oops!

dvdnull
Originally uploaded by quest313.

Does 1 of null mean I don't have to return this? Blockbuster would certainly have a hard time trying to prove I havn't returned a dvd that wasn't in existence.

modular mindset

’m afraid development ideas are now starting to flood into my outside life. On a grocery store excursion I recently had the choice of buying a small jar of “Chicken Fajita Seasoning” or purchasing each spice individually.  Let’s see I needed Cumin, Chili powder and Oregano at least. All three of those would be near ten dollars total, but the Fajita seasoning was less than five. As I reached for the mix, I began thinking about the other foods I might need to make in the future. Suddenly light the went on, I was saving money on buying the mix, but at the same time I’d still need all the raw spices for future dishes.  How nearsighted of me!  My determination for good design and “loosely coupled” ingredients won over my frugality.   “Chicken Fajita Seasoning” was suddenly a great analogy to hurried Software Development.  The time crunched developer purchases or creates the “Seasoning mix” because it is either cheaper or quicker to develop than the individual components.  Things are going well until he is forced to write a Chili program, now regretfully not having chili powder, he decides to buy a chili mix with all the spices.  Soon thereafter his boss tells him that customers are complaining the Chicken Fajitas have way too much Chili powder and this has to be fixed immediately.  The rushed developer now sees his poor judgement. There’s no way to modify his current Fajitas because his spices are all mixed together, he now has to buy the Cumin, Chili powder and Oregano separately anyway.  But that’s ok to he’ll go back and modify the whole program now as he is a consultant and gets paid per hour.

unplug me

While we spent the last decade, trying to get “plugged-in” and online, the future seems to be unplugged and wireless. In the United States we consider ourselves free people so why do we burden ourselves with wires? I’m definitely on the bandwagon as soon as I learned that wireless internet would cause very little loss in speed, I certainly pulled the plug. Now I want everything wireless!!!! It’s like pre 2000, I just accepted wires as part of my life, I even received pleasure in reconnecting all my PC cables as I moved dorm rooms. In the past year I’ve considering forking over the extra dollar for a wireless print server, wireless headphones, even a wireless midi controller. The fact that I’m always tripping over my xbox controller card angers me, and as soon as I can afford it I’ll buy wireless satellite speakers for my home entertainment system. Is there any room for wires in our future? How thin can we currently slice our EM Spectrum to make room for all these technologies? The next decade will certainly be interesting as many questions await.

Design Patterrns

Woohoo! My Design Patterns book finally got here, now I really can cringe as I read page after page of why my designs the past year have been so poor. Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates from Javaranch put togehter an "Everything You Need to Know" guide to the most common software design patterns. So far I am overly impressed with Kathy and Bert's approaches of explaining potentially dry material in a new and interesting way. I stil consider myself very new to the field of software development, and for architecture I am a mere infant, but I am easily excited when discovering general theories that can be applied to development. Thanks to Kathy and Bert I am building my "Shared Vocabulary" that I can use to communicate effectively in the field. Like a lot of other beginning programmer's I admit I believed an OO view of the world would solve all problems, but I didn't see the dangers and design traps until I began on larger more involved projects. These Design patterns really help to identify areas where a strictly OO solution is not necessarily the best decision and the less intuitive albeit better designs have been passed down and proven successful by many senior developer across a wide array of projects.

XML Madness

After 10 frustrating hours I'm still struggling to Convert base64 type response data to a binary image file for display. Everything has to work both in ASP and .NET Solutions, so we're trying to wrap our check image dll in a Web Service. We've opted to transport the data via a binary stream so there's no messy clean up of image files after an image is served. The real blocker is how to convert the base64 data to binary and write the binary content to a page. We've found base64 decoding functions in vb, however when we read in the textual data from the xml element, I believe newline and linefeed are being reformatted. oXMLHTTP.responseText appears to "preformat" the text which leads to problems while decoding with our function. oXMLHTTP.responseBody returns only the raw text, however the vb string functions don't seem compatible with the return type. Once again its a run around, and I spend more time guess and checking for solutions than making any real progress. Hopefully oXMLHTTP offers other methods that will return workable data. I plan to explore more tomorrow.

Genesis

VNV was every bit as satisfying as I hoped for. Nation however left a lot to be desired. We got to the club very early almost an hour before the opening duo Coder23. The main area was closed off until about a half hour before 9. As soon as the curtain opened we made our way towards the stage. They played normal club music as the bands finished setting up, and we didn't even notice we were right beside the main speaker until Coder opened. Coder23 is described as tech-house duo from Europe. Although I'm completely new to their music I found their show enjoyable and very remiscent of tracks on the Trance Station on DI. Both DJ's kept the beats steady on their powermac notebooks, while a large screen in front looped eerie computer animations which added to the feel of their sound.

It had to be 11 or after before VNV came on. Ronan, who I alway visualized as a very solemn and dark vocalist could not have been more the opposite. With energy he circled about the stage easily gaining control of the eager crowd. The mainly goth dressed audience responded echoing lyrics of the popular songs. Dancing was suprisingly to a minimum, most likely due to the lack of room near the stage. Mark played the "electro-drums" like a tribesman playing whack a mole. His long limbs stretched out to empasize beats as he stood towering in the center of the stage.

My biggest complaint was that the huge speaker we stood in front ( of course totally our fault, and I wouldn't do this again ) seemed to drown out the the melody on most tracks. The beats even over-powered Ronan's singing and songs that I usually knew all the words I got lost and could barely recognize. It sucks we missed Limelight the night before in New York. If I had known VNV was playing Limelight I would have definitely tried to make it. Dark Trance in a Gothic Cathedral would be a truely divine experience.

Over all I was glad we went. Somehow I manged to guide the car back to Harrisburg and get to sleep by 4am. I even convinced Carol to go to another concert in 2005 after release of the Matter and Form album.

vnv tomorrow

Christmas literally flew by, but the holidays aren't over yet. Tomorrow evening Carol and I are making a trek to Washington DC to see vnv nation http://www.vnvnation.com, and I getting really edgey. This will be my first time seeing them in concert as the last time they made a US appearance was in 2002 I believe. Everyone is saying how crazy I am to drive three hours away the day before New Years Eve, but I love VNV. Carol unfortunately doesn't care much for them, but I hope she can endure Ronan's droning. As for me, I'm sure I'll be in ecstasy as soon as i here that militarstic beat.

Sculpting Time

Taking on a full time and having a serious relationship certainly leaves a very small amout of time for personal interests. It seems like I spend more time rushing through everything I'd like to get done than enjoying my interests while I'm engrossed in them. Unfortunately there's no real way of slowing down time, but the closest attempt I've witnessed is Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's films. His award winning films , most of which were directed in the last fifty years, seem miles apart from the fast paced cinematic style of today's hollywood director's. My first Tarkovsky movie was Solaris, that I got on accident hoping to receive the George Clooney version via Netflix. After only 15 minutes into Solaris I was almost ready to turn it off, and then it started to click....As I was staring at a half minute camera pan of a wooded landscape I realized how much I've personally been so caught up in getting from A to B everyday that I was seldom living in the moment. So much time I was spending thinking about what I'd do next or what I had done before. Tarksovsky fixated on the moment. I ended making it through Solaris and just recently tried another Tarkovsky film Sacrifice. It is remarkable the amout of ground that the movie covered after setting such a slow pace. Usually Hollywood action sequences barely move me, as they are all so often strung together in a long chain with out any room for character development or plot, but with Tarkovksy's slow build up even a

New aspect on programming

Tom Janofskky, professional consultant, and Penn State professor gave a presentation this evening on AspectJ, a java language based framework for aspect oriented programming. Aspect Oriented Programming or AOP is a new contribution to the programming world that makes up for some of the inflexibility in traditional OOP scenarios. AOP has the ability cut across a solution to add new functionality that would be very challenging to do in large OOP design. By linking to methods and higher elements such as classes and interfaces at runtime, object checks and new functionality can be added on the fly. For a better introduction, check out Tom's web site at http://www.tomjanofsky.com. AOP seems to have some obvious advantages especially for debugging and logging, but its still unclear whether I would actually plan a design around this technology. Most of Tom's examples centered on "rescuing" already deployed applications or adding new functionality by declaring an aspect file that attaches or weaves directly into the java class file. This weaving can be accomplished by inputting any java class file and an aspect file to create an executable. One obvious advantage is the separation of the aspect code from your normal code base. This makes adding and removing debugging information much easier. I'm really tempted to try this out in a nonobtrusive scenario. The tool looks very powerful, however there are many uncertain areas in AOP. There is still a lot undecided in terms of how AOP can and should be used, as well as the difficulty in maintaining AOP code that has almost invisibly attached "advice" information.

new wave cinema

One would have to be blind not to notice the sudden explosion of psycho-cinema that attempts to challenge our ordinary acceptance of the rational world with mind-twists that leave us scurrying for philosophic answers at the end. I'm no cinema buff or critic. As a matter of fact I'm lucky if I watch a single move a week. I will admit however, ever since watching mentally stimulating thrillers such as the matrix and vanilla sky, I've been hooked. But now, I'm uncertain where this wave will end? Following serveral successful films, the pscycho-cinema drama is now apparently mainstream with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon having there memories wiped way too many times, just in hopes of bringing in more blockbuster movie. I supposed every genre has freshness date, before we have to retire it for another ten or twenty years.

VS Live

I was lucky enough to attend the VSLive Orlando conference early this week and despite the blatant MS propaganda I'm not severing my ties to open source software or Java. VS Live is a three day developer conference highlighting the new features that will be available to the Visual Studio 2005 developers.

Here's a rundown of some of the topics covered and my *ahem* initial reactions....

SOA Service Oriented Architecture
Hype: Connected Systems is here to stay. Leveraging Web Services will help to create a new interoperability among business function procedures.

To me: I think this is big, maybe not OOP big but Its certainly far from being a fad. Granted I have very limited experience, but am really exciting to implement this whenever I get a chance.

Databinding:
Hype: .NET has new controls that improve existing databinding features.

To me: I really havn't found a need to bind my controls so far, so I can't get to excited about this one.

Application Blocks
Hype: Microsoft got together and decided to offer "unsupported" add ins for features such as Security, Caching, Configuration Blocks, Exception Management etc.

To me: Same as above. Havn't used them but willing to give them a try especally for Security.

Rich Clients
Hype: Abandon the thin client model, to build a more effective UI.

To me: Seems like a good idea, why waste our blazing desktop CPU power loading thin Web Applications. There are definitely tradeoffs here and it looks like we'll bounce back and forth on this issue for awhile. I tend more towards the thin side, because I like its architectural benefits, and am usually less interested in my UI.

Code Snippets
Hype: With a simple mouse click you bring up frequently used code.

To me: Looks cool. But are we really that lazy we can't copy and paste this from a source file?

Visual Studio Team Systems
Hype: Integrate Designer, Developer, and Tester tools in a single software package.

To me: There's open source software out here that accomplishes most of these tasks as well if not better.

Visual Studio Express Edition
Hype: A nearly full version of VS for the hobbyist that is both faster to load and whole lot cheaper.

To me: Sign me up!


I'll stop my rants now till I actually use this stuff. However concerning my project load and upcoming features it looks like I"ll be playing in VS 2003 land for some time to come.

First Blog Test!

Just testing....