dance with dragons review

Enormous wait

I loved parts of it while I read it, and easily forgave its flaws.

But... 3 months after finishing it... reflecting back on it I am increasingly annoyed by it, and the lack of forward movement. I don't need pages and pages and pages of turtle talk, or stone zombie talk. The feeling I'm left with is that GRRM doesn't have an editor who can kick his ass and tighten up his story.


For epic fantasy... I'm much, much happier with the Malazan books. They are plenty annoying at times too. But, they've churned all 10 books out on a regular schedule and built a fascinating, complex world.

no updates for many moons

No updates. Been mostly venting on twitter / facebook recently.

In horrible movie reviews:

• Tucker & Dale vs. Evil : OMG. Great, funny, gory, awesome.
• Battle: Las Angeles  : WTF. This movie felt like it was 6 hours long. Meh.

TV reviews:

• Downton Abbey:  Where is the queue for the freaky threeway with Lady Sybil and Mr. Bates?
• The League : Best. Comedy. On. TV.
• Archer: Pretty freakin' great.

Books reviews:

• Books? What are books? 
• Also, how do I reconcile my desire for a Kindle with the fact that I've read ... 2 books this year?

Podcasts reviews:

• My Brother, My Brother And Me: I LOVE THE BROTHERS MCELROY SOOOO MUCH. Seriously. It may be unhealthy. Where should I turn for help?

religion

This post from John Scalzi's blog expresses so much of what I've struggled with trying to explain (both to myself, and to my family when I left the church).

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/03/14/reader-request-week-2011-1-children-and-faith/

A sample:

... 

But again, that’s not about me as an agnostic opposing those who have faith. It’s me as a person who knows the message of Christ pointing out a hypocrite, and me as a person with my own moral, social and political standards countering one whose standards differ. As it happens, I know a reasonable number of people of faith who feel the same way I do, and have many of the same moral, social and political standards as I have. Do I fear them? Discount them? Think them defective? No; I say “I’m glad to know you.” We believe many of the same things; that some of their belief comes from the teachings of Jesus, or from Allah by way of Muhammad, or from Buddha, to name just three examples, does not trouble me. Whatever steps we took to get there, we’re walking the same path.

i watch too much tv

Dish Network technician coming out tomorrow to deliver the new HD DVR. Excited? Perhaps.

But... now we need to enter all these timers in again. My dirty laundry:

• castle
• 30 rock
• the office
• the vampire diaries
• desperate housewives
• the gates
• lie to me
• chuck
• modern family
• glee
• america's next top model
• cougar town
• raising hope
• saturday night live
• bones
• no ordinary family
• human target
• parenthood
• parks and recreation
• community
• in plain sight
• it's always sunny in philadelphia
• bob's burgers
• the cape
• nikita
• ace of cakes
• the graham norton show
• warehouse 13
• project runway
• mr. sunshine
• eureka
• doctor who
• psych
• being human
• the inbetweeners
• house
• 'dexter'
• covert affairs
• episodes
• haven
• wipeout
• masterpiece mystery!
• the walking dead
• burn notice
• californication
• archer
• the big c
• the it crowd
• 'big love'
• top chef all-stars
• ugly americans
• the ricky gervais show
• justified
• white collar
• being human
• the venture brothers
• the league
• lights out
• top chef
• south park
• the ultimate fighter
• eagleheart
• shameless
• the daily show
• the colbert report
• bones
• anthony bourdain
• the soup
• web soup
• bully beatdown
• metalocalypse
• 'weeds'
• avengers: earth's mightiest
• royal pains
• rob dyrdek's fantasy factory
• what would brian boitano make
• tosh.0
• chelsea lately
• ncis
• kitchen nightmares
• torchwood

for bad bart

http://basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2010/12/19/how-to-criticize-someone-you-respect-deeply.html

apple and sausage stuffing recipe

Made this recipe for the family: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Apple-and-Sausage-Stuffing-107288 (go to the link to get a nicely printable version). It was a big hit.

• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1 pound spicy pork bulk sausage
• 1 cup diced celery
• 1 cup diced onion
• 1 cup diced peeled cored apple
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
• 2 teaspoons minced fresh sage
• 1 bay leaf

• 8 cups 1-inch cubes French bread with crusts (from 1-pound loaf)
• 1 cup whole milk
• 1 cup low-salt chicken broth
• 2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) butter, melted
• 3 large eggs, beaten to blend

Heat oil in heavy large skillet over medium heat. Add sausage; sauté until cooked through and brown, breaking into pieces with spoon, about 8 minutes. Using slotted spoon, transfer sausage to large bowl. Add celery and next 6 ingredients to drippings in skillet. Sauté over medium heat until vegetables are soft, about 5 minutes. Discard bay leaf. Add mixture to sausage. (Can be made 1 day ahead. Cover; chill. Reheat to lukewarm before continuing.)

Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter 13x9x2-inch glass baking dish. Add bread to sausage mixture. Whisk milk, broth, and butter in bowl to blend. Mix into stuffing; season stuffing with salt and pepper. Mix in eggs; transfer to prepared dish. Bake uncovered until cooked through and brown, about 50 minutes.

Details:

• doubled recipe
• used granny smith apples.
• didn't find any good fresh parsley, so left it out
• added some ground thyme
• used 2% instead of whole milk
• substituted apple juice for half the broth
• used Johnsonville bulk mild italian sausage (for this crowd, that was teetering on the edge of too spicy for some)

Next time:

• Double the apples. There wasn't a ton of apple flavor, despite following the proportions in the recipe and adding apple juice.

further pointless reviews

Movies:

• Hurt Locker. Wuh? Why did people love this so much?
• The Lovely Bones. Way too long and nowhere near as good as the book

Books:

• Finch, by Jeff VenderMeer. Fun, interesting, and a little gross at times. Reminded me of China Mieville
• The Dead-Tossed Waves, by Carrie Ryan. Zombie goodness. Teenage-angsty badness. Meh.

I've actually been listening to podcasts lately, rather than doing much reading or movie watching...

Podcasts (in alphabetical order):

• Being a Dudecast
• Chuck & Tina Spread TB & VD
• Comedy Death-Ray Radio
• Creeping with Armstrong
• Doomhouse
• Doug Loves Movies
• The Geek Show Podcast
• The Grandma's Virginity Podcast
• MicrobeWorld's Meet the Scientist Podcast
• The Nerdist
• NPR: Wait wait... Don't Tell Me! Podcast
• The Pod F. Tompkast
• The Robot's Pajama Party
• Savage Love Podcast
• Television Zombies
• This American Life
• Today in the Past
• WTF with Marc Maron Podcast

Looking at the list... The majority are either geeks talking about geeky stuff, or comedians talking about comedy.

Zucchini Bread

Made this tonight. Brought back lots of childhood memories.

Zucchini Bread

wet ingredients:

3 eggs

2 cups sugar

1 cup oil

2 tsp vanilla

2 cup grated zucchini

dry ingredients

3 cups flour

1 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

3 (heaping) tablespoons cinnamon. That's not a typo. 3+ Tablespoons

Beat eggs until light and frothy

Combine rest of wet ingredients with eggs

Combine dry ingredients and whisk together

Combine dry mixture with wet

Split into 2 greased loaf pans

bake at 325' for 1 hour

remove from oven when inserted toothpick comes out clean

cool on rack outside of pans

Freezes very well, I remember how happy I'd be when months after baking it my mom would pull a loaf out of the freezer for dessert after Sunday dinner.

Be sure to be the one to slice the bread, that way you can be greedy and get the crunchier heels. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

latest developments

Books read:

• Forest of Hands and Teeth -- Like someone mashed up The Village with Zombies. Pretty good, except for the teenage angsty bits.
• Ariel -- Post-apocolyptic, technology-fails, SCA members finally feel superier, boy-meets-unicorn story. You know, that old chestnut. Enjoyed it more than S.M. Stirlin's Dies the Fire.
• Boneshaker -- Zeppelins, Zombies, Zteampunk. Fun and exciting.

Movies:

• Valkrie -- Interesting story I'd heard bits of before. Unrealistic-sounding, preachy dialog about their motives kind of took you out of the story. Not that the end result of what they were trying for was bad... just that at least the politician's motives seemed more realistic, while the military guys were more pie-in-the-sky. But, maybe that's how it actually went down.
• Undead or Alive -- Chris Kattan and James Denton as cowboys during a zombie outbreak. Suprisingly good and funny in a shut-off-your-brain kind of way. The zombies were too unkillable, but still fun. Navi Rawat was as annoying as ever.

roomba: better than jesus?

Had a Roomba 550 for a month now. In non-Roomba online forums, read a few bad reviews
about shoddy parts and difficulty with returns on the 5XX series. Decided to get it at
Costco since their return policy is ludicrously good.

So far, so good. It deals w/ electrical cords and rug tassles without any issues. It also
doesn't appear to have any problems transitioning between rug and hardwood floor. Only
have one extra-fluffy bathroom rug that it has trouble with.

The scheduling feature is great. I can schedule it to clean up automatically while we're
at work. I come home and it's waiting for me on the charger, ready to have its bin
dumped. Typically, I'll clean it out, then set it loose in the basement while we're
spending the evening upstairs. And when I go to bed I clean it out again and put it back
on the charger for its automated run the next day.


On the whole, really really like it. We'd typically only vacuum once a week, and with the
dog and cat that meant big dusty hairballs at the end of the week. Roomba's taken care of
those.

Definitely still need our other vacuum, since roomba's just bouncing around
semi-randomly. But, I don't have to worry about neighbors popping over and getting
swallowed by a dust bunny.

UnitTest++ == teh awesome

Been using UnitTest++ for the last couple months on my work project. So far, enjoying it. Very simple to:

1. set up
2. add new tests
3. explain to the other developers
4. ?
5. profit

Our unit tests are part of our project's Visual Studio solution file. Each unit test's project is setup to run the unit test as a post-build step. So far, it's caught a number of 'simple' fixes that broke some.

I've also setup a Hudson server to automatically build our project... But, I didn't want it to fail the build if the tests failed. And, I wanted to collect the XML reports when it's built from the continuous integration server.

So, rather than always just blindly calling UnitTest::RunAllTests() in the unit tests's main() function, I made a utility library that'll look at an environment variable to determine how it should run the tests.

In the unit tests's main() :

int main(int, char const *[])
{
return myUnitTest_runAllTests("my_test");
}

The utility function:

#include "cstdlib"
#include "fstream"
#include "iostream"

#include "boost/filesystem.hpp"

#include "UnitTest++/UnitTest++.h"
#include "UnitTest++/XmlTestReporter.h"


namespace bfs = boost::filesystem;

struct True
{
        bool operator()(const UnitTest::Test* const) const
        {
                return true;
        }
};



DLLExport int myUnitTest_runAllTests(const char* const testName)
{
        char* xmlDir = 0;
        size_t len;
        errno_t err = _dupenv_s(&xmlDir,&len,"UNITTEST_XML_DIR");

        if (err || len == 0)
        {
                // env var not set, just run the test w/ standard mechanism
                return UnitTest::RunAllTests();
        }
        else
        {
                bfs::path p = bfs::path(xmlDir);

                // free memory from _dupenv_s
                free(xmlDir);

                // if necessary, create output directory
                if (! bfs::exists(p) || ! bfs::is_directory(p))
                {
                        if (!bfs::create_directories(p))
                        {
                                std::cerr << "Problem creating directory " << p << std::endl;
                                return -1;
                        }
                }

                std::string fname(testName);
                fname += ".xml";

                // use / operator to append filename onto path
                bfs::path fpath = p / fname;

                std::ofstream f(fpath.file_string().c_str());
                UnitTest::XmlTestReporter reporter(f);

                UnitTest::TestRunner runner(reporter);

                // if we're outputting to XML, don't return failure as return code
                // this way tests can fail without it making the automated build think the build failed.
                int ret = runner.RunTestsIf(UnitTest::Test::GetTestList(),NULL,True(),0);

                return 0;

        }
}

And then you just point Hudson's xUnit plugin at the generated reports. Came together suprisingly easy

movies

Stayed up waaaay too late last night watching movies...

• Balls Out: Gary the Tennis Coach. Bizarre. Funny. If you enjoy Sean William Scott acting goofy, you might like this movie.
• Boondock Saints. Meh. Not sure if I can say I watched this since really I fast-forwarded through most of it... especially parts with Willem Dafoe chewing up the scenery.
• No Country For Old Men. Tense. Exciting. Good
• The Reader. Good thing I saved this feel-good hit for last... OMG. Downer. But very good.

won't you please help... provide a MILF-related punchline

We got the following notice at work today

Subject: Mountain Lion Warning

The following warning has been issued for the Research Park area:

Building management has recently noticed unusual wildlife activities around the Williams Building property. Specifically several mountain lions have been sighted in and around the parking deck. Building management is working with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources with regard to this activity however we want to make you aware of the following guidelines from Wildlife Resources should you encounter a mountain lion when entering or leaving the facility:

• Do not panic. Most lions will try to avoid confrontation.
• Raise your arms to make yourself appear as large as possible. Lions prefer smaller prey.
• Slowly back away. Never run and never turn your back toward the cougar. Yell at the lion and wave your arms as you back away.
• Do not make direct eye contact. Lions perceive eye contact as aggressive behavior.
• If you are attacked, fight back. Try to prevent the lion from getting behind you.
  

Please let us know if you notice any unusual wildlife activity in & around our parking lot.

dust of dreams

Feels like I've spent the last 2 months catching up on all the plot threads by reading the last handful of books in the Malazan series, all in preparation for book 9.

Finished said book #9 last night. Dust of Dreams by Steven Erikson last night. Very good. A few huge cliff hangers for the final book. And a very exciting ending.

It's going to be a long wait for the next book.

doxygen weirdness

Spent most of my day getting Doxygen working with Visual Studio 2008. Finally happy with the output after lots of fiddling and trial-and-error. Now my API documentation is getting generated every time I do a build (and tested with UnitTest++).

Some oddities I had to deal with:

• doxygen doesn't report an error if you've got \msc in your docs, just silently puts a invalid image reference into the HTML. Doesn't seem to actually try to do anything with the \msc command unless you set MSCGEN_PATH
• I've got doxygen/dot/mscgen checked-in to subversion relative to my project's source code. Running doxygen from a Visual Studio post-build step, and decided to wrap it with a batch script. At least on windows, doxygen seems to have trouble reading an environment variable to set DOT_PATH / MSCGEN_PATH. Seems like it expands the env variable just fine, but it reports an error saying it can't find dot. Ended up just putting the relative path into the config file. Annoying since now I can't share the config file w/ multiple projects at different levels of the tree... but hey, free-ish UML sequence diagrams via mscgen.
• If I enable HAVE_DOT, lots of unhelpful error messages whenever it tries to run dot. A little googling turned up the problem -- doxygen tries to avoid re-doing some work if it thinks it doesn't have to regenerate some files. Not sure why it isn't working, but you can work-around the problem by creating a pre-build step that deletes the document-output directory.

When I wasn't messing with Doxygen, I was waiting in line at the DMV to renew my driver's license. Whee.

mingw vs. cygwin -- mingw fail

Cygwin has its warts. But, at least it has a single installer.

There's documentation on the MinGW site with install instructions. Many, many pages w/ seemingly contradictory information. And then you've got to navigate SourceForge's horrible file download interface. Ick.

quit stealing my bits

The new job is going well. Working closely with a couple other developers to design and implement some functionality for our new system.

The bad part is... we all have very similar personalities and development styles. All of us are tending to get caught up in the 'big picture' and losing sight of the functionality we need to implement in the near-term. Looooooong conversations about the N number of ways we could do X, Y, or Z.

We need the big picture view to plan the total functionality we need, and to schedule the resources we'll need. But, none of us are being very decisive about limiting the options we have to choose from.

Scarily, I'm probably the least introverted of us -- and, since I'm the 'new guy' I have fewer responsibilities -- so I'm the one writing documents, drawing diagrams, and giving presentations.

In many good ways, I've had to leave my comfort zone. But, today in particular it became clear I'm going to have to be the one to keep us on task and moving forward.

Stupid shoes on other feets.

dependency repository for visual studio / nant / msbuild / whatever

Dear LazyWeb,

For Java builds, you've got both Ivy and Maven as mechanisms to publish / discover inter-project dependencies.

Are there similar tools for C# or C++? Particularly within Visual Studio?

Googling has turned up vague hints about running Ivy from within a NAnt script. And a Visual Studio Dependency Manager on Codeplex that sounds like it might fit the bill, but doesn't have much documentation to judge.

We've got a bunch of thirdparty dependencies, as well as inhouse dependencies -- individual projects might change multiple times a day, or only every year. It'd be nice to have a Ivy-like repository that we can publish new releases into.

Ideally I'd like something integrated with Visual Studio to make our developers happy, as well as something easily scriptable/controllable to make our CM people happy.

argh

I was playing around with some python code a couple months ago. Nothing that special, just a few hours work figuring out how to parse some text files. Nothing too elaborate, but I remember being particularly pleased with one or two pieces of it.

Finally getting back to it tonight and it's nowhere to be found... I've found tons of unrelated crap I saved off and will never use again. The time I'm not anal about putting some experiments into version control is also the time I deleted it without realizing it.

I think it must have also been when I was fiddling with eclipse+pydev+IronPython, and I hadn't bothered to change the project's path from the default place in the default Eclipse workspace. Normally I always change one or both of those...

Sometime in the last few weeks I must have done my usual iteration of "eclipse is acting a little wonky, time to delete it and re-install it and all my usual plugins. Oh, and this workspace directory I never use."

Argh.

I also distinctly remember thinking that I should make a blog post of some of the code. Didn't happen.

Double argh.

gentlemen broncos

Saw Gentlemen Broncos tonight at a screening.

Yup. I've got the inside track on the Hollywood big time. My friends dog is in the film. The dog has bit me on the bum. I'm not sure how many degrees away that now makes me from Kevin Bacon.

Update: My buttocks are 4 degrees away from Kevin Bacon