Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…
* quote from Mussulman.
That was after asking him about the wonderful weather he’s getting in Champaign. Springfield has been getting freezing rain pretty much all day and we’re expecting 10-12″ of snow tonight. We’ve got so much ice right now that the screens on our north facing windows here at home are covered with a thick sheet.
The lights have flickered a little bit – here’s to hoping that the sleet stops and the power lines stay up.
Finally, the way I always sit at my computer has been justified! According to this article, the 135 degree, reclined position appears to be best for warding off back pain when sitting for long periods of time.
As many of you know, I have a Radio Shark setup at home for recording radio shows. Overall, the software sucks for it. Getting it working for the first time was nothing short of a miracle – it had lots of trouble recording to a network drive. For weeks it would not record right, but after fiddling around with non-recording settings, it would magically start working. It felt like there were terrible bugs all over the place, particularly in the app settings area.
That aside, the scheduling was very weak and cumbersome. So, I’ve been looking forward to a software update for a long time. During the past few months they released a new Mac version, but zilch for the PC. Yesterday I just happened to visit the website to look for updates and noticed they are now selling a Radio Shark 2 device that allows recording of internet radio. And there’s new software for it.
I looked at the support page for the regular Radio Shark, but they make no mention of any new software. On a hunch, I decided to download the installer for the Radio Shark 2 and see if it would work on my older hardware. As expected, it did! And so far everything about it is 100% better, only time will tell if the scheduling actually works correctly.
So for all you “version 1” Radio Shark owners – go get the new software on the Radio Shark 2 page, it’s definitely worth it.
That is what you get now when you request olives on your Subway Sandwich. I learned this the hard way, after requesting olives be added the nice girl in training who was making my sandwich put the standard handful on my sandwich (close to 10 olive slices) and was promptly corrected by the veteran sandwich artist training her that it is 3 olives only, just like the pickles, so the offending/profit busting 7 additional slices were promptly removed. My question is why? Is the profit margin so low in that franchise that anything more than 3 slices eliminates all profit? Surely not. And what is the point of offering a condiment if you are going to limit the quantity to such a low number that you can’t even tell it is on your sandwich? I have asked both of these questions to the Subway company but they have not had a chance to get back to me at this time. My guess is they are looking for other ways to increase their profits – limiting the amount of lettuce to 10 shaving slices only.
Last night I put together a simple build system and got some of the application versioning in place for the future. I’m running CruiseControl.NET for the builds but haven’t set it up for continuous integration since I’m the only one coding. I’m also not running any build tasks other than a straight compile, although once I get some time that may change to include running my NUnit test cases.
All-in-all, I didn’t spend a lot of time on Chef this weekend, but I got a few very important things done.
In the very near future I need to really examine my source control system. I am using, and have been using, CVS at home for several years. But I haven’t really used it for more than a simple version controlled file repository – few branches, few labels, etc. At work I’m very comfortable with our source control system, but I’m just not with CVS. On my list of possible replacements are SubVersion and SourceGear Vault. All said, I’m still quite nervous about changing systems.
Over the weekend I finally spent some time to tackle the problem of registration keys. Particularly, generating them. The last piece of software I attempted this was WakeUp! Alarm Clock, with a very cheesy, homegrown routine for creating a key tied to the user’s name. I never ran across any cracks/keygens for WakeUp! but I’m 99.999% sure that that’s because I charged a meager $5 for it.
With Chef, however, I’m planning on a steeper price tag and don’t want to make the mistake of using an easily cracked scheme. So, I turned my attention to the cryptographic services provided by .NET and now have a simple and, what should be, effective solution using public key cryptography.
I haven’t integrated it into the application yet, but that shouldn’t take too long. Once the code is in place, I’ll start strong naming the assemblies and even obfuscate them. The obfuscation will prevent the casual snooper from using a tool such as Reflector to simply copy code and recompile it into a working replica of Chef. The strong naming will then ensure that someone cannot release a cracked version of my assemblies with the registration limitations removed. Pretty cool I think.
Today I spent some time reviewing several payment processing options. Currently, RegNow is the leading candidate.
Just created a new Tech subcategory called Chef to put all of the Chef software related items.
This week we received a letter in the mail from Insight Communications, our cable provider. At first I just thought it was a bill, so didn’t open it right away. But when I did, I found out that we are having our internet upgraded for free, this month! Our current service is something like 384kb down and 4Mb up and will be going to 1Mb up and 10Mb down. Wooooo!!
A while back I tossed around the notion of having a beta of Chef available for testing by Thanksgiving. So far I’m doing quite well with this goal. Now that the setup situation has been resolved, I can work on a few other issues that have to be done before I add the few final features that will be in the 1.0 product. It may not be too far-fetched to see the first beta available in the coming weeks, so if you’d like to give it a try I would be very appreciative. Just shoot me an email or comment here.
Over the past week or so I have been reviewing the landscape of Installers that I can use to get Chef installed on people’s machines. The landscape has changed quite a bit since the last time I looked, with a lot more small install authoring tools available. Before, it was just InstallShield or Wise Installer – now there’s NSIS, InnoSetup (I know, not new..), AdvancedInstaller, and several other viable tools.
And after carefully reviewing many of them, I’ve run into road blocks with my setup needs that can’t be fulfilled without spending upwords of $500. So I now have a setup using Visual Studio 2005’s deployment projects. It’s not quite what I wanted when I first started down the road but it’s not too bad either. In fact, I may actually end up liking this method a bit more. Read on for details.
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