roncli.com blog

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

Friday, November 18, 2005

SQL Server & Visual Studio 2005
Posted: 5:09:00 AM 0 comments

Took my first crack at SQL Server and Visual Studio 2005 tonight. My first thought: It's a lot of fluff. Things are prettier, but they don't do too much differently.

They completely redesigned the client tools for SQL Server 2005, and I'm not entirely sure they got it right yet. There's some annoyances I've had using it at work, including how projects are done with the connections that you have to open every time, and there's a bunch of bugs with the "save password" check box that doesn't seem to always save.

Visual Studio 2005 on the other hand is for the most part bug-free from what I can tell. I did a bunch of ASP.Net 2.0 work tonight, and the master page solution is simply awesome. I don't like the way namespaces work, though, and I found it difficult at first to figure out the coding architecture.

I can't wait to start converting some VB.Net solutions over to see the improvements to that language. Perhaps the Google Desktop project I've been working on will finally work. Hmmm...

Labels: Coding, SQL Server, Visual Studio

Sunday, February 20, 2005

SQL Server v Winamp
Posted: 3:38:00 AM 0 comments

Now playing: RedHeat (m0d) - Discovery (11:25)

So I'm sitting here working on my log analyzer web app, and Kathy's sitting on her computer listening to Winamp and playing AdventureQuest. The music plays along fine... until I decide to create an index on my 5 million row table.

See, my SQL server is on the same machine as all the MP3s. Since this machine doesn't have any spectacular hardware in it - just an SIDE hard drive - SQL Server and Winamp fight for drive time. The result is usually that SQL Server wins out, causing Winamp to choke.

This happening once in a while isn't bad... but I've been hitting my database with new indexes all night trying to reduce my query times from 1 minute to under 1 second. The result, lots of unnecessary interruptions.

If we didn't use the MP3s on more than one machine - and an available machine other than the server had enough hard drive space - this could be avoidable. Until then, though, I guess we're stuck just skip skip skipping away...

Labels: AdventureQuest, Coding, Gaming, SQL Server, Winamp