::::: : 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.

Neumo's, pressure washing the deck, redundant signage

News ·Friday September 1, 2006 @ 20:42 EDT (link)

There was recently an accident at the roundabout between Duvall and Redmond (NE 124th St. to SR-203, which becomes Main St. in Duvall; another branch forks off to Carnation). I'm unaware of the details; I just drove up and saw a police car in my usual lane in the roundabout, lights on, blocking for a tow truck that was getting ready to remove a wreck. A day or so after this event, new signage started sprouting up all around the roundabout: a small white sign that said "Yield to traffic in roundabout" was affixed to each of the existing yield signs, and several large yellow and black turn arrows were added around the center of the roundabout. As a taxpayer, I'm annoyed at this waste of my money. Drivers already know to drive on the right; the roundabout is well signed from all directions, and who else would you yield to at a yield sign before a roundabout except the bloody traffic in the bloody roundabout? The twit who caused the accident probably threatened to sue the county, so they did this to placate him, when really they should have thrown him in jail for a few years for, in all likelihood, driving like an idiot.

Since I'm ranting about road signs, how about those "Don't Drink and Drive: In Memory of Susie Sweetums" signs? The whole piece of metal is a waste of my money, and of my attention—drivers can only focus on a few things at once, and on the particularly steep and twisty stretch of road where this one is located, that sign shouldn't be one of them. Yes, it's unfortunate, tragic even, that your child was killed by/by being a drunk driver (although one could argue the latter is Darwin popping up with his chainsaw of natural selection). Is it relevant to drivers on that hill? No, not in the least. Will it change anyone's mind? Probably not—I doubt very much driving drunk is premeditated. And last, who cares about your kid? Driving drunk is a bad idea anyway. I don't know your kid, maybe he was a good person, maybe a thug and a philistine; it doesn't matter. It's just ego gratification; get a headstone like the rest of us.

AT and I headed out to Neumos after Wednesday workaholics (which finished surprisingly early; before 2300). Pretty Girls Make Graves were playing; we got there just as they started (2320?), after the opening bands had finished. Dark room, loud music, lotta standing. I wish I'd known the songs since it's hard to pick out lyrics one is hearing for the first time. The club is in Seattle, so I drove; got home around 0130.

I pressure washed our top deck yesterday and this morning ; I spent 4-5 hours in total. I rented the washer from the nearby True Value, for $35 for a half day. Tough work, and fairly wet, too (soaked my shoes, so I wore sandals to work, NH style); I had to hold the sprayer about 1"-2" from the surface of all the wood on the deck (think railings, each post having four sides...) and cover all of it slowly and methodically, feathering so as not to leave too many stop marks. I was nervous about starting it, to tell the truth, having never used so much as a gas-powered lawn mower; there were no instructions and a few of the knobs and levers' covers had fallen off, but eventually I figured the choke, gears ("start" and "on"), and the pressure adjuster; turn the red switch on, gear to start, open the choke, pull the starter, gear down, adjust pressure (and choke) and go. I ran out of gas just as I was finishing, but I had to fill it before returning it anyway, so it wasn't much time lost. The former owners came to stain the deck while I was at work (this had been agreed to after the inspection as part of the sale); it looks good (same color as the lower deck, light honey brown).

Interesting bug today, although it turned out not to be so interesting; AT, MS, and I were looking at some code with two string (BSTR) allocations; the second seemed to get allocated and copied right on top of the first. Turned out to be heap corruption due to a mis-freed string earlier (but later in the same function).

Another interesting bug with a BEAR (it's a near-acronym for an idle task to download images); the task is created, it downloads the image and invalidates layout (so the image is drawn instead of the placeholder), then the task tries to unregister itself - when an image is downloaded it has no more work to do. However, it throws an exception (which readlly should have asserted; shame on you, OArt) so never unregisters itself - so we keep getting called at idle for already downloaded images. This leads to a lot of unnecessary blinking and redrawing, sometimes to the point where performance is impacted. It ended up beign a "smart pointer" bug - the object held one smart pointer proxy, but another one was created and given to the registration code, although they both pointed at the same BEAR. We tried to pass the initial proxy to the unregister code, but since it had no "strong" references (because we created the second proxy instead), it threw an exception.

The virtual megalibrary

News ·Tuesday August 29, 2006 @ 21:40 EDT (link)

Content providers want DRM, but here's an idea that might slow them down a little - at least until they can buy some new legislation:

If there is a verifiable way to transfer 'possession' of a media file between a website to a user (and back), then a virtual mega-library (VML) can be founded, working like a real library, where it's legal to lend out materials provided only one person can use them at a time (and not easily copy them).

Everyone that joins rips all their CDs and DVDs to DRM'd media files and uploads them (rescinding use permission to the website). All members can 'borrow' any file that's checked in; if the user's client software doesn't report in after a certain period, it will revoke the user's license to whatever he has checked out and the website gets it back. When the client software checks in, if there are holds on the material (or the owner wants to remove their material), the license is transferred back to the site or the owner of the material. Some sort of reciprocity can be put into effect: what you can borrow is directly related to the amount of material that you've contributed. Given proper categorization (and that's already been done via the various CDDBs), and sufficient participation, I could log on with my client software and ask to play a random selection of music by Mozart all afternoon: the client would search for a media file that the site has a license to, transfer the license to me ('check out'), play the file, and transfer the license back ('check in'). If my Internet connection went down, the license would eventually revert back to the site (the contributor could assign a timeout period, say 24 hours). Popular music would be contributed from many sources, so there would be several licensed copied of a given CD or song; if the demand was higher than the availability, requests could be queued.

Given 1000 participants each with 50 CDs with 10 songs each, that's 5 million songs available - at no monetary cost to the user, who already owns their CDs. The cost is just a temporary loss of use, and, guess what, you can only listen to one song at a time anyway! It's legal to lend the media, why not do it virtually? This idea should scare the record companies a great deal.

R.I.P., Frank and Bev Herbert

News ·Monday August 28, 2006 @ 21:42 EDT (link)

"I was an immigrant... my parents made us read dictionaries, ... memorize the dictionary... and write essays."
—Teresa Lin, Fear Factor

On one side, ladies and gentlemen, we have a girl who immigrated from China, whose parents encouraged her work hard to learn English, and who pulled herself up by her bootstraps and became a successful model. On the other side, we have entitlement-minded illegal alien Mexicans, who want to ghettoize and balkanize the country, who demand the government speak to them in their language, who refuse to integrate. I rest my case. Kudos to you, Teresa Lin, and to your parents.

Played Warcraft tonight; won against a level 19 Human (I'm level 12). He was going gyrocopters for some reason, and they just weren't all that good against my rifles. He tried to creep-jack me and my MK and I forced him and his Paladin to portal out, then we ran into each other's armies near his base, I wiped his out, and then bulled right into the base, where, despite heavy losses, I was victorious.

Last (Frank Herbert) Dune book, Chaperhouse: Dune finished. Touching obituary for his wife at the end; he died two years later (1986). He lived in the Puget Sound area. Now back to reading the Mallorean.

Work: frustrating since I have some timing-sensitive, remote-only, ship-only bugs (pick any two...), although when my build completes (and I have faith, really I do) I hope to be able to test the Japan-crash bug locally.

What were you doing in Canada, eh?

News ·Sunday August 27, 2006 @ 15:54 EDT (link)

High time for an update. Also high time to update the financial records system; it's been two months since I've added any entries, but now I have plenty of time since Honey's in WV for two weeks (I'll be joining her soon). I dropped her at the airport Friday morning; we left at 0830 and got there around 0930; her flight was at 1130. We thought it prudent to be early given the possibility of traffic (although it wasn't too bad), and the new FAA travel requirements and possible increased searching leading to longer than usual delays.

For anyone that needs a rebuttal to something they may have sent me recently, try that link to a 6-month old post (some filtering required); thanks to LjSEEK.com for a most excellent search engine that I discovered for this purpose. Note also that the amount about 50% low compared to more up to date studies, and even then, it's more than I pay for my car, and it gets me places. Anyway; I got over it and decided not to block the sender from all my domains.

I finally baked the fruit cobbler (crumble) that I was meaning to, about two weeks ago. (AT cooked it for the second part of SW's farewell, which we didn't attend so I got to see it but not taste it.) I put in just about all the fruit mentioned on the page, except I had to substitute peaches for apricots. It's been years since I've had rhubarb, and it was delicious. I ate the last piece Friday; it will be missed.

So I'm home alone this weekend, and I haven't done much except read the Mallorean and watch The Fugitive and U.S. Marshalls and practice piano. I did go looking for garage sales Saturday morning, after my mom called (Hi mom!) but didn't find many and the few I found didn't have anything to tempt me. Heather Morris stopped by Saturday evening after the neighborhood grillout (I would have attended, but had nothing to bring...) to drop off some manuals and warranties for various appliances, and to talk; we should have them over sometime.

I'm also eligible to file my N-400 (application for naturalization) form on our third anniversary, the 30th; my mom's worried about me getting drafted, but (1) you have to register for the Selective Service when becoming a permanent resident ("green card" holder) anyway, and (2) it's only between ages of 18 and 26, so I missed it since I didn't get my green card paperwork until after my 26th birthday, although it's back-dated to the year before. So I'll probably go for it - the U.S. is pretty tolerant about dual citizenships these days, so I'll be able to keep my U.K. and Canadian citizenship - and it'll let me vote, and get a gun (yay).

I came across an old observation that it was 26 hours from my parents' place to Minot, ND. From here, it's 23.5 hours - it seems to be right in the middle. Still on the memory lane trip (I was looking through old entries, trying to find dates for the N-400), I found some debates that MM and I had had over various issues, so I decided to check if her page was still up, and it is, and she has a LiveJournal account, but it hasn't been updated for a while. I'm still digging through old paperwork to fill out the N-400: exact employment, moving, and traffic citation dates can be hard to find. The last thing I need is dates that I was out of the country for 24 hours or more, since I become a permanent resident (i.e. approximately over the past three years). That'll be fun... although this log was written for times like these.

Over the past month I had a good deal of dental work done; first, a cleaning, then about five fillings over three two-hour appointments; the last one was last Wednesday, the 23rd. I don't have to go back there now until February, for my regular cleaning. Our total out of pocket was about $150, not too terrible. Honey had a filling come loose and had to have a cavity underneath it filled, too; fortunately her dentist (we go to different ones; I go to Dr. Brian D, Brooks, since he's not far from work, she goes to a Dr. Dirakshani (sp?)) could get her in quickly to fix it.

At work, we're just finishing B2TR (beta 2 technical refresh); I got what I think was the last Word fix into it, for a License Wizard (OEM tool) related bug. Now we're looking only toward RTM (release to manufacturing) in October, and every bug must be triaged. Also, we're back on Workaholic Wednesdays (work until the bug goal is reached, no matter how late it gets); we've had three so far.

(Title is a nod to "What are you doing in Canada, eh?" quote from That '70s Show, when they end up in Canada talking to the RCMP.

RAS is still super-unreliable

News ·Wednesday August 16, 2006 @ 01:11 EDT (link)

Lately (and by that I mean over the last few months), RAS (Windows remote connectivity into work) has been very unreliable. There are two steps to logging in remotely: connecting to the VPN, and then connecting to the remote machine via terminal server. First the first broke, and I was getting strange errors connecting to the network itself (which MS IT eventually got fixed for me, though neither they nor I am sure which step actually fixed the problem); now I keep getting random network errors connecting to my remote machine (any of the three), although I can ping then and connect to servers on them just fine. I wish the incompetent twits over there would just leave well alone and not try to "fix" what wasn't broken.

And finally some extracts from an article on pregnant teens (for sources see article itself; warning, crude language): * Well, 131 million returns which means there could be a lot less people actually paying taxes; divide it out, about $53 each.

Garage sailing in Duvall

News ·Saturday August 5, 2006 @ 14:05 EDT (link)

Twit of the Day
I'm going to start featuring twits, mainly drivers. Our first contestant is WA plate 328 LZM, a purple Chrysler PT Cruiser, who doesn't understand that "yield" doesn't mean "try for a collision." This was at the merge lane right at the end of the WA-520 (Avondale Road), and this idiot just kept driving like he was blind. Good going, you're our first twit!

Our second twit isn't so bad, and was a day or so later; he just never signalled, all the way to Duvall. Dark (navy) blue extrawide truck, WA plate A96056U.

We finally got out to a few garage sales this Saturday, starting on our own street. Altogether we bought:
  1. Two (more) "deluxe" folding beach chairs and a wicker picnic basket and set, $10
  2. An Ikea desk; we put it on top of the car and I held it out the window, $40
  3. A Quartz clock and a camera bag (a spare one, padded for hiking trips), $5
We put the desk upstairs in the media room with my camera gear, frames, etc.; I put the legs on with my drill. No chair in there yet. We'll probably put the new computer there when we get it.

Five barrels and no gophers

News ·Tuesday August 1, 2006 @ 21:47 EDT (link)

As we descended from this dome we arrived at a spot, on the gradual descent of the hill, nearly four acres in extent, and covered with small holes. These are the residence of a little animal called by the French petit chien (little dog), which sit erect near the mouth and make a whistling noise, but when alarmed take refuge in their holes. In order to bring them out we poured into one of the holes five barrels of water without filling it....

—William Clark, Corps of Discovery

The site has been down for a few days due to Gentoo bug #135238, which is still stuck at status "NEW". Sometimes, you get what you pay for (hint: bugs don't sit in the Office12 database that long without investigation). The fundamental problem is that two packages want Kerberos, but they want a particular flavor (either MIT or Heimdal), and they're incompatible, but one claims it'll take either, but it lies.

We had a great weekend with family from Pullman; they arrived Thursday and stayed with us, visiting Seattle during the day, and then on Saturday we headed to Cape Disappointment State Park (named by a British sea captain who expected more of the headwaters of the Columbia), camping overnight and visiting the lighthouse and the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center on Sunday. We headed back at around 1600, making good time on US 101 and then highway 12 to the I-5, a quite scenic drive.

We're doing workaholics Wednesday again tomorrow; hopefully it won't go too late. I found the crumble recipe I was looking for (that AT made for SW's leavetaking); it's called a cobbler on the site, which misled me. I found Infamous Adventures' King's Quest III, a VGA remake of the original; looks pretty good, although mere VGA resolution is pretty coarse by modern standards.

Honey says I'm weird because of my titles

News ·Friday July 14, 2006 @ 20:10 EDT (link)

I used to use joker.com for domain names; they're OK, but they lost one of my domain names (4031.net, without the "i"). I've switched some over to godaddy.com; they're pretty cheap and are quite reliable so far. I like to use register.com to look up addresses for availability, but I don't buy from them.

I discovered the Minuet in G from the book that came with the piano isn't that hard, although most of the other classical pieces in it are.

My car battery died in the Microsoft garage after our "workaholics" on Wednesday, at around 2130; I thought it was just drained, so I got AAA, but it died again after I'd got it out of the parking spot (and the AAA guy had gone), so it had to be towed to a nearby mechanic. Fortunately only the battery needed replacing; the alternator was fine. Honey came out to drive me home; we didn't get back until 0230 and I worked from home the next day.

At work we're getting ready to release Office 12 (Office Vista) in October, so we're busy fixing bugs (or not fixing them, as the case may be). I really got slammed with a lot of bugs this week; I started with 5 at the beginning of the week and have probably got ~50 new ones; I'm down to 16 now. Some are easy, some are hard, some are completely bonkers. I've been given a lot of new areas of responsibility; I handle a lot of the print code, and printer bugs can be tricky. Also I own the object model (VBA interface), and test has been hitting it hard this week.

We're reading through Mark now; I may have mentioned my Bible program before; I have a couple of scripts linked to my email system that send us both a daily chapter; we prefer to read together, but if we can't this keeps us caught up. One script is Bible-preacher, it sends the mail, and Bible-reader listens to commands to select a different book when it's time. I let it randomly select the last few and it picked a lot of minor prophets in a row; it's good to read them but they can be obscure.

We're planning a trip out to WV to see Honey's parents at the end of August; I may get up to Fonthill during that trip too, to see my parents, and Steven Tempest, a friend from back home who wrote me recently; much of this update was first written in an email to him. Must go, Honey's getting impatient.

A very buggy weekend

News ·Monday July 10, 2006 @ 01:58 EDT (link)

O soul, are you weary and troubled?
No light in the darkness you see?
There's light for a look at the Saviour,
And life more abundant and free!

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face;
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of his glory and grace.

—Turn Your Eyes upon Jesus, Helen H. Lemmel (1864-1961)

Lot of time spent on bugs this weekend, and unfortuantely not very much to show for it, although I did make some check-ins before the screws are turned down another notch and the bar is raised for the coming week. First I was trying to reorganize my OfficeArt print performance fix to run over the layout rectangles (LRGs) one less time, but I don't think that work will get in (nor do I mind very much) since it requires a lot of shuffling around of the print code for very little gain, and we're trying to avoid those sorts of changes at this point. I actually got another print bug (thanks SI), but it needs a real printer, so I won't get to look at it until Monday (alright, later Monday, when I arrive on-site). I did make a small fix, and punt a few.

I also made some headway in a print bug; background printing, 2-up, draft mode, A4 pages; print once normally, then on the second print the 2-up pages are skewed. Looks like we're setting one of our internal page structures to A4, and either not clearing it, or not resetting it, for the next print. Which page bounds, you say (c'mon, you're curious, I know it). Is it the vprsu.zaPage, vprsu.cPrZoomZ, vprsu.zaPrZoomPaper, vpri.pageDflt, vpri.pageRqd, vpri.cPrZoomZ, vpri.pagePreZoom, vpri.zaPrZoomPaper, vpri.pageAcetate, vpri.drcViewport, vpri.dzaZoomGoal, vpri.prdev.drcPrint, vpri.prdev.dzpRealPage, or perhaps the vpri.prdev.dzmmRealPage? Only time will tell. Updates will be posted when available; stay tuned to this space.

A shout out to Ali, in return for his link; a fellow Word writer. Speaking of writing with Word, here's a cover for the 2002 gansta version.

I've been playing the piano a fair bit, through the Hymns of Truth and Praise hymnbook, practicing the left hand mostly with Take Time to be Holy (Langstaff). I'm getting better at it; not much in comparison to anyone that's ever taken lessons, I'm sure; I'm barely ready to face the metronome. I still think an B-flat to D reach on the left is a mean trick; it's just beyond my reach. But playing is a peaceful way to spend a few hours.

We biked down the hill out the left of our street; it was a nice little ride. The road ends at a private drive, with a couple of pretty nice houses on it; I also found the private drive beings a bit earlier than I thought it did. There are fields and wildflowers and horses, and even a goat. Yes, a goat. Just sitting in a field, tied to a shelter of some sort. It's quite idyllic and I hope the recent annexation of some areas near the city limits doesn't cause any of it to be destroyed; nor any of the woods to the back of our property, where one can occasionally see deer.

I wish I hadn't spent so much time on bugs now, because Honey's right, the weekends should be our time, not Microsoft's, and it didn't even gain me all that much anyway. It's great to help the team, but perhaps working weekends and nights is a sign that there's something rotten in the state of Denmark (but on the other hand, as Brooks' law states so elegantly and a graph on AT's window well illustrates, adding manpower to a late project makes it later). Most of the time I love my work, and that's fine, but (uncompensated) overtime should never feel obligatory.

We picked up a few more of the DVDs that Grebel lost in the move that we'd remembered, and season one of Star Trek (the original series, not the one with the "bald-headed idiot", as my father in law likes to refer to Picard, although I think he'd enjoy The Next Generation if he gave it a try). Speaking of science fiction, try some short stories that I've been reading lately.

The Roasted Rat

News ·Tuesday July 4, 2006 @ 10:58 EDT (link)


Lion's Gate Bridge Monday, June 26: Actually, it wasn't a rat, nor was it roasted. We heard a scrabbling in a vent above the microwave (fortunately accessable via a cupboard above), and were worried it was a rat, so we turned the oven on a few times since it seemed to quiet it down. The big pest control places (Orkin, Terminex) were quoting rates in the $200-$300 range to come out, but we found a local guy (Eagle Pest Eliminators) to come take a look. Upon cracking the pipe open a little (it wasn't very well sealed), we saw a beak; I suppose better a bird than a rat. The guy recommended darkening the room and opening the door in hopes it would fly right out, and so it progressed. He charged his $65 minimum plus tax.

Wednesday, June 28: Picked up a portable vacuum cleaner from Home Depot for cleaning out the car and hard to reach areas. My life is so exciting.

Friday, June 30: Friday had me looking at a fairly interesting layout bug; one of our new title pages (a car in the background with some shaded textboxes in front) showed up fine on the screen, but when printed the car image was in front of the textboxes. The print code just takes the layout rectangles and print them back to front (and the car was in front, which was wrong), but the display code renders the layout rectangles into three different types of drawing rectangles (text, old-style shapes, and generic, which includes new OfficeArt pictures), and then merges them later by height (Z-order). However, if two items have the same height (as the picture and shaded textboxes did) it puts generic drawing rectangles in front. The fix is to make some changes to how Z-order is calculated for inline pictures.

Saturday, July 1: Happy Canada Day! We drove into Bellevue and shopped around for pianos, stopping at Prosser (Roland), Helmer's Music (Kawai), Sherman Clay (Kohler), and Washburn (Yamaha). We eventually settled on a black Yamaha CLP-240, which I picked up Monday afternoon.

Sunday, July 2: We drove into Vancouver; we had no trouble at the border either way personally, although lines were long, it being Canada Day weekend and all. We mostly drove and walked around Stanley Park; there are some nice beaches. We wanted to eat at a restaurant one one of the points, but they'd unexpectedly lost power. We did also go up to the Capilano Bridge, but the rates they're charging are extortionate ($25 Canadian per adult). Things to bring next time: picnic basket, swim gear, bikes, hat, sunscreen.

Monday, July 3: I now share responsibility for OfficeArt bugs with WB, especially print bugs; it's an area that's converging slower than others. The more I fix, the more areas I get, which isn't really a bad thing, in terms of possible advancement. When I went in yesterday, one (non-OfficeArt) print bug I had didn't repro, and two non-critical ODMA bugs that we might punt (decide not to fix because their severity is low, and at this point in the development cycle we want to reduce code churn, as every change could introduce new bugs).

As I mentioned, I picked up the piano (it had to be unboxed to fit into my car), took it home, lugged it out of the car (the "head" or top piece was a beast), and later, with Honey's help, set it up. It's a beautiful instrument.

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