Ness’ Outpost

Remember when your Mom used to make you write a list to Santa. Well now in the digital age I can do it online, update and make changes up to the night of Christmas. Of course that doesn’t mean I won’t get a lump of coal, but what can you do:

• *NEW* Survival Suit - likely Large or XL - Bright coloured and floating for ice fishing.
• *NEW* Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ By Bjarne Stroustrup
• *NEW* Paper shredder - For all this mail I’m getting with my personal information all over it.
• Snow Shoes
• Gators
• Walking Poles
• Tool Chest (Craftsman)
• Tilly Socks - full length and the Unhole-y ones ($20/pair) - absolutely worth the cost
• Hiking Socks - smart wool or other moisture wicking brands
• Pants - For work and a few for play
• Rain pants - for hiking in wet conditions - I have fleece lined winter ones, but those are too hot for non-winter activities
• Flys for fishing in southern ontario - targeting bass, trout, and the odd pike - Check out number 3 at the link
• SOLD OUT?
  “Fumbling with a Flyrod: Stories from the River” By Ian Colin James in hard cover if you can find one that isn’t a collectible. You’ll know it’s a collectible because it will be ridiculously expensive. Otherwise paperback is fine.
• Waders - unfortunately a very personal purchase based on fit, value, features, etc. and are likely going to be in the $300-$500 range
• Wader Boots - no sense buying these without having a pair of waders. Waders may come with boots as a combo.
• Canadian Tire or Home Depot gift cards are always welcome! ;)

If it looks like most of my gifts could come from MEC - you’d be right.

That’s right, I saw snow. That means it is time to start work on the winter beard.

Sorry Lo, but I have the means to keep my face warm. I know at least one woman that likes me in my beard, and it isn’t my Mom (although she might). Chantelle is a sucker for the beard as Grant will attest to.

I took a step back from all the convinces of modern day life and bought a fountain pen.

Not that I’m giving up electricity and computing or anything but this pen is somewhere in the middle. It uses a medium nib (the tip part) and ink cartridges instead of filling a well in the body of the pen from an eye drop dispenser. I can buy a well adapter if I ever wanted to use scented ink or blood to “seal a deal” — but I don’t see that happening in the near future.

I did a little research on introductory pens and found a site that recommended a Lamy Al-Star pen as a great starter pen that is rugged for daily use and the ink writes really well on moleskin paper - which is my notebook of choice.

So far I’m happy with it — when I opened the pen and punctured the cartridge I got ink on my fingers.

Good ol’ Bobby Tables. A good giggle from XKCD.

This one had a few of us rolling on the floor laughing at work today.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve written here but I have been plenty busy with packing, moving, unpacking plus the daily grind on top of that.

But all work and no play makes me a dull boy — that’s where the Wii helps. I was in a race with Chris at work to see who could accumulate > 2000 points in Wii Tennis. On Sunday night I won a game which put me at 2011 points. Just enough to edge Chris out before he could get there, but he’ll stick to his story that he had tennis elbow and couldn’t play as often as I could.

On Tuesday this week Lauren and I picked up a vacuum cleaner from Canadian Tire. It’s a Roomba Discovery created by iRobot. iRobot is a robotics company that just happens to have a hugely successful robotic vacuum. From the outside it looks like a pretty neat company with some very interesting software challenges.

Now for the neat part. You can control the roomba’s motors and read the sensors through the serial port. There is a published serial port (hardware) hack that puts a Bluetooth radio onboard the device which allows the radio to connect to any other Bluetooth device that can talk the serial port protocol. Now I need to build some hardware so I can write some software.

http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/02/how_to_roomba_bluetooth_interf.html

There is absolutely no reason for anyone to buy a version of Microsoft’s new operating system labeled “Vista”.

The time to upgrade to Vista will be when you buy a new computer and Vista comes preinstalled. This way you won’t have to worry about hardware incompatibilities and slow execution because your machine may not have enough horsepower.

Most software vendors say their software is “Vista Compatible”, but I wonder how true that is. Things like tax software, and anti-virus could be issues. If you’re not dreaming about the bleeding edge of technology and you like your computer to work for more than a few hours — then just wait. Don’t be an early adopter unless you want to deal with the upcoming issues that are bound to surface as the code base is explored by more users in new and exciting ways.

Is XP broken for you? If not, just keep on trucking because your web browser will continue to work if you don’t upgrade.

Here is a new argument against Vista based on the environmental impact of replacing tonnes of computer components. While I don’t endorse all the political ideas of the green party they do have a valid point in this specific case.

I watched the HBO documentary called “Hacking Democracy” last night and it was quite eye opening. They showed how a Diebold optical scanning voting machine was able to have it’s memory card altered to effectively “stuff” the ballot box in the favour of a candidate while maintaining the accuracy of the total vote count.

Without having looked at the software — because it is illegal thanks to the DMCA — I will speculate my thoughts on this situation.

The machine relies on removable memory cards in the same way that your camera does. This allows machines to be disconnected from a computer network, but relies on “sneaker net” to transfer the number of votes from each individual machine to the “central tabulator” which reads each memory card and sums up the totals for every machine in the election.
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I had a struggle a while back trying to get a pre-build event to fire before my code was compiled.

The pre-build event generates a class that allows me to inspect the revision level of my code and ties the revision to the subversion source code repository.

Today I had a coffee and revisited the problem. I had a lot more success. The magic string is shown below:
"$(ProjectDir)genSvnVer.bat" "" ModuleTracClient

This expands when run on my laptop to:
“C:\Documents and Settings\cgness\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\client\ModuleTrac\genSvnVer.bat” “” ModuleTracClient

There are 3 components to the magic command line above.

1. The executable needs to be quoted since the $(ProjectDir) macro may expand to something with spaces. C:\Documents and Settings… when parsed by the shell evaluates up to the first space C:\Documents which is not an executable.
2. Parameter 1 for the batch file allows me to set the output location concatenated to the current working directory for the output of the script.
3. Parameter 2 sets the namespace to be used in the generated C# class.

The script I’m using is the one I posted to the Subversion mailing list but I added a parameter for where to put the output. That will be left as an exercise for the reader.

To debug your pre and post build events simply change to the output window, check if they possibly would work in the command shell and read the errors carefully. Happy shelling!

“More seriously, even perfect program verification can only establish that a program meets its specification. The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.”

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering