Matt_ptr *

I’m starting to think I’m a masochist. Examine the evidence:

• I’ve been in 2 serious relationships with crazy (and I do mean crazy) girls — both ended crappily.
• I still hand wind my guitar strings.
• I’ve worked with PHP since version 3 and I’ve had a job doing it for 5 years. I actually gave up a job doing embedded systems with C to keep doing PHP work.
• I keep thinking I want to learn Erlang.
• Lastly, and I think this is the big one, despite the fact that I’ve worked on no less than 3 failed IRC clients — I started working on an IRC bot project.

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So, Automatic upgrade for WP has been broken for some time. Now there’s a stupid coding error that’s responsible for a worm attack. This is what I get for following the trend and not researching some software that I start using.

A possible switch to a different blog software may be in the works if they don’t get their act together.

I was, at one point, a big fan of the Visual Studio Environment. Yesterday, my appreciation of it was crushed — perhaps permanently.

See, every once in a while, I’ll get the urge to program something. Yesterday, I went to start up a new WPF project in C# Express. I wanted to code myself a little forecast/weather grabber from the NOAA NDFD Forecast Soap Service which I had experimented with before. So I added the service to the project and had Visual C# generate the code, as has been the way for a long time.

Lo’ and behold: it didn’t work.

Turns out that the service didn’t specify an encoding or didn’t encode properly. C#  wants everything to be UTF-8 or UTF-16, and dies thusly. It wasn’t dying or throwing a warning about the encoding while generating the code, or even instantiating the service, but only when data was recieved after the method call. Turns out, the way to handle encodings other than UTF-* is so unbelivably complicated that I don’t care to do it, especially when specifying the encoding could easily be an option when generating the code.

So while I’m debugging this project and trying to get it to work, a “Help Update” dialog pops up and prevents me from doing anything. I try to stop the debugger at least, so this update can complete and VS tells me that it’s waiting for the update to complete. Ok… so I wait. And wait…wait and wait and wait… nothing. According to Task Manager, this update is burning up 100% of my cpu, so I get mad and terminate the process. It takes me two or three times of terminating the process before I can actually get it to die and get control of VS back. As I stop the debugger and prepare to close the IDE, the update dialog comes back, continues to burn up my cpu and my patience.

“Something must be messed up,” I think. So I repair the MSDN install. It comes back. I repair C# Express. It comes back. I uninstall MSDN, effectively removing what needed the update (or so I thought), and it COMES BACK! I uninstall C# Express and the problem goes away :)

So I’m done with Visual C# Express for a while and my high opinion of the MS development tools is shattered. It’s a shame too — I had high hopes for XNA.

Oh yeah, my computer at home is kind of shot and I can’t afford to get a new one. So this site will probably go unmaintained for a bit.

This has been on my mind for a long, long time. Having been spoiled with SQLAlchemy and Elixir, I am tortured with sub-par ORM libraries while at work. Granted I did get to use SA for an internal project, but the majority of the things I do involves PHP.

I’ve been stuck with it for years. It is the language of choice for people who run servers and hate web developers. So yeah, 5 years of PHP and MySQL …and using so many different libs for database abstraction has given me some room to shoot my mouth off.

Anyway, this is going to be a long post and not for the faint of heart.  I’m going to start off at the beginning…

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I don’t know how long this has been around (I think only since 3.x), but if you’re using Firebug…

1. Open a site with javascript that you’re presumably trying to debug or are otherwise involved in some time sensitive development.
2. Set a breakpoint in a script.
3. Get the breakpoint to be reached, thus halting execution of the script.
4. Find exactly what you’re looking for.
5. Fix it in the code file you’re working on
6. Refresh the page.
7. Notice that none of the Javascript seems to be working — if the page even displays
8. Remove the breakpoint and try again
9. Copy the URL because you know you’re going to have to restart the browser
10. Get a message about Firefox already running
11. Open up your process manager and see Firefox using up 100% cpu and an enormous amount of memory
12. End the process
13. Start Firefox again
14. Find out that your URL wasn’t copied
15. ARGGHH

Note that this can be avoided by resuming the javascript engine before step 6 — but I never remember to do that.