The Waffle House Code Engine

I spend a lot of time at my local Waffle House writing code. I know, not the most up-scale choice, but unfortunately a necessary one considering the lack of other good options these days.

For those unfamiliar with it, Waffle House is a very large chain of greasy-spoon diners. It is nearly a national chain, but there are a few areas that haven't been graced with a waffle house yet but most places have something similar.

Waffle houses are very small restaurants seating around 25 people comfortably. They are usually located on major interstates or within major cities. They are also notoriously dirty places, with generally crappy food guaranteed to cause heat disease nearly instantly. The regular clients of such places range from retired old men to drunken motards with a lot of not much in-between.

On the plus side though, waffle houses are cheap places to eat (more or less), they serve great coffee. For their employees the house pays weekly, and they pay in cash too. This makes it the ideal job for drug-addicts, escaped convicts, illegal immigrants, and anyone whose idea of a "savings" account includes a mattress and some coupon books.

It wasn't always this way for me.

I used to hang out in higher-class establishments like IHOP or Denny's. Hey! I didn't say "high" class, just higher class than the awful waffle. But I'm a smoker, and I love sitting around with my laptop writing code while drinking coffee and smoking at 3am, and for that there just aren't many class-establishments to choose from.

It just works for me.

I've tried this at home, but all that mess about having to get up and make coffee, pour it myself when my cup runs empty... uug... and I don't smoke in the house so I have to actually go out to the garage when I want a smoke. Also, at home I have all my other stuff handy like the TV, a fast internet connection, and a lot of neglected chores that need doing.

So its easy to get distracted.

At the office, things are better. But there I have co-workers that need working with, my end-users have questions to ask, bugs to report, and just general problems that need solutions. Plus there is my boss who needs status updates and has new ideas and features to propose and some other projects to discuss. Then there are meetings and the occasional talking to the customer too.

In short:

if(codeAtHome == null && codeAtWork < optimal)
{
    DoWorkAtWaffleHouse();
}

So while I get code done at the office, and less often even at home, I still do my best work after-hours in places where there are people getting paid to look after me. Plus the staff makes good entertainment when you need to take a break from the screen for a bit.

But the anti-smoking movement is on its way, and I'm sure it wont last much longer, every year there is more and more political noise in the direction of banning smoking in all public places. At this point it may just be a matter of time. So once I either quit smoking (which I'm planning to do this year) or they finally ban it, the only real thing that changes is that I'll have more options for where to hang out.

Pack'n

Update: 6 months after buying the XD, I have replaced it with a Walther PPS 9mm. Find out why in my folllow-up post.

I was raised around guns. As a kid I lived on a small hobby farm in a rural part of South Carolina, and guns were just part of the scenery. As young as 6 or 7, I was using small rifles and shotguns. Not that I was much of a hunter or anything. Mostly the guns were for defense.

We raised cattle, and packs of wild dogs were still common in the area, so we carried weapons of some kind almost all the time in the woods or pasture. Usually we carried knifes, BB guns, pellet guns, or sometimes just big sticks. But if a pack of dogs had been sighted, suspicious strangers reported in the area, or a violent crime where the assailant was still at-large, we'd switch up to shotguns and rifles.

At least twice, having a gun on me in the woods saved my life. Once from a group of dogs and once from a very upset bull.

I have a healthy respect for the 2nd amendment and I am comfortable with guns, but I've not bothered to keep my own guns as an adult. I had several reasons including the high cost of weapons, but mostly it was just because I usually had roommates who owned plenty of guns. I just never felt the need to buy my own.

I'm not the kind to trust the police and government to protect me from danger. Police are great 10 minutes after the shit hits the fan, but they aren't likely to be handy when you are actually being assaulted, robbed, mugged, car-jacked, etc.  And governments are just as likely to be doing the assaulting as protecting anyone from it. Likewise though, I do have a good grasp of the actual rarity of random personal assaults. Even in the most dangerous of urban areas. most assaults are committed by people you already know and have pissed off. So I just make a habit not to know too many people likely to assault me, and avoid pissing off the rest so much. This greatly increases my odds.

Still though, I have a habit of being out late at night and hanging around slightly dangerous places. I also own my own house now and live alone most of the time, so there aren't roommates with guns around anymore. And that is why  I finally decided to buy a handgun, learn to shoot reasonably well, and get my conceal and carry permit. I have always carried a good knife on me, but I have no doubt that a knife would probably do little for me against a real threat.

Time to upgrade.

One thing that always bothered me about civilian gun owners is that they tend to get carried away. I don't know exactly what it is that makes an ordinary person become a gun-nut, but It does seem to be a very simple conversion for most people. They decide they want to buy a gun, and two weeks later they are at the gun-show picking up their 8th pistol and 3rd rifle and have most of their credit cards maxed out on accessories already. They'll go on for hours on end debating the merits of this vs. that weapon, talking technical details about the performance characteristics of different kinds of ammo, and worst of all --they spend an enormous amount of money buying weapons, accessories, and gear that they will likely never use other than recreationally.

I'm not a person who has a need to be a gun-collector, and I've never wanted to be a suburban gun-nut. But in becoming a gun owner, I see more clearly just how very easy it is to fall into becoming one. Guns are not simple, especially handguns. They come in an amazing array of sizes, shapes and calibers. Just deciding what to buy requires a significant investment in time and learning. And no handgun is good for everything. So it becomes very easy to have a conversation like this with yourself:

"I'll get the 5" 9mm semi-automatic for the shooting range. It is very accurate, holds a lot of ammo, and won't beat the shit out of me. It'd have similar enough recoil to my concealment weapon to make it good for practice."

"Then I can get the 6" .22 semi-automatic for the range because ammo is dirt cheap for those, almost no recoil so you can fire it all day long, plus they are just plain fun."

"But I still need a concealment weapon. For that I'd like to get the 3" sub-compact semi-auto .45 with double stack magazine. Big bullets for best chance to put down an attacker in one shot, double stacked for more bullets, and still short enough to fit in a concealment holster... more-or-less."

"But in the summer when I'm wearing thinner clothes, it would be easier to conceal that tiny little 9mm with the single stack magazine. It is really tiny, but with smaller bullets it holds as many shots as the double stack .45 and is a lot lighter. Of Course it will kick like a mule and be less accurate, so it's not that good at the range".

"OK, maybe I should go with a longer weapon. A 4" barrel will help with accuracy, even though it's harder to conceal, but that's OK I can go with a smaller caliber instead".

"Crap, what about brand. This one has a manual safety which I like, but it is double action on that first shot, which always throws off my aim. Maybe I should get the one with the trigger and grip safeties instead... I don't like that as much, but it has a single action first pull... which would be better in a crisis.

"What about a revolver. They are more reliable and a little simpler to use."

"Now, should I get all metal, or go with a polymer frame?"

"Fuck-it, I'll just buy ALL of them!"

  
So I can see how collectors and gun-nuts happen.

For the record, I decided on a 3" Sub-Compact XD .40 Caliber from Springfield Armory. It's a short and squat weapon, but still a tad on the thick and heavy side. For most people it probably wouldn’t matter, but I'm so thin that concealing a weapon of any kind is a tad tricky. But this one conceals reasonably well when I wear a coat or heavy shirt, and most of the time I'll probably just be in my laptop bag anyway (I rarely go anywhere without that at my side).

I stubbornly refuse to go crazy and become a total gun nut and collect a personal arsenal. But also, I do live in a two story house so I'll probably pick up a second handgun for up-stairs and eventually a slimmer 9mm carry weapon for those times when the XD is just a tad too big or when I'll be carrying for longer periods of time. Add that to a 12 Gauge shotgun, the ultimate home-defense weapon, and that should be about all I'll need. It's Four weapons, but still... most of my friends own twice that many or more...

Shit... OK, I'll admit it... I'm now officially a gun-nut. Damnit! But I promise not to get too carried away.

I'm not your prozac

Caress has started blogging her experience with AVM over at "I'm not your prozac". She wrote a lot of those posts while she was going through her procedures, but since I hadn't gotten off my lazy ass and put up her blog site (and she was a tad too busy to do it herself) she's didn't get them online until more recently. Most of her posts are back-dated to when she actually wrote them.

I've avoided blogging about the experience mostly because I was waiting on her to blog about it first, and also because AVM is too damned scary for me to blog well.

Akamai MSDN Download Manager sucks!

 Richard's Braindump: Problems with the new MSDN Download Manager

I agree with Richard, the new MSDN download manager is worse than horrid. I've ran into every one of the problems reported but these in particular really chap my ass:

• Close IE and the download manager closes. It asks you if you really want to close it, but it doesn't matter what you say... it will close anyway. When you re-open it, your download will be corrupt and you'll have to start over again from the beginning.
    
• It'll just randomly tell you it can't download because of persistent network problems... and you can't resume because your file is corrupt.
   
• If you have pop-up blocking on in IE 7 (which is the default) you might never get the download manager installed. It pops up a new browser window, which IE blocks, then the main page refreshes so fast you never see the notification that there was a blocked pop-up.

I have additional complaints too.

• Adding additional files to the download manager sometimes (and by "sometimes" I mean "nearly always") closes the download manager... which as we discussed already, corrupts any files it was already downloading.
   
• Manually pausing a download also usually corrupts it.
    
• When it asks if you want to start the download all over again, and you say yes, it usually can't... so you have to remove the file from the manager, go back to the MSDN page then re-click the link.... which will close your download manger and corrupt the rest of your files!

And even if they fix these major technical problems, there are other issues I have with it:

• Files are either downloading, or paused. There isn't a way to put them in any particular order in the queue and download them sequentially... so if you want to pull in 5 files, but you want 1 file immediately, then the rest to finish up whenever you have to pause all the downloads except the one, wait on it to finish, then manually resume the others.
   
• There doesn't appear to be any mechanisms in place to allow you to throttle how much bandwidth it uses.
   
• It allocates the disk space before the download starts. I HATE that. If you only have 1gig downloaded so far, it should not be taking up 4gig on my hard drive. When I'm low on disk space I can't start the download and have it coming down while I go and clean up some drive space. I have to clean up the space before I can start downloading. Minor issue, but still annoying.

Seriously, this thing is a total piece of shit... Why can't you just give me a damned link?

I have a download manager than works really good. I can control what files come down, in what order, how much bandwidth to use, and how many files to work on at a time (I use ReGet for those of you that may be curious).

Come on, just give me a regular old hyperlink or put it up on an FTP or something.

Considering that an MSDN Premium Team Suite subscription costs $10,000 up-front and around $3500/year for renewal fees,  it isn't too much to ask for is it?

Microsoft Money... still sucking...

The world of personal finance software is one of my least favorite. Anyone developing in this market has a tough job. People are idiots, and personal finance itself is especially designed to cleverly imitate real accounting yet completely fail to make any logical sense at all.

So I am never surprised at the crazy junk I see in personal finance software. The system it targets is moronic in the extreme, and the target user is assumed to equal that standard. 

But I'm a special idiot... one that uses Microsoft Money. I have tried Quicken, but I find their junk just a tad more annoying than MS Money but for different reasons. I also detest Qicken's license terms and marketing strategies. In contrast, Microsoft's lack of strategy in the personal finance market is quite refreshing. So I keep using MS Money even though I hate it.

The most annoying thing about MS Money is that they somehow makes it mandatory to upgrade to the new version every year. Somehow the old version just ends up "breaking" over time until you eventually get pissed enough to upgrade. I have no idea how they manage this, but eventually my old copy just sorta stops working right. Last time it was the fact that it wouldn't work after a patch for IE came out (and no fix available for the old version naturally). This time it just stopped being able to talk to my bank one day.

Every time I upgrade, I end up being amazed at how little was actually improved, or even changed from the previous version and equally amazed at just how many annoying "features" are still exactly as annoying as before. There always seem to be a couple of things I really like that manage to disappear from each version, and one or two new features show up that I don't care about at all. So each time I curse myself for forking over yet another $50 instead of just taking the time to put together my own spreadsheet in Excel... but I still I upgrade anyway.

Among my biggest complaints is the default "basic" checking account register. It completely lacks seriously important features, features I'd consider quite "basic"...  like the fact that it is missing the entire right-click menu and has no obvious alternatives for useful things like creating a reoccurring bill from an entry in the register, or marking transaction as reconciled, etc. It is also not obvious that you are even in a "basic" mode, nor that there an "advanced" mode that you could be using instead. Sure, there is a "Basic Register" icon, complete with text label at the top of the page, but it blends in so well that I never even noticed it until someone pointed it out to me. The "basic" mode just make the application feel like a piece of crap that doesn't do much of anything.

Fortunately, I do know about advanced mode, despite not having noticed the icon. I know this because I had used older versions where the advanced features were enabled by default. When I first upgraded to a version with the "basic" register and saw that those features had gone missing, I located how to enable them again via the online help. But the "advanced" register isn't exactly "advanced".  It just adds a few minor details to the list of transactions, turns on the right-click menu, and that's about it. But getting advanced mode enabled sure does requires an hell of an advanced level of skill. That icon at the top of the page isn't even clickable to toggle the mode! Instead, enabling the advanced register remains something that I have to look up in the online "help" feature each time because it is cleverly hidden deep within the not-so-fun "options" section of the program. Fortunately the online "help" is one of the few really well done parts of the application, and provides clear instructions for how to enable the missing functionality.

Then MS Money has the "basic" bills tracking system as the default too. In a misguided fit of "simplification", the developers of the default bills tracker helpfully allow you to choose to pay a bill using automatic payment (a.k.a. Bill Pay), electronic payment (e-pay), or by writing a check... But they thought that a "direct draft" bill was just too fucking complicated for the "basic" user, so that option isn't available unless you turn on the advanced bill tracking system. It's almost like they missed the fact that nearly every utility company on the planet pushes direct draft payment options like it was high-grade cocaine... Even people like me that prefer a push payment system over a pull payment system often end up with one or two drafts each month. In my case, some of my utilities actually give a discount if you agree to let them draft your payment. But, according to the crack MS Money development team I now know that only "advanced" users would need direct draft as a bill payment option. Thanks guys.

Then you have odd shit. Like the fact that, even in basic mode, MS Money encourages you to track your gross pay, taxes, withholdings, etc. from your paycheck. Most average joe home-users are obviously people that need to track the exact amount of their 401K deductions, but they would never need anything as advanced as fucking direct draft!

Anyway..

I find this "basic" vs. "advanced" thing to be a very obvious sign of poor UI design. After-all, it isn't as if there are THAT many "advanced" things you can do. Seems to be there should be just one account register, and just one bill tracking system. Then, by using good UI design, the software can helpfully arrange commands in a way that isn't confusing. The saddest thing is, the "advanced" register and bill tracking systems are actually quite easy to use once you figure out how to enable them. But most average joe home-users will never even learn that there is an advanced mode at all, much less get it turned on. Instead, most people would just think MS Money sucks and would not bother to use it... and, after asking around, this seems to be exactly what most people really do think.

asp.net - Web Site vs. Web Application

For more info, see my follow-up article: ASP.NET: web site vs. web application project - Part 2 

A few years ago, when I first got a look at asp.net 2.0, it was clear to me that there must have been some serious changes inside the development team at Microsoft. ASP.NET 1.x was a huge leap forward in server side web application frameworks, but it was also geared to an object oriented audience. While it did support direct data access from web pages and everything-in-one-file styles, Visual Studio's use of asp.net encouraged a more tiered design with clean separation of presentation, business, and data access. It also encouraged OO  design by making inheritance, namespaces, and assemblies all obvious, simple, and the default way of things.

By the time asp.net 2.0 was coming out,  more agile languages were getting all the buzz. PHP was still relevant and Ruby on Rails was shaping up to be the next big contender. By that time Java's JSP, the only other heavy OO platform that still mattered, had fallen flat on its face. So it wasn't exactly a surprise that there was a focus within asp.net 2.0 towards the "less is more" philosophy of quick, dirty, do-what-I-mean design. Codeless databinding, master pages, skins, themes, and configuration driven providers for common stuff like membership, profiles, personalization, etc. were all expected.

But what make several of us step back was the new compilation model and the "project-less" web site... er... project. Aside from being one of the most impossible to name mechanisms, it was also a breaking change in how asp.net was done. The new compilation model threw out the visual studio project file itself, took asp.net back to the "compile-on-the-fly" concept, all but eliminated the use of namespaces within a web site, and radically altered the way UI template and the associated code-behind were arranged.

But for those of us doing serious web frameworks in large or complex environments, the web site model had some serious drawbacks. The biggest for me was having to manually deal with namespaces, which the UI and code designers would fight every step of the way (until you finally gave up and just let it pile up in one big default namespace). The loss of the visual studio project files was also painful, and it lead to an awkward "exclude from project" mechanism where the only way to get Visual Studio to ignore a file was to physically rename it. Large web sites with lots of code suffered horribly in performance because so many helpful visual studio features, like refactoring and the verification compiler had to sift through every file in the project with no guidance from project configuration.

Microsoft seemed to notice the problem, and resurrected the old project model in what they called the "Web Application" Project. This was essentially a retro-fitted clone of the old project model complete with designer generated code files (updated to take advantage of partial classes though). The new project type brought back namespaces, and once again encouraged clean OO design patterns. It also became apparent over a very short time that Microsoft itself would consider the web application model the new "enterprise" project type while the web site project type was more for the beginner and casual developers. For example, Team system's testing, build, and deployment work great with the web application project, but work poorly if at all with web site projects. But the new project type also brought with it the need to compile everything in advance, and used a different mechanism to associate UI and code-behind files that was incompatible with dynamic compilation.

With Visual Studio 2008 Microsoft is keeping both project types. But I think they are missing an opportunity. While the web application project and web site projects both have advantages and disadvantages, there doesn't seem to be a compelling reason for some of the features to be mutually exclusive.

I for one would love to see a hybrid project type. Keep the project file to organize the site and give us a place to put visual studio specific settings. But switch it use the dynamic compilation model from web site projects. Dynamic compilation and xcopy deployment were powerful ideas, and I can't see any reason they can't be used still. The verification compiler can be optimized quite a lot by having access to a project file... exclusions can be dealt with elegantly, and the whole thing can be sped up. For other code though, you could choose to continue to compile to an assembly in advance, or leverage the app_code folder for dynamic compilation, or a combination of both. And of course, keep the namespaces and configurable compiler options.

I'd love to see a web project type that keeps the best of web site and web application projects both. Give me control over the project's structure, namespaces, and compilation but also give me xcopy deployment, dynamic compilation (using my settings), and keep a consistent way of associating an asp.net UI file to its code-behind without requiring the designer generated code file and full compilation.

Oh well, maybe in the next release.

Weighted Obsolescence: Phone book season

Few things annoy me quite like having phone books delivered to my house. There was a time when the phone book was pretty important --a time when taking a decent sized ad out in the yellow pages was the difference between a successful small business and a fire-sale. But between the internet and 411, phone books are obsolete now.

There are still a small number of people, mostly older ones, that consider this whole internet thing to be a fad. They would still prefer a printed phone book... old habits. But for most people the phone book is just a huge waste of paper. And they must be terribly expensive. Someone has to spend large amounts of time composing the contents, doing the layouts, and overseeing a massive printing and distributing operation. The books have to be printed, and that's a LOT of printing. Then they have to be physically delivered, which must represent a truly staggering cost since each one is bulky, heavy, and has to be shipped individually to a different location. Massive costs, and massive waste. Wouldn't it be better to just charge a nominal fee to people that WANT a printed phone book, and just not bother the rest of us?

Despite the irrelevance of phone books though, there is an active war in the business between several different companies. Each of them has, for reasons that still elude me, decided that the phone company isn't qualified to maintain and distribute the directory of phone numbers. Instead, these motards decided that they could do a better job and that it is their moral imperative to bring competition to the phone book market!

So every year, I get two or three huge bricks of useless paper delivered to my door. Well, more precisely, delivered to some random part of my yard that I probably won't go into for at least four or five months after the phone book has been delivered to it... not actually delivered to the door you know. For reasons even more screwed up than the basic business plan, all of these companies decided that they had to deliver their brand of awesomeness at the same time of year.

So last week I got three massive, but irrelevant phone books littering my yard. Of course, by the time I noticed two of them, they had been sitting there collecting water and bugs for a few days making them even more massive. The water and bugs don't make the book any more useless though, that would be an impossibility given their very nature.

Its bad enough that I have to dispose of these relics of hate, but what REALLY chaps my ass is this... I don't have a phone line. In fact, there is not and NEVER has been a phone line at my address. So WHY do I get three damned phone directories that I wouldn't need even if I did have a phone?

You guys seriously need to talk to Maxxum. At least they put half-naked girls on the cover of the unsolicited, irrelevant crap they drop off at my house.