Office Monkey

In the process of updating my résumé, I realized that in this increasingly Facebook-social-networking time, people might very well take the presence of a personal domain in the email address of an applicant as an invitation to look at their life.

Go ahead. Feel free. I mostly write about my cats, it seems, and I haven’t had a chance to update in over a year.

For the record, my cat is awesome. I’ll take a 5% pay cut in exchange for being able to bring him to work with me each day (not really).

(I’ve also managed to accidentally trash my theme while trying to update my WordPress installation… but really, you shouldn’t be thinking about hiring me to do visual design, anyway. You should hire Albert Lee of Yellow Devil Designs.)

Does anyone else find it curious that the prohibition of alcohol was intermingled with heavy illegal drinking, and the tail end of prohibition dovetailed with the beginning of the Great Depression?

Does anyone else look at the current economic climate, look back at the 30s, and wonder when drugs will be legalized?

Having spent an undue amount of time in compiler-land over the last four months, I have nothing but respect for a team that acknowledges the shortcomings of their architecture, and so REWRITES IT.

Congratulations on the new release, mono team!

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Jan-20-1.html

Yesterday, I had a problem to solve. I didn’t want to stay at work until 9pm, waiting for another team’s process to publish a file. (Grossly simplified, but you get the idea). I also didn’t want to log in from home at 9pm in order to wait for it to happen (I did that the night before).

So I used Powershell! Could I have used a batch file? Of course! However, I know with Powershell I can just chain commands together via a semi-colon.
I searched for “Powershell sleep”, and saw immediately that there was, in fact, a Powershell sleep command: start-sleep.

My final commandline:
start-sleep -s 7000 ; GetFileCommand ; msbuild /t:clean,build

And I could just walk away, knowing it would be waiting for me when I got into today.

(That didn’t happen, but it was unrelated to the Powershell issue.)

However, that wasn’t my only use of Powershell yesterday. The MSBuild Project system defines a build through a series of linked .XML files. I uncovered an issue where a particular task wasn’t being completed as I expected. I could, through the wonders of “Find”, locate where I EXPECTED the work to be taking place, but in a 10,000+ line XML file, scrolling upward to find the parent is not entirely pleasant.

So I used code.

I read the XML into an XML object, then found the tag I was looking for. I then got an XML Navigator object for where I was in the document, and walked back up the tree until I found something identifiable (it turned out I was screwed). All told, it took me less time to puzzle out (via get-member) how to do so under Powershell than it would have taken for me to write a real program, or to find it by hand.

Here’s the entirety of what I wrote:
$xmldoc = [xml] [string]::join(“`n”, (gc -read 10kb Native.Build.targets))
$xmldoc | get-member
$xmldoc.GetElementsByTagName(‘Internal_LinkOutputFile’)
$xmldoc.GetElementsByTagName(‘Internal_LinkOutputFile’) | get-member
$xmldoc.GetElementsByTagName(‘Internal_LinkOutputFile’).Item(0)
$xmldoc.GetElementsByTagName(‘Internal_LinkOutputFile’).Item(0) | get-member
$nav = $xmldoc.GetElementsByTagName(‘Internal_LinkOutputFile’).Item(0).CreateNavigator()
$nav
$nav | get-member
$nav.MoveToParent()
$nav
$nav.MoveToParent()
$nav

There was an awful lot of get-member calls, but I didn’t need to know ANYTHING else.

Yay Powershell!

I had a problem with a piece of code last night. An apparent infinite loop without apparent cause. Because I’m working on in-development tools, though, I couldn’t even go to disassembly.

I sat and stared this morning at the offending code, knowing I must be missing something.

I finally went down the hall to grab Nathan (I like Nathan. He’s bright and hard working, and he laughs at my jokes. Good man.). He isn’t as experienced with C++ as I am, but my experience wasn’t helping me. Besides, it was a problem with a bloody for-loop.

Nathan sat down, complained about what I named the function, and then point out the error. Less than two minutes.

Can you see the error?

for (GenericParam* Param = StartOfListOfParams; Param; Param->GetNext())


I feel a little dumb, but vindicated for my position on code reviews, especially for my own code.

Edit 08/11/07 11:28am: Added a space.

I recently transitioned my blog from a LAMP stack at 1and1.com (who I was happy with) to a Windows/IIS7 stack at GoDaddy.com (which was cheaper, and more importantly, Windows-based). At both locations I had multiple domains registered with the same account.
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Quick and dirty survey:
To Crown a King
or
To Steal a Sword
?

1200 word challenge:
Write a diary entry of someone witnessing a historical event that hasn’t happened yet.

1200 word challenge:
Be Jane Austen or JRR Tolkien: Write unnecessarily lengthy prose describing some generic and boring piece of scenery. A field is nice, as is an utterly empty room.

1200 word challenge:
Pretend you’re Joss Whedon. Write two characters having a conversation about the weather.