roncli.com blog

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

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

Thursday, May 18, 2006

Another Long Night
Posted: 1:15:00 AM 0 comments

I knew the night was going to get off to a bad start when I didn't even get sat down in front of the computer until 7 o'clock. It wasn't for a bad reason, though. Saurin called, discussing some possible projects (as if I don't have enough, see last night's post for details on that) that might be on the horizon if I'm interested.

But despite chatting for about a half an hour after work, I decided to open up Pwned Print to play around with the interface. I open Visual Studio.Net, and it opens up a few code screens. Then it tries to open a designer and dies.

Uh oh.

I spent the next half hour trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with my computer. I did a chkdsk on the hard drive that contains the source code, as that drive was known to be bad at one point (don't worry, all the code is in Source Safe and backed up twice onto Reborn), and it returned fine. I had serious thoughts of starting on that reinstallation I've been toying with before I had an idea. I opened up BOINC and suspended it. As soon as I did that, everything worked perfectly. What the heck is going on between Visual Studio and a BOINC application that causes Visual Studio to lock up? I hate it when applications don't play nice with others.

No problem, 7:30 rolls around and Kathy's up and about. I get started playing around in the code and my personal BlackBerry goes off. There's email that I have to attend to, and by the time I finish up with that, it's 11. I work another half hour, then Kathy messages me because she has no money to get any food, so I had to feed her.

12:30, I sit down for the last time, and after another half hour of work and I've at least got half of my daily goal done. Seems to be my standard since starting these projects, I can't get more done than half of what I expected to.

I was supposed to work on the roncli Productions site launch, but never got close to touching it. Here it is almost quarter after one, and quite frankly, after being up for 18 hours, I'm more than ready for bed.

Labels: Coding, Projects, Pwned Print, roncli Productions