Rants and Revelations

I’m working on something that’s fairly important and complicated, but it’s supporting current customers, not something on the critical path for the highest priority task, which is preparing for a trade show to get new customers. (I hate the fact that servicing current customers always takes a back seat to getting new customers, but that’s a rant for another time.)

There is another programmer who is working on tasks that are on the critical path. He’s task saturated, at least partly because he’s disorganized, only grudingly uses our source code management system, does stuff in a way that’s impossible for other people to understand, doesn’t document what he’s done, and when asked to explain only gives a vague generalities or launches into wild digressions. But because he’s on the critical path and I’m not, my boss thinks nothing of having me interrupt my work and do stuff for the other guy. And because the other guy is useless when it comes to explaining what he’s doing, often those interruptions are like today’s.

“Paul, I need to you remove these three lines from these four files, and submit a PCR for it.” Ok, fine. It only takes 10 minutes to do the edit, and another 10 minutes to process the PCR through the problem reporting system (which SUCKS, by the way). But it’s an interruption that I don’t want when I’m trying to concentrate on something. And lets not forget the 30 minutes of playing Net to get over my anger at being made into the most highly paid secretary outside of the executive floors.

I’m posting this mostly for Tina Marie’s benefit, since her checkride just got postponed.
Continue reading ‘My first checkride’ »

I’m a pretty pessimistic guy (ok, brief pause while everybody who knows me says “No shit, Sherlock” and rolls around laughing), and so as I’m working in a job I like a lot (ok, I’m partially responsible for delivering all those god-damned ads at the beginning of movies, but really it’s not my fault) and I’m making a ton more money at it than I ever have in the past, I naturally have to wonder what’s next after this gig runs out.
Continue reading ‘What’s next?’ »

One of the projects I’m proudest of having worked on, Cineon, won an Academy Award for technical excellence a few days ago. Too bad they shut down the project 7 years ago. (Yeah, the article says it shut down in 1997 - my resume says I left in 1998, not 1997).

The local paper has a badly written article about it:
Democrat & Chronicle: Business

But a better article can be found at Australian IT.

…just about every single cough medicine in a Canadian Shopper’s Drug Mart I was in this weekend is sucrose free, but both the local Wegmans and the local Rite Aid only have one or two sucrose free cough medicines, tucked away in a corner separate from the other cough medicines?

BTW: This cough has gone on over two weeks now, I think it’s probably time to see a doctor. Fuck.

I don’t know why, but I very suddenly have been hit with a strong desire to go to EAA Airventure 2005 (yes, I wrote 2004 the first time, sue me), or “Oshkosh” as everybody who has ever been calls it. I can think of very little else these days. I looked at the club’s schedule, and sure enough 3 planes are already booked for that week, but the Lance wasn’t. So I’ve booked the Lance for just sort of “on spec”, but I will be looking for others to go with me. Or I might decide no to fly myself and go in the “airlift” - the local EAA chapter charters an airliner and one fee gets you the flights there and back, and dorm accomodation.
Continue reading ‘Oshkosh, b’gosh’ »

Ganked from a friend’s friends locked LiveJournal.

Ten Things I’ve Done That I Bet You Haven’t:

1. Got my pilots license.
2. Cross country skied 168km in 2 days. Twice. (Canadian Ski Marathon, 1981 and 1982.)
3. Silver medal in Ontario Orienteering Championships, 1981. Competed in Canadian Orienteering Championships.
4. Landed at EAA Airventure, Oshkosh 2003 (along with 11,000 other planes).
5. Only Canadian (out of 4,000+ participants) at Jan Kjellstrom Orienteering Meet, Lake District, UK, 1992.
6. Backpacked in Banff, canoe tripped in Algonquin Park and Georgian Bay.
7. Adopted two children from Romania.
8. Married twice - got it right the second time.
9. Took the train from Toronto to Vancouver, saw Banff by moonlight.
10. Registered and then gave away the domain “canoe.com” to the lying assholes at Toronto Sun Publishing.

I drove up to Ottawa last night. I definitely was feeling the effects of the sickness - I’d laid off the cough syrup and benedril so I wouldn’t be drowsy, but I noticed a definite slowing of my reaction times and some difficulty with division of attention. For instance, I had to retune my radio because I haven’t made the Ottawa trip since they had to yank the engine a few months ago, so none of the eastern stations were set - but I couldn’t do it in traffic because even feeling for the radio buttons and occassionally glancing at the display would put me over the lane lines. Damn good thing I decided not to fly, since you need be able to do several things at once and prioritize them way more actively than you do driving.
Continue reading ‘I’m here, but should I have bothered?’ »

Seen on somebody else’s (friends only, so I can’t link it) LiveJournal.

How many total songs?
18474 songs, 48:15:38:51

Sort by song title - first and last?
“? (Modern Industry)” by Fishbone
“遠き時代を求めて” by 久石譲
(No, I have no idea what that means, I’m just a cut and paste machine)

Sort by time - first and last?
“Jim Bachus” by 3rd Bass 0:04
“Terrors of Pleasure” by Spaulding Grey 1:11:32

Sort by Album - first and last?
“�Jonathan, Te Vas A Emocionar!” by Jonathan Richman.
“紅の豚 飛ばねぇ豚は、ただのブタだ!” by 久石譲

Top five played songs?
This is probably meaningless because 90% of the time I just use iTunes to load my iPod.

Find ’sex’, how many songs show up?
89

Find ‘death’, how many songs show up?
92

Find ‘love’, how many songs show up?
990.

Ok, it’s nearly time to decide if I’m healthy enough to travel to Ottawa this weekend. I’m feeling better than I did yesterday, the sudafed keeps my nose from stuffing up and the cough seems to respond ok to DM-based cough syrup. But I’ve got pressure behind my eyes which isn’t responding to anything.

I really don’t want to cancel this trip - I told Alyssa that I’d take her snow boarding, and I was looking forward to learning how myself. Originally I told her I’d switch weekends with Liane, but when Liane’s weekend came up I had to help me move into a new apartment. And then when Alyssa’s weekend came up, I had to fly to Chicago for the memorial service. Next weekend is Liane’s weekend again, so this weekend had better be it.

I’m not going to be able to snow-board, but at least I can keep my promise to get Alyssa kitted out in rental equipment and in lessons. I really want to do this, but I’m not sure I can.

Watching my logs scroll by (doesn’t everybody?) I see an awful lot of hits on obscure parts of my web site from the IP 68.7.32.213. Grep back, and see that they’re evidently crawling my blog, and every link from my blog. And even weirder, every URL they grab they use the same URL in the referrer string - an obvious attempt to defeat one of those redirections that shows you a different page if you deep link something instead of going to it from the place you saw it referenced. - although wouldn’t it be simpler to use the page you found the link on instead? Further grepping shows that they did NOT get my robots.txt file. They’re also downloading the pages as fast as they can with no pause before getting the next one - it’s possible that they’re doing several simultaneous ones. Ok, three strikes, you’re out.

Into the /etc/http/conf/httpd.conf file, and a few well-placed
Deny 68.7.32.213
restart the server, and now Mister Badly Behaved (and probably Badly Intentioned) Crawler is getting a lot of 403s instead of pages.

The new Google Maps service is very nicely interactive. You can drag maps around with the mouse instead of clicking and waiting for a refresh. Plus the directions search works extremely well, as does the “nearby business” search. Unfortunately it only supports Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers and IE, but then again why would anybody want a browser other than Firefox?

One interesting quirk - if you ask for directions to ROC (it takes airport identifiers as well as addresses), it gives you directions to the general aviation area at the south end of the field off Scottsville Rd, instead of to the passenger terminal at the north end off Brooks Ave. I’m not sure why that would happen, since a web search for the airport’s name finds my flying club’s web page ranked well below the airport’s own web page, and the airport’s official address is on Brooks Ave, not on Scottsville Rd.

In other news, GMail must be about to come out of beta, because I suddenly have 50 invites to give out, instead of the usual 4-5. If you want a gmail invite, email ptomblin at gmail.com.

Last night’s commercial flight from Chicago to Rochester, there were a few strange things:

• When they said we were over Buffalo, I looked out the window and I swear we were only about 8,000 feet up. I didn’t know jets got such gradual descents.
• A few seconds before landing, we did a fairly abrupt left turn, about 30 degrees. It looked like it was well inside the outer marker, so I don’t think it was a turn to join the ILS. We landed on 4 and it seemed like we got to the 10-28 runway crossing pretty quickly. I wonder if they accidentally lined up on 7 and realized the mistake and turned to 4 as they crossed it? I hope not, because that would lose them about 3,000 feet of landing room.
• And as I mentioned earlier, our baggage went missing. It showed up about 9:30 this morning. The agent in Rochester mentioned that over 10 bags missed the flight. Since there were two later direct flights, I’m not sure why our bags didn’t arrive later that night though.

I hate flying commercial.

Too bad the luggage didn’t make it.

One of my cow-orkers used his new fancy GUI IDE that showed him that a variable wasn’t being used in my code, so he commented it out. Only one problem: the variable was one of a list of variables being retrieved from a SQL select statement, and like is common with these things, I was retrieving them with:


int a = rs.getInt(p++);
int b = rs.getInt(p++);
String c = rs.getString(p++);


Notice the problem there? If you comment out one of the getInts without removing the field from the select statement, you also lose the “p++”, so everything after it gets the wrong field stored. Which causes a pretty nasty little bug.

Thanks, guy. That’s a few hours of my life I’ll never get back.