The Mothership

I just got back to the office, and my arms are sore enough that I can barely type.

We went to a nearby kart track for the afternoon as a “team-building exercise,” though the competition was pretty informal. Driving the karts was pretty fun, and a chance to exercise a bit of racing skills, but… a) it’s hell on your arms and wrists due to the grip and turning force you need to exert, so you don’t want to do too many laps at once, b) the track was rather bumpy, and c) based on the results, you definitely don’t want me on your team. Our team did manage to get second place, but it definitely wasn’t thanks to me.

Ah well, I do have a bit of a weight disadvantage… I’m just happy I didn’t spin out or crash.

I’m installing Windows 2000 into a virtual machine for testing purposes, and after putting on Service Pack 4 and IE6, there’s still another 65 updates to go, according to the automatic updater.

It’s probably going to take longer to finish installing all of this than the actual testing I’ll need to do…

I had an odd problem after rebooting one of my work computers yesterday. When I went to log in, it said that it couldn’t load the local profile, that it could be lost or corrupt, and created a temporary profile for me to log into instead.

All of my usual files were there in my profile directory, so it wasn’t because I’d lost some critical files. I rebooted a couple of times in case it was a temporary thing, but it continued to happen. I also booted into safe mode and could log in just fine there, so the files weren’t corrupt either. After poking around the logs a bit, the cause of the error seemed to be that the profile files were in use when it went to try and load them. A bit of googling revealed that this is a common problem when using migrated profiles, but that wasn’t the case here.

But, then I realized that a virus scan was being kicked off when the system booted, since one hadn’t been run in a while, and one of the first sets of directories it scans is…the user profiles. Symantec AV was probably scanning my profile directories at the time I was trying to log in and causing sharing conflicts on the files.

After rebooting again, I waited five minutes before trying to log in, and everything worked fine once more.

At the office right now, we have two toilets and one urinal that are now out-of-order, leaving us with one of each still working.

I’m pretty sure this violates international cruelty laws of some sort.

I’ve just written the last bit of new code that I’m responsible for on our current seemingly-neverending project. For the last, uh, 6 days or so it’ll be just bugfixes from here on.

As a special treat, I’ll let you in on a bit of secret, proprietary knowledge and show you exactly what the very last line of code was.

Are you ready?!
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The last thing to be completed in the floor construction after our company moved in was the washrooms, apparently due to some kind of difficulty tracking down bowls with the correct mounting points or something.

Unfortunately, they’re low-flow toilets, and true to the cliche, they often require two or three flushes where the high-powered ones on the other floors only require one. And, as an added bonus, they’ve got the automatic sensors on them, which will often go off and invoke unnecessary flushes as you’re just entering or after you’ve already left.

But at least it’s, like, high-tech ‘n stuff.

I just had a brainfart and completely forgot one character in my password, and am now locked out of my own work account. I’m still logged in on one other machine, but I’ll lose that as soon as the screen saver lock kicks in.

I think it’s time to go home…

So, if I’m not really happy with IDEs, what can I do to improve my development environment? Well, I’ve discovered a few other tricks…
(more…)

My development environment at work is pretty primitive, being a collection of largely unrelated programs loosely tied together with some scripting. Integrated environments are where it’s supposedly at nowadays though, so I figured I should give some of them a shot.
(more…)

I just spent over an hour struggling to get a set of class templates to even compile properly. It kept complaining that a base class was undefined, so I kept tinkering with the template parameters, thinking that I was using them incorrectly or there was some subtle behaviour that I was failing to account for, since it’s a moderately complex template (multiple levels of derivation, multiple template parameters at each level).

But no. It was simply because I had copied the base class header file for the derived classes and forgot to change the multi-inclusion-preventer #ifdef on one of them, making it completely skip over the definition of one of the intermediate classes. Duh…

As part of the effort to work more exercise into my day, I’ve been taking the stairs instead of the elevator whenever possible. It’s a lot more practical at the office now that we’re only five flights of stairs up instead of seventeen.

Unfortunately, the building staff is being a bit lax in their duties. About half the time, I come in in the morning, walk up the stairs, and suddenly discover that the stairwell door is still locked, even though they’re supposed to have opened it an hour earlier. So, then I have to go back down and take the elevator up anyway.

At least I still get the exercise, but it still feels pointless sometimes…

(Update: And it’s still locked as of lunchtime…)

There’s still some construction work and last-minute repairs going on around the new office, and sometimes they’re hard to ignore…

There’s a high-pitched whistling sound coming through the air conditioning vents in the areas around my office. It might not be so bad if it was a constant tone as it would then just blend into the rest of the background noise, but it wavers slightly in frequency, constantly drawing attention to itself. And, apparently my hearing is better than I thought it was, as I’ve been having difficulty convincing others that it even exists. It’s plain as day to me, but I had to drag the boss into one of the rooms where it was the loudest before he could notice it. Supposedly it should get fixed when they rebalance the air flow, but they can’t do that until they fix a broken air conditioning unit, and who knows when they’re going to get around to that…

They’ve also finally placed the glass partitions by the door frames and sealed them with silicone. Unfortunately, that means the whole office now smells like silicone fumes. Plus, my door frame is apparently slightly crooked, so they’ve placed a brace there to force it open a bit wider while the silicone sets. And by ‘brace’ I mean a chunk of wood stretched across the middle of the door frame so that I have to duck underneath it every time I leave or come back.

To my smelly office. Where my brain gets stabbed with a high-pitched knife.

We’re pretty much settled into the new place now. The offices seem to be about the same size in total, wider, but just a little less deep:

The view isn’t quite as nice though…

When I first started working here, our office was in the same building as a fairly decent food court and right next to a couple other good ones. When we moved away, I could still get to those food courts through the +15 walkway system, I just had to go through about 9 buildings to get to it. After the next move, it was 15 buildings. And now it’s 18 buildings, and backtracks a couple blocks since not all buildings are directly connected.

Ah, the things we do to avoid going outside…

Just before lunchtime, the fire alarm went off in our office building, so we dutifully filed out outside. It may all be downhill, but walking down 17 flights of stairs still leaves my legs feeling like jelly. Since it was so close to lunch though, I just went off to a nearby food court instead of fighting for the elevators back up.

And then about 10 minutes ago, the alarm went off again. Wheee. No excuse to avoid the elevators this time.

And then while on the way back up in the elevator, the alarm went off again. But this time it was only on for a few seconds, so everyone just ignored it…

The work/coding-related entries are now locked and discontinued. Sorry to all you searchers who were looking for some of the technical stuff in there.

If I have time, I may go back and edit out the work context from some of the more useful entries.