It looks like blogged.com has labled me "great".  I'll take it!

Larry Clarkin called me out in a question on software development going around the blogosphere.  Here are my answers.

How old were you when you started programming?

I was 11, we were living in a town of 600 people in southern Missouri.  I was very into arcade games and the few games we had for the PC which was an 8086.  My father, a very technical man but very cheap at the time, was loathe to shell out for a new video game.  At some point in a stroke of intuition, I realized those guys must create these games somehow. 

Damon: “Dad, if I can’t have a new game, I’ll make one.  How do those guys do that?”

Dad: “Oh, that’s with programming languages son”

Damon: “Do we have any of that?”

Dad: “Here’s the GW-Basic book that came with the PC”

I did the basic infinite loop printing my name, then learned the power of GOSUB and created a subroutine that would draw a spaceship and a subroutine that would shoot lightning bolts out of said spaceship.   I didn’t understand anything about how game worlds were animated though, the “tick” concept, and though that every on-screen object must be a Thread or something.  I left it alone until years later, living in Waukesha, my Dad brought home a Turbo Pascal compiler for our massively powerful 386. 

What was your first language?

GW-Basic, later Pascal

What was the first real program you wrote?

Well, the spaceship game was vaporware so I can’t say that one, but I did briefly experiment with audio on the 8086.  There was some kind of PlaySound(frequency, duration) function in GW-Basic, and I thought I’d need to write music for my eventual spaceship game.  I painstakingly assigned every letter of the alphabet a frequency inside a subroutine and checked the key stroke to see what letter was pressed.  I would type out various things that are not fit to print here in an attempt to see what words and phrases might make cool game music.  This program worked and met the intended scope.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

GW-Basic, Pascal, C, C++, Dephi, Q-Basic, Java, Javascript, VB.NET, C#

What was your first professional programming gig?

My internship of my Junior year in college ended up lasting through my Senior year, so nearly a year.  I was a C++ developer at Great Lakes Higher Education Corporation.  We were doing code on DB2 and Solaris of the kind JSP developers would soon become familiar with.

If you knew then what you know now, would have started programming?

Absoultely.  There’s few other things I could picture myself doing.  That sounds like a good blog post “What would you do if you couldn’t create software?”

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

I would tell them to take an interpersonal communication class, or to spend some time as a real professional consultant.  Many early times in my career I got in trouble, or nearly got in trouble, by being cocky or not recognizing when situations were politically charged.  Even if you just want to write code, you must be aware of these things.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had programming?

There are lots of small things along the way where things were fun for 6 months or so, but when I think about times I was most looking forward to going to work, it was actually (and I can’t believe I’m saying this) a project I did at Assurant health.  They forced me to use VB.Net which I hate, they gave us slow computers with mandatory virus scanning, and the schedule required heroics and a lot of cleaning up bad offshore code.  However, I had some excellent people to work with that I still stay in contact with years later.  I am now a client of The Clarkinator.  DeMilde, Terski, VanDyke, and others: it was a good time.

Who am I calling out?

Aaron Staves

David Snopek

Dan Vanderboom

Matt Terski

I couldn't leave this one alone:

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/world039s-oldest-living-tree-discovered-sweden-15937.html

The first thing I thought of when I saw this, sadly, was not "wow, what an awesome discovery!" but "Wait, isn't the world only 6,000 years old?".  As much as it would be a tragedy to harm these trees, I think we ought to take a core sample and count the rings on the trees.  What would surely follow is the sound of one thousand "thuds" as the creationists trip over themselves to refute the fact that the age of trees can be determined by counting rings.  Or, as my friend put it "The devil planted that tree to confuse us and test our faith."

Johnny Appleseed was the antichrist.

I had the most frustrating dasBlog issue over the past couple of days:

I suddenly found myself unable to post anything on my blog.  This coincidentally happened at the exact same time my hosting provider had me try a web.config change to alleviate some session/viewstate issues I was having.  I would try to make a post, get no errors, and be returned to the front page and see that my post was missing.  Referral logs were strangely missing, and the dasBlog event log was also strangely empty.  The only thing I could get a vague error message from was trying to post a comment.

Apparently, my "Anonymous Asp.Net user" had suddenly hit its disk-space quota.  I don't know if this quota was created recently or not.  It seems odd indeed that dasBlog would cruise along and never report an error when it's out of disk space.  I wonder if this is something dasBlog is doing or something that's happening because of the hosting environment?

A small part in my decision to make the leap to Vista 64 was Scott Hanselman's findings upon building his home office and a new workstation therein: moving to 64bit was a non issue.  I wish I could report the same.

My first issue was with installation.  With certain hardware configurations Vista x64 will crash with 4gb of RAM installed until a hotfix is applied.  My understanding of the state of the 64bit world is this: the current 64bit processors are not entirely 64bit.  They have 64 bit registers and some 64 bit instructions.  To the average PC hotrodder or developer the preceived benefit is the ability to use 4gb of RAM instead of 2gb.  I installed the hotfix, got my 4gb of RAM working, and set about playing the Sweeny Todd soundtrack whilst I decided what order to install things in...

The drivers for my X-Fi sound card installed, I started Windows Media Player.  Windows Media Player crashes the first time I start it 100% of the time.  Vista Sp1 and a horde of updates has not fixed this.  Since the X-Fi is probably the most popular aftermarket sound card in the known universe at this time this ought to to work.  It may have nothing to do with sound drivers at all.  The 2nd or 3rd time I launch WMP it will work happily forever.

My graphics card is a PNY GeForce 8800GT series.  It clearly lables itself as having both 32 and 64 bit drivers on the driver disc.  I experienced an new Vista phenomenon with this product: installing the drivers using the OEM program declared that no changes were made to the system.  I pointed Vista at the .inf file on the disc for x64 and Vista basically said its own driver ("Standard VGA Port", yeah right) was better and refused to take the OEM drivers.  Only the Nvidia unified driver install would work.  Odd...

My next stage is to get my various messenger programs up and running so I can chat whilst I wait on things to intall.  MSN messenger is objectively the best messenging experience by far so that went worst, no issues there.  I have used Pidigin for AIM (most CarSpot folks and some friends are on AIM) since having crashtastic experiences with Trillian and an absolutely astounding clusterfuck with the actual AIM product ruining a Vista install; it would seem AOL is the reigning champ for the national heavyweight Invasive Install Championships.  Pidgin has similar behavior as WMP, it will crash and then run perfectly for as long as the machine is up.

My Blu-Ray drive was working fine as a Serial ATA DVD drive.  Folks, installations of things like Office 2007 are actually quite painless with something better than an IDE CD drive.  This alone is worth the extra expense.  Still, it came with software that can play Blu-Ray and there are nights (like tonight) where I'd like to watch a movie on my 1080p monitor while some long-running tasks scroll by on my ancient 19" CRT.  My first attempts at getting Blu-Ray playback working met with failure.  The install process (damn you Pioneer) demanded ridiculously old and specific versions of DirectX that were clearly not going to happen on Vista 64.  Some combination of Windows Update and SP1 magically fixed this, so I watched Blood Diamond on Blu-Ray while logs scrolled by tonight. 

My last two 64bit issues dealt with actual software development.  Visual Studio and the like installed and ran fine except for one issue so infuriating I have a dent in my forehead: copying an ASP.net solution from one machine to another suddenly started claiming that "{MyCustomThinger} RoleProvider has already been added", and commenting this part of Web.config out certainly allows the site to run.  As expected, putting this web.config with the role provider commented out on any other machine (including my development laptop and the two servers where the site actually lies) crashes because of course the configuration is incorrect.  I still can't explain this one.  The next issue was the most time consuming.

MySQL comes in 32 and 64 bit flavors for Windows.  I needed MySQL for one of my development efforts.  MySQL x64 does not like Vista x64.  In fact, the slightly out of date platform notes on their site claims Vista x64 is not supported, but there are enough success stories out there suggesting this is just a CYA that I gave it a whirl anyway.  MySQL 64bit would not run, claimin a "side by side configuration" was incorrect.  OK, knowing very litting about anything this sounds like some sort of thunking layer issue, so I'll try the 32bit version.  Same error.  What does Google say?  Google says that the Application Manifest in the server configuration process is broken for 64bit windows.  The MySQL forums claim that only a program called Reshack can fix this.  The problem with Reshack is that it runs on 32bit platforms only.  For those who don't know: the various Icons, embedded resources, and execution manifests for a Windows .exe get compiled into a special section of a windows PE and programs like Reshack can read/write this area without doing anything to the code itself.  I eventually found a Delphi program posted by a company in the UK that would work for me.  Having had some bad experience with libraries without a strong name that I am missing the code to recompile, I was glad MySQL doesn't attempt to use authenticode signatures with their releases.  I changed the Vista application manifest XML to the appropriate "requireAdministrator" and I was finally off and running.

The last issue I experienced this weekend was with some code I "inherited".  It uses Microsoft Jet ODBC to treat a file as a "data source", access the file rows using DataReader constructs, and sort the contents in a DataGrid.  This code bombed when I ran it.  Google tells me that Jet does not exist for x64.  I had planned on rewriting this code anyway but wasn't up to the task tonight, so I kept looking.  .NET programs are usually targetted to "any CPU" by default, but Google told me changing the target specifically to x86 would allow some extra Thunking Magic to happen, and as soon as I did this I was back on my way with Jet magically found now.

After these experiments, I'm definately going to test all of my production code to make sure I haven't done anything that won't work with 64bit editions of Windows or the .NET framework.  I also need to take it upon myself to do some research: what does 64bit do for me and for Joe Consumer besides 4gb of RAM on Vista?

It would appear the new workstation is stable now, after flashing the BIOS and other tomfoolery. 

Despite being "overkill" in terms of hardware, it still takes for freaking ever to install things in Vista, Live Messenger being the worst offender by far.  Now I need to reorganize my office, set up the extra monitors and speakers, and go about intalling my various development tools.  I should have a very productive weekend.

Yesterday when I got home I plugged the new mobo in, and wonder of wonders it would post.

Last night I had birthing classes, had to go get our daughter from Grandma's after than, so at 11pm I sat down to finish building the workstation.  Vista kept treating me to bluescreen/stop errors after copying files.  Doing some research I found that many motherboards + Vista64 have an issue booting with 4gb of ram installed, so I eventually took some RAM out and got windows installed.  There was a hotfix for this issue but I kept having hard lockups in Vista.  Long story short: I flashed the BIOS after about 4 Vista lockups, Vista insisted on using it's "standard VGA driver" instead  of the Vista 64 driver that came with my 8800 GT.  I'll have to see tonight if Vista is happy with the new BIOS and/or the NVIDIA unified drivers when I try that. 

Stupid computers...

I am now one NewEgg hat and $50 better off than I was the other day, but my replacement part still has not shipped.  So much for having it overnighted to me.  In addition to the claimed system glitches that kept this from shipping when it was supposed to, their systems showed on Friday that the part was boxed but no tracking number had made it out yet.  This morning, I find an email notification that my $$ has been refunded for the part.  I'm not sure if this is additional goodwill or another mistake, but I'll have to wait until Monday to find out.

So, I set about to RMA my motherboard on Wedesday.  To make a long story short, they gave me a UPS shipping lable and the transit times plus their RMA processing time put the round trip at something like 3 weeks for me.  This is complete BS since by then my window to return/exchange the other parts will be gone.  I shouldn't have to wait a month for something I bought to be made right.  I called NewEgg's customer support to explain this to them, and lo and behold without the slightest bit of resistance they agree to overnight me a new one without making me wait on the whole RMA Process.  I left them a strongly positive note at Reseller ratings and I should be in Quad Core Heaven Friday night or Saturday.

There's an important item to not here.  A DOA Asus motherboard is not the fault of NewEgg, but I am more directly their customer than a customer of Asus.  A company cannot directly pin their customer's satisfaction on the performance of their own vendors.  A layer of indirection is needed.

It would appear, at least on my machine, that I can add "No script debugging" to my list of IE8 complaints.  Despite making the necessary Internet Options changes I can't hit breakpoints in javascript in VS2008 any longer.  It's a beta browser and I don't really need this feature, but be warned.

I found this "atheist prayer" via Friendly Atheist.  I enjoy Friendly Atheist, but I wanted to point out an issue with this post.

"Our brains, which art in our heads, treasured be thy names. Thy reasoning come. The best you can do be done on earth as it is. Give us this day new insight to resolve conflicts and ease pain. And lead us not into supernatural explanations, deliver us from denial of logic. For thine is the kingdom of reason, and even though thy powers are limited, and you’re not always glorious, you are the best evolutionary adaptation we have for helping this earth now and forever and ever. So be it. "

I suppose this is meant as harmless humor, and I probably wouldn't flip out if it had been entitled the Atheist Credo or something similar.  Let's not kid ourselves though.  Equivocation is one of the main ways the un-religious are attacked today.  Sam Harris absolutely called this one right.  To call the extreme skepticism of the possibility of the existance of a god on the same plane as faith is one of the more popular parlor tricks of the faithful today.  To call acceptance of empirical evidence a "kind of faith" turns my FlipOut dial up to 11.  The faithful are having enough of a hayday with ridiculous equivocation arguments as it is.  Do we really need to add ammunition by creating secular versions of old catechisms?  I think not.

Main Entry:

¹prayer

Pronunciation:

\ˈprer\

Function:

noun

Usage:

often attributive

Etymology:

Middle English, from Anglo-French priere, praiere, preiere, from Medieval Latin precaria, from Latin, feminine of precarius obtained by entreaty, from prec-, prex

Date:

14th century

http://www.ps3fanboy.com/2008/03/14/microsoft-predicts-blu-ray-irrelevance-in-12-18-months/

This is ludicrous talking head speak for the vast overwhelming majority of the movie-watching population.  If I can get better than 1.5mb/s DSL in the next 18 months I'll be shocked, let alone enough pipe to handle True HD video.  At this stage of the market, digital downloads and packaged optical media are NOT different versions of the same product, as these people seem to believe.  They are utterly different products.  38mb/s MPEG4 with 5 mb/s LPCM is not "the same" as the puny bitrates we get through video on demand at this time, and the average consumer can handle having a shelf full of optical discs much easier than they can prepare for terrabytes of digital storage medium.  How many average users have a backup strategy?  The first time you want to watch The Matrix but that hard drive died and you have to redownload you'll be mad.  When you realize the DRM might make re-downloading insanely painful or impossible (as Casey has shown) you'll be wishing you had a Blu-Ray player instead.

The market will figure this out, but not in 12 months, sorry Mr Pundit.

{Edit: I ironically realized after I posted that the words of someone linking to any website with "fanboy" in the name are probably deserving of a side of salt as well.  Oh well, it's the internet...}

What an astouning letdown: I was on track for a red letter day yesterday.  My parts came in, it was sunny, and I drank some beer and BBQ-ed some poultry.  Hickory smoked BBQ chicken is among my favorite foods and I haven't been able to have it for months because my wife has a pregnancy aversion to most forms of chicken and it's also been ridiculously cold.  I went to best buy and got Bioshock only to discover later that one of my parts is either DOA, I've plugged something in wrong, or the specifications are lying about compatibility.  What a letdown, I expected to be fighting issues like MySQL on 64bit Vista but instead I have no POST.  Luckily my brother recently bought very similar Intel hardware so I should be able swap parts around to find out which piece is dead.  As much as it's a badge of geek honor to build one's own screaming development PC, I think in the future I will not do so during times like now where I have plenty of other things to worry about.

I am blogging from IE8.

Many useful things are broken, such as FreeTextBox which I am used to using to write this article.

Also broken, ironically enough, are the dynamic menus generated by asp.net from a sitemap data source. That alone will force me into "Emulate IE7" mode until Beta 2...

I downloaded the update package and installed from that, no luck.  I started searching for other people with the same problem and found that it is quite common.  I passed over some of the insane "fixes" in favor of trying some of the easier approaches.  Apparently, the Zune installer requires that the Windows Firewall service be running during installation.  What a bizarre dependency.  I'm all Zuned up now and liking it.  Now my wife wants one.

Got the Zune today.  So far I am underwhelmed.  My very fast and very up to date Vista Laptop failed to install the Zune software the first time.  The error code explains this could be one of a number of thigns: .net 2, encoders and a lot of other developer-sounding nonsense.  Since the Zune installer checks for updates etc. this is unacceptable.  I am directed to a page with a svelte 173mb download to get all of the correct versions at once. 

Downloading...

At some point recently I noticed the tremendous stack of CDs I continually burn to stay on top of Dot Net Rocks, Hanselminutes, and AVRant.  I have to admit (maybe I'm old?) I completely did not get the whole iPod/Mp3 player thing for the longest time; I'm a dinosaur who likes owning physical media and my ancient car does not have a line-in.   I do my serious music listening on a two-channel system if that tells you anything. For music and podcasts, though, I've been wanting a portable media device.  An evaluation of the reviews of the 2nd Generation Zune and the GDC2008 announcement that some form of XNA would be coming to all the Zune editions and I decided I needed to have a Zune. I had originally decided on the 80gb zune since it looked cool online and it would hold the entire history of .NET rocks and my entire digital music collection, but seeing them in person, the 8gb is so much sleeker and smaller and portable feeling I ordered that one instead.  The 80gb Zune would be like carrying a second Tilt.

It's over folks.  Take your pick of any one of a dozen news outlets, or read this nice summary on Ars: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080217-official-hd-dvd-obituary-a-matter-of-days-not-weeks.html

Sadly there's not that many titles that I'll be picking up after the inevitable announcements by Paramount and Universal.  Pitch Black and Chronicles of Riddick are guilty pleasures; King-Kong shall be a rental, as will Sweeny Todd and Transformers.  I won't buy the whole "Jack Ryan Collection" for my beloved Hunt for Red October but I'll netflix them.

This is good news for lovers of the high definition experience.

CarSpot has just expanded onto the 5th floor of the building above the Ale House and behold, I get an new office.  I think this is one of the nicer ones; I think I managed to get this one because no one else was willing to sit next door to the President.

I feel like I need to put some UML diagrams up in order to make it feel cozy.  We got this space from a creative company who was up here previously.  We threw out all the iMacs but kept the general decor.  There's an Agry Coal Miner's Bowling Night theme going on everwhere but I kinda like it.

I used to play billiards a lot.  One of my uncles was a pool hustler, but that's a story for another day.  I think I'll be able to get back into practice.

We also have a full kitchen.  I'm still hiring too....

http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/01/04/warner-goes-blu-ray-exclusive/

Let the healing begin...

 

Update: I posted my furthur thoughts on this on KlipschCorner.com: http://www.klipschcorner.com/BlogDetail.aspx?guid=84883401-25a5-47ab-8bfa-8382175c22c3

80%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Looking for x ray tech schools?

It would appear that AIM6 has the ability to completly fry a Vista isntallation.

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1185469&SiteID=17 and other threads. Windows Media Player, the Network List service, WMI, and msinfo32 are (seemingly) permanently crippled by this according to various threads.  All of this because I got tired of Trillian misbehaving on Vista.  Now I know better.  I suppose I'll see if Office Communicator has made it's way into MSDN and start backing up for a rebuild.

 

Via slashdot: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/28/2342211&from=rss

Of course the states are going to say that MSFT needs to be monitored.  The politicians gain tremendous power by punishing businesses and restricting free trade.  As Google and other companies come testify for the states against Microsoft  I'm reminded of several quotes, and a little company called "Standard Oil"

First, the quotes:

"Maybe I did well and maybe I led the battle but nobody ever said we were going to win this thing at any point in time. Eternal vigilance is required and there have to be people who step up to the plate, who believe in liberty, and who are willing to fight for it." -- Milton Friedman

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania (1759)

It behoves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.
--Thomas Jefferson

Companies seeking to use government force to succeed where their own efforts in the marketplace have failed should be aware that what goes around, comes around.

Standard Oil:

I don't have the exact historical dates and percentages in front of me, but Standard Oil went something like this: Standard Oil had over 90% of the market for Oil in the United States at one time.  As the politicians and the public got behind the idea of Trust Busting, competitors to Standard Oil were slowly gaining market share, and the competition forced the price of oil down.  At the time the Standard Oil "evil monopoly" was broken up it had roughly 60% market share and the inflation adjusted price of oil was lower than it had ever been.  Politicians treated this as a great victory and it was sold to the public as a great victory.  The free market had already done what the goverment sought to do, and justice, property rights, and freedom were compromised to punish an "unpopular" company.

Thanksgiving has come and gone and I had an absolutely smashing time with my family, especially my dad.  The apple (me) fell perhaps a bit further from the tree (dad) than he would sometimes prefer: I'm a college guy and mostly a software nerd, he got electronics training in the Navy and is more of a hard core electronics nerd.  I write software and he fixes GE's MRIs.  MRI is just insane to read about: Magnets who's strength is measured in Teslas, titanium/niobium coils, and superconductive circuits that lose less than .001% of a charge in 1000 years.  Dad and I completely rebuilt my center channel since I had just ordered a new sqauker (mid-range horn) diaphragm, and he was very disappointed in my soldering job so all the solder points were re-done and the internal wiring was cleaned up with zip ties and such.  If I ever sell the thing I'll take a picture of the internals to show what a top-notch job was done.  As part of this whole effort, he diagnosed some possible issues with a free osciliscope I inherited: someone smart enough to fix insane superconductive electronics is pretty handy to have around.

Another place where the apple was flung far is metaphysics: I'm an atheist and my father was raised (and raised us) in variants of the Babtist religion.  A lot of red wine into the second night of the visit we had covered:

• Religion and why it has no bearing on my life and why that doesn't make me a bad human being
• Technology
• Wealth
• Relativity (space time, the train and some of Einstein's gedenken experiments)
• Health care: dad had a great (if depressingly Orwellian) observation about health care.  As the goverment gets more involved in our health care decisions, how long will it be before a helecopter flies through my neighborhood with a diffration horn  screaming "Time to wake up and exercise!!  Keep health care costs low, citizens!"   My solution: health insurance does not "work" using the current popular definitions of "work" without an army of healthy people bearing the costs for those who are not healthy.  Get the goverment out of the health care industry alltogether and you won't find yourself doing pushups at the point of a gun.

"You're not as far into la-la land as I thought" was my father's final judgement on my night of philosophy and politics.  I meet incredibly few Objectivists in day-to-day life, but the more scientific and rational someone's job is the more I find them coming around to my way of thinking.  The world is not populated by John Galts, we wouldn't recognize it if it were.  There are great masses of "Eddie Willers" who can be reached.  Recall Eddie Willers from Atlas Shrugged: 3rd in command, not a Prime Mover, always playing the supporting role to Dangy Taggart.  Eddie is rightfully counted by Rand as one of the heros of the book though.  He rides on the rails made of Rearden metal and he could never have created the metal, the bridge design, or the engines propelling the train, but he also does not seek to enslave the minds who did create these things.  My dad perhaps could not have invented the superconductor system in one of GE's MRIs, but he's smart enough to know what it took to make the thing and can fix the thing when it goes down.  He's smarter than 99.999% of the people out picketing for "universal healthcare." 

Inside a piece of technology like an MRI is a glimpse of the astounding effort, resources, and intelligence that it takes to make our standard of living possible.  I hope the scientists and engineers who work on them gain astounding wealth, and I hope GE makes hundreds of millions of dollars on MRI technology: it's the only reason this life-saving technology exists.

I suppose it's going to be fashionable to slam Microsoft until the end of time.  Check out this headline at Slashdot, which I have generaly enjoyed for 9 years or so:

Developers: C# Memory Leak Torpedoed Princeton's DARPA Chances

"In a case of 20/20 hindsight, Princeton DARPA Grand Challenge team member Bryan Cattle reflects on how their code failed to forget obstacles it had passed. It was written in Microsoft's C#, which isn't supposed to let you have memory leaks. 'We kept noticing that the computer would begin to bog down after extended periods of driving. This problem was pernicious because it only showed up after 40 minutes to an hour of driving around and collecting obstacles. The computer performance would just gradually slow down until the car just simply stopped responding, usually with the gas pedal down, and would just drive off into the bush until we pulled the plug. We looked through the code on paper, literally line by line, and just couldn't for the life of us imagine what the problem was.'"

Damn Microsoft and their bad products!  Why doesn't everyone just get a Mac so things will "just work"?  The commentary by the team that wrote the code is a bit more telling:

http://www.codeproject.com/showcase/IfOnlyWedUsedANTSProfiler.asp

So, the problem was not C#, but a bit of confusion in that subscribing to an event keeps a reference to the subscriber in memory, hence no objects can be deleted.  So this issue would occur in pretty much any modern managed programming language.  Am I wrong to occasionally be miffed at the constant misrepresentation of Microsoft's excellent developer technologies?

I still can't officially blog about what we have going on, but obviously I'm trying to hire people into my department and am traveling.  We've beenn working quite a bit at the 'ole CarSpot lately to make some things happen and over time that takes its toll.  I've been in more meetings than is healthy (by USRDA standards) the past three days, culminating with giving a brief talk to 600 people in Atlanta today.  I'm back home and feeling a little bit recharged mentally.  No matter how much work has to be done inside Visual Studio, or MS-Project, or Power Point, or Thawte, or Expression Blend, it's very good to escape into the real world and spend some time interacting with entities who don't respond to Ctrl+S or CTRL-SHIFT-B

It is, if I am not mistaken, the year 2007.  Why is it that my fancy-pantz hotel room in downtown Atlanta does not just come with Internet access?  Why, further, do they outsource to these companies who's systems seem unerringly to not work the first time?  I don't travel a lot, but I have yet to have Internet access work in a room without calling the front desk or "iBahn" or whatever.  Business travelers flying business class staying in business hotels asking for the corporate rate are highly likely to expect to plug their laptops into the wall and have it work.

One of my co-workers has decided to get with the 00s and start blogging.  Introducing David Snopek!  He is not a .Net developer, yet: silverlight+mono+DLR will win over even some diehard Microsoft haters.  David is my favorite sparring partner at CarSpot, so hopefully we can take our disagreements into the blogosphere for your entertainment.

I'm sitting at my kitchen table tonight burning about a dozen podcasts for my commute.  For a while I stuck to Dot Net Rocks but I've been throwing in the occasional Hanselminutes and Audioholics into the mix as well.  Tonight is the first time in a while I donn't truly have to do anything right now.  I still can't make any public announcements on the work situation but suffice to say my typical day is go to work --> pick up daughter --> put kiddo to bed at 8pm --> work till 12pm; throw in some required travel and marathon meetings and I'm more than a little tired.  I have two solid, relevant articles I need to complete and just haven't had the time.  In the next two weeks I'll be getting our new WPF based product into a demoable state and preparing for a talk in front of 600 people in Atlanta.

Tonight shall be spent catching up on Netflix night with my friend M. Chateauneuf du Pape and little else. 

Some people I know personally got an invitation to see Bram Stoker's Dracula on BD this weekend as one of my two Halloween movie nights this month.  I would encourage Milwaukee area nerds to try to make this one, in addition to the screening of one of my favorite films someone has promised to bring over a Halo edition 360 for some 106" front projection large and loud H3 action. 

This is my 1st new toy today, The Rocket.  This is a mobile wifi hotspot and router with a cellular card, running some kind of Linux distribution.  I think I shall plug this into my car adapter and go work from the lakefront later.

Via FriendlyAtheist:

There's a good chance that people's notion of "human solidarity" will triumph in the end, slowly but surely.