roncli.com blog

It's finally done! roncli Productions is complete and live. Backup and Due Process, two pieces of software I've been talking about for many months, are now available for download. I'm quite excited about it, and look forward to see how people use the software and what kind of suggestions they will come up with.

I've yet to submit the software to various download sites, but hopefully I'll be able to wrap that up tonight, so I can concentrate on other things, like providing a blow-by-blow account of Melbourne and Surfers, quote, "Paradise", unquote.

Enjoy the site.

Labels: Backup, Coding, Due Process, roncli Productions

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

More work!
Posted: 11:40:00 PM 0 comments

Does the catching up ever end? More questions than answers today, it seems.

Despite doing extra work, I slacked again on the weekend and have forced myself into catchup mode. Right now, I'm an estimated 14 hours of work behind, with STILL most of it being in the Pwned Print category. There's no way in hell I'm getting that done by Australia like I had hoped. The good news is that the 14 hours are spread across 3 tasks, one of them being a 2 hour progress review, so I'm really hoping my time estimations are on the high side.

What I am going to get done for sure is the roncli Productions website, with the official launch planned for Monday, June 26th. Backup and Due Process will be the site's first two offerings, with a new project, Sitemap Generator on the way.

Yes, I decided to write my own, simply because I can't be bothered with adapting other people's ASP code into something that doesn't time out and kill my web server on my larger sites. In fact, that's going to be a primary feature of Sitemap Generator: you can run it on your own webserver and specify a delay between page reads so that it won't completely destroy your server. There are also plans to be able to include or exclude specific pages or directories, and I'm hoping I can manage to write a nice scheduler for it, complete with a little taskbar icon in the corner to be able to control the application. It should be a fairly complete application, and I plan for the free trial version to be able to index up to 100 pages, which is perfect for bloggers and smaller personal sites. I'm wondering how I'm going to be able to deal with ASP.Net pages, though, something I may challenge myself to accomplish should it come down to that. It should be a fun app to create.

I've left both Saturday the 17th open (I leave around 7 PM) and Sunday the 25th open (We return Saturday). Hopefully I'll be able to dedicate some of that free time to projects.

But for now, sleep.

Labels: Coding, Due Process, Projects, Pwned Print, roncli Productions, Sitemap Generator

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

The Long Weekend
Posted: 2:13:00 AM 0 comments

Well, the long Memorial Day weekend has come to a close, and to be honest, I have amazed myself with how much I got done. I found the bug with Backup that causes it to run at 100% CPU until you kill it and squished it. That allowed me to repackage and finalize the MSI that will be distributed once roncli Productions comes online. I've also found the bug in Due Process that causes it to tell Windows it didn't startup properly when, in fact, it did. I still have one more feature I want to add to Due Process before I finalize its MSI, which is the ability to never allow a process to run (&%*#% ctfmon.exe!). That shouldn't take terribly long.

On the website front, the forums are slowly moving along, I anticipate 12 hours worth of work remaining before they are online. However, once that's done, I have at least two sites I can port them to, including Outpost Music, something I plan on doing before I leave for vacation.

The problem is that Pwned Print is slipping further than I had wanted it to. I've been quite ignoring this big 8 hour task for the simple fact that it's... well, 8 hours. And overdue. I want to sit down and at least start it at some point, maybe I'll do it tomorrow after work or something.

Overall, I've managed to not slip further behind in my projects than I was a week ago this time, and I'm more optimistic than ever that I can follow these projects for some time to come.

Labels: Backup, Coding, Due Process, Outpost Music, Projects, Pwned Print, roncli Productions

Monday, May 29, 2006

So Much To Do
Posted: 3:15:00 AM 0 comments

I did some research as to where I stand for four other projects today... holy crap, do I have a lot to do on so many things. I'm trying to take it one project at a time. I see the light on Backup and Due Process, as all that needs to be done for them is to fix bugs and make the final package. But the roncli Productions website is just going to take forever.

I got some good work done on the forums today, but I got a late start and didn't get as far as I had hoped. Most of that stems from the complexities that exist in my classic ASP forums code. Translating it over to ASP.Net 2.0 is going to be interesting.

I also decided to add the bug fixes necessary for OSMusic.Net into the projects, and hopefully I'll slowly get to those. I'm surprised, after 5 months of nothingness, 8 songs have been added to the site within the past two weeks. I don't know if it's going to become a more active site as a result, but the activity is quite welcome.

I took a good look at Outpost Music, and decided that, when the time comes, I'll simply copy the forum system from roncli Productions into Outpost. In the meantime, there's some additions I want to make to the site to make it more functional for me and the other members of the group.

Finally, I looked at The Nightstalker page, where my music is supposed to go. I decided that I'm going to add all of my current releases there, and eventually I'll go back and add my old tracked releases as well. Maybe some day I'll convert them to Reason, but each song is a project in and of itself - I can see that taking years.

There is no shortage of work for me to do, I have stuff planned out to July 1st, and some of that work is set aside to plan out future work. There's so much to do, and I wish I had more hours in the day to do it with.

Labels: Backup, Coding, Due Process, OSMusic.Net, Outpost Music, Projects, roncli Productions, The Nightstalker

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Still Catching Up
Posted: 11:58:00 PM 0 comments

After falling behind badly in the first week of my committment to do 2 projects a night, I feel I'm making a lot of progress. That's good, I didn't want to have to scrap the idea entirely and end up with nothing ever getting done.

The progress for Pwned Print is finally coming along nicely with all but one of the 5 tasks I had scheduled for last week being finished. Yesterday, I cleaned up my desktop and my god does it look empty. But it looks really nice and gives me a lot of space to work with. I was able to review my progress on roncli Productions and scope out another week or two's worth of work in it. I've also been able to figure out what I need to do with Backup, and after this I'll probably do the same for Due Process.

Tonight, after doing a little bit of Pwned Print, I finally sat down and figured out how to backup files in SQL Server 2005, and went a step further by scheduling monthly maintenance on the indexes and database size. Then I dove into Linux, compiled and installed BOINC, SETI@Home, and Einstein@Home (not in the plans, but remarkably easy to do), and wrestled with getting that to run. After a bit of a scare (yes, you CAN accidentally type in rm /*/*), everything was running smoothly.

The three things from last week I still haven't done is correcting the NATd and IPFW configuration for Reborn, a single form for Pwned Print, and review what's left to do for Due Process, which I should get to before I head to bed. All in all, a pretty full Monday and Tuesday, and I'm finally making some real progress on these projects.

Labels: BOINC, Coding, Due Process, Einstein@Home, Projects, Pwned Print, roncli Productions, SETI@Home

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Due Process Close
Posted: 2:40:00 AM 0 comments

Now playing: Korn - Twisted Transistor (2:58)

Actually, Due Process is done! I have it happily running on my workstation and my computer with no problems. I am very pleased with how it turned out.

The reason you don't have a copy of it yet is because I'm working on the website that's going to promote this and other pieces of software I'll be spitting out over the course of time. Backup is going to be the next offering, which is a copy of my FTP file backup service. After that, I'm open to pretty much anything. Who knows, I might even get back to Cent.

Labels: Backup, Coding, Due Process

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

Sunday, November 20, 2005

Where have the days gone?
Posted: 3:56:00 AM 0 comments

Since downloading Visual Studio .NET 2005, I've been doing absolutely nothing but ASP.Net. I mean, nothing to the point where I haven't eaten food, I haven't slept much, and just about every thought (outside of the area of my brain permanently reserved for music) has been how to get something to work in ASP.Net.

And for once, I'm actually excited about AJAX.

I'm working on the roncli Productions website. In order to properly launch Due Process, I will need to develop the website full on. I plan on having a simple page that has a product listing, trial downloads, purchasing, and forums.

Of course this means I need a registration process. The whole "are you 13 years of age" thing to collect email addresses set in, and I thought, wouldn't it be nice if there was a control that could limit the date range in which one could enter within it?

This quest led me to Michael Schwerz's amazing and free AJAX.Net library. It's not open source, but there is enough support for the library, and it's just so damn easy to use, that I decided to give it a shot. My jaw literally dropped when I saw how easy it was to do.

My problem, though, is I'm far from a JavaScript guru. In fact, my JavaScript is about as bad as my C++. Considering they are related languages that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. The simplest tasks become complex when I typo here, case wrong there, forget to var something elsewhere.

So now I have a nice date picker control in ASP.Net 2.0 that I can use anywhere I can use AJAX.Net. So I figured, why not do the entire registration process like this?

I'm about halfway done, having tackled my first AJAX routines, and I actually WANT to finish it. Never mind I'm half asleep and it's 4 AM in the morning.

Ah, the coder's life.

Labels: AJAX, ASP.Net, Coding, Due Process, roncli Productions

Sunday, November 06, 2005

Due Process
Posted: 6:13:00 AM 0 comments

My latest attempt at programming something useful is called "Due Process", a program that allows you to change the priority of a running process permanently. The difference between this and something like WinLauncherXP, which is buggy as hell might I add, is that Due Process runs as a process and has a setup front end where you do your configuration from.

This program was so incredibly simple to write. The most difficult part was finding a decent enough grid control to handle what I needed to do. All that's left is pampering the interface so that it doesn't look quite as n00bish. Figure I'll slap it up as shareware and make it roncli Productions' first software offering. Why not?

Labels: Coding, Due Process, Software