On Tuesday I felt like read a good but easy book. Enders Game fit the need, so I sat down and read it in one sitting. Yip I enjoyed it that much, that at each hour past midnight, I said to myself “oh this is a good bit, just a little longer”. So at 5:30am I was filled with triumph, for the morals and glory of the story, and having finished the before Michaela got up for work at 6:30am. I had a whole hour to sleep, what joy.

Turns out, that in the year of 2006, one hour is still not enough sleep, by any margin. I was feeling out-of-body all day at work. I even fell straight to sleep, when I went to bed at the un-earthly 7:30pm. I’m not even sure both kids where asleep. Anyway I am feeling better now and the book was good.

Edited 11th Dec 06: Fixed some shocking spelling/grammar, I’m sure I’ve left some more for the expert spellers.

I’m have upgraded to the Beta 2 of RSS Bandit 1.5 (Jubilee) and I’m finding it much better. I like the new icons on the feedlist. The UI feels snappier, even though I know they have on changed the UI toolkit.

My display formatter still works, and with the improved handling of Window Live blogs, I looking forward to less feed errors.

Great work RSS Bandit team…. Dare has the list of changes.

Ah, and it feels great to be back…

The big hold up was Telstra discovered on the day of moving houses, that they couldn’t install cable to our new house. Well that was the message I got on my cell phone from the unhelpful Astute call-centre person. Lots of time and holding, and talking with Astute and Telstra and it boiled down to. They can’t run wire to our house due to the wire been blocked via the garage from one side, and trespassing the back sections driveway on the other (ie the same way our Telecom wire runs). They could do underground drilling to get the cable to the house, (took three weeks to get to this point) but we would have to sign a waver saying, if the drill gets stuck, they will rip up our three month old driveway to retrieve the drill, and the drive will not be repaired to original condition. Have just brought this house I’m not ready for that possibility, sorry. I was very close though.

So we now have ADSL with XTRA. And I feel guilty, but in the end I couldn’t be bothered hunting for a better deal else where. The plus side is after getting the ASDL kit from XTRA discovering that there is not a phone in the office, we changed to the Wifi option, and $150 later, I now am connected to the Internet via 802.11g & PPPoA. Honestly is just works, and I’m quite pleased with it.

I’ve done a few speed tests on the XTRA speed test page, and I get ~1.7Mb or ~210KB, which is good enough for me.

Last thing left to tidy up is to, find out how to turn the ASDL link on/off from my PC, as described in the D-Link help somewhere.

I quite enjoyed this movie. While been limited to poor headphones and small in-seat screen, I found the movie engaging. I must admit I lost track of the plot just at the end, so wasn’t sure why the ending was “dramatic”.

The CG was good. The girl (what ever her name is) seemed to find some cleavage from the prop department, but not enough, that it didn’t look like it was taped at the edge of her dress. Shrug.

All-in-all a golly pirate romp movie.

Now that the development phase of our release cycle has end, and the last minute tweaks have also stopped, I have spent the last two weeks moving our development source control from Visual SourceunSafe to Subversion.

The first task was to dump our two main repositories into SVN dump files. I was not the first team in our group to make this move (this helped getting approval from my technical lead). I was handed the other team’s python conversion script. This was based on the state of the VSS2SVN project (a few years ago), but heavily modified to just do the required job. I had some problems running the script on our repositories, so went to see how the current project had improved.

The current VSS2SVN have changed from Python to Perl and stopped using the VSS COM API, to using their own archive reading tool. Because they can read/recover stuff the COM API could not handle. Spooky, it’s reading things like that, that gave me the energy to keep plodding when things got tough. Our smaller repository converted with only ~20 problems, files reported as missing parents when all versions could be seen, and retrieved via the VSS client. The larger (and shared with another team) repository just was unhappy.

After reading ~4 months worth of mailing list, I knew what/why things weren’t working as I wanted. The long and short of it is, the VSS2SVN project is trying to port the complete history of the project to SVN, which I could see as a good thing. But for our needs, it is not what we need, I trust VSS for what it currently has, I just don’t trust it going forward. I want the current live tree, and all the history (changes and notes) for that current tree. I don’t want the file moves or the likes.

So now knowing what I really want, I went digging, and found a Perl script doing this thing, I had trouble getting it working (eg, it didn’t work in the first few minutes), so I decided you try the Python script again. The perl was laid out really clean, but I have always had this mental pictures of Perl been spaghetti.

So I picked up the python code I was handed at the beginning of that week, and now with all my incite/understanding, I got it working in ~3 minutes. First repository dumped as sweet as you could dream. The second had issues, as some really old files didn’t have the first n versions there. You could see it, just not retrieve from the VSS archive. So I altered the code to return “This version could not be found” and then it also dumped.

I’ve spent this week sorting out of the shared files (auto within the same repository, and manually between repositories). I’m getting to the happier place. And soon will be ready to unleash it on the rest of the team. He’s looking forward to using the new tools.

We are upgrading from VS 6.0 to VS 2005 at the same time. Ah things are starting to look better all the time. I will also not have to maintain two copies of all my work. Good tools are so nice. Now to move from char* to std::string, that may be a longer term project…

Well I think Alex is bleeding, his Base4.Net project seems very cool, I just don’t understand it enough to know how to use it, but I do know I should try understand it.

But what is cool is that he does a fantastic job of blogging his insights and revelations to making it a better product. I am therefore learning quite a bit about how I can do things better. For instance his series of posts on Intellisense Planning, has been really educational as I’d never knew why the refactor tool offered implicit or explicit implementations of interfaces, and I didn’t notice any difference when I chose the different options. But having read the entries twice it now has clicked. You get that warm happy feeling of “wow that’s cool” when you realised the power that has been always available, while I just ignorantly coded on…

I was playing the “Google Image Labeler“ game today, even though my spelling is not the best. But it sure is fun. That is until it started to be buggy. Ok so it’s BETA like every thing Google, thus I’m not allowed to complain. But when you see a picture of a woman, enter women and the next picture is the same picture, but the previous description word is house (you are not allowed to use previous matched words), you know your not seeing the correct picture…

It seems to happen when you are still typing and the page refreshes. Oh I must confess, I’m also using Firefox 2.0 RC3 so it could be some interacting with that…. hmm.

Anyway, when it works it’s good fun, trying to guess what the other person also labeled a picture. Neat idea really.

In a previous life I think I was some big wig marketing person, and being as it was a previous life, I most likely was a man. Unless of course I was a high flying female executive, struck down in her prime (in the 70’s) most likely by some over aggressive male employee, feeling repressed by this high flying female. Now having established some probable scenarios for my prior life, I feel more attracted to the female plot, as it has more excitement. Not that I’m saying I spend all my days wondering what been a woman would be like. But then again I’m not saying I’m disconnected form the feminine side, as I can feel a reproachful look from my older sisters already. But now I’m wondering what this male that cut my blazing career short is doing now. I could even twist the story a little a say the man was also the victim, and in realty my life partner, and I actually died in child birth. You know I had a career, and a man, but the one thing I really needed was to fulfill my primal capacity to create life, and it was this act that I sacrificed it all. Yea, and the child lived. Now with all this great back ground I feel the need to leave work, and begin the epic quest to find my lost child.

I seem to have got a little side track from my original purpose which was to post a quote from myself that I babbled the other day, that now in reflection of my past life seems small and pitiful. I was going to justify it with my past life, or some need to be heard as youngest of six, as I learnt a little embellishment never hurt (much). So without many a more word my quote (which is also now the title).

“Reverse engineer a quotient of logic” This was in regards to some code, that surly had some part of logic hiding in all it’s glory, but was not readily identifiable by the current collection of engineers reading it.

Well my friend has opened his new shop The Beer Emporium, and what a shock I got today when I opened the paper and there on page 4 was his smiling taped face. Here is the Google Earth link (zipped), so you can find your way there.

It has been a long time in the works, and it’s great to see the day of opening has arrived.

I plan to head down sometime soonish, and try me some imported English beer.

Well I want to make some funny spoof of the fight club rules, but could make it work. That was my intention. So instead I just explain it verbose rambling blog style.

We taped High School Musical for the kids off the TV a few months ago but missed the first 15 minutes. So in my infinite desire to impress my wife with the value of high speed Internet, I downloaded a copy of the movie of the Internet. Yes it is piracy, and to prove my wife correct that I shouldn’t be doing it. Here is a list of my mistakes.

First mistake, choosing the first torrent I found with the name “High School Musical”

Second mistake, not watching the video after some of it was down.

Third mistake, after having the upload capped at 10KBps overnight to stop the waste of paid for bandwidth. Leaving it on uncapped the next night while going to underwater hockey and telling my wife to turn it off when it was finished, in ~15 minutes.

So when I get back ~2 hours later, I check the computer, and there is it uploading at 200KBps. In the time I have gone I had got the last 100MB of the 1.3GB movie, and uploaded 1.3GB after having already uploaded 700MB. So now with 66% of my monthly data cap gone on a stupid kids movie. I though, well lets check it out.

Well it was High School Musical, but in Spanish, with Spanish subtitles, because the voice was overdubbed (well done of course) but not in sync with the lips. At this point my wife is laughing her ass off, after been sorry that she didn’t take my “turn it off” seriously.

So it’s around this point that I go searching and find different sites that tell you all the details of the torrent (time, size, language, subtitles), but I have no bandwidth left to get the movie. Grrr

Luckily Michaela has reserved it already from the library, only problem is we are about 30th on the list, and at 1 week borrowing, I don’t think we’ll get it any time soon.

So looking at what should have been a 2GB download on the Telstra high speed internet pricing page, it would cost 4*500MB block @ $2.95 each to get a movie. That equals ~$12, so it’s cheaper, legal, and faster just to hire the DVD. Yes I could move to the 10GB plan and get 2.5 movies for $10 extra, but I’m not sure I could think of two movies a month that I want to watch, let alone watch on the computer screen. So that plan is not going to get the wife acceptance factor anytime soon.