::::: : the wood : davidrobins.com

My name is David Robins: Christian, lead developer (resume), writer, photographer, runner, libertarian (voluntaryist), and student.

This is also my son David Geoffrey Robins' site.

Precursor to a storm

News ·Thursday December 14, 2006 @ 19:43 EST (link)

My laptop has five USB devices (USB card reader for work, flatbed scanner, barcode scanner, and external keyboard and mouse) and only three slots, so to remedy this issue I picked up a D-Link 7-port hub; worked out of the box, no more swapping USB devices, plus room for three more.

We also got Timecop (another Grebel loss from the move; they keep turning up), Stargate SG-1 season 2, Doctor Who season 1, and have ordered E.R. season 6.

Honey's dad's back at home, but then they wanted him back at the hospital for a few days, which didn't make him very happy at all, but now he's home again.

The MS06-069 Microsoft security patch was grossly incompetent, although it may be Adobe's fault (the fix is for their software, but I think we're distributing it because we bundle it). The fix didn't work, even after a reboot, so it keeps trying to do the same fix. Eventually I uninstalled Macromedia Flash—it's a useless piece of junk anyway—and the warnings went away. I'd've just ignored them, but they were preventing me from VPN'ing into work. Imbeciles.

It's been rainy and windy, with a storm warning.

And expect a large technical article fairly soon, since I've been doing some interesting compiler acrobatics to clean up Word's object model of late.

Stupid Progressive commercial

News ·Sunday December 3, 2006 @ 01:04 EST (link)

Just a wee rant about one of Progessive (insurance)'s commercials I've been hearing a lot on the radio lately. They end it with something like "If they're this helpful before you're a customer, imagine how helpful they'll be afterwards"; an attempted a fortiori construct. Clearly, as advertisers, they know they're lying (and not just because their lips are moving); if not they're stupider than even I could imagine. It's not that that annoys me; it's the pure brazen barefacedness of it all. Like a politician, all insurance companies care about after they have your (vote, money) is (re-election, renewal)—i.e. getting more money—and minimizing the amount of money they have to shell out, i.e. keeping the money they've already got. The statement is backwards: they work hard until they get you as a customer—not after. I also don't mind the fact of it; of course they want to make money, they're a business, that's their job. And unfortunately the claim is too airy to sic the gutted remains of any truth-in-advertising laws on them.

Oh, and a few remarks about Toyota of Kirkland. As you may have read here, we recently purchased a 2007 Toyota Corolla from them, trading in Honey's 2000 VW Golf for it, a beast we were happy to get rid of; we were also very ready to walk away, so perhaps they really did give us more for it than they wanted to (but I doubt it). However, the Golf was titled in West Virginia, and (a) Honey's grandfather's name was on the title, since he helped her get the loan and (b) there was a lienholder (United Bank), although a few weeks before purchasing the Toyota we'd paid off the loan in full. We first had trouble getting the title from United Bank; they claim they sent it but it never arrived (we paid off my car at the same time; different bank, title arrived just fine, although it was for Massachusetts; that'll probably be trouble down the line), but eventually we were able to get a signed release of interest from them which was acceptable in stead. Next, we needed to get Honey's grandfather to sign over the title to them; this was more trouble—not at all because of him, but because of how badly Toyota of Kirkland handled the whole deal.

First, a discourtesy; they sent the title paperwork, but no stamped envelope; rude, but not a huge deal. He signed it and sent it back, but they didn't receive it—or at least they claim they didn't. They called my wife several times and harassed her; I suspected they were trying to welch on the trade-in (we had to sign two sets of loan papers, one without the trade-in, in case it didn't go through, and unfortunately I don't think there's much we could have done if they'd've tried to renege, even with the Microsoft's legal program). It was a bad time for them to be making threatening phone calls, too, given Honey's dad's pending heart surgery. Anyway, either because we persisted (we were getting bounced around their finance department trying to get them to send new paperwork) or because mail was slow because of the snowstorm (also, the old finance manager quit during the whole deal, which didn't help much), eventually the title from Honey's grandfather "arrived" and all is well. Just be careful to read the fine print when you deal with Toyota of Kirkland.

This sordid tale reminds me of something my dad and I saw in Waterloo when I was there for school: a jeep, driving around the city, with a sign strapped to the back:

We Will Never Buy Another Vehicle from Bustard Chrysler

I'll bet thousands of people saw that sign. I wonder how much it affected Bustard Chrysler's business? Takeaway: don't annoy your customers—even if you do get the sale, you may lose more than you gain. Sometimes it's best just to back off. Until Toyota of Kirkland called us to say the trade-in paperwork was finalized, I was not very far from making my own sign.

Blizzarding in Abbotsford

News ·Thursday November 30, 2006 @ 02:53 EST (link)

As promised, we drove up to Abbotsford, BC this Saturday; we left around 1500, fairly uneventful trip—border was good, just asked where we were from and where we were going and if we were leaving anything—but shortly after we got into Canada it started snowing. Hard. Looking forward through the windscreen was like looking out of Ten-Forward on the Enterprise at high warp (how's that for a geeky metaphor?) I took over driving and although we missed one turn (badly signed highway), we got to Grandma Martin's at about 1815, came in and talked for a while, and then headed over to Swiss Chalet (Canadian family restaurant) for three of their festive specials.

We were there for about three hours; we watched the snow come down by the glare of the outside street lamps as darkness settled in. On the way back to my Grandma's place we stopped at the her bank, then stopped in again for a few minutes; she was a little worried about us getting back and offered to let us stay overnight, but we decided to drive home. I drove back, since I've a fair amount of experience driving in snow in Ontario... seems most Americans (and, according to AT, British Columbians too) have trouble driving in snow. There was one skid but I grabbed the wheel and steered into it and all was well. It took about the same time going back as getting there, but there was no wait at the border, so the driving time was probably a little more. When we arrived home there was no snow in the east side.

On Sunday and Monday, the snow came to Seattle; I went in Monday and left around 1800. It took me an hour to get out of the parking garage—cars were backed up to the first-second floor ramp, and not moving much at all as people were creeping out of every building on 36th Way and wedging themselves into the creeping line. We snaked our way to the WA-520, but after that traffic was only about as bad as it would have been on a normal day but an hour earlier (i.e. 1800 traffic at 1900) and the rest of the drive was slow but uneventful; even Novelty Hill and Stephens Road weren't bad. Tuesday was a snow day, much of the campus was closed, I worked from home.

Update on Douglas Hedrick (Honey's dad): he went to the hospital to get his heart trouble checked out on Wednesday, and the doctors determined that he'd have to have open heart surgery; stents would not suffice (they tried putting one in but it gave him pain and they realized there was a second 99% blockage behind the first). I left work early to be with Honey and VPN'd in later on. The surgery is scheduled for Monday, but will be done sooner if required; he's in the critical care unit at the Richmond, VA (Virginia) VA (Veterans' Association) hospital.

Speaking of VPNing: VPNing into MS is like using a 28.8k modem right now. I hit shift and it gets relayed 3 seconds later which means I get 0 instead of ) or [ instead of { and redraw is so slow you can critique the gnomes' brush strokes. Argh. And the connection process is pretty random, too; sometimes you get through, sometimes it attempts to count to infinity, sometimes it bluescreens, and sometimes it needs a reboot because, as I believe I've mentioned a few times already, the Windows OS has many a pile of fetid horse dung hiding in its nooks and crannies.

We're watching House, Stargate SG-1 season 1, and various items on the MythTV machine which is now pretty full so is starting to auto-expire some shows, which is fine; if they're important we can tag them not to expire. I have another 120 Gb HD I can put in (since I elected to use Linux's Logical Volume Manager, I can add it to the logical partition and it will grow seamlessly), but I need some longer screws to put it into the silent-mount chassis.

Fixed a bug in the pH internal parser for these pages (actually not the parser itself, which is a rock solid C++ XS module, really, but in the pH::Journal module), where it ignored element content of "0", since it was checking an iterator value for truth (and "0" is false in perl, either as a string or a number) rather than definedness.

A race to destroy buildings

News ·Friday November 24, 2006 @ 19:03 EST (link)

Played a (purported) level 3 undead in Warcraft (I was also playing as undead); it looked like I was going to lose; he'd foregone any sort of teching or other upgrades to mass fiends; he almost wiped out my army (and my base) a few times, until I made him portal out by attacking his hero, who got to level 9 by the end of the game. I had an expansion for a large part of the game, so had managed to tech fairly well. Toward the end of the game he was calling on me to give up, but when he came in for a final assault on my base I sent the rest of my army, including a catapult (meat wagon) to his base, and started destroying his buildings. From there, it became a race, which, to cut a long story short, I won. He wiped out my main base, but I had several buildings at my expansion, which I'd rebuilt several times (and eventually built a necropolis there). He'd started to expand too, but his buildings were just starting and I wiped them out to win the game. I'll bet he was pretty upset, but he annoyed me so the win was very sweet.

(The original) RtError is almost gone... (from 700 to 0 in three days). Now it's just an error return, not a longjmp.

We're going up to Abbotsford tomorrow to take Grandma Martin out for her birthday.

Thanksgiving—plans to go anywhere fell through, but a good time was had by all nonetheless, although we miss our families.

The Office 2007 ship gift was a digital picture frame, which I recently set up. All seems well, except there's a little purple arrow in the top right corner that I can't remove; since it's there when the unit is powered down, it could be a sticker, but it doesn't seem to be removable. It's reasonable for what it does, but the manual and setup pages are written in Engrish, that is, badly-translated English chock full of lovely bloopers. You'd think they'd've been able to distribute the cost of a few hours of an English speaker's time among all the units sold without taking too large a hit to the bottom line. Seems that kwaliti is job #1!

Note that just because I work for Microsoft doesn't mean I like Windows. Frequently it shows itself to be a truly lousy piece of software. For example, using Linux I've never had to reboot unless I'm upgrading the kernel. Windows forces reboots for the stupidest things; the latest was because it had got itself into a crap-all-over-itself state when I tried to VPN into work: I managed to get a partial fix by killing one of the random SVCHOST.EXE items in the task manager, which bounced the PPTP protocol service (daemon), but the system still didn't have enough marbles to let the VPN client work, so it went on its merry way counting a timeout to infinity (I know this because I forked off another quantum thread and timed it).

Task manager is also an idiotic application; it should try to find a "true name" of sorts for particular OS-related running tasks (e.g. don't say RUNDLL32.EXE; that's a wrapper for just about any DLL in existence; tell me which DLL; same goes for SVCHOST.EXE), and also (optionally) pull a secure short descriptor from a reliable online source, e.g. "PPTP network service".

The Ministry of Silly Questions

News ·Saturday November 18, 2006 @ 06:28 EST (link)

I'm writing up a few "M0" (milestone zero, that is, code cleanup and reorganization) proposals, based on a stack of six densely written post-it notes spanning the project. Most items are small, like fixing bad Hungarian, and I've already fixed them and put the changes into a diff; a couple are larger:

Remove use of setjmp and longjmp from Word: Some older code uses the C setjmp and longjmp intrinsics as exceptions; ideally these should go away as they don't play well with real C++ exceptions. Along the way I'm also removing a legacy math library.

Clean up the Word object model dispatch: We dispatch to C functions, rather than to a class method, for one thing. Also want to add pre/post task handlers (e.g. drawing methods need setup/cleanup) and enable/disable flags (e.g. since Word doesn't do reentrancy well, most mutators would be disabled when in an event handler such as New Document). Fortunately since I added a (debug only) object model logger in Office 12 (2007), there's already code to intercept object model calls which will make a good starting place to handle flag checking and pre/post-dispatch tasks.

Ministry of Silly Questions: I didn't send in my citizenship application when I mentioned it before, but now I plan to. The N-400 naturalization form has several questions that one might regard as silly, e.g. asking if people have been Communists, helped the Nazis, lied on tax returns, illegally voted, are terrorists, been deported (or are currently being deported!), dodged the draft, deserted, support the Constitution, persecuted people, been jailed, sold illegal drugs, gambled illegally, helped people enter the US illegally, committed bigamy/polygamy, etc. But I think the purpose of the questions is twofold: first, to give people a chance to confess to and explain any lesser items (for many they allow attaching an explanatory page, e.g. "Yes, I was a member of the Communist party, but I would have been killed otherwise"), and second, to let people incriminate themselves, so that if evidence of breach is found, and the person has lied in black and white, they can be more easily denied than if there was no such question.

DVDspot added the remainder of my DVDs; I have six contributions now (1 2 3 4 5 6).

Warcraft: won vs. Orc, playing as Undead, which is the second race I've played and I seem to be getting the hang of it.

The rains came down and the floods came up

News ·Friday November 10, 2006 @ 20:56 EST (link)

Then Aslan turned to them and said:
"You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be."
Lucy said, "We're so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often."

"No fear of that," said Aslan. "Have you not guessed?"

Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.
"There was a real railway accident," said Aslan softly. "Your father and mother and all of you are—as you would say in Shadow-Lands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning."

—The Last Battle, chapter XVI: Farewell to Shadow-Lands, C. S. Lewis.

Today we watched Shadowlands, a the story of C. S. Lewis, it was a very moving film, certainly worth watching. It was most poignant when they go out in the country to the Golden Valley and his wife Joy tries to prepare him for her imminent death: "The pain then is part of the happiness now. That's the deal."

There's been flooding in Duvall and nearby towns; 124th Street, the way I usually go to work, is closed; Woodinville-Duvall Road is open, but Novelty Hill is closed; I'm not sure why for the latter, possibly because of mudslides. I've been home all week anyway; it's sort of a quiet time after Office 12 and before Office 14.

Honey and I went up to BC yesterday; we stopped at Tim Horton's and also got some Remembrance Day poppies. I had to explain about the poppy and Remembrance Day in Canada; what do they teach them at these schools? Honey also finished Super Mario World and I won a few Warcraft games playing undead.

I recently bought a ring-bound copy of Hymns of Truth and Praise for the piano, through an Amazon reseller, "Dena Sabin, bookseller" (Amazon name "denasabinbookseller"); I today discovered a page was missing (Hymn #1, "How Great Thou Art", and #2 on the reverse), emailed the seller, and received a $10 partial refund, with which I am more than satisfied (the book cost $18.44 including tax, so I felt the refund was more than generous). I just wanted to positively comment about the prompt response; also the book itself arrived in good time and as promised. I hadn't noticed the missing page until now because I'd started playing in the middle of the book—the same place I was at in the non-ring book I'd been using.

Weird network errors

News ·Thursday November 9, 2006 @ 02:20 EST (link)

I temporarily activate an FTP (file transfer) server on minas-tirith (it's usually off because the less services running the better for security, especially as that box is the Internet gateway machine) to transfer an image that I've just scanned and edited in Paint Shop Pro. But I can't connect to the server!

I muddle through diagnosis: am I reaching the FTP server (proftpd)? no; is it reaching the super-server (xinetd)? no; does it reach the FTP server without using the super-server (ServerMode standalone)? no; are the packets coming over the wire (tcpdump)? yes, well, most of the time. Is iptables routing interfering? no; there are no FTP rules, and strangely enough, the auth server (midentd) works. The FTP server also works fine from localhost and another machine. Is the wireless router interfering? I'd like to know, but I can't connect to the administrative interface. Hmm.... I can connect from another machine. And, looks like the wireless router is using the same internal address that the machine I'm connecting from is using. Oops. I'm not sure why this hasn't affected other connections (ssh between the same two machines is fine, as is auth, as I've mentioned); could be the wireless router is sending some sort of quench packet for FTP requests. The address on the router isn't even actually used; I've reconfigured it to act more like a switch than a router, but it must still recognize packets with that address sent over the wire.

Just another fun exciting day in the land of networks. Ha!

Canon populated by inept morons, film at 11

News ·Tuesday November 7, 2006 @ 23:34 EST (link)

I recently purchased a Canon CanoScan LiDE 70 via Amazon, and just now attempted to install it. At the end of the installation from the CD (which was super-exciting due to the near-dead state of my Acer laptop's optical drive), it prompted "Would you like to reboot the computer now?", with two choices, Yes, or No.

Well, no, that's not actually how it went. There was one choice, "OK". Having some unsaved work, I really didn't want to reboot, so I clicked the close button. The system proceeded to reboot anyway and lose my work. Bastards. Then they add no less than four icons to the desktop (without asking) (which I promptly deleted), and prompt for the CD again. Why? Well, they need to ask me if I want to register. That's all, and it requires insertion of the CD. Idiots, too. No wonder I feel safer with Nikon gear.

Um, so, what else was I writing about when I was so very rudely interrupted? Well, this week I'm basically off work; there's nothing going on so we're not required to be there. Honey's last day at Amec Earth and Environmental was today, so she's happy. She'll be taking a break for a while and then looking for a new job, possibly with the temp. agency she was with before.

Note: the scanner appears to work well enough, although I prefer Corel Paint Shop Pro (formerly Jasc Paint Shop Pro, for those that remember) to the bundled editing software. I'll be using it to scan DVD covers that DVDspot doesn't have in the short term, but primarily to scan in old photos; 23 albums worth and a few loose ones that need homes first.

The MythTV box is still great, although before we told it to record episodes of Frasier we had no idea how frequently that show ran in a day. Pretty decent Outer Limits episode, "Fathers and Sons", and Doctor Who too, "The Girl in the Fireplace".

Honey's dad in hospital, please pray

News ·Friday November 3, 2006 @ 02:24 EST (link)

Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.

—1 Peter 5:7

Honey's father (Douglas Hedrick) was taken to the local (Beckley, WV) VA hospital a few days ago because of heart-related pain. Currently the doctors expect to move him to a larger hospital (possibly the VA hospital in Richmond, VA) and put in a stent. He's had heart trouble before and they were able to successfully operate and remove a clot. Pray for a successful operation, speedy recovery, and for the family.

On how the WinACE people should be waterboarded then shot

News ·Friday November 3, 2006 @ 01:36 EST (link)

I'd like to take this rare opportunity to say a few deservedly mean things about WinACE. Oh boy do they annoy me. They dangle an admittedly decent compression format in front of unsuspecting users, but it's a closed format, useless to anybody. They do pretend that there's a working Linux version, downloadable from their site, but it fails CRC checks and eventually crashes randomly, lending credence to my theory that it was produced by a roomful of blind gophers on crack.

The WinACE twits also bounced my (polite—really) email; they use some sort of ignorant DNS blackhole list which thinks I'm using residential cable (the same one Honey's work uses, but since she's quitting I figured I didn't need to bother with them*). Yep, Honey gave her notice two weeks ago so technically Friday's her last day but they want her to come back for a few days; given how much she likes her boss, I was hoping she'd give them a sheet of insanely-high contracting rates and tell them to get back to her when they'd picked their jaws off the floor.

* I had to email and call my ISP, Millennium Digital Media (MDM) several times to get them to contact a similar list that Microsoft uses so that we could send mail to my work address... argh.

CLOSED FORMATS ARE HORRIBLE. WE HATES THEM, GOLLUM, WE HATESES THEM! DIE DIE DIE.

(This is why I'm ecstatic about the Microsoft Word .docx format; for those not up to speed, it's the default Word 12 open XML format, soon to be an ECMA ISO standard. It's so completely open that in theory Microsoft could lose control of it.)

Anyway, back to the ACE issue. So I have a few collections of NES/SNES/Atari game ROMs for MythGame on the MythTV system, generously burned to DVD by BB from work. Fine, I say, I'll mount the DVD on the MythTV box and copy the files to the disk and uncompress them. Haha! say the blind gophers on crack at ACE, oh no you won't. First uncompression program I tried (emerge unace) said unknown compression method; fine, it's a (very) old version, at least it can see the filenames in the archives. When I downloaded the latest unace from WinACE's site, it ran (in 32-bit compatibility mode, of course), but was having trouble creating directories (it also liked to freeze a lot). Eventually I straced it to find out what was going on, and created one of the directories it needed, but that's when I got the CRC errors and eventually Segmentation fault. If I had source, or even a spec, I wouldn't have had that problem.

So here's the plan. I'm going to uncompress the files on my only Windows system, my laptop. Sadly, its DVD drive has just about had it, so there's come circumlocution involved here. I'd already bought a DVD writer (ASUS DRW-1608P35 DVD±RW 16x16) from HDNW when I traded my Hauppauge capture card; I installed it on my primary server machine, minas-tirith, tonight (I'd got it for backups). When I was at Costco tonight picking up some DVD blanks, I wasn't sure whether I needed DVR-R or DVD+R, so I guessed and picked DVD+R, which turned out to be best but either would have worked; if I'd've guessed wrong, I could have exchanged them next time.

Naturally, when I tried to restart the server, it didn't.

I unplug the EIDE and power cables from the DVD drive and the existing CD drive, still nothing; the monitor I dragged over and connected has no signal. I vacuum out the more obvious dust, and somehow this makes it come up. Reconnect the optical drives, still boots, so while it's still powered I screw them onto the rails and close up the box, not willing to risk it not coming up again. And, um, note to self, do those proposed backups soon since it's been a while.

To the plan! Copy the DVD onto minas-tirith's HD, transfer the files to the Windows laptop that can actually run WinACE, uncompress the files, and then probably recompress them with something saner, or just copy them over the network to the MythTV box. What a hassle! Now, it's not that impressive that my (Acer) laptop's DVD drive is dying, but these contortions could have been avoided if the idiots at WinACE had just put down the crack pipe for a few hours.

I've been working on getting two months of receipts into the system... the tax man cometh.