Coffee and Code

Will someone please buy me this shirt?

Sometimes, I embody what the pictured shirt says. Every few months or so, I become obsessed over some programming project and spend almost all of my free time working on it until it's done. That's how this weblog, and the website it sits on, came into being in the first place.

Is this a good way to work? I'm not sure. One one hand, single-minded focus can be handy, because it makes it easier for me to push through and complete large bodies of code. I tend to overdo caffeine and sacrifice too much sleep during my code-a-thons, though, and it becomes more difficult to communicate with other humanoids when I've got code on the brain constantly.

I manage to get a little balance in my life by simply going months and months without doing any techie-type stuff at home. It's a feast-or-famine approach, I guess, but there really is more to life than just the internet. Seriously. Someone told me that, and I believe it.

You'll see a new design for my website appear this summer, the details of which are still quite secret. I have a couple of smaller code project planned as well. However, I am devoting most of the summer to non-techie stuff, such as looking for a house, marksmanship, taking care of our awesome dogs (see: my flickr account), and some awesome summer concerts (Iron Maiden/Dream Theater in June, and also RUSH! in June).

Today, I will be getting some sun in my backyard... mandatory sun, as I must bring the rule of law to my yard with my mighty weed-trimmer. As the weeds are trimmed, so too must beer be consumed. If you're a home-coding geek, reading this post: How do you like to work? How do you achieve balance? Do you try to? Tell me.

I recently re-installed Windows on to my Dell Inspiron 6000 machine, with a new hard drive. I reformatted the disk fully and used the NTFS option for filesystem.

After re-installing Windows, and then all of the drivers, the machine is noticably slower than it should be. I think I may have figured out what the problem is from a forum post out there (Allan - posted Oct 25) - after reading that, I googled "dell inspiron", "chipset driver first". I found good evidence that it's important to install the Dell chipset driver first, because it has some effect on subsequent driver installations.

Dang. I'm not sure if I installed that one first or not. So, I'm going to have to back up all my stuffs again, wipe the disk and reinstall. If the correct driver installation helps, I'll post the results!

p.s. The batteries in my mouse just died. A sign? -Jeff

I received the new hard drive for my laptop last week, reinstalled windows and a ton of other stuff, and now I am back online and happy.

The summer here in Santa Fe has (so far) been amazingly cool and temperate... 81 degrees is about as hot as I have seen it get so far. Plus, we have had lots of rain so far. Sweet!

My weblog tool is apparently incompatible with Internet Explorer 8... My WSIWYG editor is ominously absent, so I am hard-coding some XHTML here. Excuse the brevity. See you in cyberspace.

- Jeff Woodman

I received my first issue of Make magazine this week(thanks for the subscription, Claudia!). Pretty cool stuff - It seems to cover do-it-yourself tech projects running the gamut from building your own electrical circuits to home automation. I haven't had time to read the magazine in depth, but it's a good hefty size and looks promising!

I've pretty much got a working prototype of what my new weblogger will be!!! I made the decision today to go ahead with the final project, which will be forthcoming very soon (Now that I've got all of the architectural quandries sorted out....).

Whew! I will be glad do be done with that and moving on to something else. I think it's ironic that I've spent all of this time writing a weblogger for this site when, in actuality, I'm not that in to blogging, per se. It's a convenient way of updating the website content but I'm not that into online culture and I'm not a very compelling blogger, he he. Anyway, I'm prattling on, so I'll say good day!

Now: Coding, drinking coffee.

Later: SOCOM 3, Tekken 5, gyro sandwich.

Here are a couple of ASP.Net databinding / formatting tricks I've picked up recently:

1. I recently had to bind to a telephone number in a GridView that was stored in the database as a 10-character string. I ran into problems trying to use a DataFormatString property to format the output as (555) 555.5555. Turns out that format strings generally work better with numbers than strings.... duh.

C# Solution: Convert.ToInt64(string).ToString('(000) 000.0000') did the trick. I can't remember where I found the solution, but it's really useful! Sure beats writing a custom method to re-format the number.

2. When using a BoundField to display a DateTime, the DataFormatString property will only work when the HtmlEncode property is set to false.

Happy New Year! May 2007 be easy on you.

Here's a quick status for those who need to know:

1. Phone line is still on the fritz. It started working this morning, and then promptly stopped again.

2. Milestone: I completed all my Christmas shopping this evening. And it's not even February yet! I set a new record for myself.

3. The new job is great. I love everything about it except for the small issue of my first project being converting a Filemaker app to SQL Server.... said FileMaker app has 1 table with - brace yourself - 759 columns. That's right: Seven Hundred and Fifty-Nine columns. My head hurts.

4. Still working on my new blogger. It's progressing well, so it shouldn't be too much longer until you see it in action on this website.

Shout out to my peeps. Out.

I bought a network walkman this weekend (1GB).

THE VERDICT:

I really like the physical interface to the walkman, and the general aesthetics of the player. It's got an organic luminescent display that seems to float above the silvery skin of the player. The player itself is compact and feels sturdy. The sound quality is everything I would expect from Sony. It's got adjustable bass, treble, and balance. And the volume goes up really high. Rock on.

It also comes with an FM radio. I dig this greatly.

HOWEVER...

The controls are somewhat counter-intuitive: There is a jog switch that you slide out from the top of the player either one or two clicks. You can then twist the jog to move up/down in your playlist, but it's easy to forget how far you've pulled out the switch, so I end up changing artists instead of songs alot.

The management software, SonicStage, is AWFUL. Freaking Awful. It makes me feel paranoid when I install a piece of software and my personal firewall goes bonkers, and SonicStage falls into this category. Also, you CANNOT directly copy music onto the walkman via windows explorer. This sucks.

Overall, I dig the player, but I hope I can find out how to bypass the management software to copy music over without violating the EULA...

I read about something called OpenID yesterday - basically a way to show identity vis-a-vis your personal URL.

I have been having trouble finding how-to information, not to mention information on how the system works. Anybody out there using OpenID yet? Any info on system requirements would be helpful. My server is running IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003.

We got about 3 inches of snow last night here in Santa Fe. It was actually the first decent snow of the entire winter, actually. And people thought winter was over.... HA!

So last night I get this bright idea: Wipe my new Dell computer's hard drive and install WinXP Pro. No big deal, right?

I got to the screen that allows you to format partitions. I noticed a large 80 GB chunk formatted as FAT. I deleted the partition.

STUPID! Stupid, stupid. I had just deleted all data on my external hard drive (I wasn't expecting it to show up with no OS booted, I guess). Well, bye bye, backups. Bye bye years and years of accumulated photos, textfiles, webpages, etc. I almost wept.

If I had a samurai sword, I probably would've committed Seppuku last night. ARRRGH!!!! But, on a lighter note, I realized that most of the backed-up information existed on one of my older PCs which had been decommissioned. So now I'm in the process of recovering what I can, and trying not to hate myself too much...

Never attempt a major computer operation without Coffee!!!

I am writing this from my brand-new, ultra-spiffy Dell Inspiron laptop, a gift from The Dark Priestess.

This is such a sleek machine - extra wide 1280x800 resolution, DVD-ROM/CD-RW, and fast. It runs Call of Duty like a champ and maaaan am I stoked.

I feel a need to spend money this weekend. What's on the shopping list? Well... A new phone with caller id... A new pair of tactical boots ($25.00 at Big 5!!!), a dresser and perhaps some new pants or something. Perhaps some Thai food is in order as well.