London calling

So my vacation has just begun. I've only got three weeks this year, because I switched jobs about a quarter of a year into the period that determines the yearly vacation time. I didn’t negotiate more paid vacation time when I took this new job, either. My mistake, but there you go.

We’re kicking my vacation off with a trip to London tomorrow. We’ll be there for a week. Our current plans include some of the mandatory sights, but mostly I just want to wander around a bit, sit in cafés, browse books at book stores and get to know the local culture a bit.

In the meantime, three of our friends are touring the Europe together on the InterRail. With any luck, they’ll manage a detour to London for a day or two so we can hit the town together, and see what sort of mayhem we can come up with. :)

In other news, I’m futzing a bit with Windows Live Photo Gallery – I think it really needs a publishing plug-in that creates a zip archive from the selected images. This will most likely end up being Yet Another Project I Won’t Finish, but still, it’s enough to keep me interested.

Another developer-y thing I’ve been looking at is the XNA framework. It’s really fun, even if all I’ve managed so far is to draw a couple of lines here and there. I’m considering starting a small game project with a friend of mine.

This about wraps it up for today. Rytmis out.

Friday, here we come

Last night we went to see Faith No More at the Kaisaniemi park, home of the Tuska Festival (which begins tomorrow, by the by), and even though I’ve never been a big fan, the gig was pure awesome. The sheer intensity of Patton’s act is amazing, his vocal range is beyond belief, and the style with which the band performed made it one hell of a night.

While going through the photos (a few of which I cropped up a bit and uploaded to a Flickr set) I remembered how much I suck as a photographer. By and large that’s because I practice rarely if ever, and I don’t really know the camera I’m shooting with. :P

So Tuska tomorrow, and while I’m not attending the festival, I am planning on a little get-together on the lawn outside. The weather so far has been incredible and we’ve got friends from all over coming to join us. Should be fun!

“I see beer… lots and lots of beer in the near future!”

My wrongness quota is filling up

Today I blamed TFS for a problem I was having, when it was me all along who was looking in the wrong place. Granted, VS could have been a liiiiittle bit more informative, but still, had I opened the correct branch to begin with, the problem wouldn’t have been there.

In the same vein, I noticed that my issue about getting the “upgrade to IE” error on IE 8 was actually because the page in Firefox is a result of a redirect – and guess what happens when you copy the redirected URL and paste it into another browser? You guessed it! You get the redirected page instead of the original one. Duh.

Edit: Boy, reading this a month later, I realized I had mixed up the link titles and the link texts. Even took me a while to figure out what I was trying to say there. :P Well, that’s fixed now.

Windows 7 RC and Visual Studio 2008

So I thought I’d install VS 2008 to dabble around with WPF a bit. After the installer was finished, I was confronted with this:

OK, so I reboot my machine, and as soon as I log in, this pops up:

After having seen the error, I think “service releases, let’s see,” and click on the link. Firefox opens up with this:

OK, fair enough, let’s take the URL and fire up IE:

OK, now you’re just fucking with me. Seriously.

The kicker? Looks like VS has no problems working, despite the apparent failure of every single installed component. :-)

Mathemagics

I’ve been listening to and transcribing the StackOverflow Podcast 31 in the last couple of days, and something Jeff Atwood said struck a nerve:

Spolsky: Maybe you just don't like the kind of math they teach in American high schools. I mean, maybe you would like discrete math or set theory or that kind of stuff. The stuff that's like really interesting math.

Atwood: I think historically the problem has been that I just didn't really have -- couldn't really grok it at some fundamental level, like I could do it, like you could just show me a problem and I could solve that problem. But I couldn't really extrapolate that to anywhere interesting. At all.

I can relate to Jeff here. That used to be, and to a very large extent, still is, my problem with math. While I can mechanically apply a solution I’ve learned, actually extracting the underlying principle and being able to identify analogous problems doesn’t come nearly as easily.

Fortunately, university math tends to be taught differently than high school math, and there is a heavy emphasis on being able to prove things and understand why things work, not just learn and apply them. That, and hindsight from the way I botched my high school studies should ensure that I learn at least a thing or two this time.

Listening to that bit in the podcast made me wish I had more time to devote to studying in general, and math specifically. Too bad I’m busy with my Data Structures course (final exam tomorrow) and work. Still, I’m keeping an eye out for math textbooks that seem interesting enough to grab my attention even outside the lecture halls.

Speaking of Data Structures, I have this funny feeling that I’ve both let myself down in terms of what I got from the course, and simultaneously learned more than I thought I had. Simply being familiar with some simple tree and graph traversal algorithms has given me the kind of insight into programming problems I didn’t used to have. It’s great, being able to recognize a concrete problem as an instance of something more abstract I’ve seen before, because it opens up a wide variety of known solutions to the problem. :)

Here’s hoping tomorrow’s exam won’t be a complete disaster. \o/

Exercise, debugging and books aplenty.

Phew, finally managed to complete Week 2, Day 1 of the One Hundred Pushups program, even if it was just barely. This is the third time I’m repeating the Week 2 exercises. I decided I’d keep repeating until I can complete each day with at least the minimum number of pushups in the last set. So far I’ve been living up to the decision, too.

--

Today at work brought to mind a meta-quote from Code Complete:

“If you haven't spent at least a month working on the same program—working 16 hours a day, dreaming about it during the remaining 8 hours of restless sleep, working several nights straight through truing to eliminate that "one last bug" from the program—then you haven't really written a complicated computer program. And you may not have the sense that there is something exhilarating about programming. “

—Edward Yourdon

This lusty tribute to programming machismo is pure B.S. and an almost certain recipe for failure. Those all-night programming stints make you feel like the greatest programmer in the world, but then you have to spend several weeks correcting the defects you installed during your blaze of glory. By all means, get excited about programming. But excitement is no substitute for competency. Remember which is more important.

Props to Jeff Atwood for typing this quote out so I didn’t have to.

Both the original quote and McConnell’s commentary sprang to mind as I drank cup after cup of coffee (and my mug is not lacking in volume), tried to debug JITted .NET code by watching the local variables and call stack (because that was the only thing I could understand – you see, I’m not a Real Programmer), and finally, almost by a stroke of luck managing to figure out the cause of the mystery bug.

I had forgotten how strange that combination of excitement and frustration can be. I almost shouted out loud as laid out a solution in my head and went off to explain it to my team members.

--

Finally managed to get a copy of K&R C, too. I read about half of it in one sittng, pleased with how the book is written and wondering why I ever bothered with a huge monster like C Primer Plus, which drones on and on about basic programming constructs, and is a bitch to carry around. I also got The One-page Project Manager – communicating the status of a project is something I’m interested in, specifically ways to visualize actual progress. A quick glance at the contents of the book suggests this is not the kind of progress or communication I meant. More on that later.

--

That’s all for today. :)

A week of Windows 7

I’ve been playing with Windows 7 Beta for just under a week now. Initially I thought I’d install it in a virtual machine, but I never seemed to have enough space on my laptop. I also had an issue with my Vista install – a lockup that forced me to do a hard reset also broke a file or two that were integral to the functioning of Windows Update. Imagine my surprise when I figured I hadn’t had any updates in over a month. I tried various voodoo-esque methods to fix things, but as each of them failed to provide results, I began to consider using a beta version more and more.

The installer seemed nice for starters, almost on par with modern Linux installers. ;-) However, one thing that caused hours of frustration was that since I had PowerShell installed, the upgrade refused to run. And Vista refused to show me any way to uninstall PowerShell. After some searching I found a registry setting which fooled the installer to thinking I didn’t have PS, and things began to work.

Well, by “work” I mean the installer agreed to run. It took hours to “gather” my files (why it needed to know that, I have no idea – every file I care about is in the exact same spot it was in before the upgrade). In the morning I peeked at the progress. It told me “21%” and “Windows needs to reboot”, but gave me no way to agree to the reboot. A forced restart later, the installer booted up, only to fail at resuming. I figured this was due to the forced restart, booted back into Vista (luckily the installer left Vista untouched at that point) and fired the installer again. This time at 21% I got a reboot prompt, after which things have gone smoothly.

I had to futz with the settings a little to make sleep-on-lid-close work again, which was a bit annoying, but the bigger problem is WMP 12, which downright refuses to work after I wake the laptop up by opening the lid. The application launches, but then it presents me with this:

and a busy cursor. And there it remains. In fact, it refuses to die by any conventional means: the close button doesn’t work, the close command in the Jump List menu doesn’t work, taskkill doesn’t have any effect, and neither does ending the process via Task Manager. The only thing that does work is restarting the computer. At least once I’ve had even that fail to kill the WMP process, so the shutdown process shut down, and the OS kept on running. A hard reset and a disk check later, things work fine again – until the next time I close the lid.

I posted a summary about the problem on the Windows 7 Beta TechNet forum. Here’s hoping someone has a solution. :)

Overall, I like Windows 7. It does a good job at bringing the Windows GUI closer to modern standards. The window manager has even learned a couple of useful tricks. I can’t wait for the day when alternate Window Managers for Windows begin to appear.

Unleash that dragon

So I’m in the clutches of the lurgy here, and trying to keep my brain active. I’ve received a miscellaneous bunch of books in the mail in the last few days, one of them being Microsoft Expression Blend Unleashed. I’ve read the first two chapters, and skimmed the next two.

First, a quote:

“If you have used Microsoft Vista, you will have noticed how Microsoft appears to have finally gotten an outstanding balance with their product with respect to familiarity, visual appearance and general feel.”

OK, so we’re starting off with a Vista ad. Great. This bit, on page 10, was the moment when I began to question my judgment in choosing this book over the others on the market. No, wait, that happened on page 4:

“Next Generation Hardware Is Coming!

Already hardware changes are being made to accommodate Vista-specific features like Windows Sideshow.

[…]

However, it appears that the implementation has been slow to gather momentum in this particular case.”

… yeah.

The same chapter expresses similar feelings towards other Microsoft technologies, such as Silverlight. Fine, I get it, Silverlight is cool. However, I bought a book to learn how to work with the tools, not to be blasted with marketing garbage.

Chapter 2 really makes clear that this book is not intended for a programmer. Topics that are obvious or at least easy for a developer are discussed in a tone that, to me, feels condescending. Around page 48 things get more interesting – first demo app. At this point, the author’s conversational tone is beginning to feel forced. However, the next few pages do cover bits of the Blend tooling that are interesting to me. On the downside, that coverage is accompanied by a step-by-step tutorial no less than 44 steps long. Perhaps this could have been broken down to a number of sub-tasks, so that the steps could be kept simple, and grouped logically?

Chapter 3 meticulously goes through all the panels of the Blend UI. Maybe it’s just me, but again a little breathing room would have been nice.

I have few comments about the XAML basics bits in Chapter 4. It’s a very short chapter.

I’m really hoping the rest of the book offers something more compelling for me. More posts when I read further.

Lazy bum…

No pictures, or posts for that matter. I’m coming down with something, possibly a flu, possibly worse – I already have a sore throat, and my bronchi seems to be clogging up.

Brief updates: I’ve started my new gig with a day of general briefing about the customs of the customer, and another day of training specific to the customer’s platform. Movements are definitely constrained, code-wise, but the platform seems impressive.

I’m also re-doing week one of One Hundred Push-ups, now with considerably less muscle ache on the in-between days. Now, if I could only get my eating habits in check… :)

Ow ow ow

I’m back to trying the one hundred pushups exercise program – they even have a spiffy new logger now – and yesterday was week 1, day 1. I feel like someone beat me up with a baseball bat. It’s going to feel worse tomorrow, and tomorrow’s week 1, day 2. Ow. Ow ow ow.

I’ve got the prosthesis now, trying to get used to it. It looks great, but feels weird. More on that, possibly with pics, later when I feel less lazy.