Piano

I've stopped learning how to play the piano.

I don't know what to do. I don't know how to really read sheet music. It's not motivating enough to simply follow this book. The book jumps too fast. I also don't know if I'm doing things right. I learnt that I was a note or two off for a few songs. It sounded weird but I didn't know.

With no direction, I feel a little messed up.

I'm considering hiring a tutor.

I need to also play more songs that I enjoy listening to. I can usually tell if a song is off. But if it's a song I know then I'll definitely know it's screwed up. It's also more motivating to do that than to just play scales. Scales are boring.

Everyone tells me that scales are the natural beginner's way to learn how to play a piano. That that's all that I need to know. But I fucking can't force myself to just play scales. I didn't buy a piano to learn how to play scales. I wanted to play songs. I can't *just* do scales. I need to play simple songs that compliment them.

I feel as though nothing is working for me.

R.I.P. Grandma

The funeral was last week Wednesday. Well, the ceremony was. The burial was on Thursday. I never forgave my parents for not telling me that my grandfather had passed away when I was in school. They considered school to be more important but I hated them for it.

She didn't leave this Earth in peace though. I know that. She attempted to kill herself a few times in the hospital. She was also living with my aunt who hated her company. She moved back voluntarily to help pay her (my aunt) bills during her messy divorce. Not to mention my uncle (not the previous wife's husband) was spending all his time taking away her life savings before she passes away. He took her money to bail out his son.

I'm honestly a bit tired of going through this drama repeatedly in my head. I wish it was easier than this. I can remember a time when family was simple. That was before I landed in Canada. My concept of family only consisted of my mother, father, and brother.

After we emigrated from England ... my parents were too busy and my grandmother took care of me a lot. Sadly, I could never truly communicate with her. I tried my best but my Cantonese or Vietnamese was almost non-existent. I still loved my grandmother. No matter how broken my Cantonese may have seemed. She still took care of us. Cooked for us. Looked after us. She even took care of the next wave of children who came by.

As a secular humanist, I don't believe in an afterlife. I also don't believe that she's looking out for me somewhere. But I would hope to live my life in a way that would make her proud. Which means, I'm going to have to be a better son to my mother. And a better family member to look out for the rest of those kids. 

Microsoft Dynamics CRM

So I'm trying to automate the deployment process for any Microsoft Dynamics CRM customizations that we perform.

Thus far, I've learnt the following things:

1. WCF does NOT play nicely with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
   
2. Apparently people rely on an external tool to register assemblies
3. There are two types of customizations. UI changes which annoyingly enough are called 'Customizations' and the second being assemblies deployed via 2.

Now, CRM to me is like SharePoint. It's an ASP.NET site that has all these extras that are loaded onto it. Since it's closed source, you need to be able to go around it. In order to automate deployment, we require a few funny tricks to be able to do it properly.

So far, I've narrowed it down to two steps. I need to run this PluginRegistration tool with two xml files to load in the CRM Customizations. Then I need to run my own custom application to load in and publish xml customizations.

Great, so how do I deploy it?

When I wrote my custom sharepoint package I wrote my own batch files that loaded and packaged everything into a cab file. They were pretty complex ... they didn't just run makecab. They also used scripting to do some automated things as well.

For this one, I'm thinking of using the SetUp Project for Visual Studio. I haven't done much of it yet. However, there are a few things that I see that I like already. I can output the results of any project into the project and it gets packaged. I also see that screens are nicely setup for me.

What don't I like about it?  It feels eerily restrictive. Each UI form has a set number of textboxes and radiobuttons that I can set their visibility. Their forms are dictated only by properties. I can only seem to add a certain number of forms. There's no designer for them. I can only enter code through CustomActions as well. I'm unsure how to do exception handling and for a silly little MSI app. But anyways, I'll need to run executables ... I'll need to run a lot of other things ... Just to see if this all works out. I'm wondering if it'd just be better for me to write my own .exe file to execute.

BULLSHIT

So a 47-year-old ugly person sings well. So what?

So she can sing. So nobody thinks she could because she didn't dress up or look like the norm.

Why the fuck am I reading all these self-satisfying mother fuckers writing articles about how disgusting all humans are and how we shouldn't pre-judge. Everyone's talking about how she teaches us a lesson about this.

Aren't there enough examples out there in the world of people who have broken preconceptions? You ever interview a candidate? You ever meet other people? It drives me absolutely insane.

You think this shows the ugliness of human nature? Are you fucking stupid? You ever heard of the Milgram experiments? How about Guantanamo Bay? How about the Taliban? How about the financial bastards who put us in the worse economic downturn since the great depression? You ever watch A&E where they talk about serial killers?

This doesn't even make a blip on my radar.

Now let's get back to this. This is the entertainment industry. Yes, most entertainers are intended to be very attractive and have a certain look but there 

*are* examples of entertainers who don't have the "look". Macy Gray, Courtney Love, or Amy Lee. So why is this making so much news!?

This is going to be my last example of why this commotion is ridiculous. This happened before:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DelJrP3P7tA

Same fucking show as well.

New Team

I'm a little annoyed at the circumstances that have occurred in the past week.

We had our principal architect run amok. He pumped up our website application with all these technologies. I had to be the wet blanket and say that I needed reasonable timelines to ramp-up on new technologies as well as architect time to help us along the way.

The deal was that our 3 person team was to grow to 5. My team lead and I were to each get an underling and to control either the front or the back-end. My 'sub' project manager was to get into coding a little bit more.

Due to circumstances beyond our control. They inform us that we will both lose our underlings. And lastly, I just lost my team lead.

The project will still go on without my lead. But that leaves myself as the technical lead on this project. I kind of want a lead on the project ... but I'd want a lead who's better than me. Otherwise, EVERY accomplishment I make is going to be "because we picked a good lead" and not because of me.

On the other hand, I don't want to be overwhelmed with technology and other things.


Here's a personal list of all the things that I want for the next project:

• NUnit (Unit Testing)
  
• RhinoMock
• VS 2008 Database Edition
• Entity Framework (Microsoft ORM)
  
• LINQ
• C# .NET 3.5
  
• WCF
• Silverlight 2.0
• MVVM Pattern
• CruiseControl

I'm devouring a book about the entity framework. I already know NUnit (straightforward enough). I need to know what RhinoMock is all about for devising my test cases. The VS 2008 Database Edition for managing database changes. I've read a lot of tutorials about LINQ. C# .NET 3.5 is just going to be me coding in 2.0 and learning about 3.5 from sample code I read online. I did some video tutorials of WCF a year ago but I'll need to refresh myself. I need to learn Silverlight from scratch as well as the MVVM pattern.

CruiseControl is set-up for managing our builds. I think I'll need to learn about how our solution builder works.

Previous Entry

The last entry looks fucked up because the blockquote button on the blogger is finnicky. Why is it finnicky, I don't understand ... You'd think it'd act like a toggle button.

Also I added some xml for my query. They're invisible because 'compose' doesn't automatically escape them.

I went to Edit Html and it's a mess. I'm not going to bother to escape them myself. I figured Blogger would take care of this. It obviously hasn't.

Bleh.

SharePoint Sucks - How do I debug this?

This is some dummy code that I'm testing:

SPSite site = new SPSite("http://site/");

        SPWeb web = site.RootWeb;

        SPList list = web.Lists["Project Management Documents"];

        SPView view = list.Views["View Reports"];

        SPQuery query = new SPQuery(view);

        query.Query = @"

                        

                          

                        ";

        query.RowLimit = 5;

        spLit.Text = list.RenderAsHtml(query);

So I execute the code. I get a null reference error at the bottom.

I'm like, that's odd. If any of those were actually null, then I should have gotten an error. Anyways, let's see:

list - exists

query - exists

spLit - exists

Fuck you SharePoint.

$

My brother had to do one of the harder things in life today.

He has to ask his little brother for money. This is the fourth time he hit me up for money this year. Don't get me wrong. I had to ask him for money when I was going to University. But, I've repaid that debt, add about 10-12K on top of all it.

Now I'm trying to be a little bit irresponsible with my money. And I've got to chip up way more on top of it. My brother's in a bind because he has nowhere else to go. He's not done school. He doesn't spend irresponsibly (he's using my old computers for crying out loud).

But there are two mortgages out there right now. All I know is that I'm paying for one of them. I gave more than my fair share. There are three other wage earners in this house. Apparently the three of them can't scrape the rest.

Do I sound insulting? Yes, am I trying to be? Nope. But being blunt can sound that way.

I'm rude when I'm around my parents a lot. Pritesh (who may be one of the only people who reads this blog) wonders why sometimes. It's because of moments like these. It's because my mom's too lazy to work. My dad's spending all his money on chicks. My brother's not out of school yet.

And I'm going out of my fucking mind.

iSuck

I hate Apple.

Apple is fucking worse than Microsoft.

I bought the iPod Touch. I was like this is going to be sweet!

However

• I learnt that iTunes on Windows is fucking brain retarded.
  
• I cannot copy a jpeg onto the touch without syncing a folder
• I CANNOT COPY A JPEG ONTO THE TOUCH WITHOUT SYNCING A FOLDER
• Syncing is retarded (goes for ALL mp3 players). I accidentally wiped out my music collection by syncing it with my work laptop.
• DRM Music. I purchased 3 songs from the iTunes store on my work laptop. Guess what? They're gone forever because I didn't back them up illegally.
• The videos only take Mp4; how fucking long do you think you can get away with this? It doesn't even take it's retarded QT format.
• I can't possibly separate my own mp3 in the podcast section. Only if I use iTunes.
• Playlist management is a fucking joke (aka there IS none (not without iTunes)).
• They tried to force me to pay $10 for a software update since I purchased it before Jan 2008. (fuck you to all who tell me this is justified)
• I turn the Touch and charge it while it's off. It's mean to be on and charged. Great way to kill the battery intentionally (planned obsolecense anyone?)
• How long do you think you can get away with not putting in a radio?
• I felt that they usurped features to not make it compete with the iPhone.

This is probably the last Apple purchase I'm going to make. I was considering a laptop but I think this is the end. I'm either going to get a BlackBerry, HTC Touch Diamond, or N95.

Commenting is important.

/***************************************************************************

* Table Name:

* Purpose: Retrieves 

*

* REVISION HISTORY

* -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* 4 Feb 2008 LA Created

* 20 July 2008 RL Added retrieving the end date and status alongside the rest

* 28 Sept 2008 RL Added retrieving the QAID

*******************************************************************************************/

Bitching

(paraphrase) "Arguing is a good thing. It's bitching that's bad. When an argument is over, the air is cleared. Bitching goes nowhere."

Branching

So I wanted to make my branch.

Can anyone tell me what justifies a good reason to branch?

Because apparently a lot of people are against it. So far the reasons are silly though:

- merging is going to be a nightmare (this one makes no sense)
- you're able to shelve changes (I tried not to scream at the top of my lungs)

I'm torn right now. I don't know whether to just fuck up the trunk and let my team feel the consequences. Or just do it anyways.

...

Okay, forget the 'justifies' a good reason to branch, I Googled it and did some reading. Here's a good resource:

http://www.ericsink.com/scm/scm_branches.html .

This is exactly where I fall under:

Subteam.  Sometimes a subset of your team needs to work on something experimental that will take several weeks.  When they finish, their work will be folded into the main tree, but in the meantime, they need a separate place to work.

I had three people tell me I was wrong at work. Fantastic.

BBQ

We had a party the other day at my company.

I had a guy come up to me and tell me that his team was crazy. They were working on Java with Linux. He said they were even using Cygwin.

Cygwin on Linux? I was confused.

Cygwin, I thought was a way to have emulate the Linux shell on Windows.

I attempted to clarify but I had two people in agreement that I was nuts. Then they said Cygwin is perfectly fine on Linux if you don't mind it running without the IDE. I'm like ... what IDE? Then they said that it's a good handler of source control.

I just went to the cygwin.com site and my initial definition is about right. There IS Cygwin on Red Hat. It's all about porting Linux apps to Windows. Cygwin/X apparently is doing the X Window thing on Windows.


No one would explain it to me though. I figure that at least they must have heard of my version of Cygwin.

Preview

Is it more important to have a developer who understands sales? Or is it more important to have a salesman understand development?

I'm taking a good look at how software consulting works.

The hierarchy of a consulting company (not too much from a regular software company) is:

Sales
(Technical Sales)
Account Manager
Program Manager
(Architect)
Team Lead
Lead Developer
Senior Consultant
Junior Consultant

Sales - does the immediate pitch of the product
Technical Sales - pitches the technical side of the product
Account Manager - performs high level assistance of the service
Program Manager - overlooks the health of the project in relation to deadlines
Architect - overlooks the overall technical architecture of the project
Team Lead - matches the technical implementation to the architecture to the specs
Lead Developer - does the implementation of the architecture
Senior Consultant - developer with imaginary importance
Junior Consultant - developer with no importance

I define these levels because to execute a large-scale successful product requires a good level of management between the two. In certain cases, no management at levels.

What a day

I don't take criticism well. I'll say that up front. However, if I have a heated discussion with someone. For example, Ian Halliday ... at the end of the conversation, after everything has cooled down. If the other person is right ... I'd like to think that I've taken away something from it. Sometimes I've even come back later and thank them for challenging me. It doesn't happen too often but I've done it before.

I admit it's a problem with me. I'd like to think that I'm at least man enough to admit my flaws. I also want people to point them out to me so I can work on them.

I just had a review today. I think it was probably the dumbest review I've ever gotten. They wanted it both ways.

The person giving the review received all his information second-hand. So I have to accept everything he says.

The person said he wanted a discussion. But he rarely let me speak.

The person claimed I missed most of my deadlines but did not produce anything to prove it. (I called bullshit on this.)

The person claimed that I was difficult to work with and missed deadlines but of all the developers ... they wanted to keep *me* on the project.

The person claimed that I was immature but instantiated the lower maturity on all the conversations. (I'll throw you off the roof) (That's what Italian mothers do) (etc etc ...)

The person claims that I should have clean code and yet claims that sometimes you have to do what you have to do. (Good, fast, and cheap ... I'm cheap, choose one of the other two)

Oh yes, they tell me to listen to my lead developer because it's his ass on the line. But, somehow I'm on trial for these problems. YOU CANNOT HAVE IT EVERY WAY.

By the by, no one else gets called out on the deadlines. I did miss deadlines. By about 3 hours ... once. Bad? My teammates missed theirs by days-weeks-months. *I* got called out on mine. I also got threatened by my lead developer. No one else did. No one gets a peep.

He's going to send this information to all the managers.

Reviews are a painful time for anyone/everyone. I take things critically, I'll concede that. I will call bullshit on anyone who says that they don't have similar flaws. You haven't looked at yourself honestly or clearly if you haven't. But, when you're going to go through a list of issues that I have. How can it be constructive criticism or even a discussion if you are not the person I've been dealing with? I can't defend anything. It's all a third source.

What happened was that things got hot. I was working on a volatile piece of code. Every change could break the system. I gave repeated warnings about the data I'm reading, its integrity, and the volatility. Instead my lead developer had amnesia and repeated the same thing over and over. Asking for me to have it all done ... I repeat the risks and tasks ... he says that's okay ... and he come back again asking the same thing. The next time with a threat.

Software

Here's a list of software that I've been using:

Programs
Mozilla Firefox
Paint.NET

Development
- Beyond Compare ($)

Configuration & Utilities
- Input Directory
- UltraMon ($)
- DAEMON Tools
- Launchy
- KeePass Password Safe
- CoreFTP
- WinRAR ($)

Communication
- Skype
- Live Messenger

Media
- FLV Player
- Foobar 2000

... I HATE SHAREPOINT.

... Security Validation errors whilst using SharePoint Designer.
... Fucking regenerating web part zone.

What garbage is this?

SharePoint Gripes

I don't care what reason Microsoft has for their piss-poor non-IE support. It's despicable. They can go on about how they will face compatibility issues. You know what? Tough! If you can support IE6 and IE7 you can support Firefox. What sort of lunacy is this?

It's bad enough the HTML editor is non-existent in Firefox ... also ... their license for a non-editable RAD editor is nice ... but not enough. Note I threw in non-editable. But the damned date-pickers are gone too in Firefox.

Man. Microsoft. It's late, but fuck you.

NTP

Alright.

I was supposed to be done minesweeper a LOT earlier. What happened? Polish happens.

I'd say it only took 2 days to do the main game. The polish however is taking well over a week and I'm exhausted. Funny eh?

Well, let me broaden my definition of polish. Adding highscores is polish to me. I've read briefly about the SRAM. That meant finding graphics for a keyboard. Then redesigning graphics for the keyboard. Working the keyboard. All that.



There's my new modified keyboard and title screen. I could have put some effort and made a really bitching one but I decided to go with graphics that are a lot simpler to go with my retro theme.

Anyways, I'm going to have to take each key separately and load them in.

Marc has been complaining about using separate fonts. Aka, any font besides the console font. So what I've decided to do is use Bitstream Vera Mono, since it's a beautiful pixel font. I've also attempted to make the keyboard hover, instead of switching screens. This took a while for some reason.

The transparency flag for GFX2GBA doesn't seem to be working for the NDS. It switches the colour of the first colour, to the one you specify. I also can't get ndstexconf working properly. It complained about me not having Directx9.0c. After installing that multiple times, it still complains. So, I'm stuck using GFX2GBA that only supports 8-bit graphics.

So, on the official GFX2GBA website. There's instructions on how to create transparent graphics using Adobe Photoshop. So, after messing around with my palettes a few times. I have a floating keyboard. I also have fonts working to a certain extent.

Anyways, I have to readjust the keyboard because I created depressed and raised keys. So I have to remap the keyboard appropriately. This creates some issues because I have a keyboard class that initially only mean to return a string of characters, but not may be required to give graphics positions. So, my designs aren't getting much more modular. Urgh.

That's the end of that.

NDP

So I've been doing Nintendo DS Homebrew Development for the short little while.

What motivated me to do it? Initially Pritesh. Then after that ... myself. Sadly, I don't think anyone in the industry besides other than game developers would give a flying damn that I decided to do this.

Anyways, what have I decided to do? I've decided to create minesweeper. As of Sunday May 27th 2007, I have minesweeper working with the following features:

- displays debugging information
- creates a 10x14 minefield
- randomly creates places 25 mines in the field
- the number detection thing
- hold L and tap a tile and it will place a flag
- click on a mine and it will 'end' the game - revealing all the bombs (unfortunately you can still click stuff), and 'correcting' any false flags
- pressing A regenerates the game

I think covers it. The problem with me and projects is that I never know when to put them down. Even the most simplistic. So here are my goals for tonight.

- disable clicking anymore when you die
- enable "sweep" -- equivalent to the middle click for Windows Minesweeper, done by pressing any of U,D,L,R,A,B,X,Y while tapping a tile
- seed the darn random number generator
- add a timer to the top
- add a possibility of victory

Now here are a few things that I COULD do:

- add wireless/multiplayer
- add stats
- add changing the number of mines
- add a scrolling field
- add music
- add additional tiles
- add sound

I may not do any of those additional things. I may decide to just cut and run.




"Science can't explain everything!"
"No shit. If we could explain everything, we wouldn't need science woudl we?"