skip to main |
skip to sidebar
So there I am, merrily changing some settings on my Windows Server 2003 VMWare image and I somewhat take it down, and make a real mess of it. Jolly good, looks to be completely dead, oh and the backup is screwed too, YAY! Well I'd been thinking of putting together a new VMWare image image anyway with a more recent server/database combination... so it's not all that bad.
Still, I have SQL Server 2008 Express running on my desktop, so I restored the db backups to that and am already back to where I was with the RetroF1 development, so thankfully no great backward step.
I think I'm done with the maintenance functionality now... the data model is somewhat interesting (as pictured below), and the next phase is to produce a viewable website... this should be fun.
As many of my friends and colleagues will tell you, I am hideously late for just about everything - I suspect it's to do with holding my interest, but I'm rarely early if I have to be (conversely, out of choice and I'll be there 3 hours early).
Watching the excellent Seven Ages of Britain this evening reminded me of probably the only time I've been somewhere at 8am out of choice - 1982; the raising of the Mary Rose.
A young Colin would have been about 5 at the time, this would have been after the fire at my primary school which forced me to travel across town to a temporary site for education (prior to being stung on the nuts by a bee flicked up my trouser leg). I distinctly remember being the first into the AV room, sitting on my heart-shaped cushion (seriously, did nobody send a memo to my parents?) to watch the hulk of the ship being pulled up.
Curiously, and now probably to the frequent boredom of Chris, I can recall details about the lift, and subsequent preservation operations to some fine detail - and when it pops up on TV today - well the interest doesn't wane.
Was I ever that interested in history? Not really, until recently I was quite accepting of "that was what it was"... I suppose, with age, I'm now more impressed with our forebear's achievements, and intrigued, but I'm actually fascinated with the how... not so much the what. Yes, this series has focused on art too, which has been entirely fascinating within the realms of the politics and power of the age - and I've been enthralled by it all.
But, looking back though, is this what that young Colin, rushing to that TV, observing the great hulking lifting frame and mechanism, was interested in? Was this every indication of being an... engineer... all along? Am I subconsciously sat there trying to work out "well, if I didn't have X, Y, or Z - how would I do that?"
Well, yes, obviously on one level that is entirely true, but what these programmes and undertakings have is the ability to join my love of problem solving to the real world - making the engineer engineer. So often these days my problem solving is in a virtual, detached reality... this brings home the possibility of innovation, imagination and the power of engineering and gives it substance.
I'm loving this recent renaissance of BBC series connecting all these kinds of concepts to the real world, presented in entertaining and curiosity driven ways...
More!
Have got a lot done today on the RetroF1 Sweepstake - after abandoning the idea of the cloud, I'm ploughin' on through getting the ASP.NET MVC stuff to a state I can at least start plugging in data, and be running, for the start of the season.
I upgraded to ASP.NET MVC v2 because I thought it might help me out with a problem, which it didn't (multiple lists within a view/controller)... reading around it appears some people are extended the HtmlHelper (and I presume routing too) stuff to get around this, I played briefly but couldn't get anything obviously working... so reverted to directly managing names, and picking stuff off the form to get it going - which works a treat. I'll come back to this topic when I'm done developing, I need to really see what they're doing - as by the example they're giving it's perfect for my needs.
Still, today I sorted out adding a competitor to a season and all the setup that goes on there, and completed all the result recording (some real nice abuse of try/catch there for determining if it's an edit or new record, yum!) - although I still need to complete the "attach a specific driver to a race" stuff, but that's only used for reporting rather than integral, I'll try to get that done tomorrow.
After that I need to knock up a pdf for email/print and create some publishable views to dump on the static website for the time being. Getting there slowly, as is the start of the season.
On the plus side, I feel I'm getting more to grips with LINQ and Lambda Expressions, and am already plotting the Beavervision Scoreboard, even considering a mobile-friendly website served up to let us techno-haves laud it over those scummy techno-have-nots.
I watched Moon the other day, and whilst being an excellent film, I take umbrage with some of the finer details of the plot.
It adds to my "ye gods, did you actually give this plot any thought?" list, most recent of which was the plot of Batman: Begins - which had a device that vaporised water many feet away, but miraculously ignored all water in the human body of the operators stood beside it.
Anyway, let us return to Moon - if you haven't seen it, do, it's entertaining - then come back here.
So, we open with Sam Bell coming to the end of his stint on the Moon doing his thang - but something turns interesting. He starts hallucinating, seeing people from his memories, but on the Moon he's only comforted by; watching old TV shows, a worn leather chair, a table tennis table, a robot companion (who expressed through a massive 7 emoticons - a record for Kevin Spacey), 2 lunar rovers, and a job. All very "normal"... still he potters out to do something and crashes because of the hallucination.
Suddenly, Sam Bell awakens in the sickbay - not a scratch on him... and being denied access to the external aspects of the base kicks up a fuss. Eventually the automaton lets him go, and he buggers off to the crash site - why? Did he remember it - no... but you don't know that. He finds el-corpso previous version of him and brings it back to base... then we hit a long drawn-out hand-wringing explanation of what this is... ok lets look at this without our film goggles on, what are the options:
- Time travel - where from? There is not future for el-corpso, so it's balls.
- We're super-duper robots with all them skillz... if I could make the emoticon-wielding automaton, why would I bother with robots?
- Cloning... ye gods, no, who would have thought of such a thing... I mean characters playing the same part - this isn't Last of the Summer Wine is it?
So, we've established the obvious - now we play the obvious out... the two meet and enjoy a game of wiff-waff...Hang on, table tennis... but one person is assigned to the base, table tennis... doesn't that involve two people? Oh, hang on, there are two vehicles, two space-suits, two seats in the vehicles, but only one set of slippers... and we're lead to believe the company is doing the clone thing because it's cheap...Did nobody perform any accounting on this outfit? Did nobody notice their moonbase costs where drastically reduced because they never went there? Did nobody notice the lack of launches? Yeah - take that Hollywood - accountants will crap over your plots from a great height... I accept Lunar Industries: The Dodgy Accounts may not have been as glamorous a film title - but still... how much am I expected to disbelieve?And, after all the completely obvious plot points, the emoticon-wielding automaton felt the need to spell it out even further at the end of the film, in case you were so stupid you didn't understand.And, if you didn't understand, never come here again.Gah.Gah.Gah.Visually fantastic, and loved every minute though.
Dear Microsoft, the sales description of your pricing model sucks. KTHXBAI.
Yes - thanks for the free 24 hours, which reduces your monthly bill by a whopping 3%, but only for your first use. Not because I've used the computed time, no, because I've used the time of the computer to do no computation.
Why should I be surprised, this is standard cloud-style provisioning? Well, not quite. Firstly the sales pitch indicates all the way through that it is the use of compute time, not computer time - and the cost calculator seemed to confirm this. Secondly, every single deployment, staged & production counts as a computer time - you cannot scale up within a computer to maximise the available compute time, and that is where I believe it differs from the standard. Each application you want to use on the cloud - regardless of usage patterns or footprint will cost a pretty hefty amount, and only the first deployment or the first application will see the free hours. So do we end up bundling everything into a single stupidly weighty and CPU intensive application just to avoid the cost?
Great - how about load/unload at point of use? Yeah - awesome for a web application, no thanks.
OK, so they're not aiming at hobbyist programmers? Sure, fine, I'll also heartily not recommend them to my current or future employers now... and I'm sure they'll be cowering in their boots for that. Yeah, pow, take that big corporation, woo!
It doesn't seem to sit easily with them opening up free versions of Visual Studio for web development, and trying to encourage an uptake there. Sure, you can develop for free and it's great - but surely you wouldn't want to use it anywhere, like on the web, would you?
And I was happy to pay them for hosting my hobby work, the costs didn't look unreasonable for similar packages available, it could be useful and would certainly put me closer to the "development edge". But, no, not now - the costs of what I'd like to do would be completely uncompetitive compared to other packages.
I await the chimes of "should use LAMP" - which naturally misses the point, so don't bother.
On the plus side, IIS6 and ASP.NET MVC - yay, they really hate each other too.
Happy times.
I’d contend there is little more amusing than driving a rocket-powered car at high speed into a wall and being flung through the windscreen like a ragdoll, or ploughing recklessly through a field of cows setting light to everything with a flame thrower to obtain a “barbecue bonus”.
I’d hazard a guess that this may not be a particularly universally held view, or one that would be approved of generally, but in the world of gaming – hey anything goes.And so it does go, with great regularity, in some of my favourite driving games – most recently FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage. Navigating through a debris strewn track, which has been created by what can only be described as novel driving styles to wreak havoc, all the time pointing out that “it’d be really nice if I could see where I was going” (although that seems to be entirely optional – and more often than not detrimental to the chaos caused), or yelling “EAT IT!” when ramming someone into a wall – yes it is quite carnage filled (not entirely sure it’s ultimate though). I do spend more than a few hours playing it, and as was with the case with the “predecessor” in my personal collection of favourite driving games; Carmageddon.However, each time an excellent game like these come out, the developers or publishers inevitably go bust, and we never see a follow up. We’re left to scavenge hardware and operating systems for years to follow, trying to keep at least a couple of bits of kit alive enough to be able to continue playing, but it is a tough battle to keep them going – and I fear that Carmageddon may be passing beyond our playable reach (mostly down to what appears to be an IPX issue more than anything else).It’s quite sad, in several ways (I know), but it’d be helped if we had a more steady stream of these style of games instead of the usual dull procession of movie tie-ins or new versions of already tired series – ditch those and give us some entertaining physics in a sandbox environment, with ridiculous cars and multiplayer capability... then go bust and get someone else to do another game within a year or two... simples!
So, the team I thought I had no chance of joining seem to think I've done as well as anyone who has "taken the test previously and joined the team", so they'd like me to move over...
Not sure if this a good sign, do they get through a lot of developers? Is the system so bad they'll have any idiot in? Or, do I, through some fluke of years of "hard" work have some skills they recognised. Perhaps I shouldn't be so hard on myself as this is a pretty good opportunity to do some new and exciting things (to me at any rate), and the hiring manager has recognised my eagerness to learn - which he says is an important and useful thing to him (I think that is usually code for "big pile of rubbish code ahoy") - but it's going forward and more experience, in a more developer focused environment, hopefully.
All I seem to need to do now is navigate my way across, and the logistics of that are going to be all kinds of not-fun on numerous levels - so we're not there quite yet.
Part of me has been wondering for the last couple of weeks whether I want to continue being a developer, at times it seems like we're the last sane people in the building trying to prevent the "business" bestowing a great disaster upon itself, rather than changing the world... and it's true I get fed up of the constant "why?" questions that people come up with after they've come up with utterly unrealistic or unimaginably poor ideas through the power of their own groupthink. But yet, I still enjoy the output, producing useful stuff, making the world better (tm) - or, just slightly less worse (or, miles worse if I'm not feeling charitable).
But, a change is as good as a rest, or going postal.
There is something strangely satisfying when you receive an email which opens with "Tired of receiving..." and then goes on to persue the very thing they're questioning your level of exhaustion at.
My latest addition to this pile of stupidity is from a recruiment firm, which opens with:
"Are you tired of receiving irrelevant mailshots for locations which are completely out of the question?"
Why yes, yes I am!
"Then we have positions available in; Manchester, Zurich, High Wycome, Leatherhead, Edinburg, Aberdeen, Richmond, Norwich, Winchester and Basingstoke!"
But I've already said I'm tired of mailshots that do that, why are you doing that? Are you so stupid as to have forgotten the point of your mailshot? Or, is it that you are trying to sneak a badly formed mailshot past me, under the illusion that it isn't?
Entertaining Retro Bar Pop Teasers Pop Quiz (to be known henceforth as RBPTPQ - snappy hey?) - based around power ballads.
We managed to sneak second place and got some crap CDs as prizes (although I had to complain one of the jewel cases was completely devoid of CDs).
I surprised myself by how many of the songs I loved, and enjoyed... and hated. But the questions were often slightly out of my grasp - Kenny, as usual, came to the rescue and filled in many of the blanks - even Motley Crew - which seemed to be based off the "cryptic clue" of - A cartoon characters side-kick goes to the hairdresser... I was still pushing for Bonnie Tyler personally, but he saw straight through it.
Here's to power ballads... and Pete Waterman, please write us something in that vein, being slightly anthemic... it's a sure-fired Eurovision winner - maybe.
So, I was asked to do a test today by the team I certainly won't be moving into.Two parts. A) Implement a Stack & Queue without Collections, B) Hook a WinForm up to multiple tables and provide an edit method.Well, A was mostly ok - much of my time was spent battling with VS2003 - I'd forgotten just how bad it was. B - well, yes, for me, was a disaster - but I've never pretended to have any WinForm or GUI experience - had it instead been "do it in ASP.NET" - would have taken me about 20 minutes.Ho hum.
A new series of "bodged-together" adverts has appeared from the venerable planet resource wasting corporation.
This time it appears to involve some form of innovative post-shaving balm to stop your skin becoming "something terrible" and "even worse". Helpfully, and to illustrate the power of this new wonder product, the first shot after the description of said product involved the model wiping it on his nose.
Remember kids, next time you shave your nose you can relieve it instantly and keep it shining bright for all our tomorrows.
I, for one, shall sleep more soundly tonight.
