Anyway, I start the new job on Monday, but although I’m excited, I don’t actually know much about what I’m in for, other than that this group is a Microsoft TAP partner and a heavy and early adopter of Microsoft technology, and that I’m expecting to work on platform development for XGS’s core product: the Xerox Services Manager.

Consider yourself up-to-date (more about me next week, after I’ve got myself oriented).

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?

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.

I aced my Master’s Defense

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 ...

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

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.

How old were you when you started programming?

I got my first computer shortly after my family moved back to the USA from Costa Rica, just in time for 9th grade … before that I’d never seen a computer better than my Atari 6400 game machine.

How did you get started in programming?

I bought that “computer” second-hand — it was an Atari 800XL, and it came with a cartridge for Atari BASIC, and a stack of magazines with code in them. That’s pretty much all there is to it, I was hooked.

What was your first language?

BASIC. First Atari, then QW, then … well, Visual Basic Script, believe it or not.

What was the first real program you wrote?

You mean BlackJack for the Atari doesn’t count? I guess the first real program I wrote was one I wrote at work to randomize test cases …

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Basic, Visual Basic, C/C++, C#, Java, Perl, PHP, a bunch of automation languages like batch and shell scripts, VB script and VB for Applications, MS Test Basic, Rational’s SQABasic, AutoIt, AutoHotkey, ScriptIt, and a slew of web languages like JavaScript, VB Script, HTML, XML ... and of course, lets not forget SQL (although I kind-of wish I could).

What was your first professional programming gig?

Not counting a few tiny web-sites I did in college … my first programming job was at Xerox, where I started out doing software testing, started automating the testing, and then moved to writing and maintaining apps, web sites etc.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Absolutely. I love what I do, and I love that I work in a job where every year there’s new languages, new tools, new challenges, and new and more clever solutions.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

There’s really only three kinds of programmers: Web developers, Database developers, System developers. Take a database class and a web-design class early on and figure out what you want to be — then work hard to make sure you don’t end up being the wrong kind of programmer

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had … programming?

I think I’d have to say that the memory that stands out the most was working on the open source project GeoShell … it’s mostly died off now (although I’m still threatening to ressurect it later this year), but at it’s height it was a near ideal interaction of passionate users, laid back developers, and cool software that made everyone ask: “whoah, what’s that you’re running?”

I guess I should call someone else out, right? That’s how these silly posts become memes. How about Lee Holmes, Jachymko and Mark Schill …

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.

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).

Fingers don’t fail me now!

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

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?

This has nothing to do with anything in particular, just that it’s been a very long time since I wrote something creative for no purpose other than to be creative … and when this came to me this afternoon, I figured I should post it publicly and see if I can pick up the thread of creative writing again — as bad as this first effort may be .