Pixelzine
So I haven’t posted in awhile because we’re busy with Pixelzine
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Working at Work
Ahhh! I had to go into work today!
And probably the next few months for sure.
Sure was nice working from home so much. Guess the dream is over. But I’m glad I get to go to Southfield instead of downtown Detroit.
I really miss my 19″ monitor though (at home). And I sure saved a lot of money on lunches while at home.
Laptop Killer
“They call me the laptop killer” … (a reference to some song that came out before I was born so I can’t quite remember).
Hopefully I didn’t just kill my second laptop. Left it running for at least 5 days straight, tried to use it and there were tons of errors saying the hard drive could not be found. Looked in windows explorer and my C and D drives were missing. Shut it down. I’m scared to turn it on and find out the hard drive is toast and my data is unrecoverable.
This happened to me while I was in Brasil too. Ok, maybe I should be the HD killer, but it only happens in laptops, my desktops are fine (knock on wood).
MS Access
Wow, I have now learned first hand why MS Access (2000) should not be used with more than ~5 people at once.
We told our testers and fixers to update their issues in our “tracking” database on the LAN, only to have the database become corrupt 4 times in one day. I learned very quickly how to rapidly back up the table we were using and export it, then delete the corrupt file and import the table back into a backup copy of the database.
Its very frustraiting to get messages “MyDatabase.mdb is not a database file”. How can that be? I’m in the database you bastard!! AHHHH.
Bugs
There’s always bugs.
I thought I’d download bugzilla to track bugs in stuff I work on, but damned if I can’t get it working! Something screwy with the Apache configuration. Hopefully when I get some time to look at it I’ll be able to fix it (but I’m more experienced with IIS than apache).
Though Bugzilla did come highly recommended, I’m wondering what other solutions might exist. Anyone?
Code IDE
At work we use WSAD, IBM’s version of Eclipse.
Its a very cool, free IDE (Integrated Development Environment) we use for coding Java with.
I plan on using Eclipse at home on my personal projects. It also has a Perl plug-in so I can use it to update MovableType. (Probably has support for other languages, but those are the ones I use the most).
While the tool is very cool, myself and a few other co-workers end up spending a LOT of extra time trying to fix errors in it instead of doing things we should be doing.
Today I updated all my code on my hard drive and now I can’t run any tests. I fixed the first problem, which made no sense, but the NullPointException I’m getting now is a mystery. Fixing the problem is not a high priority because the cause is likely in a temporary class we created because we are not integrated with the security team (so we made a stub).
One thing we always struggle with is: How to code and test. Before people would code in a text editor and send it to a test server (that was shared by everyone on the team). This was horrible because your changes could cause other people to have problems. Finding your error messages mixed in with everyone else’s messages was a pain! However, there was only 1 server to support.
After this we got Visual Age from IBM. Its was pretty cool as you could run JSPs and Java code, but itself didn’t support JSPs nor did it support EJBs so it was VERY limiting. After we got used to it, we changed to WSAD.
With WSAD, we all have our own development environment, but we all have to support it. Can’t win, can we?
Escalators
People at work (and in general) are funny getting onto and off of the escalators.
I consider myself a rather coordinated person so maybe I’m biased, but getting onto the escalator should not be that difficult. People have to come to a complete stop before they can get on or they might fall over. They have to look down at their feet and concentraight rather hard to get off without falling over. Its very funny to watch.
I just get on the escalator as if it were no different from the rest of the ground I’m walking on. If I happen to step over two stairs, I can easily adjust after the fact, no need to look at my feet and come to a complete stop to plan my entrance before getting on.
Lunch
I must say I am rather hooked/impressed with the Greek Gyro place here at the Ren Cen Food Court. I’ve had both the beef and chicken Gyro and they are excellent. The meat is seasoned, the sauce is good, the onions are fresh as is the bread. The tomatoes are fine, but nothing special.
However, I have yet to have “great” fries. Today’s we rather undercooked. Seems most “fast food” places are like that to get you your food quicker. I admit I probably like my fries more well done that most, but its fairly obvious that most of the time the fries are under cooked when they are almost white (instead of golden).
My previous favorite: “The Great Steak & Potatoe Company” is closed for remodeling. They had the WORST fries I’ve ever had in my life. But the steak sandwich/sub was pretty darn good.
My step-brother keeps asking me if I’ve gone out to eat while downtown. Unfortunately I’ve gone only once, to Hallas’ Cafe in Greektown. My project requires all of my time so I don’t have the oppertunity to go out. I usually eat at my desk. I am also one of the fastest eaters I know (I can eat a Hungry Howies medium pizza in 7 minutes). Even so, the project has high demands so I probably won’t be going out anytime soon.