Huddled Masses

Posts Tagged ‘Personal’

So this evening we went to a concert to see Jars of Clay and Audio (Adrenaline) Unplugged… they were very good, as expected. I have to say I had a lot of fun partly because it was the first actual rock concert that I’ve convinced my wife to go to in years (really, since we used to go to Kingdom Bound before the kids were born).

In any case, Jars of Clay rocked, Audio Unplugged was a cool flashback, and we were introduced to a couple of new bands… I’m an instant fan of B. Reith who was very entertaining, and who’s music was somewhat reminiscent of Toby Mac, blending guitar, hip hop, and rap with a great voice and deep lyrics. We also heard Thousand Foot Krutch for the first time… and was reminded that although I don’t dislike hard rock, when it borders on heavy metal, I can’t enjoy it for very long. They opened with the title song of their new album “Welcome to the Masquerade” which was really good, but after head-banging through a couple more tunes, I’d had enough and wandered off to by some snacks while I waited for Jars of Clay.

If you’re interested … B. Reith has a soulful, hip hop vibe to his sound, and there’s a free EP with a couple of jazzy tunes and a couple of rap tunes over at Amazon … they don’t necessarily showcase the depth of his skills, but they’re a nice taste. Oh yeah, and he’s got this video thingy (I embedded it below, there’s not a lot of music in it, but hey, I almost never post YouTube videos, so this is a good excuse .

One very sad thing: the festival sponsors got together a free iTunes gift card promising a download of 20 songs from the festival … and in order to get it, I had to finally give in and create an iTunes Store Account. Yeah. That’s right. Incidentally, installing iTunes without ending up with a boat load of crap requires a degree in double talk I guess, because they somehow managed to sneak their crappy Bonjour service on, and … why the heck to they want my address and phone number just so I can download some free MP3s? Oh, and also … why can’t this company write software that looks normal on Windows?

Ok, so it’s been awhile since I blogged faithfully. I got really busy leading up to the Scripting Games, and then I got even busier afterward … and then I just got distracted. In fact, I have about 9 “drafts” posts queued up in WordPress that I started and never finished, so what I probably need to do to get myself going again is to stop trying to make every post into the complete documentation of … whatever I was writing about.

So, in the spirit of “spit it out”, I’m going to just leave this post at that, and just add I’ve been working on PowerBoots, PoshConsole, PoshCode … some OAuth code for authenticating and posting to FriendFeed (which just got bought by Facebook, so maybe my code will work there some day), and some more voice-recognition stuff … posts on all of these are coming soon.

Well, I feel like I left some of you hanging (those who read my blog but don’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook or FriendFeed or … something) ...

I aced my Master’s Defense [groupwoot]

Which is to say, I got the highest grade possible for my project (yes, RIT grades your Master’s project when you defend it) and am (unofficially, since I’m still waiting for the paperwork to clear) done with my Master’s degree.

Here are the slides from my presentation (not very exciting without all the stuff I said … maybe I should scan in my 3.5” cards), along with the source .tex including my final paper, the proposal and the original research I did. The source code for the prioject is available, as well as compiled binaries and if you actually want to work on it, I’ve got my database which I could make available.

I took the weekend off

I intended to spend last week celebrating my defense by releasing a new PoshCode build, but stuff happened™ and before I knew it, I had spent the whole weekend hanging out with my kids, and setting up a new MythTV box, and then upgrading my main development box to Vista 64bit (I’ve been frustrated about missing out on some of my RAM because I was running 32-bit Vista).

That’s pretty much completed now (except for the hanging out with the kids part ), so tonight, or tomorrow at the latest, I will get back to the work I had left for PoshCode and try to get that done in time to use it in my presentation next week.

I have several backlogged blog posts waiting…

• I’ve got a few more ideas about doing REST from PowerShell, and about setting up DekiWiki for the PowerShell Community
• I wrote a little script to do compiled C# in PowerShell v1, and a couple functions to do custom IComparer implementations with it.
• Visifire now supports WPF (which means you can use their charts from PowerShell)

• I wrote an extensible IRC bot in under 40 lines of code using SmartIRC4Net from PowerShell

And on top of that, I’ve got a ton of work at work now, mostly involving writing Ruby ...

This is just a short note to let you know that after much persuasion from various of her friends, my wife has started her own blog to write about parenting, being a stay-at-home mother of preschoolers, saving money by shopping smarter, and in general … all the many things she does.

It’s called Helpful Mom and if you’re a parent of preschoolers, you should check it out!

So, I’ve been called out on this latest meme posting by /\/\o\/\/ and although I usually just ignore these things,

As with any curious developer, I had to trace this thing back to it’s root cause … it turns out this started as a Software Development thing, and it was altered into a sort of SysAdmin thing.

So, since I’m putting up with this in the first place, I think I’ll go back to that original developer-oriented list of questions, if you don’t mind.

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Here’s a snippet from the latest update to my resumé ... you’ll notice I struck out the “create” portion of the descriptions — as long as we just talk about maintenance and support tasks, everything you see here is what I did in just the last two weeks since one of my teammates transferred to a different division and our temp/contract was stolen away to a full-time position with a different company.

Software Engineer, Test Tools Development.

Lead developer for in-house software solutions for a 100-strong quality assurance team at a Fortune 500 company … responsible for creating and maintaining all custom software solutions and database systems.

1. Create and maintain a randomized software test-case generation tool capable of managing hundreds of test projects with dozens of variables and using pseudo-random weighted generation to create thousands of test cases for each of our hardware and software tests.
2. Maintain a custom HR tracking and reporting tool for billing internal customers based on hourly rates for work done testing hardware and software products for dozens of internal and external customers.
3. Create and maintain a custom requirement and test-case tracking system for internal tracking of spec-based testing and reporting.
4. Create and maintain a custom defect tracking system which interfaces with and provides metrics for over half a dozen different defect tracking systems (DDTS, ClearQuest, MS TFS, SourceForge, etc) used by the development teams we support.
5. Create and maintain internal test-results reporting system capable of capturing test-case pass/fail/waive information and tying it to internal requirements and test case tracking systems as well as external defect and work-request tracking systems.

1. Create and maintain various reporting systems providing charts and reports of counts and rates to support capacity planning, software quality metrics, test effectiveness and efficiency measures, software quality predictions etc, as well as tracking post-release defect discovery and analysis to improve the effectiveness of pre-release testing.

Work with a multitude of languages and technologies to provide the most effective solutions for each request in a timely manner on multiple platforms … from client apps and scripting solutions to cross-platform web apps.

• Using Asp.Net with HTML/CSS/Javascript and VB.Net and C#.net to provide “AJAX” web-based applications.
• Using PHP and Perl to provide web-based defect query and search services.
• Using C#, Windows Forms and WPF to provide rich-client tools for test planning and test-case generation.
• Using PowerShell, VBScript, TestBasic, and AutoHotkey to automate testing, as well as maintenance and data-entry tasks.
• Using and maintaining SQL Server, SQL Reporting Services, and SQL Analysis Services to provide reporting and business intelligence and to support tool development.

• Tracking work and changes in various source control and defect tracking systems such as VSS, ClearCase, ClearQuest, Bugzilla, SVN and TFS.

[crazy] 10 languages, 5 software platforms, 7 separate applications … and the apps I wrote myself (and am therefore most familiar with) seem to be the only ones that I’m not fielding support calls for multiple times a day. I need a vacation (or rather, a couple new coworkers). [surrender]

Fingers don’t fail me now! [whip]

Of course, in my spare time, I’m working on my capstone project for my Masters degree in Computer Science …

So this goes in the “WORSE THAN FAILURE” bucket …

I got an email from my dad this week wondering if I knew “What in the world is this message that keeps coming up every time we start Mom’s computer? It began appearing right after I inserted the removable hard drive to do the most recent backup.” He attached the following screen shot from Windows XP which pretty much speaks for itself (as much as such a thing can):

To be honest, I’ve never heard of it. No Disk? Exception Processing Message? What on earth … I did a web search or two and came up with several fairly recent threads on every tech support site out there … none of which had anything resembling an authoritative answer.

My best guess from the DaniWeb and TechGuy threads is that there is some media app running on startup, but I’ve already had them disable everything in their MSConfig startup tab without getting rid of this annoying message which takes multiple clicks to actually go away.

I had them bring up Task Manager and determined that the message window seems to be owned by the csrss.exe process … apparently it’s only started happening recently after a reboot when my dad switched out the removable hard disks they have been using for backups for years … seems like maybe it’s a recent Windows update but at this point I have no idea, so I guess I’ll try poking around when I get over to their house next time. Anyone have any ideas?

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I have a funny story about politically correct toys. Well, cautious toys, anyway.

We got this “Word Whammer” from LeapFrog this week. They make these fridge toys that come with a bunch of letter magnets, and three slots that you can put the letters into. When you put a letter in, it reads it and pronounces it phonetically, like: “Eff! Eff says fuh, eff says fuh, every letter makes a sound, eff says fuh!”

Except the Word Whammer is special. It can pronounce whole words! Well, only three letter words, but still. If you put P-I-N in, it says: “Letter Pee, Letter Eye, Letter En. Press the three letters to hear your word” ... and when you do, it says: “Pee, Eye, En; Pin! Pih, iih, nuh; Pin!” and then encourages you to play some more … if you put C-A-T in and press all three letters, it says “Cee, Aeh, Tee; Cat! That’s one of my favorite words! Kuh, Ah, Tuh; Cat!”

What’s amusing is that LeapFrog is so careful not to offend people …

If you put G-O-D in, it doesn’t know the word, so it just says: “Gee, Oh, Dee; Guh, Oh, Duh” and then suggests that you do another word — now to be fair, that’s just the default behavior for words that it doesn’t know, but really, I mean, if you’re teaching it words, why would you leave out god?

It gets funnier if you put D-I-M in, it will say “Letter Dee, Letter Eye, Letter Em. Press the three letters to hear your word” and then you press them, and it says “Duh, Eye, Em, Dim! Great word, try another one” so you just switch out the I for an A, and it says: “Letter Dee, Letter Aeh, Letter Em; Let’s build a word! Put three new letters into the Word Whammer!” Yep, it won’t even phonetically pronounce it! Nothing you can do will get it to do so … all it will do is repeat the letters and then tell you to start over with three different letters.