same skill set or experience. Some have years of college and work experience, while others are new but well taught. Others are self taught, gleaning on the histories of others. As such the ways code is written will vary deeply depending on who codes.

Coder's Language familiarity The familiarity a coder has with a language certainly helps with how well they can code. A lot of languages have a very similar structure so someone familiar with a similar language can generally be somewhat efficient in another. But there are things such as libraries and learning the gotchas of a language which differ. For instance Someone who was educated in C++ can program in C# but they are likely to make things more difficult than necessary. And Someone who was trained in C# is likely to need to heavily use references to get much dome.

All of these things and others can make things difficult. A Programmer who is handed a project but is not familiar with how a program works is likely to unknowingly break parts which work perfectly well, while trying to fix some other part.

It was amazing to see how all of these factors can play into how a program eventually ends up. And the quality of it.

Cool Releases

A few cool releases this week, and one from a while back.

Windows Vista SP1 was released to Windows update yesterday. There are supposed to be lots of improvements and changes, including updating the Kernel to the one used in Windows Server 2008. I installed it last night. So far I haven't seen much difference. Instant Search is supposed to be cut back now, but I don't see any change there. Maybe there is some power mode I don't usually use or something.

The most drastic change is supposed to be with the speed of the normal File operations, such as Moving or copying files. Finally! I won't have to wait an eternity for a file to move! Another is that unzipping zip archives should be faster as well.

I think I can vouch for the zip file extraction being faster. I just unzipped an archive and it didn't seem as painfully slow as usual.

I also found out that Apple's Safari 3.1 has been updated. It's improvements are supposed to make it faster and more standards compliant.

It does seem faster. It actually seems to be usable now. But Safari it is still missing some power features which still makes IE, Opera and FireFox better for developers. Such as being able to save an entire website rather than just the html.

Right now I'm using Safari to write this post. The built in spell checker is a nice feature for blogging, as is the ability to resize the text box. But it is still such an ugly misfit to run in Windows. Skinned windows are for toy applications not serious ones. It also still looks horribly naked without the Windows borders.

A while back FireFox 3 Beta 4 was release. It is on it's final leg of Beta's so there shouldn't be many differences with it from Beta 3. I haven't spent much time on it so I haven't found many interesting points. However the user interface is kinda cool.

Unemployed

A week long Friday is now over. I am officially unemployed for an hundred days. Today at a little after 3:36 PM I handed my badge over to my Employment Rep.

Before the day was up, I sent this email to those I thought would care.

The curtain closes and it’s time to take the final bow.

Goodbye all, the pleasure has been mine, to have worked with each of you.

Thank you.

The funnyest responce was from my former Manager:

Not every day a tester comes along like Him who both cranked out a lot of excellent work and didn’t drink all the beer!

It's a bitter sweet time. A short time to be free before the next adventure begins. Yet sad, to miss what I have been enjoying doing for the past year.

Happy π day!

it's 3 14 again. It looks like librivox is celebrating in their own way http://librivox.org/?page_id=1999&preview=true You can listen to the first 50 digits read by many readers. Sounds like fun. Once again I forgot all about it so I don't have any Pie to celebrate with but it's a fun day anyway.

Drooling over announcements

Oooh! IE8 Beta 1 is out today. I'm excited! I'm easy to excite aren't I? I simply had to download it and try it out. http://msdn.microsoft.com/ie

I decided to re-download the IE6 and IE7 Virtual machines so I could try installing IE8 in a safe environment, so I wouldn't mess up anything. When I went to the VM page I found there was already an IE8 Virtual machine up too. Nice! But it means that just running the VM I don't get to see the installation, oh well.

I'm having fun anyway. I'm even writing this post from IE8 running on the Virtual Machine. It's so funny how broken Blogger is as it's expecting the old broken IE behavior.

Another really cool thing I saw today, is that a project I have been watching excitedly for a few years, has been released with source code. The project is Microsoft Research's Singularity OS. The all Managed Micro-Kernel, Software Isolated Process, Operating System. Even better, I know the one of the guys in charge of it. I've gotta find the time to try it out some time. http://www.codeplex.com/singularity. I wonder if I can understand any of it?

Time Line Template

Here is something I have been working on over the past week or so. I keep coming across the need to use certain dates in forms or Resumes and so on. But all of these dates are scattered all over the place.

I have employment dates in my Resumes, Special Church dates in my Baby book and Church records, and certificates. Mission dates in Mission Journals etc.

So it is sometimes difficult to find the exact date info I need. As I thought about it I realized that what I really needed, was a Time line. A central location to store all of the scattered date data of importance. And as a time line I could also get a nice visual perspective of my life.

So Here it is. I have linked the thumbnail below to the file on my SkyDrive.

It is created in Office 2007 Excel and uses some of the new features found in Excel 2007 such as Sortable tables and some of the new visual styling. It may be possible to convert it to the old format, but I haven't had a need to try.

For now now, I filled it with generic sample data and it is currently only set up for 100 events. To add any more, requires expanding the two tables and editing any new data labels to point to the event text.

One more thing. The Time line is also set to January 1st 1978 as the current Axis minimum, it can be changed but you will have to find the right numbers for the date. I did this because there seems to be a frustrating issue where if the dates span a certain point Excel thinks the Axis minimum should be 0 which coincidently is 1/0/1990 but in the chart it is 1/0/1900, neither of which make very valid dates.

The file is 30.6 KB.

Refrigerator Doors

Refrigerators could really use glass doors. Maybe something with blinds just behind the glass so the world doesn't have to see the contents all the time. It's such a waste ending up standing in front of the  open refrigerator staring in trying to figure out what I want to eat.

Lately I just end up popping some frozen food like item into the microwave. Ah what a life.