::::: : 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.

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.

Nice visit and then wretchedly sick

News ·Monday February 20, 2006 @ 14:53 EST (link)

We left Friday night (the 17th) to pick up my mother and grandmother in Abbotsford; it's about a 2.5 hour trip. We crossed at Sumas, as usual; no trouble finding them; they fed us dinner and then we headed back, getting in after midnight. Since we're not in the house yet we put them up on our couch and air mattress.

We had a delay at US customs on the way in since they thought I had failed to turn in my conditional green card after getting the permanent one. Actually, I'd turned it in in Seattle when I filed the paperwork to remove the conditional residence, and had gotten a stamp in my passport to use as a temporary card until the permanent one arrived in the mail. They may have missed that stamp due to a paperclip that was stuck earlier in my passport, and the stamp was after a couple of blank pages.

On Saturday we took them to Fred Meyer to pick up film, then over the WA-520 bridge over Lake Washington to see Bill's place, then to Microsoft, into my building; we went by the store and visitor center but it's only open weekdays. Our last stop was our house, we gave them the tour and unloaded the box we'd brought with us. We ate lunch at Subway and took them to Applebee's for dinner. Mom gave me a DVD of our wedding they'd had transferred for a late birthday present, and a few other odds and ends and notes from my sisters (hi sisters).

On Sunday we went to Northgate as usual (second meeting, because, one bathroom, four people, good luck). They were having their yearly soup and salad luncheon, fortunately for us, so we stayed. Then, we headed back, this time via Aldergrove; it seems to be a slightly more direct route. I drove there, Honey back. Naturally we stopped at Timmy's for a coffee on the way out. No trouble with customs this time; I think the guy cleared up any "missing card" status; he just asked if I'd turned in the conditional card and I told him I had and he waved us through.

We stopped at a Wendy's on the US side of the border, and then I slept some of the way back. When we got home and I woke up I was feeling dizzy and queasy; I staggered into the house and lay down but even with my eyes closed everything was spinning. I threw up a couple of times and then felt a little better and managed to get to sleep. I was feeling somewhat better in the morning but still felt it would be better if I worked from home.

Moving the Internet

News ·Wednesday February 15, 2006 @ 22:21 EST (link)

I am ecstatic about SpeakEasy. They deserve all kudos. I ordered a moving package from their site which I received yesterday (postcards, some stickers for IP info and technical support, numbers to call, moving tips); I called them, quickly got all the information I neede—and the news is good—and the tech gave me his direct line to call back with the move order (even if he did do it for the commission, if they do that, so what; he was very helpful). The good news is that DSL (the same service) is available there; if we don't already have a voice line it's $6 more a month, and their VoIP (voice over IP—voice telephone service over the Internet) is $27.95 for unlimited long distance in the US, which (assuming their service is decent) beats Verizon like the proverbial red-headed stepchild. It will be a happy day to cease dealings with Verizon.

Speaking of helpful salespeople, that reminds me, we bought some furniture recently; Mor was having a super bowl sale where they pay the sales tax. We got a white leather living room set (couch, loveseat, chair, side tables, coffee table, and lamps); salesperson was very helpful; they'll be delivered in about 8 weeks due to availability (so unfortunately not in time for my mother's visit).

Speaking of Mom's visit, she arrived yesterday and she and Grandma Martin will be visiting us over the weekend; she wants to see our house, and the Microsoft campus, and we may take her up to Edmonds on the ferry and to some parks etc., and to Seattle, depending on what they want to do.

The sellers called Sunday night and said they were out and we could pick up the keys from them, so we drove over, bringing with a few things in the trunk, to take posession (although we and the bank have owned the place since December and rented it back to the sellers for two months). Everything's great; I was worrying that a ping-pong table wouldn't fit in the TV room but it will, and our furniture and kitchen table will fit fine upstairs.

Today we went over to the house to drop off a form for the mail carrier so we can start receiving mail there, and brought a few boxes of books and miscellaneous items along for the ride.

Smart card reader driver not so smart

News ·Thursday February 2, 2006 @ 17:58 EST (link)

About a month ago I finally got my RAS connection to work working (I think it was a bad routing table on the client). But it's still a little tricky: the smart card driver is broken and tends to lock the process (sometimes the entire machine); fortunately it will relent and return control if the USB card reader is unplugged. So the login process goes something like this:
  1. Connect the USB reader and insert my smart card (badge).
  2. Open the IT Connection Manager, click Connect, enter PIN.
  3. After it connects and gets 5-7 seconds into verifying the password, disconnect the smart card reader.
  4. Wait for the machine to be scanned, and terminal serve to my machine.
Our DVD player is back, we got an automated call this morning and I picked it up after work at the local store; seems to be working fine and they actually provided a callback number for the technician that worked on it (I imagine that's at least partly self-interest; Circuit City probably contracted out to the company, and if the player fails and we tell Circuit City first, it'll probably be a black mark against the contractor). We started E. R. season 4.

Lots of new bugs coming my way at work, new areas, some interesting performance and idle-time issues.

The people that sold us our house are in their new place, but haven't finished moving out yet; they'll be out and we'll be in by the 13th, which is when my mother arrives in town to visit us and sundry relatives across the border in la Colombie Brittanique.

On the Net::SSH2 front, someone's looking to get it to work on perl 5.6; I set 5.8 as the require version to avoid cruft and compatibility hacks, but I recognize that 5.6 is still used in a lot of shops (e.g. despite an attempt at an upgrade, athena's still using it), and I'm willing to work with this guy and anyone else so interested to make the required changes, although I would like to keep the 5.8 "path" as clean as possible.

Good news about our DVD player: CityAdvantage did come through for us; in about 10 days after we dropped it off at our local store (the web page said we'd have to ship it out, but our receipt differed and we went with it), we got an automated call saying it was ready for pickup; picked it up the same day, it was wrapped in tape with the name and contact info for the tech that fixed it (probably because it's contracted out, and if Circuit City hears back first then the contractor gets dinged financially or perhaps dropped). We can take it back within 90 days and get it repaired for free if it fails again, which is a reasonable cushion. Count us satisfied.

rt.cpan.org SSH bug list roundup

News ·Friday January 27, 2006 @ 19:46 EST (link)

I visited rt.cpan.org today to check out some bugs I'd gotten emailed for Net::SSH::Perl and Net::SSH2. I think I've learned a lot at Microsoft about taking care of bugs, especially that they don't always need to be fixed. I rejected a good many because either I didn't want to add functionality to or redesign a legacy module (Net::SSH::Perl) when there's a new hotness (Net::SSH2) (although I am still fixing bugs, and in most cases I'd take a patch), or because I'd requested clarification, logs, and/or (minimal) source and the requestor hadn't replied back for six months or more, because they were dupes (people really don't check the list), because the bug was elsewhere (user code or another module or a bad install), or because it was a legacy design issue. Some I actually fixed, sometimes incorporating provided code; sometimes I fixed documentation instead.

Altogether I knocked off about 20 bugs; I wish I could take care of that many that quickly at work. (Of course the real difference is I scrub my work bug list daily and the people reporting the bugs are usually more clueful—usually SDETs and very rarely random users—although certainly not always.)

Our (Onkyo) DVD player died last Saturday (the 21st), suddenly refusing to load DVDs (it circled the 6-CD load tray and then reported NO PLAY). We'd only had it since April. Fortunately (?) we had Circuit City's CityAdvantage plan, so we were able to return it to the store at the Bellevue Crossroads mall (the site says it needs to be returned by mail, but the receipt said differently). They'll repair it if possible and replace it if not. I'll definitely be reporting back about how things go.

I had 5 bugs at the beginning of the week and my goal was to get to 4 (it goes by percentages); unsurprisingly I had another 10 dumped on me and my build was failing. My stats stood at about -500% until I finally got Word to build on Wednesday, because of the small delta. I'm now down to 3, which is 200% of my goal (the small delta works both ways) and I may knock off another few this weekend (although one requires Windows Vista so that's pretty hard to work on unless testing has set up a machine for me to terminal serve into).

Honey left Tuesday to fly to her parents' in WV to attend her grandfather Isiah (I think that's how it's spelt, it's not like Isaiah in the Bible, although he'd say it was) Hedrick's funeral, her father's father. She'll be back Monday.

We hope to get into the house by February 2nd if the sellers can get into their new place by then (they're waiting for a key from their builder who's waiting for a permit from city hall); if not, we expect to be in by the 13th. We're certainly looking forward to it.

Gentoo upgrade time

News ·Sunday January 15, 2006 @ 15:01 EST (link)

Saturday: Upgraded Gentoo (emerge --update world) on my server box; it stopped at postgres and said I needed to manually upgrade the database files, which was weak. Anyway, not really a big problem, just pg_dumpall before and pipe the data to psql afterwards. It also wanted to install X, but I tweaked the USE flags (-arts) and it gave up on that.

Sunday: Made it to the second meeting at Northgate only; Honey didn't go, she wasn't feeling well.

So, we're starting to think about things we need for the new house; first off we need a washer and dryer, which we're thinking of getting from the same place the sellers did: a Sears outlet that sells refurbished units. We probably want another bed (although we do have one inflatable double bed) for a spare bedroom (if there's one left after the exercise room, computer room, piano room, etc.), although that's pretty low on the list. More desks for the computer room (this pullout has done well but now it's time to get organized), a kitchen table, another couch, beanbag chairs for the basement, more bookshelves, possibly a ping pong table... time to prioritize and budget. Probably need a lawn mower after not too long, too. A house affords some permanence, a place to really set up the way we want.

We cannot recommend The Talon Group

News ·Friday January 13, 2006 @ 14:26 EST (link)

Tuesday: Parking was so bad that I couldn't find a space even on P4 or at several surrounding buildings, so I headed home and O joy! O delight! RAS is finally working (amazingly I managed to find my PIN) and I term-served to my build machine; emailed my boss; working from home was fine and the parking congestion was probably due to a couple conferencees, including a Women's Conference (so when's the Men's Conference? and why are we as a company wasting our money on this feelgood crap? Mini-Microsoft, where are you?)

Remote login is fine, except due to some crappiness in the Microsoft-provided connection drivers (perhaps the smart card drivers, which are pretty flaky), it pretty much requires a reboot for each use, otherwise the "verifying password" countup just keeps on going, never completing (I just stopped it at 1360 seconds). Maybe I can get the source and do something about it. Don't put any big bets on that though, because it's probably a political issue to somebody.

Changed my email signature, borrowing a Microsoft Office graphic from someone on the Christians at Microsoft list, and adding my name and "Word Developer"; not too long, and certainly McQuarry compliant, if images are legit (I'll only use it internally at Microsoft, so they are).

Wednesday: We cannot recommend The Talon Group to potential home purchasers; the fees were much higher than expected. I'm not sure about Michael Knoll; I'm not sure what his part in the fees were, but on the whole he seemed a decent guy and tried to get us a square deal, including at the end tracking down some money we were supposed to get back because of a prepayment we'd made that Talon hadn't discounted from the total. On the whole it went fairly smoothly; the sellers especially were great; we bought the place from a fellow Christian at Microsoft; they're moving to a place a few block away (more kids => bigger place); it will be nice to have some friends as close neighbours.

Thursday: My business cards arrived today; first time having business cards, very snazzy. Office is one of the few groups (I think MSN is the other one) that has cards with a colour logo. Started Amityville Horror.

Friday: Finished Amityville Horror (great date for it). Igx (diagram) test failure; tried syncing and rebuilding, fixed an OArt build break, built everything that matters (don't care about Outlook failures now that I don't have Outlook bugs; I've since removed it from my build), trying to run tests again. Bug goals are looking pretty good for the week, around 433% (but given that the goal was 3, from 19 to 16, that's not a huge accomplishment).

Stacks upon stacks of red Microsoft-logo cups

News ·Friday January 6, 2006 @ 22:30 EST (link)

I think I'm going to name my first child Moonunit.

I was thinking of drawing random letters from a hat; it'll give a better name than some breeders give.

Bziytk. Yay! I wonder how ... that would be pronounced.

It's pronounced "Jane." :P

YOU WIN AT TEH INTARWEB for that. (Via LiveJournal Childfree community.)

So, apparently it's been raining here on and off for the past 18 days. Feels like I'm back in England.

Honey's grandfather is better; they cleaned out his lungs and took him off the ventilator.

My office mate LW is on vacation (back to Ann Arbor, MI) this week, so we covered his side of the office with stacks red Microsoft-logo cups... on the keyboards, lining desk surface, on monitors, his gym shoes, chair, floor, shelves, and even a few rows on the light. Yoda tops the stack on the highest shelf (don't ask, we got him from AB when we were building with cups earlier, but then the stack got knocked down while I was out so AT and I came up with this plan). We were assisted by MD, SW, SI, JB, and a cast of thousands. (Hopefully he doesn't read this before he gets back to work.) I'll get the pictures up RSN.

Latest bug is one where Internet Explorer sends us a crap command-line, because it hateses us, preciousss (yeah, I'm watching LOTR, how could you tell?) When the "Open in Microsoft Office Word" 'W' icon is clicked, if Word is already open it sends a DDE FileOpen request, but it includes too many quotes, so we get FileOpen(""filename""). Fair enough, maybe the registered Open pattern is FileOpen("%1") and it just adds another set; we can work around that (although God help you if your filename actually begins and ends with double quotes). If Word isn't open, it runs it with a command line like /n /dde ""filename", yes, with the unbalanced quotes. We could work around that too—there doesn't seem to be an equivalent unbalanced registry entry—but I'm trying to contact someone on the IE team to see what's up.

Since Honey's away this week I've been staying later; I went to dinner with some of the guys yesterday, JB drove his BMW. He was taking the corners a little fast, so WB doesn't want to ride with him any more so today WB drove and demonstrated proper driving habits, while JB sat up front and played with his Club™ anti-theft device. Sometimes "It's like a little boy's nursery school I've come upon here" (Attley Jackson, Gone in 60 Seconds) :-). We work hard, but we also have fun.

Wrote to Bob for Christmas, we've been writing back and forth a little; hiring situation at Hilton is as dismal as it ever was; I'm glad Doyle's still around. Good times... Memphis wasn't a bad place to live nor Hilton a bad place to work. It was the first place we lived together, plus the first place I lived on my own, first place I lived in in the US... many memories, sad, happy, frustrated; the wave of heat that hit you on leaving an air-conditioned building in summer; finding out that my car's temperature display could do three digits; running at Shelby farms; Natchez Trace park; canoeing in Arkansas; etc.

Happy New Year, and a few happy returns

News ·Sunday January 1, 2006 @ 21:33 EST (link)

Dubyah and Hitler are at the pearly gates on judgement day, with Jesus conducting a group admissions interview. One of them says, "I did my best to do the will of God, conducting war against your enemies, securing my homeland, and campaigning against the godless." The other says, "But he's Hitler!"
—Slashdot comment

I just got back from my... I suppose cousins, aunt, and uncle-in-law; that is, Honey's Aunt Lynn and Uncle David and cousins Sarah and Will, in Pullman, WA. I got there Thursday night (I left after work and arrived around 2300), not too much snow in the mountains, made fairly good time. I had a great time and really appreciate them having me. We did a puzzle, hiked, I read some Calvin and Hobbes, wrote a program on my laptop to find Sets, played with the cats, avoided the dog, and ate like a king.

For Christmas Day, as I previously mentioned, I got invited to my cousins on my mother's side, to their house in Abbotsford, BC. It's my cousin Chris and his wife Vanessa's house; a 5-bedroom that he had build (he's a contractor), with a 2-bedroom suite for his parents attached. It's on a 10 acre land parcel at the edge of the city and is heated with geothermal energy. Real nice place, great media room with HDTV and speakers set in the walls and a poker table he built himself. It was great to see them, and my other cousins Jordan and Ashley, and Uncle Graham and Aunt Wendy, and my Grandma Martin. We all talked a lot, caught up on things; I even managed to sneak in a game of Warcraft with Jordan, although it wasn't a fair fight since he had video card troubles: his cursor disappeared.

Excellent food there too, although the turkey was a little late because of some trouble with the oven. I got the grand tour and then a tour of the property out back; they have lots of plans for the back, which right now doesn't even have grass. Chris is building a workshop, and may put up a volleyball court, put some stone around a pond back there, perhaps a pool eventually.

Honey's grandfather Hedrick is in hospital, and not doing very well; he's been put on a ventilator.


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