::::: : 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 night the roof fell in

News ·Friday December 15, 2006 @ 11:27 EST (link)

December 14: It was, indeed, a dark and stormy night. The power went out at about 2030 Thursday night and we went to bed around 2300 with the the wind tearing around the house, whistling horribly; eventually we sunk into fitful sleep, and then the roof caved in with a great tearing and we were choking on clouds of insulation and looking up at a midnight-blue gash in what used to be our bedroom ceiling. It was 0230; it was pitch dark (with all the grues and pits that entails); I rolled out of bed and helped Honey out my side since hers was blocked, and we ran into the hallway, holding onto each other for dear life. Still filled with adrenaline, I went back in to retrieve some clothes and my big Mag flashlight, which was standing on my side table but was now buried under it. Neither of us had our glasses, and after a couple of checks, still uncertain about how stable the room was, I gave up the search and we went into the street; I had on a pair of jeans I'd fished out of the ankle-deep insulation, and a dressing gown; fortunately my keys, wallet, etc. were in the pockets of my jeans. We went into the kitchen to get a drink and try to clear out some of the insulation.

A neighbor—the one whose tree had fallen, one street over—had called the police, so they were just coming down the street as we left; I waved my flashlight to signal them over. They put us into the back of their car and gave us some water; I was able to vomit out some more insulation and breathe easier. We were transferred to an ambulance, which took us to Valley General Hospital in Monroe. Honey was checked out for a bruised nose (thankfully not broken) and I had some scratches on my back, which they gave me a tetanus shot for; I'm not sure if I got them crawling off the bed, or from diving under my night table/cabinet. Valley General discharged us after determining damage was superficial (God be praised), but let us stay in a room overnight, on narrow (twin? hah!) hospital cot.

December 15: In the morning we washed up as best we could in the adjoining shower, and strolled down blearily (no glasses, if you'll recall) to the nurses' station; they directed us to another desk where we attempted to call a cab, but were thankfully diverted by a lady named Lynn from the hospital foundation, who took us to breakfast in the hospital cafeteria and also paid for our cab (I remember the meter showing about $40 when we got to our house). The power was still out, of course, but we were able to survey the damage for the first time: a large cedar (100-150') had broken off and had sheared right through the roof and bedroom wall, and was laying across the bedroom, from the lower far right corner of the room to the upper left, over the bathroom, with a collection of smaller branches reaching all the way to and over the front porch. The tree had knocked the bathroom skylight down so that it rested on the door and had pierced through the next bedroom's wall; the bathroom was also full of insulation. The other (en suite) bathroom was fine, except for a light knocked askew (but it still worked); there was a crack in the ceiling of another bedroom (the one the skylight had poked through). Our first problem was retrieving our glasses; fortunately I was able to lean over the bed and find them in the rubble. In the daylight it was a nightmare of downed trusses (seven in all, we were to find out later), beams, shingles, drywall, and tree branches. Fortunately the structure of the lower floor didn't seem compromised, but not knowing this I went into the bedroom with some trepidation.

We got our cars out of the garage, and then visited a neighbor that had a generator, and used their phone, since ours is VoIP; we called a friend in Monroe, who was able to get us a decent rate at a hotel in Kirkland, the Carlton Inn; we also called our insurance, filed a claim, and they told us to go ahead and get the tree removed, called our families again (we'd called them at around 0400, which wasn't as bad as it seems for them since they're both on Eastern time, which made it 0700 there), and started calling tree companies. We left for the hotel before it got dark; the hotel still had no power, but we met our friend Lisa there and played some card games using a Pinochle deck our friend had (that explained why it was so cheap...).

At about 1700 I decided to sleep some in our room, Honey woke me up and said she and Lisa were going to hospital to get some X-rays of her face and chest to see if anything was broken, because she was feeling pain. I woke up at 1900 and they still weren't back, so I took a book to the hotel lobby and brought their candelabra over to a table and read. After some hours (2130) I called Lisa's cell phone and they said they were almost finished; they got back at 2200. Power was restored to the hotel at 2237, and we went downstairs with some of the hotel staff and management (it's somewhat of a family business) and they made us hot chocolate; friendly people, nice place. We called MetLife again from our room, but still no word on when the adjuster could come out.

(Of course, I'm not writing these on the actual entry date above; this entry was written December 28; I'm just using the entry dates to track the events.)

Precursor to a storm

News ·Thursday December 14, 2006 @ 19:43 EST (link)

My laptop has five USB devices (USB card reader for work, flatbed scanner, barcode scanner, and external keyboard and mouse) and only three slots, so to remedy this issue I picked up a D-Link 7-port hub; worked out of the box, no more swapping USB devices, plus room for three more.

We also got Timecop (another Grebel loss from the move; they keep turning up), Stargate SG-1 season 2, Doctor Who season 1, and have ordered E.R. season 6.

Honey's dad's back at home, but then they wanted him back at the hospital for a few days, which didn't make him very happy at all, but now he's home again.

The MS06-069 Microsoft security patch was grossly incompetent, although it may be Adobe's fault (the fix is for their software, but I think we're distributing it because we bundle it). The fix didn't work, even after a reboot, so it keeps trying to do the same fix. Eventually I uninstalled Macromedia Flash—it's a useless piece of junk anyway—and the warnings went away. I'd've just ignored them, but they were preventing me from VPN'ing into work. Imbeciles.

It's been rainy and windy, with a storm warning.

And expect a large technical article fairly soon, since I've been doing some interesting compiler acrobatics to clean up Word's object model of late.

Stupid Progressive commercial

News ·Sunday December 3, 2006 @ 01:04 EST (link)

Just a wee rant about one of Progessive (insurance)'s commercials I've been hearing a lot on the radio lately. They end it with something like "If they're this helpful before you're a customer, imagine how helpful they'll be afterwards"; an attempted a fortiori construct. Clearly, as advertisers, they know they're lying (and not just because their lips are moving); if not they're stupider than even I could imagine. It's not that that annoys me; it's the pure brazen barefacedness of it all. Like a politician, all insurance companies care about after they have your (vote, money) is (re-election, renewal)—i.e. getting more money—and minimizing the amount of money they have to shell out, i.e. keeping the money they've already got. The statement is backwards: they work hard until they get you as a customer—not after. I also don't mind the fact of it; of course they want to make money, they're a business, that's their job. And unfortunately the claim is too airy to sic the gutted remains of any truth-in-advertising laws on them.

Oh, and a few remarks about Toyota of Kirkland. As you may have read here, we recently purchased a 2007 Toyota Corolla from them, trading in Honey's 2000 VW Golf for it, a beast we were happy to get rid of; we were also very ready to walk away, so perhaps they really did give us more for it than they wanted to (but I doubt it). However, the Golf was titled in West Virginia, and (a) Honey's grandfather's name was on the title, since he helped her get the loan and (b) there was a lienholder (United Bank), although a few weeks before purchasing the Toyota we'd paid off the loan in full. We first had trouble getting the title from United Bank; they claim they sent it but it never arrived (we paid off my car at the same time; different bank, title arrived just fine, although it was for Massachusetts; that'll probably be trouble down the line), but eventually we were able to get a signed release of interest from them which was acceptable in stead. Next, we needed to get Honey's grandfather to sign over the title to them; this was more trouble—not at all because of him, but because of how badly Toyota of Kirkland handled the whole deal.

First, a discourtesy; they sent the title paperwork, but no stamped envelope; rude, but not a huge deal. He signed it and sent it back, but they didn't receive it—or at least they claim they didn't. They called my wife several times and harassed her; I suspected they were trying to welch on the trade-in (we had to sign two sets of loan papers, one without the trade-in, in case it didn't go through, and unfortunately I don't think there's much we could have done if they'd've tried to renege, even with the Microsoft's legal program). It was a bad time for them to be making threatening phone calls, too, given Honey's dad's pending heart surgery. Anyway, either because we persisted (we were getting bounced around their finance department trying to get them to send new paperwork) or because mail was slow because of the snowstorm (also, the old finance manager quit during the whole deal, which didn't help much), eventually the title from Honey's grandfather "arrived" and all is well. Just be careful to read the fine print when you deal with Toyota of Kirkland.

This sordid tale reminds me of something my dad and I saw in Waterloo when I was there for school: a jeep, driving around the city, with a sign strapped to the back:

We Will Never Buy Another Vehicle from Bustard Chrysler

I'll bet thousands of people saw that sign. I wonder how much it affected Bustard Chrysler's business? Takeaway: don't annoy your customers—even if you do get the sale, you may lose more than you gain. Sometimes it's best just to back off. Until Toyota of Kirkland called us to say the trade-in paperwork was finalized, I was not very far from making my own sign.

Blizzarding in Abbotsford

News ·Thursday November 30, 2006 @ 02:53 EST (link)

As promised, we drove up to Abbotsford, BC this Saturday; we left around 1500, fairly uneventful trip—border was good, just asked where we were from and where we were going and if we were leaving anything—but shortly after we got into Canada it started snowing. Hard. Looking forward through the windscreen was like looking out of Ten-Forward on the Enterprise at high warp (how's that for a geeky metaphor?) I took over driving and although we missed one turn (badly signed highway), we got to Grandma Martin's at about 1815, came in and talked for a while, and then headed over to Swiss Chalet (Canadian family restaurant) for three of their festive specials.

We were there for about three hours; we watched the snow come down by the glare of the outside street lamps as darkness settled in. On the way back to my Grandma's place we stopped at the her bank, then stopped in again for a few minutes; she was a little worried about us getting back and offered to let us stay overnight, but we decided to drive home. I drove back, since I've a fair amount of experience driving in snow in Ontario... seems most Americans (and, according to AT, British Columbians too) have trouble driving in snow. There was one skid but I grabbed the wheel and steered into it and all was well. It took about the same time going back as getting there, but there was no wait at the border, so the driving time was probably a little more. When we arrived home there was no snow in the east side.

On Sunday and Monday, the snow came to Seattle; I went in Monday and left around 1800. It took me an hour to get out of the parking garage—cars were backed up to the first-second floor ramp, and not moving much at all as people were creeping out of every building on 36th Way and wedging themselves into the creeping line. We snaked our way to the WA-520, but after that traffic was only about as bad as it would have been on a normal day but an hour earlier (i.e. 1800 traffic at 1900) and the rest of the drive was slow but uneventful; even Novelty Hill and Stephens Road weren't bad. Tuesday was a snow day, much of the campus was closed, I worked from home.

Update on Douglas Hedrick (Honey's dad): he went to the hospital to get his heart trouble checked out on Wednesday, and the doctors determined that he'd have to have open heart surgery; stents would not suffice (they tried putting one in but it gave him pain and they realized there was a second 99% blockage behind the first). I left work early to be with Honey and VPN'd in later on. The surgery is scheduled for Monday, but will be done sooner if required; he's in the critical care unit at the Richmond, VA (Virginia) VA (Veterans' Association) hospital.

Speaking of VPNing: VPNing into MS is like using a 28.8k modem right now. I hit shift and it gets relayed 3 seconds later which means I get 0 instead of ) or [ instead of { and redraw is so slow you can critique the gnomes' brush strokes. Argh. And the connection process is pretty random, too; sometimes you get through, sometimes it attempts to count to infinity, sometimes it bluescreens, and sometimes it needs a reboot because, as I believe I've mentioned a few times already, the Windows OS has many a pile of fetid horse dung hiding in its nooks and crannies.

We're watching House, Stargate SG-1 season 1, and various items on the MythTV machine which is now pretty full so is starting to auto-expire some shows, which is fine; if they're important we can tag them not to expire. I have another 120 Gb HD I can put in (since I elected to use Linux's Logical Volume Manager, I can add it to the logical partition and it will grow seamlessly), but I need some longer screws to put it into the silent-mount chassis.

Fixed a bug in the pH internal parser for these pages (actually not the parser itself, which is a rock solid C++ XS module, really, but in the pH::Journal module), where it ignored element content of "0", since it was checking an iterator value for truth (and "0" is false in perl, either as a string or a number) rather than definedness.

A race to destroy buildings

News ·Friday November 24, 2006 @ 19:03 EST (link)

Played a (purported) level 3 undead in Warcraft (I was also playing as undead); it looked like I was going to lose; he'd foregone any sort of teching or other upgrades to mass fiends; he almost wiped out my army (and my base) a few times, until I made him portal out by attacking his hero, who got to level 9 by the end of the game. I had an expansion for a large part of the game, so had managed to tech fairly well. Toward the end of the game he was calling on me to give up, but when he came in for a final assault on my base I sent the rest of my army, including a catapult (meat wagon) to his base, and started destroying his buildings. From there, it became a race, which, to cut a long story short, I won. He wiped out my main base, but I had several buildings at my expansion, which I'd rebuilt several times (and eventually built a necropolis there). He'd started to expand too, but his buildings were just starting and I wiped them out to win the game. I'll bet he was pretty upset, but he annoyed me so the win was very sweet.

(The original) RtError is almost gone... (from 700 to 0 in three days). Now it's just an error return, not a longjmp.

We're going up to Abbotsford tomorrow to take Grandma Martin out for her birthday.

Thanksgiving—plans to go anywhere fell through, but a good time was had by all nonetheless, although we miss our families.

The Office 2007 ship gift was a digital picture frame, which I recently set up. All seems well, except there's a little purple arrow in the top right corner that I can't remove; since it's there when the unit is powered down, it could be a sticker, but it doesn't seem to be removable. It's reasonable for what it does, but the manual and setup pages are written in Engrish, that is, badly-translated English chock full of lovely bloopers. You'd think they'd've been able to distribute the cost of a few hours of an English speaker's time among all the units sold without taking too large a hit to the bottom line. Seems that kwaliti is job #1!

Note that just because I work for Microsoft doesn't mean I like Windows. Frequently it shows itself to be a truly lousy piece of software. For example, using Linux I've never had to reboot unless I'm upgrading the kernel. Windows forces reboots for the stupidest things; the latest was because it had got itself into a crap-all-over-itself state when I tried to VPN into work: I managed to get a partial fix by killing one of the random SVCHOST.EXE items in the task manager, which bounced the PPTP protocol service (daemon), but the system still didn't have enough marbles to let the VPN client work, so it went on its merry way counting a timeout to infinity (I know this because I forked off another quantum thread and timed it).

Task manager is also an idiotic application; it should try to find a "true name" of sorts for particular OS-related running tasks (e.g. don't say RUNDLL32.EXE; that's a wrapper for just about any DLL in existence; tell me which DLL; same goes for SVCHOST.EXE), and also (optionally) pull a secure short descriptor from a reliable online source, e.g. "PPTP network service".

The Ministry of Silly Questions

News ·Saturday November 18, 2006 @ 06:28 EST (link)

I'm writing up a few "M0" (milestone zero, that is, code cleanup and reorganization) proposals, based on a stack of six densely written post-it notes spanning the project. Most items are small, like fixing bad Hungarian, and I've already fixed them and put the changes into a diff; a couple are larger:

Remove use of setjmp and longjmp from Word: Some older code uses the C setjmp and longjmp intrinsics as exceptions; ideally these should go away as they don't play well with real C++ exceptions. Along the way I'm also removing a legacy math library.

Clean up the Word object model dispatch: We dispatch to C functions, rather than to a class method, for one thing. Also want to add pre/post task handlers (e.g. drawing methods need setup/cleanup) and enable/disable flags (e.g. since Word doesn't do reentrancy well, most mutators would be disabled when in an event handler such as New Document). Fortunately since I added a (debug only) object model logger in Office 12 (2007), there's already code to intercept object model calls which will make a good starting place to handle flag checking and pre/post-dispatch tasks.

Ministry of Silly Questions: I didn't send in my citizenship application when I mentioned it before, but now I plan to. The N-400 naturalization form has several questions that one might regard as silly, e.g. asking if people have been Communists, helped the Nazis, lied on tax returns, illegally voted, are terrorists, been deported (or are currently being deported!), dodged the draft, deserted, support the Constitution, persecuted people, been jailed, sold illegal drugs, gambled illegally, helped people enter the US illegally, committed bigamy/polygamy, etc. But I think the purpose of the questions is twofold: first, to give people a chance to confess to and explain any lesser items (for many they allow attaching an explanatory page, e.g. "Yes, I was a member of the Communist party, but I would have been killed otherwise"), and second, to let people incriminate themselves, so that if evidence of breach is found, and the person has lied in black and white, they can be more easily denied than if there was no such question.

DVDspot added the remainder of my DVDs; I have six contributions now (1 2 3 4 5 6).

Warcraft: won vs. Orc, playing as Undead, which is the second race I've played and I seem to be getting the hang of it.

The rains came down and the floods came up

News ·Friday November 10, 2006 @ 20:56 EST (link)

Then Aslan turned to them and said:
"You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be."
Lucy said, "We're so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often."

"No fear of that," said Aslan. "Have you not guessed?"

Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.
"There was a real railway accident," said Aslan softly. "Your father and mother and all of you are—as you would say in Shadow-Lands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning."

—The Last Battle, chapter XVI: Farewell to Shadow-Lands, C. S. Lewis.

Today we watched Shadowlands, a the story of C. S. Lewis, it was a very moving film, certainly worth watching. It was most poignant when they go out in the country to the Golden Valley and his wife Joy tries to prepare him for her imminent death: "The pain then is part of the happiness now. That's the deal."

There's been flooding in Duvall and nearby towns; 124th Street, the way I usually go to work, is closed; Woodinville-Duvall Road is open, but Novelty Hill is closed; I'm not sure why for the latter, possibly because of mudslides. I've been home all week anyway; it's sort of a quiet time after Office 12 and before Office 14.

Honey and I went up to BC yesterday; we stopped at Tim Horton's and also got some Remembrance Day poppies. I had to explain about the poppy and Remembrance Day in Canada; what do they teach them at these schools? Honey also finished Super Mario World and I won a few Warcraft games playing undead.

I recently bought a ring-bound copy of Hymns of Truth and Praise for the piano, through an Amazon reseller, "Dena Sabin, bookseller" (Amazon name "denasabinbookseller"); I today discovered a page was missing (Hymn #1, "How Great Thou Art", and #2 on the reverse), emailed the seller, and received a $10 partial refund, with which I am more than satisfied (the book cost $18.44 including tax, so I felt the refund was more than generous). I just wanted to positively comment about the prompt response; also the book itself arrived in good time and as promised. I hadn't noticed the missing page until now because I'd started playing in the middle of the book—the same place I was at in the non-ring book I'd been using.

Weird network errors

News ·Thursday November 9, 2006 @ 02:20 EST (link)

I temporarily activate an FTP (file transfer) server on minas-tirith (it's usually off because the less services running the better for security, especially as that box is the Internet gateway machine) to transfer an image that I've just scanned and edited in Paint Shop Pro. But I can't connect to the server!

I muddle through diagnosis: am I reaching the FTP server (proftpd)? no; is it reaching the super-server (xinetd)? no; does it reach the FTP server without using the super-server (ServerMode standalone)? no; are the packets coming over the wire (tcpdump)? yes, well, most of the time. Is iptables routing interfering? no; there are no FTP rules, and strangely enough, the auth server (midentd) works. The FTP server also works fine from localhost and another machine. Is the wireless router interfering? I'd like to know, but I can't connect to the administrative interface. Hmm.... I can connect from another machine. And, looks like the wireless router is using the same internal address that the machine I'm connecting from is using. Oops. I'm not sure why this hasn't affected other connections (ssh between the same two machines is fine, as is auth, as I've mentioned); could be the wireless router is sending some sort of quench packet for FTP requests. The address on the router isn't even actually used; I've reconfigured it to act more like a switch than a router, but it must still recognize packets with that address sent over the wire.

Just another fun exciting day in the land of networks. Ha!

Canon populated by inept morons, film at 11

News ·Tuesday November 7, 2006 @ 23:34 EST (link)

I recently purchased a Canon CanoScan LiDE 70 via Amazon, and just now attempted to install it. At the end of the installation from the CD (which was super-exciting due to the near-dead state of my Acer laptop's optical drive), it prompted "Would you like to reboot the computer now?", with two choices, Yes, or No.

Well, no, that's not actually how it went. There was one choice, "OK". Having some unsaved work, I really didn't want to reboot, so I clicked the close button. The system proceeded to reboot anyway and lose my work. Bastards. Then they add no less than four icons to the desktop (without asking) (which I promptly deleted), and prompt for the CD again. Why? Well, they need to ask me if I want to register. That's all, and it requires insertion of the CD. Idiots, too. No wonder I feel safer with Nikon gear.

Um, so, what else was I writing about when I was so very rudely interrupted? Well, this week I'm basically off work; there's nothing going on so we're not required to be there. Honey's last day at Amec Earth and Environmental was today, so she's happy. She'll be taking a break for a while and then looking for a new job, possibly with the temp. agency she was with before.

Note: the scanner appears to work well enough, although I prefer Corel Paint Shop Pro (formerly Jasc Paint Shop Pro, for those that remember) to the bundled editing software. I'll be using it to scan DVD covers that DVDspot doesn't have in the short term, but primarily to scan in old photos; 23 albums worth and a few loose ones that need homes first.

The MythTV box is still great, although before we told it to record episodes of Frasier we had no idea how frequently that show ran in a day. Pretty decent Outer Limits episode, "Fathers and Sons", and Doctor Who too, "The Girl in the Fireplace".

Honey's dad in hospital, please pray

News ·Friday November 3, 2006 @ 02:24 EST (link)

Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.

—1 Peter 5:7

Honey's father (Douglas Hedrick) was taken to the local (Beckley, WV) VA hospital a few days ago because of heart-related pain. Currently the doctors expect to move him to a larger hospital (possibly the VA hospital in Richmond, VA) and put in a stent. He's had heart trouble before and they were able to successfully operate and remove a clot. Pray for a successful operation, speedy recovery, and for the family.