Yikes, it's been a while

Hmm, it's been a while... it seems that life has gotten in the way of me updating my blog. No matter. Things are going very well according to plan. I'm starting working on my MBA (at the University of Houston, GO COOGS!) next week. (YAY!) Aaaaand... work is really great. I got back from the Dr. Dobbs Journal Architecture and Design World (learned a lot and met some interesting people). Umm... other than that, things are pretty much going steady and nice. My laptop battery (Dell 600m) is one of the recalled ones (kinda makes sense, the side of the computer where the battery is heats up a bit). Still, Dell is making it super easy, just type in your battery serial number, then fill in your address info and "voila" you will have your new battery (and instructions on disposing of your old one) within 20 days (ish). We'll see how long it REALLY takes. I'm finally starting to use Visual Studio 2005 (good grief, it's about time!). I wish Microsoft would hurry up and release their SP1 patches for Visual Studio 2003 and 2005. I'm also starting to learn more about web services and such. Very interesting. Oh, my abstract was accepted for the Baker Hughes Technology Forum 2006! Party on! I'm going to talk about how Inversion of Control can streamline the build / debug / test process. I'm also going to give a presentation for my group about all the goodies I learned at the Dr. Dobb's AD World thingy. I went to my last HDNUG (www.hdnug.org) (Houston Dot Net Users Group) meeting that I'll be able to attend for a while. I won a book (Test Driven Development (the NUnit book)), and a Best Buy gift card (shweeeeet). TDD is very interesting, I need to finish that book and send the HDNUGgers a review. I really want to start an independent project (been wanting to for a loooong whiles now). I'm thinking either an email-based game engine or perhaps a good subversion (subversion.tigris.org) client for GNOME. Not sure yet. Both would be fun projects. The former would be a .NET 2.o project using Windows Forms (or GTK#) and the latter would be GTK+ and C/C++. Oooooh... tasty. But... alas. School will take up a lot of my time I believe (and I really want to make sure I have enough time to get back into running). At one time, I was able to run almost 3 miles straight... I need to work back up to that. I've been going to the gym on a very regular basis now so far this year. I need to get my run on Tuesdays and Thursdays so I can keep up the burn. My goal of being under 200 lbs by end of the year doesn't seem like its going to happen. But hey, my clothes all fit better and I can wear some brand size 34 jeans, so that's a huge step in the right direction. In Nerdage news... I'm toying with the idea of upgrading my computer to the behemoth gaming machine worthy of an uber-nerd. Mmmmm.... silicon wafery goodness. Vee shall see how that little plan goes... Ah... hopefully I'll be keeping up with this blog more. It is very refreshing being able to dump my brain out here for my own posterity.

Fun at Work

I've been having some crazy fun at work! Our project is progressing very well and I've added some really sexy features to it. I found that I enjoy writing tools / scripts for developers more than writing applications for customers. (Unfortunately, the latter are more prone to paying for software than the former) ',;-) I am the resident build-master in my department. I manage the build scripts and make sure that people don't check in stuff that breaks the build. I could call myself a "Build Nazi", but that may carry the wrong connotation. I think of myself more like the "Soup Nazi", but with software builds instead of jambalaya. What is this commit? Huh? NO BUILD FOR YOU! Heh heh heh...

Yea, so. Fun at work. I think it's very important to have fun at work irregardless (not a real word) of anything. My modus operandi is that if I'm not having fun at work at the moment, I need to get up, walk around, and go bug some of my coworkers. After all, what good is having coworkers if you don't go bother them everyone once in a while to let them know you're still around.

I know there's some nerdage in this post somewhere... heh. Oh yea, the software I'm working on! Great stuff. I wrote a GUI framework a whiles back for this application and I'm finally getting some integration work done to pull pieces into it. Basically, you start with a skeleton application that has some menus predefined, a toolbar, a sidebar, and a main work area. You can define plugins via .xml files that exist in the distribution tree. These files are pulled in automatically when the application starts. I've been using Spring (for .NET) [linky: http://www.springframework.net]. They still have some bugs in there, but it's coming along really well. I think I had a post about it before... [linky]. Anyhoo, Spring is an "Inversion of Control" or "Dependency Injection" container. You describe objects in xml files and how to instantiate them. Each object may require other objects in the container to be set in the constructor or via properties (this determines the instantiation order). Check out the website, they have links to some articles regarding the topic. I may even write a paper or something about my GUI framework... oooh... great idea. So yea, the nerdage part of this is that you can drop new pieces into the application by dropping a folder into any subfolder of the application and then restarting the application. It will automagically pull in the new pieces and fire up the application. My boss liked it, I did a short demo where I pulled in a few pieces and showed how they were in the app, then deleted a folder, restarted the app and showed that the features were missing. So, the great part is that when I do a "debug" build, it will pull in all our testing plugins that test the individual controls or features as well as the whole application. When we want to do a "release" build, it won't pull those folders in. If we wanted to update a feature, we could just remove the folder and put the new one in. If we wanted to add a new feature, all we do is push the folder into the filesystem. Sexy! My job satisfaction has been skyrocketing these last two weeks. I owe it to my overdue vacation in California. (Nice place to visit, but I wouldn't live there unless I got some crazy crazy job offer or something I couldn't pass up). I couldn't move there though... I would miss my family and my girlfriend. I dunno what it was, but after I got back from my vacation, my fingers had a mind of their own (don't think dirty thoughts, I'm talking about typing). I think I'm going to need a new keyboard soon... my old one at work is a biohazard area. I've spilled coffee, orange juice (both from an orange and from a bottle), milk, water, and random bits of food on it. It contains 2.5 years of hair, flecks of skin and boogers. I'm not afraid to admit that when I'm deep in thought, I pick my nose (I'm trying to pick my brain, but haven't been quite able to reach it). I have hairy hands and they like to shed. Back to job satisfaction... Yea. We have a really small group (4 developers) so I get a lot of freedom when it comes to what tools to use and I have a say in how the project goes programming-wise (15%... the manager has more pull than me, go figure). All this work on the build script and integrating into my GUI framework have been very invigorating. There's some thing beautiful about pulling a source tree, running one command, then firing up a working application. Mmmm... hotness. This high should last until mid to late June, at which time I hope to start up another high (with a new project). Ahhhh.... yummy.

Back to work...

Well, the holidays are officially over, time to get back to the daily grind. I'm looking forward to it, actually. That means I'll have more nerdy things to report on! (When I'm home, I try to nerd out as much as possible, but the holidays are usually very busy with non-nerdy things) ',;-) Right now at work I'm working on a GUI framework based on the Spring Framework for .NET (http://www.springframework.net). It's an "Inversion of Control" (IoC) container that is a port of the same framework for java (which seems to be popular). It allows us to develop software in parallel and forces us to take a component-oriented approach to development. I'll post some more juicy bits about it later, right now I need to get to bed because I'll be waking up at 4:30am tomorrow... gnight!