The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

Author: eajhnsn1

  • New Orleans

    This is the area where, over night last night, some individual(s) spent approximately $700 of my money.  At a Wal-Mart, a Popeye’s Chicken, and a Shell gas station.

    This morning I received a call from my bank, saying they wanted to validate some suspicious activity on my debit card.  The gentleman mentioned they were from Louisiana and were from yesterday.  Well, Ana was in Louisiana for the past two days, so I thought nothing of it and said things were just fine.  I was stupid, didn’t ask for a dollar amount or anything, he just mentioned in passing that Wal-mart was involved.

    Something was nagging at me so I called Ana and asked if she had bought anything down there at Wal-Mart and she said she hadn’t.   Uh oh.  I called the bank back and talked with him more and learned that around $700 had been spent in total and that they were now closing my card.

    I just had to sign a few papers and should be getting a new card in a couple days.

    Oh, what fun.

  • 1 Year

    Today marks a year since I started regularly exercising.  Every weekday after work I’m in my basement lifting, with very few exceptions (which has been a pleasant surprise).  Now that the weather is turning nice, we’ll be able to get our bikes out and get back into that routine too.

    Wooo!

  • Software Idea part 2

    Ok folks, you can all stop your typing and/or compiling.  Mr. Scott Fenstermacher has heeded the call (unexpectedly, I might add since it was a wish-list item type of thing) and delivered a perfect little utility for this very thing.

    In summary, or in case you are too lazy to scroll down 2 posts and read, I wanted an application that would allow me to stop/start groups of services without having to do them manually.  Scott’s solution involves a piece of Windows/ IE technology that I’ve never knowingly used and definitely never written before: the HTML Application.  It just goes to show there’s always more than one way to skin a cat – I was imagining hopping into Visual Studio for a little while to create a little C#/WinForms app.
    Thanks Scott, it’s much appreciated.

    For those interested, I present ServiceProfiles.zip
    Next, I would really like a little application that obfuscates .NET code, that can be run from command line,  provides control flow obfuscation, renaming, stack trace interpretation, string encryption,…  😉  Scott?

  • New Curtains!

    Ana just finished making the new Roman Shades for the office, and they look phenomenal. Have a look, clicking goes to the gallery.
    Roman Shades Up Roman Shades Down

    A couple weeks ago, she also made the new curtains for our family room.

    Black Curtains

    Way to go Ana, they look awesome!

  • Note to self: software idea

    I would like a software product that would allow me to define “profiles” of windows services to be running or stopped.  For instance, there are times when I’m not on my LAN at home and want to code on my laptop.  That entails having my sql server instance up and running.  But I don’t want it running the vast majority of the times hogging resources.

    So if I could have this little app and just click a button to start/stop a group of services, that’d be great.

  • Current Book

    I am reading Code Complete, 2nd Edition (great Valentine’s Day gift Ana! 😉 and must say that it’s much better and far more interesting than I expected it to be. I thought of it as being one of those books that you just have to read, but would probably be a chore to do so. Boy was I wrong.

    If you’re in the business of writing software, you DO have to read this. It isn’t a high-level, software design book. Instead, it’s all about the small things you do and decisions you make at the mundane levels of coding – the naming of methods, size of methods, general formatting, comments, etc.

    It’s great to see this stuff written down.  In the time I’ve been coding, I’ve noticed myself continually refining my style and gradually honing in on many of the techniques and suggestions recommended in this book.  Now that I’ve seen it written down, I can have more confidence in my style – that it isn’t just my gut feeling about how the code should be written.

    I think that if I were running my own shop, I’d put this on a mandatory reading list for all of my developers.   It would fit in nicely with The Pragmatic Programmer and result in better code by better developers.

  • DST

    Here we sit at Panera this beautiful Sunday morning.  Knowing the time change was coming, we went to bed a little earlier than usual and got a good night’s rest.   As the alarm went off, I looked at the time on my clock (one of those fancy, auto-setting clocks) and then at Ana’s (another fancy, auto-setting one) and discovered that my clock didn’t Leap Forward!

    So we missed church this morning and decided to come to Panera and lounge around before heading over to Ana’s parents’ for our weekly visit.

    I have always mildly chuckled at our clocks – they are on opposite sides of the bed and always display different times even though they are supposed to be synchronized with the US clock.  My explanation is that my side of the bed is closest to the next time zone 😉

  • Visual Studio on Vista

    As mentioned I installed Vista on my new desktop, since I have been running it on my laptop with Visual Studio for a month now without any real problems. Go figure, I ran into an issue that has been bugging me for the past couple days.

    The symptoms are as follows:

    • Every time I start VS, it prompts me for which initial environment I’d like to use (C#, C++, etc).
    • If I look at Tools..Options..Import/Export Settings, the settings file path doesn’t include a drive and root directory – it’s just Visual Studio 2005/Settings/CurrentSettings.vssettings.
    • If I go to that Import/Export Settings screen and then try to leave it without changing anything, it blows up regarding the messed up path.
    • Each time I exit and re-enter VS and view that setting, it has appended a new number to the filename. Sure enough, I can see lots of those files being created.

    The problem?

    It turns out that VS didn’t like the fact that I changed the Location of my Documents folder to point to a network share. Pretty odd behavior though, glad I remembered I made that change.

  • Computer Parts II

    As a follow up, my new computer is together and running.  We didn’t really run into any issues, other than Microsoft’s phone activation for XP being “down for maintenance” on Friday night.

    The plan was to use my new video card alongside a rather old one of mine (MX440) so I could continue using 3 monitors at home.  That hit a snag when Vista wouldn’t run on the old card – so I had to go buy another (albeit much cheaper) video card at Computer Deli in town.  So now I’m back up and running with 3 monitors – whew, crisis averted.

    I have run into an odd problem with Visual Studio, however.  Every single time I start it, it prompts me for what type of environment I’d like to start out with (configuration settings for c#, c++, etc.).  For some reason after it writes the settings file to disk, it has trouble reading it again so it asks.  Over and over and over.  I think I’ll uninstall, reinstall and see if that takes care of it.  I’ve been running vista on my laptop for a month now and never had this issue…

  • Computer parts

    Tonight I ordered the parts for my new desktop at home.  After using dual-core machines for development (my work pc, and my home laptop), I’ve grown tired of the slow desktop (2Ghz athlon).  So, with Jay’s assistance I’ve ended up with:

    • Intel Core 2 Duo (E6400)
    • 2GB RAM
    • 160GB SATA HD
    • GeForce 7900GS graphics card
    • ASUS SLI motherboard
    • 430W power supply

    Components to be reused from current machine:

    • 80GB drive for more storage
    • DVD Burner
    • Lightscribe DVD Burner
    • SoundBlaster Audigy 4
    • pci video card (for my third monitor)
    • case

    It’ll be running my second copy of Vista Business and should make for a hell of a development (and gaming for that matter) box.