The Blog of Harald

I spent much of last week in Ottawa, and this week catching up. Plus getting ready for Gareth’s (first) birthday sleepover (tonight), Kortright kite fest this weekend, and I’m going back to Ottawa for a week on Sunday. Then the following week is the open source conference (Sun-Tue)… not to mention mundane things like 5.1 patch 2 and a continuing low-level stream of customer issues…

I’m a little wrung out?

I haven’t even managed to check off any more movies from the list!

On the plus side, my 2002 income tax refund showed up yesterday! (Mine, mine all mine… I’m rich! I’m independently wealthy! I’m financially secure!)

After seeing some good trailers on “apple.com”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/, I decided to put my list together, so I wouldn’t forget.

Apparently I’m going to be busy in June :-)

* “Hellboy”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167190/ – April 2 “trailer”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/hellboy/
* (seen!) “Ella Enchanted”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0327679/ – April 9 (A favourite book) “trailer”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/miramax/ella_enchanted/trailer/
* “The Girl Next Door”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0265208/ – April 9 “trailer”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/girl_next_door/
* (dvd?) “13 Going on 30”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337563/ – April 23 (Jennifer Garner) “trailer”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/13goingon30/
* “Van Helsing”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338526/ – May 7 “trailer”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/van_helsing/trailer/
* “Troy”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0332452/ – May 14 “trailer”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/troy/
* “Shrek 2”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298148/ – May 21 “trailer”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/dreamworks/shrek_2/trailer/
* “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0304141/ – June 4 “trailer”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/harry_potter-azkaban/
* “Around the World in 80 Days”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0327437/ – June 16 “trailer”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/aroundtheworldin80days/
* “The Notebook”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0332280/ – June 25 “trailer”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/newline/the_notebook/
* “The Village”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368447/ – June 30 (M. Night Shyamalan!) “trailer”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/touchstone/the_village/
* “Spiderman 2”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0316654/ – June 30 “trailer”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/spider-man_2/trailer/
* “Garden State”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0333766/ – July 30 “trailer”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox_searchlight/garden_state/
* “The Bourne Supremacy”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0372183/ – July 23
* “The Thunderbirds”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167456/ – August 6 “trailer”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/thunderbirds/
* “The Last Shot”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0357054/ – September 2004 “trailer”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/touchstone/the_last_shot.html
* “Shark Tale”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307453/ – October 1
* “The Brothers Grimm”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0355295/ – November 19 (Terry Gilliam)
* “Serenity”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379786/ – 2005

So I took a picture of my keys, sitting in sunlight and casting a shadow. And I like the picture, and I wanted to share it. And then it occurred to me that my house key was sitting there, in high enough resolution to be duplicated by anyone bored enough to try… and so I’m not going to share it.

<sigh>

We shipped our latest version to manufacturing on Thursday, and we all had Friday off.

So of course, I’ve been sick since Thursday morning. I’ll spare you the gory details, but I only started feeling like a normal human being this afternoon…

I haven’t been completely idle; I caught up on some laundry, cleaned up the kitchen, tried a new bread recipe, rebuilt hermione.cfrq.net (disk crash), cleaned up and vacuumed the family room, and probably other stuff too. I also watched way too much TV (mainly Space, HGTV, and DVDs). All in all, a reasonably relaxing time…

It was so nice out this morning, I drove all the way to work with the windows rolled down and the radio cranked up…

Someone recently recommended that we pull the kids out of hockey, purchase a membership at a ski club, and go skiing during the winter instead. The advantage being that skiing is something that we can all do together, as a family.

I like the idea; I like skiing, and Gareth’s pretty good for an 8-year old. Charlotte has a lot of trouble with skates (she has wonky ankles), so I don’t see hockey in her future. But Gareth really likes hockey, and it’s got all that teamwork stuff going for it :-), so I’m kinda undecided on the whole issue…

This weekend, millions of people around here simultaneously viewed a strange glowing orb in the sky. It appeared in the east, and gradually moved across the sky as the day passed, eventually disappearing in the west. I’m sure there was general panic; human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria…

Even better, the air temperature was above the freezing temperature of water! A miracle!

I think this is the earliest I’ve ever given up on winter (and I have one more ski date planned for Saturday :-). I think it was the ridiculously cold January that we had this year.

We’ve been pushing to get a release out the door for the end of the month, so things have been very hectic; lots of bugs to fix, and many interrupts during the day by other developers trying to get _their_ bugs fixed. (That’s not a complaint; I’d rather they ask questions than disappear down paths I’ve already ruled out in the past :-).

Over the last two weeks (!!) I have spent my mental capacity chasing down an obscure resource leak. It took me too long to get a test harness set up, and then I ran down several dead ends before finally narrowing the problem down to a few lines of code. There were a couple of things I could have done better, but mostly I was plagued by dumb problems causing delays (the version of our software I needed to debug crashes our customized XP desktops; our Win2K+DevStudio ghost images don’t work inside Microsoft Virtual PC; We had a lot of trouble getting our license servers for purify to actually serve licenses; purify refused to deal with _one_ DLL; etc. etc.)

Tracking this down meant I missed a ski day with my son. Fortunately we’re going skiing as a family soon, so it wasn’t the _last_ day…

I haven’t felt much like ranting lately; there are too many targets, and I’m feeling more apathy than usual about all of them. It took me three days to even find out there was a “sponsorship scandal” going on in Canada, and I’m _still_ not clear on the details; that’s how disconnected I am :)

I did take some interesting sunrise pictures while driving to work the other day, but I haven’t even copied them out of the camera yet. Maybe this weekend I’ll find some time to play. In between loads of laundry, probably…

I’m pretty sure these are correct; my ‘visited countries’ and ‘visited states’ maps:

create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

create your own visited country map

Update: Greg asked about provinces. I’ve been everywhere _except_ Alberta, Manitoba, and the Territories…

Ok, it’s -22°C right now, colder than it was before sunrise. This is getting silly…

I’m working from home today. After last night’s ugly commute, I couldn’t face another day of slippery conditions and idiot drivers. The plows have been by, but it’s so cold that the salt we normally dump on the roads isn’t working. They’re trying sand, but they’re only really doing the highways right now; city streets (especially side streets) are treacherous.

Anyway, it’s cold. I’m sitting in my dining room, with the bulk of the house to my left and a window to my right. I’m pretty sure there’s a 3-4° temperature differential on opposite sides of my body right now…

Fortunately my laptop is keeping my hands warm. I knew all that excess heat would eventually come in handy!

So it snowed all day yesterday. Not a whole lot (between 5 and 10 cm), but it was also cold (around -15°C), so the usual remedy of salting the roads wasn’t working. Apparently I wasn’t paying attention to the weather forecast, because if I had known, I would have stayed home.

It took me an hour to get from work (well, the CNE grounds) to Thorncliffe. That’s almost 16 km/h. Then it took me 30 minutes to get to Lawrence; that’s about 6 km/h. Then it took another 45 minutes to get to the school; less than 3 km/h. No accidents or anything; just traffic volume, slippery roads, and small hills. I felt like I was in Zeno’s paradox; the closer I was to my destination, the slower I was driving…

There were the usual idiots pretending that their SUVs made them invulnerable; passing on the right (in the snow banks), trying (and sometimes failing :-) to corner at speed, tailgating, and similar stupidity. I drove slowly and carefully, and let all of the stupid people get _way_ ahead of me.

The staff at the school were very nice. Apparently so few people actually _call_ when they’re delayed that those of us who _do_ call are treated well :-)

So the week before Christmas I drove once and took the subway once, and did a hybrid once (I drove down with my wife, then hopped the streetcar over to the office). It was about 40 minutes to drive; the expected 1:20 on the TTC.

This week I’m picking up the kids, so I leave the house around 7:15, and leave work by 16:20 or so. Commute times (door to door, where the afternoon door is Bayview Glen) were:

| |_ Morning |_ Evening |
| Monday | 1 hour | 20 minutes |
| Tuesday | 30 minutes | 35 minutes |
| Wednesday | 40 minutes | unknown |
| Thursday | 45 minutes | 30 minutes |
| Friday | 35 minutes | 35 minutes |

Hardly a large sample set, but it is supporting my hypothesis that driving is much faster than TTC. Sure it’s expensive, and environmentally sucks rotten eggs. But I’d rather spend extra time with my family…

Maybe I’ll pick one day a week to TTC, so that I can get some reading done. :-)

h3. Before

!http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/files/before.jpg!

h3. After

!http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/files/after.jpg!

Seen on “Not What I Expected”:http://www.plaidworks.com/lsefton/blog/001078.html:

bq. no, I really am on vacation

bq. And if you’re in high tech, that sometimes means that you’re working from 1600km down the road, rather than at work.

Well, about 20 km in my case. I got a phone call from the customer support manager on Monday morning, the first day of my vacation. Fortunately a relatively easy fix; most of the time was spent downloading source code over the VPN. I’m amused more than anything… :-)

We put the christmas tree up today. I was trying to capture my reflection in one of the ornaments, but couldn’t get the right combination of my position, camera position, ornament position. And the kids were “helping”, and then the camera batteries died… &ltgrin>.

I’ll try again tomorrow…

I’m sitting in the food court of the Toronto Stock Exchange building, using a “BWireless”:http://www.bwirelesszone.com/ 802.11b wireless Ethernet access point, checking my email and posting this entry. I even bought something online :-)

It’s performing quite well, once I moved out from under the overhang; apparently the AP is actually in their store (which is upstairs) so you get better signal in the open part of the food court.

That’s my geek moment for the day.

I brought the new (well, old) server home last week; installed Debian on it on Saturday. (Debian is a strange distribution, but that’s another blog entry :-).

I decided that I was going to move the MP3 collection from the Win2K box to the new server (running Linux). So I want to put my smaller 15Gb drive in place of the 30Gb drive that’s in there right now, and put the 30Gb in the fileserver. I dutifully repartition the 15Gb drive into two pieces, format the two partitions as NTFS, reboot into DOS, and ghost the boot partition from the 30Gb to the 15Gb. Boot up, and everything works ok. Remove the 30Gb drive. Boot up; can’t login. Every account is the same. With the 30Gb drive in place (but not as the boot drive or system partition), the system works; without it, nobody can log in.

I noticed that when the machine booted with both drives, it thought that the system drive was still drive F:, so I tried removing drive letters from all drives. Another series of reboots; still no go (although the system drive is now C: like it’s supposed to be).

I’m stumped at this point. I Googled, and most people said “system restore”, but I’m not sure I want to go down that road yet. I did see a couple of articles suggesting that voodoo might work: the suggestion is to reformat the 15Gb drive from the ground up (to make sure no old data is interfering with the ghosting or booting). I’ll try that tonight; if it doesn’t work, I may have to go the system restore route; Ugh :-)

Anyway, that’s what I did last night, instead of folding laundry :-)

Oops; I’ve been a little busy.

I received my new laptop on Monday and I’ve been busy with setup and copying files and settings from the old desktop. We have a code freeze today, which isn’t helping (trying to develop code _and_ rebuild your environment at the same time is … interesting). On the other hand, I was able to be extremely productive from home on Thursday with the new machine, so it has been worth the effort.

It’s been a hectic week personally. G. had a hockey practice on Monday night, after which we went out for dinner for my birthday. I had a curling game Tuesday; Michaéla had a board meeting on Wednesday (and I was coding in front of the TV, playing with the new VPN); and Thursday night cards was much busier than normal because people came over for Andrew and Michelle’s birthdays.

Tonight I’m going to collapse in front of the TV; I might get some blogging done. Saturday is hockey, hockey, rolemaster. I’ve (finally) received the new VPN hardware that I’m supposed to test, so I’m probably going to play with that on Sunday, along with the usual laundry and cleaning (and Michaéla et al have a 3:15 curling game that day).

Next week we leap into the pre-Christmas rush…

While taking a break during the execution of this program, I decided (on a whim) to write it down.

Saturday:

* 8AM hockey with C.
* 10AM hockey with G.
* kids laundry
* _adult_ laundry
* find the floors in the house
* _clean_ the floors in the house
* ditto for the bathrooms
* add 30Gb drive to yvonne, copy data, remove 15Gb drive
* organize photos and MP3s that are currently spread across three computers
* nap
* 4:30PM: watch old-timers hockey game
* blog

Sunday:

* brunch with dad & lil sis
* Lion King matinée
* dinner at Black Forest Room

So far I’ve done the hockey, I’m halfway through laundry and finding floors, and there’s about 90 minutes left until the hockey game :-)

It has been 5 years, but I’m once again working for “a profitable company”:http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/investor/financials/quarters/2003/q4.html.

It is a pleasant change :-)