fall 2009 status

• dog still good. Other than chomping on the neighbor's cat.
• new job still good. Fixed a long-outstanding bug in the code. Waiting to get more bugs to work on, and in the meantime working on a new tool to help ease our transition from ClearCase to Subversion. Getting to play in python most of the day, good times.
• Best book I've read lately: Soon I Will Be Invincible, by Austin Grossman.
• Best audiobook I've listened to lately: How to Succeed in Evil, by Patrick McLean

Odd that both the book and the audiobook are superhero satire/homage.

Currently reading: Matter, by Iain M. Banks

proof that babies provide excellent winter traction?

things learned on my first day at the new job

• eclipse is positively snappy on a 8-core workstation
• lotus notes still exists
• there is such thing as too big a monitor. So far, not liking the ginormous widescreen. Would much rather have 2 or more 19"-20" monitors.

good presentation on TDD

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/tdd-ten-years-later

daemon

Just finished Daemon by Daniel Suarez. Very good, devoured it in a day this weekend. Not sure if I liked how it ended -- very clearly setting up the sequel, which isn't due until 2010.

how I spent my labor day weekend

putting dogs in swings

losing my geek cred

Finding pydev + eclipse a decent IDE for playing around with python. That place in my heart used to be held by Vim.

The very new IronPython integration in pydev is surprisingly functional.

interesting dynamic languages on .net talk from 2008

argh

why did it take 10+ years for us to realize our round-to-nearest-100th algorithm is busted (on windows)?

Not sure why the original developer cast to 'long' rather than using some modulo division on the floating point number. Stupid windows 32bit long.

And, we can't do the easy solution of 'long long' because of incompatibility with the HP-UX C-runtime on the old-as-dirt patch levels some of our customers refuse to move from.

why I love python

Lately, discussions at the NFJS conference and recent conversations with friends have made me introspective about why I like Python.

I first started using Python about 9 years ago. Previously, I'd used mostly C, C++, Perl, Pascal, and a very little bit of Visual Basic.

Pascal was what I'd learned in High School. VB, C, and C++ were what I'd used during college (I guess there was a teeeeny bit of Lisp thrown in there too). My first couple years as a software engineer, C++ was the hammer with which I'd pounded all programming nails.

Eventually I learned Perl. It was OK. But, like most people, I'd write Perl scripts and not be able to read them the next month.

After a recomendation I'd read online, I tried the Python tutorial. The conciseness was a revelation. The way it got out of my way and let me worry about the problem and not the compile/run/debug loop. Having dictionaries and lists as a first-class language features blew me away. I don't know why similar features in Perl never struck me in the same way.

Learning Python not only completely reinvigorated my interest in programming, but it also and completely changed the way I program. Maybe I still love Python because of the sentimental attachment to it from that first revelatory period of experimentation.

no fluff just stuff SLC 2009

It was pretty good. Only went to one session that was a dud. Decided to try to go to a number of different speakers in an attempt to not get burnt out. But, I should have just stuck with all of Venkat Subramanian's sessions the first day's afternoon. He's an awesome speaker.

I enjoyed seeing other dynamic languages -- groovy, scala, clojure. Definitely seems like mixing in Groovy to any java project would be pretty easy. Loved that it removed a lot of Java's verbosity, but kept the barrier of entry low. Groovy also seemed to be much more readable than clojure or scala.

Scala seemed very interesting -- liked the type inference, and concurrency support. But, I hate hate hate the underscore. And that g-damn colon that changed the operator/operand. Maybe if I used it every day, it'd seem more readable.

I guess if people can hate Python's significant whitespace (which I love), I can have an irrational hatred of Scala's underscores/colons.

further adventures in horrible code -- effin assert

Lots of assert() checks spread throughout our code, testing perfectly valid error conditions. Used sparingly, testing things that absolutely could not happen... ok. But checking for NULL values passed as parameters to various type comparison functions? Eeesh.

It's caused problems up a couple times before... but last Friday's was extra awesome. I'd been working for 3 days with a customer, trying to resolve the cause of a crash of our application at their site. Finally get them to install WinDbg and run our debug build so we can get some crash dumps.

Bang. Assertion failure. Nowhere near the crash we see when running a release build.

Dig into the crash dump. Dirty data in their database that the release-compiled version of our application just ignores because the assert() check is turned into a no-op by the preprocessor for release builds.

I can't tell them it's their data that needs to be fixed. This application and its periodic releases has been running just fine on their system for 5+ years.

But, I also can't run the debug version of the latest release to diagnose their current problem. It's stopping during initialization due to the asserts.

Argh.

what I've been up to

walkin

pickin up poop

trainin

readin'

Just finished Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks. For whatever reason, found it hard to get through. Mostly because I wasn't in much of a reading mood. The two timelines also confused me at first. I enjoyed it though, and will definitely re-read in a few months to see if I like it better the second time.

Next on the to-be-read pile, in no particular order

• IronPython in Action
• Watchmen
• Dark Knight Returns
• In Defense of Food
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

In other news: Got a promotion at work (in semi-official-title but not in salary). Now I get to do even more of the things I'd rather not be doing. Good times.

klingon night school

Klingon Night School

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parable of the goose

The windows near my cube overlook a winding river through the nearby golf course.

Early this morning the ice was pretty patchy. Open in places, other sections just thin enough.

Thin enough that geese walking across would crack through, plop into the water, and create a 3x-goose-size hole in the ice. A pair of them fell through within a section of ice around 30 feet across. Then, a different pair swam happily past in the open area.

One goose got so upset it starts swimming back and forth. Zigging and zagging, banging into the sides of the ice. Trying to get closer to its fellow stuck in the ice, then zooming towards the freely swimming pair. Lots of excitement and action, but ultimately no movement.

Later today....

While talking over all the crazy synchronization steps that my team has to follow in order to stay useful and relevant to the rest of the project, and how we'll transition that into our long-term goals, I tell them the above parable of the goose.

I was talking with the project's PM and current SD-manager (my boss), and was trying to describe how frustrated I was getting. Back and forth, the same discussions, different groups pulling our priorities all over, and ultimately no real progress towards the end goal.

Of course... rather than end the story there, I accidentally finish it up with the goose getting fed up and flying away.

The moral of the story:
I suck at fairy tales. But, I'm awesome at Fruedian slips.

belated reading/listening/watching/playing updates

Read:

• The Algebraist, by Iain Banks. Re-read this. Even better the second time.
• World War Z, by Max Brooks. Also a re-read, also awesome.

Listened:

• Ancestor and Infected, by Scott Sigler. I think I'd have liked these better in print form than as audiobooks... The author does the audiobooks, which I assume allows them to be free. As stingey as I can be, I might pony up some cash if the voices of the characters weren't so lame. Story-wise, I much prefered Infected to Ancestor.

Watched:

• Finally saw WALL*E, The Dark Knight, and Wanted. All great.

Played:

• Many, many games with friends and family. Some new/continuing favorites: Ticket to Ride, Game of Thrones, Hey That's My Fish, Snorta, Samurai. 

best weird debugging experience ever

I am captivated by each nugget of horrible code.

typedef struct RMAP
{
bill* pbill;
line* pline;
rule* prule;
} rmap;

I'm not sure what I find the most interesting... The fact that somebody thought it was fine to copy that struct definition throughout 15+ .c files.

Or, the fact that somebody slightly modified a couple of those instances.

typedef struct RMAP
{
bill* pbill;
line* pline;
rule* prule;
Bool overrideFlg;
} rmap;

typedef struct RMAP
{
bill* pbill;
line* pline;
rule* prule;
double accum;
} rmap;

Or... the best subtle weirdness, in one instance someone reordered the pointers.

typedef struct RMAP
{
rule* prule;
bill* pbill;
line* pline;
} rmap;

So... when you debug the following code in any of the _other_ .c files...

void myCrazyFunction(rmap* a_rmap)
{
rule* r = a_rmap->prule;
double reduction = r->reduction;
... blahblahblahblahblah ...
}

At runtime, everything works -- the definition of rmap used by the compiler is the definition within the .c file, and the third set of pointer-size bits within the a_rmap struct are assigned to 'r'.

But, when I try to debug the code in Visual Studio and hover over the a_rmap->prule I see a bunch of garbage. I hover of 'r', and I see it's got the values I expect.

I'm guessing the debugger finds the first instance of the rmap type in the .pdb file, and the one oddly ordered struct just so happens to be in the first .c file alphabetically (and also first in build order).

But, that realization doesn't come until about 2 hours of other wild goose chases through the rest of the call stack to eliminate the other 'more likely' possibilities.

Good times.

further adventures in wasting time

The 2 days I'd never get back eventually turned into around 4-5 days total of developing, creating unit tests, system testing, and correcting various bugs the tests didn't find.

And now 1 more day. Backing the changes out.

Released ~2 weeks ago; customers and internal support are finally installing the new version and KABOOM! Unknown references in the C Runtime library.

Superfantastic news! Turns out our development / production testing environment isn't at the same HP-UX patch level as most customers' systems. Thanks, Oracle 11g! Thanks, budget constraints that made someone decide they had to stick it on the same server we use for support!

twitterpated

I'm all aflutter over the news that HBO has ordered the pilot for Game of Thrones -- http://grrm.livejournal.com/58155.html