roncli.com blog: December 2005

Now playing: Trans-Siberian Orchestra - What is Christmas (2:50)

"And there is one more thing that I have discovered
That I would now like you to know
The reason for Christmas I now realize
Is an excuse to tolerate snow!

Snow... I don't even like the SOUND of it!"

-Trans-Siberian Orchestra, "What Is Christmas"

I'm glad they cleared that up for me. :)

Labels: Silliness, Trans-Siberian Orchestra

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Seti@Home Classic is Dead
Posted: 5:43:00 PM 0 comments

Well, Seti@Home finally announced the inevitable: Seti@Home Classic sent out it's final work unit, and is switching solely to BOINC. What sucks is that they aren't allowing Classic users the ability to upload completed work units anymore, so all that queuing done was rendered useless. I've seen the new BOINC version and am not really sure I want to go to it yet. I've done a lot for the Classic version, having run a SetiQueue for over 3 years. It's more a sentimental thing than anything.

Labels: BOINC, SETI@Home, Software

Friday, December 02, 2005

Frustration
Posted: 2:06:00 AM 0 comments

Now playing: Staind - Right Here (4:13)

The last few days have kept me quite busy. I've barely gotten any work done on Due Process other than to get it working with the new double buffered control, and it still doesn't look 100%. There's issues with autosizing columns, as it only autosizes what's on the screen which I absolutely hate, as well as rare but still notable screen flickers. Then there's the problem that certain parts of the WMI aren't available on versions of Windows other than XP and 2003. On the positive side, I've discovered VB.Net 2005 has bit shift functions as well as unsigned integer types, allowing me to upgrade my CRC32 function. It's beautiful. I may post it later. But then again, why hasn't Microsoft included CRC32 yet in their encryption namespace? They say it's because it's too "insecure". Okay, that's fine, but many things still use it. Get with the program, MS.

My ASP.Net 2.0 experience has been less than fun. I ran into the "enter key won't submit a one text box form" bug again. It's been driving me out of my mind for the past week, but only tonight did I take a serious look at it, as I really like the CAPTCHA control I've implemented and didn't want to have to figure something else out. Fortunately, I didn't have to, but I didn't realize this until I created my own CAPTCHA user control, incorporating the project's classes directly into the website. In short, I haven't gotten anything done. If I didn't have far more patience with ASP.Net 2.0 than I did when ASP.Net 1.0 came out, I wouldn't be using it today.

Even coding at work's been frustrating me lately, which is rare. I am in the process of optimizing a particular function, and am running into an odd problem with a SQL Server trigger where generating the inserted table is taking a significant fraction of a second. It wouldn't be much of a problem if the trigger wasn't called upwards of 400 times at once, locking up the system for minutes at a time. It's very poor design, and I fear that I'm going to have to rip it out entirely in order to get this to work. That's going to take a lot of time.

And when I'm coding for fun, I still get frustrated. A TopCoder competition yesterday saw me submit my first dynamic programming solution since I joined the site. It was absolutely perfect, even passed a challenged by one of my opponents. Problem was, I forgot that I defined the bounds in a zero-based array, and called it as a one-based array in only one spot in the entire program, causing an array out of bounds when it tried to call the maximum bound of the array. Cost me over 300 points in the competition, and over 160 algorithm rating points.

I've managed to relax myself with games and the like, so I'm not angry about it at all, but life would be so much nicer if things worked the first time I coded them.

Like that ever happened in the first place! Heh.

Labels: ASP.Net, Coding, Due Process, Gaming, SQL Server, TopCoder