Boat ride for work

To celebrate a release at work, our group went out on the Crystal Dolphin for a 3 hour tour. I got sunburned so I could try and get workers comp out of the deal.

Ubuntu 9 on thumb drive

Currently if I work from home I have two options: remote desktop into my work machine and code from there, or work locally at home after syncing up my code. The problem with remoting into work is it's extremely slow and I can't use your full screen. The problem with working locally is when I'm going back to the office and my code isn't finished, it's difficult to sync the half finished code.

So I have installed Ubuntu Linux onto a thumb drive and will use that as my 'work' machine, and tote it back and forth to work. Now I can have my half finished work on the drive and either work from home or in the office.

Here are the steps I took:

• Partitioned my thumb drive with GParted following Choice 1 of these directions (I had to download the vb6stkit.dll). I put this install onto a SD card instead of the thumbdrive as you can't partition the drive you are running GParted from. So the SD card has GParted and that partitions the thumbdrive.
• Downloaded the Ubuntu ISO (install) and used these directions to install it onto my thumbdrive. I upgraded to the 4GB persistence file. You have to use the peristence if you want to save your customizations or installs from within Ubuntu

New Job

I switched jobs last week to Oracle. The office is back downtown in the Pac West building. Besides being a nice switch in work, there are showers, a bike room, free parking and free Mountain Dew.

Snow and Precipitation Reports

One of my projects from work has been moved into the real world and is ready for use. I work at a climate center that has climate data for the Western US. The most popular data is precipitation and snow water equivalent (how much water is in the snow).

My program is replacing a static report that shows the precipitation and snow water equivalent for certain areas in the country. One of the problems was the data could change and the static reports would then become out of date. The new program gets the most current data instead.

There are six different reports now, instead of the original one. You can compare the current snow levels to the average, the peak average or to another year. I think it's pretty nifty, especially if you're into winter sports and want to know the current snow levels. There is a special report you can run that is tailored to skiing - "Ski West Report" (it will take around 10 seconds).

Here is the entry page to the reporting program.

New Office

My office moved over the weekend from downtown Portland to Lloyd Center. I lost my nice view:

and got this view:

So that kinda sucks. And our showers are gone, so I'm left to taking a sponge bath in the sinks. I got a weired look this morning, but what can I do?

And last week I was over in Denver, CO for a developers conference. That was pretty neat, I got to spend time with some family and eat some steak and drink some beer. So that was good. I have some pictures over on my mobile blog. The little ones are my second cousins.

Pay Raise

Once a year we have a performance review here at work. I, of course, flew through with flying colors (how else do colors go?) I got my raise, which I think pretty much accounts for inflation. Today was my first new paycheck at the new rate, not a huge change, but enough to buy a few burgers.

For the last week I'd been running over to my new house to do some scraping, painting, mudding, sanding, and DDP drinking. Since there is no food besides a box of Cheez-it crumbs at my house, I have been visiting the fast food restaurants. Ok, just Burger King. I think I ordered like 3 whoppers, 2 double whoppers and 4 large fries in 2 days. I figure you need protein when you're scraping paint.

Security

At work today I had to fill out a security clearance questioneer, listing my jobs and felonys and where I've lived. Like who remembers where they lived in college? And I had to figure out my Selective Service #, which you can get by calling 1-847-688-6888.

Waste 'o time

I just spent the last two days working on a utility that turns out to be worthless. Some of our code was allocating a block of memory and deleting it soon after. Since the code was going to be called multiple times I figured that it'd be smart to reuse a buffer.

I did some tests of reusing a buffer vs. malloc/new. Reusing the buffer was an order of magnitude faster. Great. So I spent a few days creating a factory that would reuse arbitrary lengthed buffers.

I ran some tests today and it was dog slow compared to malloc/new. I am pretty sure the overhead of the factory and the function calls are too much and can't compete.

I'm sure other people already knew this, but I had to waste work time figuring it out. It sucks because I had touted this factory idea as a huge speed up - like 10x - and it wasn't.

HP Servers

We have an extremely slow HP machine that we use for development at work. I'm doing unit testing - finding the bugs I've made - and each compilation takes on the order of 3 minutes. What can one do with 3 minutes? Not much time to do anything useful.
I ended up falling asleep.

Blog/Wiki for work

Yesterday I installed SnipSnap onto my machine at work. It's a wiki and a blog. I was writing all of my notes down on yellow pads and putting index tabs on them, but it was getting out of order.

So I'm trying out the SnipSnap system, which seems pretty cool. Now my notes are searchable and indexed and all that stuff. They're not huge revelation type notes, but things I seem to forget

Old computer systems

I'm writing a C++ logging utility (because I like to reinvent the wheel.) Our development server is super slow and has a terrible development environment. So I do development on my PC and then move the code over to the server and try to get things to work. The server has an older compiler which isn't even supported anymore.

I'm using streams to parse a string, and while this works fine with a recent compiler, the old compiler has some issues. Calls like seekg() and tellg() are available, but they don't work properly. Calling tellg() while you're working on a stream will make all following calls fail. I guess it's a quantam physics effect.

So I'm re-writing my code to not use streams, which is a pain in the rear. Yet another reason to not do development on HP-UX 10.x.