Feral Code Monkies

Um.  Wow.  It has been a REALLY long time since I’ve posted on my blog.  I’ve been frighteningly busy in my life.  I’ve been working out for the past 4 weeks, and have taken up Racquetball.  Friggen awesome game!  I love it, and though I still, well, you know, suck, it’s an absolute blast, and plan on taking the time to get good at it.  I’ve also been doing the full-on workout think with weights, including creatine and protein supplementation.  So far, so good.  My arms aren’t exactly what you’d call “guns”, but they’re actually showing, which is saying something.

We also got the NetFlix Wii DVD last night, and let me tell you, it works great.  It’s a tiny bit grainy, but I knew that going in; it’s a Wii, not an XBox 360 or a Playstation 3.  It buffers flawlessly, and is very easy to control and use.  My wife and I started re-watching the Highlander TV series, and SeqQuest.

I’ve also downloaded and installed VS.NET 2010, since it went RTM on the 12th.  At some point in the hopefully near future, I’ll be updating my blog to use .NET 4 and MVC 2.  Probably even some Silverlight so I can learn to use it as well.  Exciting times.

I’ve learned an important lesson; ALWAYS back up your posts, pages, and any other dynamic data before trying to do any updates to your site.  I was testing some ASP.NET Web Service stuff with my site, and lost a bunch of posts, which is why it looks like I haven’t posted since March of last year.  Sigh.  Oh well.  As I said, lesson learned.

Also, due to furiously large amounts of spam, I’ve had to turn comment moderation on, so if you post legitimately to my blog, give it a day or two to show up.  I hated having to do it, but until I find a way to prevent these f’ers from spamming my site, it’s necessary.  Also, please post with an actual name, not the name of a company or such, or I’ll assume the comment is spam, and delete it.

When are they going to make spamming a capitol crime?  ;)

Several weeks back, I brought my 80 Gig iPod Classic to the local Mac store to have it repaired.  The Click Wheel had become faulty, and as a result, it was almost impossible to pause a song, or shut the thing off.

Almost three weeks later, I still hadn’t heard anything from them, so I contacted them to get a status update, only to find that they hadn’t even shipped it back for repair yet!  Needless to say, I was livid.  They immediately shipped the unit, and let me know they’d keep me updated.  That was a week and a half ago.

Having already spent several weeks without my tunes, I called back personally every other day to get a status on it.  Finally today, I received a call from the Mac store, telling me that they still hadn’t heard anything from Apple.  They guy I talked to said he’d talked it over with his boss, and they didn’t want me to wait any longer.  I’m now sitting at home with a brand new, 120 Gig Classic as compensation for my time.  Not a bad deal.  I’ll certainly shop there again, at least when it comes to iPods or accessories.  I still intend to buy a Dell laptop, especially with Windows 7 sounding so damn promising, but as for my music needs, I’ll leave those with Apple and the iPod.

Damn, but it’s been a long week.  Granted, I’m 33 years old, but it’s Saturday night, 10:16 at the exact moment I started typing this, and I’m SO ready for bed.  It’s possible that the Peppermint Patty I’m drinking has something to do with it, but who knows?  By the way, for the uninitiated, a Peppermint Patty is an adult beverage, consisting of hot cocoa, peppermint schnapps, whipped cream, and Cream de Minthe.  Very good! 

I’ve been working my tail end off at work on an old ASP classic application, that shall remain nameless to protect the innocent (specifically, me), and am SO ready to have 5 minutes in a ring with their lead developer.  I’ll even let the guy wear a Hogu (Taekwondo chest protector).  Never would I have thought, except maybe when I was first beginning my journey as a developer, that it’d take 3 damn days to get a drop down working on a web page!  No kidding!  Not because I’m lacking in skills.  As humbly as I can say it, I’m not lacking for knowledge when it comes to being a developer.  No, it’s the fact that you have to sort through many layers of ASP, XML, VBI, and XSL files to find what you’re looking for.  And when you DO find it, they’ve got so much custom junk in the way that’s it’s ridiculous.

Case and point.  Part of the application is a form that has its controls generated dynamically based on settings in a database.  The user can specify what data type the field should contain, whether it’s a dropdown, a text box, or whatever, and so forth.  Now, they offer the developer very little in the way of customization on the screen, so if a custom need arises that the designer doesn’t support (more often than not, sadly), we have to resort to javascript.  Not too big an issue, normally, except that it’s not as simple as it should be.

The form uses dropdowns, just like any other form might.  So what happens when I try to use my friend jQuery to find the dropdown?  I get back zilch!  Nada.  Nothing.  I used the right ID, so why aren’t I getting anything.  Oh, hey, I bet it’s because all I can see in the DOM at runtime for the dropdown is a DIV element with an IMG element in it.  That’s it.  No SELECT element to be found. Yet one is being drawn!  AAAAAAAARGH!!!  I’m still waiting for a decent response from the parent company about how to deal with it.  So far, their response, literally, was “we don’t know how to do what you need”…    I say again.  Please, just 5 minutes in a ring.  That’s all I want…

I’ve also been busy hammering away at a jQuery Brownbag that I’m leading on Friday.  Our company recently added it to the list of things they support, and as the company expert on it so far, the task has fallen on me to make sure everyone comes up to speed on it.  I’m looking forward to doing this, as I love this library, and really wonder how I ever got on without it.  Oh yeah, I remember.  I wrote lot’s and lot’s of code that eventually found their way in to libraries.

So, as I said, I’m exhausted, and can’t wait for beautiful, beautiful sleep to take me… 

OK, I think I've finally settled on the theme that I really like.  It's called iTheme, and as of today, is the theme shown on the site.  I want to make it a bit wider, and will most likely be uploading a new version in the next couple days, but for now, I really like how it looks.  I also intend to get some monkey images up at some point as well.  Why?  Well, think about the name of the site...

In other news, I've managed to find 3 pretty substantial bugs in a version 6 production application that we use at work.  Apparently, some people have never heard of Q & A.  Sad, really.  It took me all of 2 seconds to fix each, once I'd found the cause (in an application that has an ASP file, a JS file, a VBI file, and possibly and XML file to edit to correct one stupid thing, they take a while to find).  Why anybody would continue to release NEW products in ASP is beyond me.  Microsoft is getting ready to soon relase .NET 4.0.  Come on, guys!  Get on the friggen ASP.NET bandwagon already... 

The company I work for recently purchased an application that we lowly developers are of course required to support.  The problem lies in the fact that it's implemented in Classic ASP.  In and of itself, this isn't a bad thing.  A little archaic with it's wonderful jumble of spaghetti code (dammit, now I want spaghetti), but certainly maintainable.  No, this particular product doesn't stop there.  Almost all of it's configuration is in large XML files, all of which have to be cached when the web application first loads.  After a 5 minute wait, you're up and running.  If the session didn't time out first, of course. If you make a small change to a javascript file, you get to wait another 5 minutes to reload it in to the cache.

Adding controls to a form is fun.  You have to change the database to store the new value(s), alter about 5 different settings in a designer that takes at least 30 seconds to change each setting, then publish, which takes another 5 minutes.  So, to add a control to a form, you're looking at a good half hour of work.  Minimum.  For one field.  Another half hour for the 2nd field, and so forth. 

Ah, the wonderful life of a developer.

I'm looking forward to this Mac...

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

I'm currently playing around with a bunch of various themes on my local dev box, hoping to find that one that jumps out at me as "Cool!".  In the mean time, I'll stick with this one, as I like how it separates the categories from the rest of the post.  Whatever theme I use permanently will do the same.  I've got a couple that I'm converting to BlogEngine.NET themes as I find time.  We'll see how it goes, but they look nice!