Yes?

My buddy Eric made a submission to WorseThanFailure and was featured today! Check it out.

Holy Crap I'm Buying a House

The sellers got their act together, so we're buying a house. We close on Tuesday. Which is great, except that we had planned to not get the house, so we were only maybe 50% packed. The easy part.

So as soon as I returned from my company outing, the first things I packed were the 360 and my DVDs. That way I can't slack as easily. How much I want to play Forza 2!!

This post was written immediately after sealing the extra bedding box and immediately before checking the cabinets in the closet.

Query Analyzer, How Do I Hate Thee?

Microsoft's Query Analyzer is the tool MS provides as the main SQL Server development environment. Are they kidding? Besides the fact that it is broken, it lacks one of the best features ever made for IDEs: intellisense. How the hell is this not included? It could also have background compilation like VB.NET (checking for errors automatically). Adding these things are obvious wins.

What I'd really like to see is some sort of auto-formatting preferences. Everyone prefers their SQL formatted a little differently. I like capital keywords and short lines. Some like less indenting, lowercase keywords. Line breaks, spacing, capitalization of keywords, all these things have no impact on the actual parsing and execution of SQL code. The ideal SQL IDE would be able to store individual preferences for these things and apply them for each user. That way, I wouldn't spend 10 minutes reformatting SQL my coworker wrote or just struggle through it. This isn't really that hard; why they haven't done it is beyond me.

The Mighty Casey Strikes Out

My softball team had its first playoff game last night. Every team makes the playoffs, and we were the 7th seed out of 8, so that gives you an idea of how good (or bad) we are. Still we have lots of fun.

We were getting crushed, something like 12-3, in the 4th or 5th inning. I had been up once before with a bloop single the other way. I noticed their pitcher was changing his location based on where the batter was standing. So I tried to fake him out a little, standing in one location then moving as he delivered. That backfired when on a 3-2 pitch, I was standing about 6 inches back from the plate. I stepped in as the pitch came, but it appeared outside. It only looked outside because I was standing back, and as I watched the ball fall right on the outside of the strike mat.

I struck out looking in slow-pitch softball! And to make matters worse, it ended up being the last at bat of the season for me! I'm so disgusted with myself.

Seriously, No House For Me

The town board of health did not meet; they didn't have quorum. So they meet tomorrow... if they say yes, then the sellers have like 2 days to get all their paperwork to the bank. If they don't make it, then we don't close.

We had to talk to our landlord because we might have to stay in the apartment, obviously. Ironically enough, he had already rented it. While we waited to hear back from him, we had about four hours of sheer terror, thinking we might have to move to a new apartment. Thankfully, our landlord, the coolest landlord ever, said we could stay, but only if we signed a 1-year lease (we'd been renting at-will). So possibly no new house for me until next summer.

Force Fixing

I talked earlier about using enums for things like datarows returned from the database. Well, as you might have guessed, if I change what I return from the DB, my app will break. I've had many arguments about this sort of behavior and whether it's better to hard code the metadata from the DB or soft code it (meaning use reflection or other tools to determine what has been returned and handle it accordingly). I had a fairly long debate with Eric about it.

Obviously, as with every design situation, think of what you're doing first! Don't blindly follow a pattern. My coworker Joseph just transformed 500+ lines of code to 12 using reflection and soft coding. Was this a good move? Yes, because the code is still readable and manageable. I don't have the code here, but basically he checks the data's name, then finds the textbox with the same name, and puts the data in the box. Even in his iteration, there is some hard coding.

The point I'm getting to is that the main point people mention as a con to hard coding is actually a plus in many cases; being forced to fix the hard-coded stuff when you change what it's coded to. Before you say "WTF Ed!" let me say this; I'm not advocating highly-coupled design. However, I am advocating coupling your data controller classes/code tightly to your database. That way, if you (or someone else) changes your database, your code will fail, and you are forced to fix it.

America, Know Thyself

I was reading this article in the NYTimes about the possibly extinction of the trees used to make ash baseball bats when I came across this interesting tidbit:

Still, the emerald ash borer, or Agrilus planipennis Fairmaire, is the most immediate threat. Discovered in the United States near Detroit in 2002, the beetles, which are shiny green, will destroy a tree in two to three years. The larvae tunnel inside the trees, cutting off water and food.

Wait wait... a new insect species was discovered in Detroit in 2002? It seems a little crazy that in a super-advanced nation such as ours, we still don't know all the species in our own borders.

I'm Never Going to Own a House

The sellers of the house I am attempting to buy met with the town board of health last night to discuss and potentially grant the necessary variance for doing the required septic work. Basically, the town was going to say "Yes" or "No". This meeting was last night, and it's now the morning after and I haven't heard anything. A little courtesy would be nice.

Enumerations, How I Love Thee

I love enums. I use them all the time. Jared on Giant Robots got me thinking more about them. Let me list the ways I love them:

• I use enums for column ids for a grid control. I get to say "grid.col(cols.thisOne)" instead of "grid.col(2)". Easier to read, easier to change, and it forces me to fix them on refactoring (more on this in a later article).
• When I have a stored procedure return more than one table, I will use an enum to index the tables in the dataset. Again, I get to do "ds.tables(products.sold)" instead of "ds.tables(1)".
• A more esoteric thing I like to do is when using datatables, I'll use an enum with "tostring" to reference the datarow. So I'd have something like "row(taskData.client.tostring)" ("taskData.client.tostring" evals to "client") instead of "row(5)". Again, this is more readable, and it forces fixing.

When I make an enum, I know exactly how it's going to behave. It's kind of like a super constant in that respect.

I'll talk about force-fixing in my next post.

Visual Studio Crash Log

This will a perpetual feature. I will log every time Visual Studio crashes on me and what I was doing when it did.

• July 2nd, 10:15AM: Building a solution.
• July 2nd, 2:55PM: Getting the latest from source control.
• July 3rd, 12:24PM: Building a solution.
• July 5th, 4:31PM: Building a solution.
• July 9th, 11:43AM: Building a solution.
• July 9th, 2:42PM: Getting the latest from source control.
• July 10th, 10:31AM: Rebuilding a solution.

More Home News

So our house closing got delayed... again! This time, the sellers need to get a variance from the town board of health to do septic work so close to the well. This time we even got in a big fight with the sellers; they didn't want to pay the fees they are legally required to pay. Oops. We'll move in eventually. Maybe.

Rest In Peace

I never really understood the words "rest in peace". It's almost a cliche phrase these days. I used it in a blog post over on IFOD a while ago. It's just something you say to someone who has died. More importantly, it's something you say to others who share your grief.

Recent events have caused me to think more about what "rest in peace" really means. For Jon to rest in peace, it would mean two things: 1) he'd have to be happy with his life, and 2) he'd have to be happy with how everyone else is doing. I'm certain he'd be happy with how his life was; he always was living 110% and having a great time. But he'd also have to be happy with how his family and friends continue to live.

So there's a large part of "rest in peace" that relies on us, living our lives as Jon would've approved or wanted. I've found myself thinking more and more about Jon in everyday situations. Not that I'm trying to be just like Jon (because, as anyone who knows me knows, that's impossible), but who knows.

(As always, I'm just rambling here. Nothing I post is meant to be preachy unless I say so.)

Left to right: Jon, Ed (me), Adam

Survival

Most of my friends knew Jon Snyder. Those who didn't know him learned of his passing by way of Annie or others. It's been a terrible time for all of us. There are no words to describe what Jon meant to most of us. Even people who crossed paths with Jon only briefly are profoundly affected by his death. I'm not going to try to relate how much we all hurt, and I'm not trying to write a tribute here.

It's been a two weeks since we in Boston got news of his death, and one week since his funeral. I am in better shape than I was last week; I can get stuff done at work, and I played in a softball game this week. I've done some cleaning and took out the trash. All things that I normally do.

And yet I still feel Jon's absence. I feel like I'm sleepwalking. Like it's all a bad dream. I seem to have a constant headache too. Katy said something that Bill mentioned at the funeral: "Jon's not gone; we just can't touch him anymore." I think that's what I feel when I say I can feel his absence. It's like a blind person; when you remove one sense, your others become heightened. Because I can't touch Jon, I can feel him more.

Here are some links:

Facebook group "Rest in Peace Jonathan Snyder"
Phil's well-written blog post
Kansas City Star Article
Obituary

Repurposing of the Blog... AGAIN

So obviously I haven't been writing much in here. Personal events of good and bad nature have happened, my goals have shifted, and things are just different. So prepare for a shift!

I Apologize for the Following

I need to rant.

I bought a house. I signed the purchase and sale agreement on April 22nd. We were set to close on May 31. That's 39 days. The sellers had one job during those 39 days: get the septic system inspected, and if it fails inspection, replace it. Naturally, you'd expect the sellers to do the inspection as soon as possible after the 22nd.

You'd expect wrong.

Our sellers waited until the week before closing to have the inspection done. And it failed. We still might have been able to close on time with a holdback (where the bank holds money from the sellers until they do the work), but the town engineer responsible for approving the plans was on vacation that week. Closing delayed.

I find out today that the town engineer looked at the failed report and was, and I quote, "confused." Apparently he couldn't understand why it failed. So he wants to dig up the system and take a closer look. Of course, this pushes back our closing to at least the 15th, possibly later.

All because the seller was too lazy to get the inspection done early.

Is this a serious problem? Not really. In two months, will I laugh at this? Yes. Am I super pissed right now? You betcha.

Could it be? Finally?

So the Halo 3 multiplayer beta went live last week. And I'm in it. Of course.

So where does this fall in terms of productivity? I almost feel like it's my job to play this game as much as I can before the beta is over, both because I feel some loyalty to Bungie to help them collect the data they want, and because it's a limited time beta, and I won't see Halo 3 again until September. But should I spent time on my website?

I've already given up on getting a formal video game review site working. I just don't have the time/money/crew to do what I dreamed of. But I could get a basic blog working, then add review functionality to it. And I could create the gamertype quiz I wanted to.

But, Halo 3. It's that good. :)

Productivity? Maybe...

I've been doing tons of stuff for the new house, so my traditional methods of tracking productivity@home do not apply. However, I did have time to make this Wikihow.

Scientists Discover Internet Is Useless

Last night I got home from work, sat down on the couch, and turned on my laptop. I booted up Firefox, checked my fantasy baseball scores, opened a new tab, and stared at the blank page. "What am I doing?" I thought. "Nothing," came the answer from my brain. And then it hit me.

Most people know that you can spend basically your whole life browsing the Internet. And I spend my whole day in front of a computer at work. I never thought of my browsing at home as a waste, but it is. I don't really accomplish or learn anything. It always ends with me refreshing blogs and using StumbleUpon.

So I got up (leaving StatTracker on, because, hey, I gotta know the score) and decided to do the last constructive thing I had thought about doing. I grabbed my Yankees baseball cap and hand washed it in the sink. It's nice and clean now, though still sun-faded.

Now that I've tackled one of my major time-sinks at home, I will attempt to conquer the next one: TV.

The Home Front

Last week I had to work from home for the afternoon. I treated it as a sort of trial run. Would I be able to maintain focus while the XBox 360 is only feet away?

Turns out I'm crazy productive while working at home. When I'm not in the office when I physically can be, I get pretty guilty, even if I have a completely legit reason. So that guilt drives me to focus, and focus I did. Of course, my couch and leisure clothes are much more comfortable too.

The office environment here doesn't really encourage random working from home, but often people take half a day off for a doctor's appointment or similar, then work from home the second half. I will be attempting to take advantage of that as best I can.

Thwarted Once Again

I've been quite busy with home stuff. We're approved for a mortgage now, so all that's left is to wait... and buy as much furniture and linens and stuff as we can stuff in my car. Also Annie and I are running again, so that takes some time.

I wanted to mention work blockages again. I mentioned previously how a seemingly impossible error can derail your work almost instantly. But sometimes it's not an impossible problem that can stop you. In my case, it was a 900-line SQL stored procedure.

I may have mentioned this before, but basically, this sproc, written by my coworker, creates a pivot table... in SQL. I had to make my own version of it with half the features his did. That was tough, and my brain threw some roadblocks in my way, but I made it through.

Then came the horrible moment. I foound out I'd have to restore all that insane code I mercilessly cut out. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!! [a la Darth Vader]

And so, for the past three days, I'd get into work, get my coffee, load up Visual Studio, poke around for a while, see my "TODO:" statements politely reminding me to "Fix the goddamned stored procedure from hell", fire up SQL Query Analyzer, load the stored procedure (via sp_helptext), then stare at the SQL until my eyes bleed (well, it feels like they do). This is not healthy.

I finally was able to figure out the problem and fix the code. So what's my point? I'm not sure. Maybe it's that debugging large SQL procedures is not why I decided to be a programmer.