Snow stays in Duvall
News ·Sunday January 14, 2007 @ 15:10 EST (link)
I haven't seen snow stick around this long since Boston, or perhaps Canada; piles of the wretched stuff are all over the place. The roads, fortunately, are fairly navigable, with our street being the worst part of any trip.
I've been at work all week (remotely Wednesday, waiting for the no-show structural engineer), working on "OACR" bugs for Office 11; OACR is the Office Automated Code Review tool which finds things like potential buffer overflows or use of unsafe functions. Its error messages are cryptic and mercurial, but I'm plugging away through all 500 or so bugs that I've been assigned (others on the team will probably take some too). On Friday a few of us got together to talk about enhancing collaboration on Word documents—from making it easier to collaborate via email to Word as a wiki editor.
Speaking of wikis, I'm designing a new internal wiki for Word developers, based on my pH wiki: Apache 2, mod_perl (the wiki is structured as a response handler), Template Toolkit for formatting, and PostgreSQL for storage, and Subversion for (page) versioning (I'd use our Source Depot, but the layers of bureaucracy to get a wiki project added would be piled high and deep). Some criteria for it are on the NewWiki page on the old wiki. I may borrow some HTML templates from the MoinMoin wiki, since it looks pretty but unfortunately uses flat text storage (stupid, stupid, stupid!) so search is pathetic.
I was working on the new wiki remotely Saturday morning, installing some perl modules, when something caused a shutdown (not a reboot; it never came back). I drove into work at 0330 and restarted the machine, and then at around 0800 it happened again (I tried shutdown -a to abort it, but it was too fast), so I went to sleep and drove in when I woke up. I'd disabled the shutdown permissions for everyone except the local administrator account, but it didn't take effect until after a reboot. Also one of the perl modules was exec'ing ps in one of its tests, which lists processes under Unix but for us runs Product Studio, our bug database software. Finally, another module used variadic macros, which aren't supported on Visual C++ .NET (they are in 2005, but that machine needed to have .NET for compatibility), so I had to convert the macro into an inline function. Also, pH::Parser had to link msvcprt.lib rather than Unix's libstdc++.so to get non-inline C++ library code. But now things are looking good; database tables have been created; mod_auth_sspi is picking up the username; Template Toolkit is working, with a pH parser filter; soon people will be able to edit pages.
On Friday, I followed a white GMC Sierra truck most of the way home (Novelty Hill onward); A87522X; slowest driver I've ever seen, rode the brake all the way down Novelty Hill, never got above 5mph. It had snowed a few days before, but the road was pretty much clear. I started out in a long line of cars, but by the time this slowpoke got to the bottom of the hill, there wasn't a car to be seen in front of him.
