Rampidbyter Rampid byter: A byte of my .Net developing life.

The one word I could use to describe UC would be bureaucratic. I have never, even in the Army, had so much trouble dealing with a group of individuals that hold an office or title. The paperwork system at UC, while somehow managing to be functional, given any situation deviating from norm requiring even the slightest more effort will single handedly double the irritation for the requester. It seems that in the going on six years that I’ve somehow managed to tolerate the bureaucracy of the system my tolerance has reached its peak. If you’re not familiar with the system I can give you a quick introduction to how things seem to work. Given a situation where a given person has a document that must be quickly processed in order to take affect, then you might as well advise them to sit on the document for about three weeks hoping it will grow into a golden egg. Paperwork does not move quickly through UC, hell I know an individual that had to wait over one year just to receive their degree due to a professor haphazardly forgetting to input final grades for an entire class. I do have names to back this up should someone from UC like to argue this point I’d be happy to name drop the professor as well. Considering defamation lawsuits I’ll leave this point made, but without identification of the individuals.

Let us concentrate on even the system used to register students, and UCs wonderful policy of course availability. Should you, the student, need to take four required classes during the quarter, well, good luck. The UC planning committees can seem to think of nothing but money, and depending on the number of suckers…. I mean students (sorry all start with ‘s’ anyway) they can put in a seat determines the course availability. So considering the number of students pursuing the same classes as you, during the same quarter, you’ve got only about a 50/50 shot at having the course available. Then there is what I call the UC class paradox. Should the course be available to you during the quarter you require, well, then a nice little time availability overlapping occurs. This same class, that you require mind you, will be offered at both the same time and days as other required classes. As if to somehow drag out your graduation longer these classes tend to be exactly as the same times (day or night) or they will share an overlapping day at least. Typically UC courses are either Tuesday or Thursday or Wednesday and Friday. Unless you don’t work you can always opt for the four days a week class that is offered during the morning, and afternoon. For them anything is possible, but for evening students you may plan to extend your school engagement by at least another year.

The most fantastic part of the course registration system is the separation provided to make sure that you are truly taking advantage of having multiple web browsers open, or using those new multiple tab pages from within your browser of choice. I’d stick with IE myself when dealing with anything UC on the web. UC is particular about engaging web development from students trained at the school, whom have no concept of document object models, nor the differences between IE and non-IE browsers.

Anyway, so once you go to check out those nifty courses, make sure you’ve printed out the required class listing, and are prepared for at least a half hour battle to get your next quarter courses just right. You’ll need to first have your transcript ready (or knowledge of completed classes), listing of remaining required courses, a calendar, then you’ll need to open One Stop’s website to go to a page to search for your courses. At this point you could argue that you could open another web browser to perform a degree audit instead of using a transcript, but clearly you’ve never used the degree audit before. But I digress, from there you’ll want to open another browser, log into One Stop to register for classes so the registration screen is viewable. At this point you’ll want to start skimming through the online listing of courses, be sure to copy and paste them into Notepad so you can have the call number, dates, and times ready. Then you’ll want to search for more classes, copy and paste them into Notepad from the displayed page.

(I need to interject at this point in time. UC haven’t you heard of online shopping carts? Amazon.com can single handedly manage hundreds of thousands of concurrent registrations, and purchasing of product by placement in a digital cart. Why can’t you freaking create a digital cart to add classes too so you can just sign-in to course registration with classes that are available, and then just checkout. You’re still raping us on price so you might as well start modeling your system after an e-commerce system. )

Once you’ve gathered a good amount (if any courses are available that is) of courses that you need to take you’ll have to start sifting through to the ones that don’t overlap. In the end from a list that may contain, say five classes, you’ll probably end up with at least two. You may even get lucky to find three available courses. At this point close the class availability page, then switch over to the registration page. Cross your fingers and start registering for the classes by inputting the information from your Notepad document into the required fields on the registration page. Hit submit when you’re done, then wait for the message that the class is unavailable. You’ll get either unavailable, course has been closed, or maybe registering pending administrative approval. Congratulations five layers of irritation later you’re now a guaranteed student of the defunct system. That is, of course, unless you receive a letter, yes mailed letter, that your class has been closed due to lack of enrollment about one week before the class was set to begin. The powers that be will close your class one week before the quarter begins, then complains that students still wait till the last minute to register. Given you’ve just received only a weeks notice I can see why there may be an influx of last minute registrations taking place in some situations.

Oh, there is much, much more I could complain about, but I’m out of time. Stay tuned to future warnings of UC.

Well here’s to shits and giggles today. I posted recently that I went out with my gf and taught her how to shoot down at the local target range. Well while we were down there I heard things flying around near us. I just assumed that it was shells from other lanes that were flopping around on the floor, or were getting thrown near us. Heaven knows that my gun likes to throw red-hot shells back on you while you’re shooting.

Little did I know at that time that one of those noises I heard flying around us managed to find itself fall out of my skin on Sunday. Of all the things I had apparently been shot by what appeared to be buck shot from someone shooting a shot gun down the range. Considering that everyone was in the same row of booths the likelihood that I’d get shot was slim to nil. Apparently those odds weren’t good enough as sure enough I ended up getting some lead stuck in me. So I’m going from this point forward refer to myself as gangsta, and carry myself with a have a false sense of street cred.

Had an interesting talk today with the father in law of one of my good friends during his sons 3 year birthday party. The guy is a self employed microchip designer/developer who for the past thirty years has been selling his product. Up until recently he’d been releasing his product for the parallel port, but as we all know this port is going the way of the floppy disk. So in order to keep up with changes he started asking me what new technology he could use to interact with the USB port. Considering I’ve been reading “USB Design by Example” along with a few other choice USB books I gave him what I knew. We started talking about .Net, and to much my surprise he seemed pretty confused on why anyone would use .Net. We talked for a good three hours on current trends, what the .Net framework really was, and then voiced his opinions about how if you’re not programming on the wire then you’re leaving your code in a state where if it breaks you can’t fix it because you’re building on someone else’s stuff. It sounded like your typical embedded programmer trying to stay embedded in the opinion that reinventing the wheel was in the best interests of everyone as you can be sure that it will function correctly. I heard what he said, but I had my opposition that if everyone kept reinventing the wheel then productivity would be limited in either time or expertise of the developers. Still it’s hard telling who is right, and I sometimes wonder whether what the future of computing will hold. Either way it goes I feel like I took home a new perspective, and maybe I helped answer some of his questions.

So I taught my girlfriend how to shoot the other day. After getting off work, finishing another work project for another client (yes, two jobs that day) I decided to blow off some steam by going to take some target practice. Since my girlfriend was complaining that I am always too busy (aka going to school and working long hours) I told her she was welcome to come along. She decided to come down, but said she’d only stay half an hour. So while at Target World she rented a gun (.22 revolver) and I took in my new 9mm that I bought over Christmas. Into the first five minutes of shooting she was putting holes all over the place, and many instances totally missing the target just ten feet away. So I told her she needed to line the notch on the end of the barrel parallel to the sights towards the back of the gun so the tops of each were flush. After showing her how to do that she started putting holes dead center in the target she then got fancy by putting six shots dead center in the head of the target. At that point my mouth dropped open, and I had a suspicion she’d done that before. The half hour flew by and at the end she was apologizing to me for only wanting to stay half an hour, and how next time she’d like to stay longer. In the end I think we all learned a valuable lesson that target practice is fun.

Found an interesting problem today when trying to run multiple instances of a multithreaded application. The application would run together loading the data for a while, then all of a sudden one would throw an exception from a FileStream error. It was a little confusing as the code blocks the thread were running was purely data acquisition from a DSN database connection. I dug a little deeper (opened my eyes) and the code that caused the problems was pretty obvious. The only FileStream access I could imagine that was taking place was through my Trace.WriteLineIf() statements that were outputting to an application output log file.

<system.diagnostics>

<switches>

<!-- Enable/disable profiling messages (0 = disable, 1 = enable) -->

<addname="outputTrace"value="1"/>

</switches>

<traceautoflush="true"indentsize="4">

<listeners>

<addname="traceListener"type="System.Diagnostics.TextWriterTraceListener"initializeData="TraceOutput.log"/>

<removename="Default"/>

</listeners>

</trace>

</system.diagnostics>

Based on a BooleanSwitch I was turning on and writing to Trace output log file from within the application. While building the multithreaded application I never once thought to take into account trying to keep Trace statement calls into account as possible bottlenecks. I’ve not yet figured out a work around for multiple instances of a multithreaded applications taking advantage of a Trace listener, but when I get free time I’ll be sure to look into it and post something here. It could be the same behavior for non-multithreaded apps attempting to do the same, but at least I know this application definitly has the problem. Even still these Trace statements are wrapped in Try/Catch blocks and the exception was still unhandled. The exception itself stated the problem was coming from Line ## from the Appname.exe.config file.

HA! Today was the day it happened. I was working on a project in Visual Studio 2003 and all of a sudden I got an unhanded nullreference exception error pop up. That’s when I realized I wasn’t currently running the application so how could it generate an exception? So I click the OK button , and Visual Studio disappears. Of all the things… all I was doing at the time was clicking to open the main form design view.

It was mentioned, somewhat out of topic of the conversation, that what a friend and I need to do is build a fully function autonomous battle bot. A sentry bot have you, but primarily for the purpose of battle. Perhaps armed with a paintball gun, or some sort of weapon to ward off unwelcome visitors. Hopefully an unwelcome visitor does not include myself during the initial phases of the project, which undoubtedly will have minor friend/foe association difficulties. The point of the matter is building a gas powered robot (that will be able to navigate the landscape surrounding the premises) is to patrol the house also there is the intent of causing general wonderment by individuals witnessing this event. Perhaps luring them into a sense of wondrous curiosity that would make them venture close to the bot. Then, at that point, we can test the robot deterrents. As my friend so quaintly pointed out the bot would need to be cheap enough for us to build, and also cheap enough for us to afford to have stolen. Without programming a ‘kill’ or arming the bot with lethal deterrents I assume at some point the scum in my area will steal it, much like they did with the cup holder tray from my truck. Again, thank you little perps for stealing that, not like I was using it for much other than holding drinks while driving, and assorted gas receipts. I still need to hunt them down as they stole my grandpas WW2 beating club that was in the truck for purpose of beating people if they attacked me, that is of course, unless they had a gun.

I was asked a few months ago to give a presentation at my companies once a month GeekSpeak this January. I was to give a presentation on the new features available to ASP.Net 2.0. Considering there are so many new features, and many of the new features were provided to limit the amount of code required I decided to give a presentation on the code-less functionality of the new features for ASP.Net 2.0. The hope was that by showing how the controls could be simply be dropped onto a form, configurations set through the GUI, and then deployed without many hassles it would show off the neat new abilities provided by ASP.Net 2.0. At least that was my thought anyway.

Well, I got out of my client site about 4pm after working a solid nine without lunch, and started booking it downtown. The client is a little more than an hour away from the downtown office in case you were wondering. I get to the office about 4:40 (may have sped a little), went up to the bullpen (u-shaped cubicle isle way where developers work) to chat with a few associates I hadn’t seen in a while, and started into the presentation room at 5pm. Things were good, everyone had a beer from the company fridge, I was getting setup, and the night before I fixed the lack of SQL Express on the laptop that prevented me from including local databases into the APP_DATA folder. After getting setup I tried to use the projector to display my main display, and that’s when the problems started. First the monitor appeared on the projector (as a second monitor when marked as attached), and regardless of what I nor anyone else tried the projector would not display my main display. Thank you Dell Latitude D610 and your (l)atitude against working properly with external displays.

So in the end we worked out a combination where I displayed the main display on the projector via the Fn-F8 key combo, and I gave the presentation sitting sideways to everyone. It was a bit awkward as I had to violate the don’t speak to the room with your back turned policy, but I did try to focus on returning my focus. Having been up till after 1am studying for finance, troubleshooting the lack of SQL Express/installing SQL Express on the work laptop to display my examples, well it left my brain a little scattered. I gave the presentation and unfortunately deviated from the planned material I had wanted to focus on. I never do prepared speeches as I’m not likely to remember them verbatim so I like to give on the fly presentations as its pretty interesting what new topics get addressed that may otherwise have been scripted over.

In the end I started to recover the presentation about a quarter of the way into giving the talk and trying to demo the material. It went a bit smoother, not totally ripple free, but in the end we got some dialog from the room. Three of the audience members have used ASP.Net, and my luck is that our resident SharePoint expert was in the room, and wanted to contradict that a custom user control plopped into the WebPartZone on the page did not represent an actual WebPart. I’m aware of web parts, and the coding required to make them render correctly, but the way I see it is that a custom user control included into the WebPartZone with attributes set would constitute a WebPart. I’ll have to do more reading to determine who is accurate, but the point stands that it’s still a neat feature to have when developing web applications.

Anyway, the presentation went ok, not fantastic, but I suppose it went well. I’ve yet to hear any feedback (so it could have been horrible) so I’ll have to wait till I hear anything about it before I profess adequate success or major inner office fax-pas. It’s strange being able to talk in front of total strangers without unease, but giving presentations to a group of people I work with and know caught me on edge. I suppose the jitters may have won this round, but the war continues.

I was thinking about deadlines earlier today when sitting down with my client manager trying to get clarification on where the data I needed was coming from. At any point during the day I have people stopping by my cubicle asking for new features, or asking for new capabilities. These requests for programs I’ve already written outside the scope of the initial priority work to be done. I guess it comes with the territory as before I got there the programmer was a novice with less than a few months experience to VB.net 1.1, and when he left nobody could find/update the programs.

As an aside I wonder whether they call it a deadline because in the old days if you didn’t make it to the point of successful delivery they would shoot you dead. Hrm.

So I’ve stepped in and revamped most of the programs out in production, and now that they’re getting them pushed out so quickly they’re anxious to get more added to them. Unfortunately I can only do a certain number of things at once before quality, speed, and efficiency is compromised. At the moment I’m at my peak trying to revamp a pretty complex inventory/order/parts allocation interface program with the actual inventory pegging application, and three other applications used for management/logistics meetings all in parallel.

With this responsibility I’m also taking two graduate level business classes that are outside the scope of my knowledge base, which requires extra time to commit to memory. At the same time I’m studying for two more certification exams, preparing a lecture for next week on ASP.Net 2.0 new functionality for my home office, and I’m writing a paper to submit to my previous college for change recommendations to the curriculum. In addition to this I’m working on two applications, one with a group of others, and one for my own personal interests.

So I’ve had quite a bit on my hands lately. I was asked by my home office to start a management training program that would be in addition to everything else I have going on, but I’ve thankfully had this training postponed until the Fall. In the fall I’m also slotted to get married on top of everything else going on in my life. Speaking of life a friend of a friend just moved off to another state, and I have to say even though I’ve only hung out with the guy for a little bit it feels a little bit more empty around here. With that on top of my step brothers marital problems trying to help him cope, and trying to lend my support to him it’s been a trying time.

My other bird Katie (actually a dude but I still call him a chick) has come down with a case of pneumonia, which if you remember my bird Wilber died of. So I’m stressing out that she’s sick too because it could cause me to lose her. I was asked the other day where I’ve been by a friend of mine, and hopefully this explains why I’ve been AWOL from life for a little while. At the end of the day you’ve just got to say “it’s alright” and put your head down to push through.

Thursday was my first day of financial analysis tools a level 700 finance class, and all I can say is wow. I learned so much in the four hour period that my head felt like it would pop. I can now tell you how to calculate future value or present value of money given a period of time, interest rate, and any combination thereof. It was so much information I felt like my head would pop, but I did meet a very nice lady from China who talked to me for a little bit. Pretty nice girl, finishing her masters in statistics, but I won’t hold that against her.

Anyway, after another grueling 15+ hour day I was unloaded on from my main boss when the clock struck four and I started to head out. Turns out the program he’d told me earlier in the day that ‘he’d like it soon’, well he actually meant the next day by 8am, and I don’t get in till 6:40amish. I have to tell you the program I’ve been revamping (program 2 or 3) was in horrid condition. It was totally linked to older servers with old data tables, and absolutely no comments as to what did what. All the methods, variables, and everything you could possibly imagine was some sort of abbreviation that meant absolutely nothing to me. I had to literally read line by line and refractor everything. So after a full day of working on what I’d assume was months worth of work by this guy I was asked to have it ready the next day by 8am. Sadly that was beyond my means so my main boss was not exactly pleased.

Be sure I’ll expand on my experiences with school in more detail, but for now I’m off to get more work accomplished.