The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

Author: eajhnsn1

  • Week Roundup

    It has been a busy week.
    I’m sitting here waiting on the 1.0.0 build of Chef to complete so I can begin testing. 5 months ago I targeted April 1 as the release date, but I feel very good about have the code complete and starting thorough/final testing on that date. I’ve worked on the last few features and bug fixes for about 5 hours today and it’s looking good. I’ll just need to do some end-to-end testing on the various platforms, polish up the release website and I’ll be all done.

    Yesterday Ana and I spent a couple hours digging up our side yard. Last year’s grubs were terrible to it, killing all of the grass and paving the way for dense weeds. We’ll be tilling it up and replanting grass in the next week or so. It sucked, and I hoped we don’t have to do that again.

    The work week went well, but started off rough with Ana having to take Neo (one of our cats) to the emergency vet at 3:30am Monday. A month or so ago he had a urinary problem that we treated, but it apparently didn’t go away completely so he got blocked and couldn’t go to the bathroom. He woke us up in the middle of the night howling, and he couldn’t move without pain. He spent 3 days at the vet and is back home now, in a pseudo-solitary confinement so we can monitor his bathroom usage. His medication will last a couple weeks but we should be able to let him out of solitary in a day or two.

    There’s great weather outside.

    The Cardinals are starting their season.

    That’s all I’ve got.

  • StarUML

    Last night I conducted a little research into free/opensource UML diagramming tools for Windows.  I’ve done this search a few times during the past several years and have tried a variety of the top-dogs.  The best one I can recall was ArgoUML but it’s UI behaved so annoyingly unpredictable that I ended up ditching it after just a short amount of time.  A runner-up was Dia, but it was a more general purpose diagramming tool that, again, had a pretty clumsy interface.

     

    I didn’t expect to run across anything new in this search.  I actually came close to just buying Visio – it’s general purpose, obviously, but its interface is far from clumsy.  Then I ran across StarUML.  From the 30,000ft view, it appears to be a good tool.  It’s definitely worth putting into use and seeing how it handles under real usage scenarios.  Has anyone reading this ever used it?

    It’s a responsive win32 app, which pleases me because I’m sick of the crappy Java UML tool UIs I keep finding.   

    So I think I’ll give this one a shot for future development.  I’ll report back my findings.

  • JRE and Google Desktop?!

    Can someone please tell me why on earth I was just asked if I wanted to install Google Desktop when installing Java’s new runtime?  I don’t enjoy using Java apps, and this sure doesn’t help its case with me.

    Seriously, it’s a runtime platform.  Don’t ask if I want to install 3rd party helper applications!  Just so we’re clear, I’d be just as mad if Microsoft prompted to install other apps with the .NET Framework.  There’s just no excuse.  ‘

    Damn you, Sun.  What’s next, QuickTime?  RealPlayer?

  • 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 😉