::::: : the wood : davidrobins.net

My name is David Robins: Christian, lead developer (resume), writer, photographer, runner, libertarian (voluntaryist), and student.

This is also my son David Geoffrey Robins' site.

The great desk adventure

News ·Sunday May 21, 2006 @ 21:50 EDT (link)


Back garden Today at the Lord's Supper at Northgate Gospel Chapel I was remembering another assembly that I used to attend: Cowley Road Gospel Hall, in Uxbridge, England; it would be nice to go back and visit sometime. I remember the large text over the platform at the front: "Jesus Christ is Lord"; the worn chairs, the cupboard for the hymnbooks at the back, the dark brown carpet, the drafty entryway; the wall around the outside, and the sign outside advertising services. My dad has a wedding picture of him and my mother outside it.

Dr. Who was on again Friday night at midnight (Saturday morning if you want to be picky about it); another excellent episode, I'm really getting into it. It's only the second episode I've seen; I know it's a British tradition and I've heard of it all my life, so it is indeed surprising it's taken so long for me to catch a show. During commercials I tidied up most of the remaining items we had sitting in a pile in the basement; deciding where things go and putting them in their proper places can be very relaxing (but only the first time!)

We had a drawer fall apart in the move from Boston, and I took a serious look at repairing it Saturday morning, but no go. It looks like Grebel (the movers) tried to repair it themselves with a nailgun, some random pieces of wood and acetylene plastic, and a complete lack of finesse, and did rather poorly. If I had the tools it might be possible (I need to be able to cut a groove), but we'll probably just do without it and keep the telephone there.

I've been wanting a decent (large) desk for a while—the one my parents gave me when I moved to Memphis is great, but somewhat small—so now that I have an office to put it in I lined up a few promising candidate desks on the Micronews Classified Ads, and even made an offer on one, but it wasn't the highest; most required hauling or were more than I wanted to pay, so we headed to the local Ikea store to make a selection from the Galant collection.

From Ikea's side, the store is great; it forces you to walk past absolutely everything, but that's very unhelpful when you're looking for a particular set. It didn't take long to decide on a combination (one matching one of the demos: corner table, extension, and a curved end, but without the hanging computer cage which looked somewhat flimsy).


The new desk When it came to load the car—Honey's VW Golf—we found that the largest piece didn't fit in the car. No problem, they provide cardboard roofracks and twine. I heaved it up there, we passed a large quantity of twine over and around it, and off we went. The front end was up on the sunroof visor, and the back was against the antenna, so it flapped around a bit on the I-405, but the three times we pulled over it was fine, although it was probably the weight rather than the twine that kept it in place. It made for nervous driving, though—especially on Novelty Hill.

After I got it unpacked I was very impressed with the design, construction, and assembly instructions, especially considering that they don't use words, just pictures and numbers (saves translating). My drill, with a Phillips screwdriver bit, was very helpful as always. The hardest part was turning the desk back over after assembly, given its weight and the space available. But it's a magificent desk, L-shaped, medium brown, plenty of space, about 6'6" on the long sides. I assembled it while Honey was sleeping after we got back from church; it took about an hour. I'll probably put the small desk I had upstairs in the "media room" (it has my photographic equipment in there now and will probably host the piano when we get one, and since it's wired for Ethernet I'll probably put a computer in there too).

Made my bug goal this week, but not the secondary "stale" goal, due to some stubborn old bugs and not a few ambushes.

And the lawn keeps growing, and I keep cutting it....

A few of my favorite* things

News ·Saturday May 13, 2006 @ 22:11 EDT (link)

* Yes, US spelling. It's shorter, thus more efficient, and efficient is good.

With all of our picture frames together in one place now (the upstairs "media room"), I was able to pick out a suitable frame for the picture of my mother (Anne) that my mother (Esther) gave me a little while ago. It's a nice silvered frame, and now the picture sits on one of our end tables in the living room.

The US senate has voted to make English the official language. Finally! A few choice quotes from the linked article, from that bastion of journalistic integrity, the Inquirer (actually it's not so bad; it was founded by the same person that brought us the Register, which hosts that networking nemesis, the BOFH):
The US senate has formally decided that English will be the official language of the former British colony.

...

It is not clear if adopting English means that Microsoft will now have to use proper UK English rather than that bastardised US English it has been peddling on Microsoft Word for years.

Nor whether Yanks will now learn to speak proper.
A few Word developers and testers founded the Word book club a few weeks ago; our first book is Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, chosen by yours truly; we're about done it; it's high time to pick another book. On the video side of things, we're working our way through Deep Space Nine season 4, and will order season 5 shortly.

We drove out to Wallace Falls State Park on Saturday the 13th; unfortunately I left my camera at home, but perhaps next time I'll go all the way to the Upper Falls and bring my camera with me.

And the last few of my favorite things: Ribena, a delicious blackcurrent drink of English origin, also available in Canada, and my mother gave me a bottle when I was last there, which I had packed away and recently discovered. Yay! I also discovered some Turkish Delight in the same bag. What a wonderful way to end a day.

O to be in England

News ·Friday April 28, 2006 @ 18:55 EDT (link)

O, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!
And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossom'd pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray's edge—
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower
—Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!
—Home-thoughts, from Abroad, Robert Browning.

A recent post to MetaFilter (MeFi) on Oxfordshire churches reminded me of spring in England.

My car's brakes are fixed. Autosys couldn't finish the work on Thursday as expected, so they paid for a rental car for me, a gray Camry LE, for that day, until I could pick up the car the next day. All seems to be well; they do good work.

Filling out the house

News ·Sunday April 23, 2006 @ 15:25 EDT (link)


View from upper deck We're not particularly happy with Ravenswood at the Park, our old apartments; they hit us with a lot of junk charges on move-out for unnecessary cleaning and so forth. Boo. But at least we're out.

The kind people at MDM finally fixed up our SORBS entry to indicate that this is a static IP, which means that mail to Microsoft (and other systems that bounce mail to users in the Dynamic IP list) will get through now. We also got a lot of piled up old mail inbound, which means some systems are using the Dynamic IP listings to stop sending mail, too. Shame, shame.

I set up my old sound system (Sony DreamSystem) upstairs; the DVD player is dead (despite attempts in Boston to revive it), but the tuner and amp. is fine; we'll get a small CD player and hook it up in a bit.

Our washer and dryer were delivered and hooked up around 1000 Saturday morning. I filled out our rebates (a delivery rebate and two for efficiency). The deliverymen ran a test cycle and Honey did several loads of laundry; the units work very well and are quite quiet.

I went to mow the lawn, after less than stellar results last time (the rechargeable mower, a Black and Decker CMM1000, cut out before I finished), and it wasn't that great this time, either, so we drove into Redmond and picked up a regular electric mower (the Black and Decker MM875), which was much better. I also edged with the Grass Hog we'd bought a few days back, and weeded the back of the garden, with Honey's help.

We picked up a new DVD rack at Circuit City; it's as wide as our other two together and a little higher; we assembled it, and moved all our DVDs over to it, with space to spare. We also picked up the Star Trek movies, I-VI, and Nemesis, First Contact, and Insurrection at a decent discount, although we had to get V from Amazon since they didn't have it.

I took some pictures today, maybe I'll get them up soon. Very sore after yesterday's work. Sausages and coffee for breakfast, and then Raphael calls and says ZorbaTwit is making inane remarks about our new #c++ bot, which I go over and quell. It's a beautiful day again today.

New washer/dryer, server downtime, proxy

News ·Thursday April 20, 2006 @ 11:46 EDT (link)

We bought a washer/dryer today, a set of white Kenmore Elite HE4s from Sears. They've gotten good reviews from Consumer Reports (Kenmore took the top three places, in fact), and the former owners of the house had a (graphite) set. We also picked up a Black and Decker Grass Hog.

Small (web-only) server downtime today due to Gentoo upgrades being slightly bonkers, but I pulled in some new Apache packages and all is well.

I've set up an IRC proxy, ctrlproxy; I've been meaning to for a while; it stays connected even when I need to disconnect (lets me stay opped and keep my nick) and multiple machines can connect to it, which means seamless switching between machines and not having multiple logged in accounts. I'm using the latest branch from bzr (yet another revision control system, and a pretty crappy one from what I've seen); there were several crashes at first; I debugged some of them and sent fixes to the author.

It's been raining most of the week; high time to finish cutting the lawn!

Happy birthday to my sister Emily.

Illegal invasion

News ·Thursday April 13, 2006 @ 00:52 EDT (link)

Wherein I rant about the current immigration issues.

I'll start with apropos quote that dear old Dad (in-law) sent me after reading the original item:

In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American.... There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag.... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.
—Theodore Roosevelt, 1907

First, it's not immigration if you sneaked across the border or hid in a truck or otherwise got here illegally. Someone that did so is not an "undocumented worker", as if they just mislaid their papers or someone forgot to issue them. They are an illegal invader, or just "illegal", a tresspasser, and a criminal. As a legal immigrant who filled out all the paperwork and paid the required fees, any talk of "amnesty" is intensely annoying; it's usually just pandering for votes, anyway (and you won't get mine when I get my citizenship, which I should be eligible to file for within the year).

Where to begin? There's so much wrong with the situation, from understaffed, underequipped, and unsupported border ("ICE") agents to the bleeding heart open borders twits to the Mexican flags at the recent protests.

I suppose the protests would be a good place to start: since the illegals were all conveniently together, it would have been a great opportunity to round them up, check their papers, and deport them. Yes, I support deporting 11+ million people. Just because you've been breaking the law and gotten away with it for a while, and even gotten comfortable, doesn't mean I owe you anything. Of course, removing them doesn't do any good if they'll just turn around and sneak back in again, so we need a fence, too.

Jobs Americans won't do: "What harm do they do?", one may ask. After all, they do "jobs Americans won't do". Do they? Rush Limbaugh, April 3 (radio):
... What is this silliness that Americans won't do these jobs? Somebody tell that to the West Virginia coal miners. Somebody tell that to the Americans, those lazy Americans in Iraq on the battlefield.

This notion that there are jobs Americans will not do is getting a little bit histrionic to me. I'm sick and tired of being told by these elites in Washington, these politicians how we all refuse to work. They seem to think we're all raised like Ted Kennedy or married into wealth like John Kerry. The American people work. They work damn hard. The economy and the numbers there prove it but yet we're told, "No, no, no! The Americans are lazy. They're uppity. There are certain jobs that they will not do."

Well, check the coal mines. Check the military. I don't see any illegals there.
I liked another quote that I can't find now, that states that America was founded and became strong because there was no job that Americans wouldn't do.

They're cheaper: So, perhaps the story is that they work for lower pay than Americans would; well, if that's below minimum wage, that's illegal, Go Directly to Jail and Do Not Pass Go. But let's assume it's above minimum wage, but citizens and legal residents ("legals") aren't lining up to work for you; perhaps working as a cashier or in food preparation is preferable to picking strawberries in the sun. Well, that's sad, but let me let you in on a little secret on how you can get workers: pay more money. "Ah, but it's not that simple! Farmers can't survive without illegal workers." Respect the Invisible Hand.

So, you pay 1.5x minimum wage, and people—legal people—start applying to work for you. You pass on the cost to the consumer. Ideally, they gripe but everyone has to pay this wage so they pay the higher cost, but then pay less income tax because they're no longer supporting the Mexican welfare state. Less ideally, growers are undercut by foreign imports and start to go out of business, but congress comes up with tarriffs and subsidies to save the day (protectionism? what's that... well, let's just say it's an encouragement to buy local).

Open borders, free movement of capital: The idea is that borders should be open and capital free to move where it wants, which seems libertarian (but isn't necessarily). Sounds like a fine idea, except that with the United States' social programs (also called "entitlement programs", usually by those opposed to them), the US ends up bearing the costs of the poor, criminal, and uneducated that move here: welfare, hospital stays, incarceration, policing, housing increases, etc. If those were dispensed with, it might make more sense to allow open borders (but with no handouts, would they still come?) but it would also be a country of small fiefdoms with a lot of anarchy in between.

Where do your loyalties lie? If you're coming to live in a country, your loyalties had better be with that country, and you'd better try to fit into it, not it to you. Previous waves of immigrants haven't demanded the US speak their language and provide government forms in their language, but the hispanics have, and they're getting it. That translates to higher costs to taxpayers, and to Spanish-speaking ghettoes springing up in cities across the country. It's Mexican flags and reconquista.

Sure, bring your culture here, but give it to the melting pot, don't try to impose it. I'm from Canada, but as a permanent resident of these United States, my loyalty is to the United States; I don't send money back to Canada, and I don't fly a Canadian flag. The freedoms I have here would allow me to do all of that, but I chose to come here, and it is my home. Billions of dollars that could be spent here flow from the US to Mexico; if legals had the jobs, I'm fairly confident that the money would remain in the US.

It's not amnesty if they have to pay a fine! A fine is a slap on the wrist and an encouragement of illegal behavior. If someone breaks into a house, you don't fine them and let them keep their loot. They forfeit anything they've taken, and their liberty besides. Illegals should be rounded up, have DNA samples taken to prevent re-entry, and be sent back across the border, possessions forfeit, to be sold by the government at auction.

What about the chylllllldrun? What about them? The parents chose to have them while illegal; personally I think their citizenship should be revoked and they should be turfed out with the parents. At the least, minor children should be sent back to Mexico with their parents. Children of illegals (or even legal immigrants), so-called "anchor babies", should not become citizens just by dint of birth within the borders of the US; that's a ridiculous interpretation of the 14th amendment: illegals are breaking the law by their very presence.

How can employers know? The US social security administration is very willing to verify the legality of SSNs; it's not a breach of privacy because the employer provides the information to the government, which only returns back whether the potential employee is legal or not—no other information.

As in many cases, the way to get rid of the problem is to reduce demand (consider illegal drugs, for example); this can be done by heavily fining those employing illegals, and jailing those responsible (a $100,000 fine per illegal and 60 days in jail, per illegal worker, should do nicely).

A net gain: So, fruits and vegetables cost a little more; the price of some goods go up, as services previously performed by illegals (janitorial work, construction) now cost more when done by legals, and must be factored into costs. But everyone's playing on a level field: farmer John can't hire illegals, but farmer Fred can't either, and if either does, the fines will probably put them out of business. With no-one hiring, the illegals go home; the government stops providing Spanish versions of anything, social service costs in the border states and areas with high illegal concentration fall, local spending increases, and everyone's taxes are reduced. With less illegals, legal immigration quotas are raised.

And America is back on the straight and narrow path, strong, self-sufficient, independent, free.

(Unfortunately, it'll probably never work. Republicans are in the pockets of big businesses that want illegals for cheap labor, and Democrats want to throw (our) money at them to pander to the hispanics to get their vote—probably the votes of those given citizenship by the 1986 amnesty; look how well that turned out.)

Tiny hoodlums breaking things

News ·Wednesday April 12, 2006 @ 23:44 EDT (link)

Finally got rid of a bug that'd been hanging around for ages: I'd fixed it on my machine, but apparently it still repro'd on other machines, because of a few other idle performance issues. It's about time; requiescat in pace.

Tuesday, March 28: MOR delivered our furniture today; a sofa set, with two tables, two lamps, and a coffee table. They gave a time range of 1100-1400, arrived around 1140, and were done around 1200, which meant I didn't have to work too late. It's very comfortable.

Wednesday, March 29: Had to stay home again today, 0900-1200 this time, for MDM (cable Internet); the guy didn't arrive until 1100. Since most of the computers were still at the apartment I verified the connection with my laptop. "Silver" was the lowest level that provided the required static IP and unblocked ports for running my servers; it's more expensive than Speakeasy was (it was about $55/month) at $80/month, however we'll save some money using VoIP rather than a Verizon landline.

Friday, March 31: Ordered Vonage VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) connection, $24.95/month, first month free, but that doesn't really mean anything as they get you for a $30 activation fee.

Monday, April 3: I took my car in to Autosys today (which required us both to get up very early) for an oil change and their "spring special" tuneup; unfortunately the engine light's come on and so I had them run a diagnostic ($150, ouch) and there's quite a lot wrong with it, with the oxygen sensor only a beginning. It seems Boston is still exacting its toll from us; the snowy roads were not kind.

Thursday, April 6: Mowed 3/4 of the lawn (the battery gave out at that point; the grass was pretty long).

Friday, April 7: Went to the doctor about an allergic reaction; first time going to the doctor here, picked one in Bellevue, nice guy, prescribed Zyrtec and said it should clear up shortly. Called Waste Management, added yard waste collection (extra $9.23/month, sigh).

Vonage's package (some papers and a reconditioned Linksys router with two phone jacks) had arrived a few days ago, but I'd gotten annoyed at them since it appeared that they wanted their device to sit outside my firewall, and act as a router for my network, which I wasn't having. Turns out (from perusing their site) that it will work just fine behind the firewall, getting an address with DHCP.

Saturday, April 8: Having the phone chained to the Vonage router didn't appeal much, but Google answers provided some information about using the house telephone wiring. I picked up a multimeter, unhooked the outside wiring at the junction box, checked the line with the multimeter—all clear—and hooked the Vonage device to the nearby jack, et voilà: distributed telephony.

This is where this entry's title comes in: we had observed some broken toys on a lane next to our house; the lane is public property, the drive goes about to our back yard and then has posts, although it's paved a little further to behind our yard. I'd thrown away a few items left out because they were eyesores. A couple of our garden lamps had been broken not too long ago, quite possibly by kids cutting through our yard to go to this lane (could also have been by the MOR movers, though).

That evening I observed a kid cutting through our yard and yelled at him (and told them to clean up their mess when they were done). A couple of the kids went to talk to parents and, shockingly enough, they came back with plastic bags and started actually picking up their trash. What they'd been doing was taking (old, possibly already-broken) toys and hitting them with a baseball bat. Not the most constructive behavior in the world, but fine, their time, their stuff, as long as they kept the noise down. A little later, though, they picked up one of the broken parts of one of our lamps and started hitting it, so I had to go out and take it away from them. Fortunately, things ended well; some parents showed up and we talked with them, they agreed to have their kids tidy up their messes (and not cut through our yard), and I apologized for yelling at them.

Sunday, April 9: Went to Northgate, then met Honey at the apartment and cleaned the remainder (vacuumed and mopped kitchen and bathroom floor, cleaned bathroom and windows, did some laundry); I'll do a walkthrough with them this week and get our security deposit back.

Monday, April 10: I called MDM technical support today (800-829-2225) (I'd emailed earlier, but I think it went to a marketing address). My new Internet address shows up in the SORBS dynamic IP list, which makes me sad as I paid for a static IP, and it's not just the principle of the thing, either, as it causes mail from Microsoft to bounce. I tried to get SORBS to remove the listing, but they said my ISP had to handle it. My jaw nearly hit the floor when the (first!) person I talked to not only knew what I was talking about, but said it would be taken care of that day. (Unfortunately, as well as that boded, it's still in the list two days later. I'll give them a day or two more and then call them back to see what's going on.)

Tuesday, April 11: Waited 40 minutes on hold to cancel our old Verizon number (yay! we hate Verizon, they've stiffed us at every opportunity). I also called the Royal Bank of Canada to see why they were taking $4 out of my Canadian account every month (which would soon put it in the red). Turns out it was for 15 (unneeded and unused) transactions monthly; I had it removed (I can still use the account for $0.50/debit or $0.75/cheque).

Wednesday, April 12: We (Word development) got our new machines today (dual core, not sure how fast, but fast), and were talking about machine names (the convention is to prefix with one's alias, usually <alias><number> e.g. JDOE3, but it's not a requirement). Best (Microsoft network) machine name ever: WHACKWHACK. As in "please review \\WHACKWHACK\public\bogus.dpk" (spoken as "whack whack whack whack whack public whack bogus dot dee pee kay"). Unfortunately somebody already has it, but AT came up with a suitable alternate: QUACKQUACK.

Moving day

News ·Sunday March 26, 2006 @ 15:30 EST (link)

Many things have happened since I last wrote; not the least of which being that we have finally moved into our house, and this is the way of it.

We rented a 16' Budget truck for Saturday the 25th, and on that day I and three co-workers converged on my office and drove over to our apartment in my car, getting there around 1100. I'd picked the truck up earlier and backed it toward the apartment; we'd been packing and removing boxes every few days for the past few weeks and made sure that the way was clear to remove the larger items. It probably took us an hour to load up, then about 30 minutes to drive over to our house in Duvall, and another hour to unload, punctuated by ordering pizza for the hungry laborers. After we dropped everyone back at Microsoft, Honey and I packed the truck again.there were still plenty of smaller items, e.g. the drawers we'd removed earlier, files, kitchen and bathroom items, laundry baskets, etc..and made another trip. We were pretty knackered after unloading, so we waited until the next day to bring the truck back (we had it from 0800 Saturday to 0900 Sunday).

I am also now involved in lawn care, which, I'm told, is both an art and a science. I ordered a broadcast spreader and a lawnmower from Amazon (better price than Home Depot; until now, I hadn't known Amazon sold tools, either). The spreader had to be assembled, which was a bit of an exercise, but it seems solid; the lawnmower just needed the handle to be folded back and some screws to be tightened (and to be charged). Yesterday (the 2nd) I spread some fertilizer on the lawn and pulled up a few dozen dandelions, most of them by the roots. I'll mow in a few days when the fertilizers had a chance to, um, fertilize. Very new at this lawn stuff but the seller has given me some helpful advice. We picked up Deep Space Nine season 2 and some GRE books with the other Amazon purchases.

Last entry I was fairly happy to have been accepted as a GNM student into the University of Washington's Professional Master's Program in Computer Science and Engineering, but unfortunately the class that I wanted, and the alternate both filled up. Maybe next quarter; perhaps I'll have written the GRE by then.

At work I'm trying to check my current outstanding fixes in. Lots of build breaks to navigate around, before I can even attempt to run the remote test suite (the local "quick" test suite passed already).

We've had to transfer various utilities: we no longer have Ista (water, sewage, electricity, trash); the City of Duvall handles water, Puget Sound Energy handles electricity, and Waste Management picks up trash, recycling and yard waste. Millennium Digital Media provide cable here, instead of Comcast; we also decided to get cable Internet through MDM, since Speakeasy's contractor wasn't able to install OneLink DSL out here. We're going to try to go with Vonage VoIP for telephone service (free long distance in the US and Canada). It's all part of the process of moving, which I hope we don't have to do again soon; we're still sore from loading and unloading the truck.

Admittance, grammar rants, Roe vs. Wade for men

News ·Tuesday March 7, 2006 @ 15:02 EST (link)


Dining room Good news: I've been accepted into the Professional Masters Program (PMP) in Computer Science and Engineering (CS&E) at the University of Washington (UWa.), as a Graduate Non-Matriculated (GNM) student, which lets me take a few courses and see how I like it before enrolling (which also requires taking the GRE and getting letters of recommendation).

Move status: We're still moving a few boxes every few days; we've moved all of our books and most of the dishes we don't use, camping gear, some DVDs, and some office supplies. We had a little trouble with the blinds (couldn't move them) but the seller told us they're just really heavy; knowing that we wouldn't damage them by pulling harder, we had no trouble moving them. We have a Budget truck reserved for the weekend of the 25th and some helpful guys from work to help move the larger items.

Speaking of work, I took a chap from work (MS from MS) to the airport last Friday. Here's a sad story about bears. Louis Voyer, a travelling preacher, sent us some news of his recent US trip (he calls Mississauga home). In other news, my bug count's low and I'm having no trouble hitting my goals even with all the new areas that I've been assigned.

Mini-rants: The pairings "might could" and "might would" are awkward and, to me at least, sound uneducated. "Might" takes an infinitive, so the first would be correctly "might be able", and the second is redundant and collapses to just "might".

The accounting firm of Gipson & Woodruff, P.S., based in Kirkland, sent a form letter to our new house, proffering their services. This letter container two errors: "effect" for "affect" (common, but still inexcusable), and "The congress" for "Congress" (which should be capitalized when talking about the U.S. Congress, as they were). Needless to say, I'm not inclined to let a company that lets such shoddy prose out of their doors do my taxes. I prepared a scathing letter (in Word 12, natch) but I probably won't send it.

Thank you all for allowing me these rants.

A case dubbed Roe vs. Wade for men is in the Michigan courts now (comments, news articles). In a nutshell, it argues that men that don't want a child shouldn't have to pay child support for it, since the woman has the choice of abortion or adoption. In some egregious cases, men have been hit up for back support payments for children several years after the fact, have been tricked into fatherhood, or even end uup paying for kids that aren't theirs (the state sometimes doesn't even stop the required payments, much less returns the money). The guy filing the suit doesn't expect to win, but he expects to bring the issue to peoples' attention; that he has done.

I was having some trouble with my RAS connection to work; I called the helpdesk and the issue was elevated to tier 2 and they managed to get me a fix, in the form of an IPsec service update. Yay.

Recent books/movies:

A frustrating few days

News ·Tuesday February 28, 2006 @ 22:50 EST (link)

15 bugs at the start of the week, goal was to get to 13, reasonable enough. By the end of Monday, I had 10 more bugs (I don't meant to imply I'm alone in this, either; the whole team was getting swamped). Probably another six or seven on Tuesday, with maybe five total fixed between both days.

By now I've accumulated about 25 fixes which I want to check in, so on Wednesday I run the quick tests, which pass after a minor fix, and sync up my changed files with the current build; I lose just about the whole day to build breaks (it's primarily the usual suspect, the installer (.msi) client project). Thursday I try to run the remote test suite but I have a huge failure count. On looking at the screen shots, there's a random "Microsoft Office can help" dialog popping up preventing several tests from working. I eventually track down a fix, or at least a workaround, tests pass, I check in, yay. It's now Friday evening and I'm up to 28 bugs.

It's a busy weekend, but there is light at the end of the tunnel; at 0400 Monday I'm down to 13. A few highlights

  1. Extra item shows up in the schema collection. Pretty simple, although a pain to track down: just an off-by-one in a string copy, so simpleSchema.xsd becomes simpleSchema.xs. Other code references the schema, which isn't found by the original name so another entry is created with the right name.

  2. Undead toolbars. Create a new custom toolbar, restart, delete the toolbar, restart, it's baack! Little trickier: turns out every "main window" clones the toolbar, and on delete one wasn't getting removed—the one in the VBA window (I was distracted by a comment that claimed otherwise).

  3. Incorrect correction. On Japanese Word, when \alpha is autocorrected to α, the "stop autocorrecting" item on the "on object" floating menu was always checked. Turns out that in Japanese, sometimes backslash and the Yen sign are equivalent, sometimes not. When you type \ it displays as ¥ but still acts as a backslash for autocorrection. However, we fetch the display text, not the document text. When we populate the floating menu, we check if there's an autocorrect item for ¥alpha, and when there isn't, we assume the user has turned off autocorrection for it. Fix was to temporarily turn off the "convert backslash to yen" flag when formatting text for the autocorrect lexer, although this still needs to be examined to see if we always want to convert in this case.

  4. Another set of settings. Creating another Word application and toggling an option fails. Turns out it crashes the other Word because the application was created without a window, and somebody was assuming we had one. Only tough because it required debugging another instance and because someone threw a spanner into the gears of my finely-tuned debugging environment (remember those remote tests I was trying to pass earlier? the Office test framework guys like to stomp all over everything and not clean up after themselves).

Watched The Devil's Own and Saw II (one can only work so long) plus we're going through M*A*S*H again. We're still going over to the house every few days to drop off boxes, mainly books but also random office supplies, today our bikes, and some boxed china.

And finally: a bug bounced its way around Office, finally getting handed to me by the Word dev manager (speaking of Word dev, we had our group meeting today and everything seems to be on track, although there's still lots of work to be done). A customer has a VB (not VBA, VB 6 actually; positively ancient and losing support fast with the takeup of VB.net) application that worked fine in Office 11, but slows to an absolute crawl on Office 12, except when run under the VB 6 debugger.

I tracked it down to our idle loop: VB calls us through a "component manager" interface so that Word can run various idle tasks (cleanup, delayed layout, etc.), apparently when user code calls DoEvents (and their code calls DoEvents thousands of times in a loop for some reason). If there's nothing much going on, we don't want to just wait around so we give back time to the operating system, as well-behaved programs ought: a second here, 500 ms. there, 60 ms. somewhere else, as it happens. That's all fine and good most of the time, but not when we're being called thousands of times by an external program. Turning off these delays in the "component manager" case caused an amazing speed increase. We may not want to turn them off entirely, just if we're called in rapid succession; I'll get consult some other devs in the area to see what the best fix is. That was nice to nail down, though. Setting up the client program was a bit fiddly; I could debug on my own machine, but it had to be as an OEM test user so their program would install properly.

I'm in the market for a lawn mower; I'm thinking of going with a Black & Decker rechargeable (cordless) model: no cords, no gas, what's not to like? I also got a lot of good lawncare advice from the previous owner of the house. I'm also going to get a spreader (for fertilizer, pesticides, etc.) and a set of shears; that should do for now. We still need to get a washer and dryer, although we're pretty sure which we want, a nice refurbished set from the Sears outlet in Tacoma. Also our furniture (sofa, loveseat, chair) will be arriving in a few weeks.

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