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

The whiteness of the whale

Technical, Work ·Saturday March 1, 2008 @ 20:46 EST (link)

20080215: Had Valentine's a day late since Honey had late classes yesterday; cards and chocolate for all. Yay!

20080216: Working for RL on the ECMA Office OpenXML spec. tools is pretty interesting; I started on a tool to import our XSDs to a database, and optimized it some, and worked on some bugs; next I worked on the internal web site: I wrote code to find dependent bugs that need revisiting when sections of the spec. are checked in. Since the parent/child relationships have a lot of holes, and the XSD importer is very pessimally written, I'm doing a rewrite to fix bugs and improve efficiency (right now, it walks all of the important elements/attributes/etc. as "X" and then for each, it walks the entire schema as "Y" and asks "is Y a child of X", an O(n²) process at best).

Going out to Fred Meyer (to buy DVDs we've been looking for that are cheaper than Amazon), Home Depot (light bulbs of various sizes), and Circuit City (more cheaper DVDs), and will look at some camera stores on 20th in Bellevue. Bought Ghost Rider and ER season 8, and went to Cameras West and looked at the Nikon D300 (with the 18-200 VR lens, and took a look at the 85/1.8). Circuit City tried to charge more than the advertised price of ER, but Honey caught it.

Modified the MythTV episode scanner to parse out the episode list from epguides.com and store that in the cache rather than the raw page, and that let me improve matching by canonicalizing names: lowercase everything, strip non-alphanumeric characters, add 'a.k.a.'s, fix up part numbers, remove preceding the/a, etc. Burned SG:A season 4 part 1 of 2 to make space for trying out Battlestar Galactica and Babylon 5. Started recording Mythbusters on the Myth box. Upgraded Postgres database from 8.1 to 8.2, which was atypical in that it required backing up the database and restoring it. I realize it's open source, and you get what you pay for, but would it be so hard to do automatic conversion from the previous version?

20080224: New ECMA schema processor is about done (that was what I worked on most of last week; lots of database table diffing); RL did some testing over the weekend, fixed one glitch; will probably check in Monday. Wrote a mail to BM about C# (parts of which follows); the environment is seductive.

I'm working on some C# XSD-processing tools, and an ASP.NET site, backed by an MS SQL database. I haven't done much C# previously but it's a pretty decent environment (the lure of the dark side...), except sometimes I wish I could trace into the System libraries and I can't₁ (although a 3rd-party tool called Reflector lets me at least see what's going on in there). The tools were written by a "technical PM" (program manager), so while it's great that he got them written at all, they're not terribly efficient (one tool that imports all the OOXML XSDs into our database used to take 10 minutes, now down to about 2 seconds, for example, although fixing bugs is the main task, not making it faster).
Part of the code is to find parent-child relationships; the old code went through each schema element and then walked the entire schema and checked if that element was a child; the new code just traverses the schema once, pushing parent items on a stack. Anyway, C# isn't bad, .NET isn't bad and is getting better (we're using 3.0, 3.5 has some nice things though and DML in 4.0 looks interesting). It may be useful to have C#/.NET/XSD stuff on my resume, too.

* I recently found out about a possible way to trace into .NET's System libraries (thanks AT), but I haven't tried it yet.

Picked up some leaves and bamboo (left piled from last year) yesterday, put in the yard waste container to take out with this week's trash; yard is in pretty good shape; I cut back some branches overhanging the path from the driveway to the back yard. Grass is a little long, needs cutting when it's a little warmer; probably also de-thatching and weed treatment. Louis Voyer, a preacher with Christian Transportation, will be staying with us for a couple of nights at the end of April (29-30), and may speak at the Northgate midweek meeting.

20080228: Starting on the ECMA OpenXML documentation comparison ("deviations") tool; did some more refactoring (since starting on these tools, I've factored out BookGeneration, a library to generate the Word document from the database, so it can be used in a command-line tool as well as the web site, and EcmaDatabase, the database class definitions, so they can be used various places, and written CmdLineParser from scratch).

20080301: Finished Moby Dick (Melville) finally! Also finished Treason (Coulter) not too long ago. Next: The Companions (Daniell; Dragonlance Meetings Sextet 6/6) and some more books by Ann Coulter (surprisingly, it didnÂt take long to fill the holds I placed on several of her books in the King County library system; liberals don't like to read much, and even less like the truth). Starting Slander and Torchwood (video) series.