Pandora.com Rocks
I love Pandora.com. On my Slaid Cleaves station, I just heard Ray Wylie Hubbard, the godfather of Austin alt-country scene followed by Burl Ives singing Pearly Shells (Yup, Burl Ives) followed by the Lost Immigrants. Now if I could just get Pandora.com in my car, my life would be totally complete.
News of the Surreal
Read the explanation first and then watch the video. Wouldn’t hurt to follow their advice when you do.
Intial TFS and CI Thoughts
So I’m taking a deep dive into TFS and continuous integration which is kind of like eating 5 orders of Pintos ‘N Cheese from Taco Bell, going home, drinking a glass of Metamucil, stuffing one end of the garden hose up your ass and the other up one nostril and then practicing Kundalini yoga by breathing in one nostril and out the other in an attempt to not asphyxiate on your own methane, i.e. it’s going to lead to learning and self-enlightenment but it’s going to get messy in the process. I digress.
So far, as much as it pains me to admit it (and trust me, to utter even one little positive thing about a Microsoft source control product at this point is pretty painful) it’s been a reasonably easy process. If source control and code is going to be tightly integrated, they might as well make an automatic build process that does all the work for you and to a certain degree, TFS does this. It’s pretty easy to get a basic CI process up and running, much easier than the similar CruiseControl.Net implementation would be since with TFS, you don’t have to write any gawdawful XML configuration file by hand.
There have been several hiccups but none of those are directly attributable to TFS. So here’s to you, TFS. By having tightly integrated projects, solutions and source control, you’ve managed to make continuous integration mostly unpainful.
Blue Kittens
Do you sometimes find yourself feeling like Woody Allen?
Yeah, me neither.
I Really DON’T Need All That Information
So some of you will remember that I made some Lenten commitments and here’s the point where I update you since I know you’ve been anxiously awaiting all my amazing self-discovery. Right. Anyway, I do feel like jotting down a little bit about the experience. We’ll start with the success first. For 40 days and 40 nights, I didn’t surf the web. It was damn hard. I never really go used to not reading ESPN or DallasNews.com or whatever. But I did it. I wasn’t completely off the wire since I can hardly do my job without talking to God daily but I wasted no time on mindless surfing.
What did I learn from that? That I really don’t need all that information. Monday night, I went on dallasnews.com and there were two stories about murder, one about a crooked politician and just a bunch of junk. It dawned on me at that moment that I really don’t need that stuff. I don’t remember any of it, it’s completely wasted time and it absolutely saps my focus, attention and energy. So I’m mostly sticking with it. I went through Newsgator tonight (after we set up a large chunk of this weekend’s garage sale-come buy stuff!!) and while there is definitely some quality there, there’s also a bunch of stuff I just don’t need to bother with. Scott Berkun was right, you just don’t need all that stuff and it’s making your life quality much, much lower. The things that are important are things that require complete and total undivided attention. Everything else is fluff and wasted time. I think K and I had more dinners together during those 40 days than the 80 days before that. We took up tennis (well “took up” is a tad strong but we’ve been twice in 3 weeks so that should certainly be considered a habit, given the participants) and I think we talked more about important things (though still not nearly as much as she would like, I am a guy after all).
So that’s the success. The failure is my meditation habit. I did it for about 10 days and then completely dropped it. I’m sad about that, I was starting to get somewhere with it and then it just went away. I’m trying to do shorter meditations more often but I miss the 20 minutes. I’m still trying to do it but it’s certainly not a daily habit.
Overall, I’m happy with how Lent worked out this year. I’m writing more, thinking more clearly which may or may not be reflected in my writing and I have more time for the important things. God must be happy with me.
Further Proof I Lack Self-Control
So much for the hiatus. Frequently when you’re working in a team environment using Visual Studio in general and Visual Studio 2008 for this specific example, you’ll start to get an error dialog when you open the solution file that says “Some of the properties associated with the solution could not be read”. This isn’t a huge problem but it is a medium level annoyance as far as I’m concerned. It got to be a scratchy enough annoyance this morning so I decided to ask God for the answer. As is the case in 98% of the technological problems out there, God knew the answer.
As it turns out, this comes from a corrupted solution file. Specifically in this instance, it comes from having two “GlobalSection(TeamFoundationVersionControl) = preSolution” blocks in the solution file (I’d normally make a comment about TFS at this point but in my new happy, non-caustic personality, I’m refraining and only making a subtle, snide comment referring to what I’d usually do, something my more astute readers will probably read as veiled caustic-ness wrapped in false sincerity. Whatever). To get rid of the problem, just delete the second section and magically, the dialog doesn’t pop up.
I’m not sure how two identical global sections related to Team Foundation Version Control could get into the solution file but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. Next time it happens to us, I’ll dig into it a little.
Non-Hiatus Hiatus
I’m toying with the idea of just blogging over at Blowing Sunshine Up Your Asparagus for a little while. There’s a ton of things to write about in the early spring here in Texas and my writing on this blog has been, well, caustic lately. I’m looking to return to a little more measured consideration with more of the quality I’d prefer in my writing, versus just one off riffs. So, while this certainly isn’t a hiatus, I plan to write more over there for a little bit than I do here. We’ll see how that goes.
The Saga Continues
Running tests requires a checkout too. Sweet Mother, Mary of Unintended Consequences.
Confusing Causation With Correlation The Completely Unrelated
Let’s say you’re reasonably mechanically inclined and you decide that you’re going to start changing your own oil in your car instead of taking it down to the Kwiky Lube for their $50 special. So you go to Wal-mart, buy all the necessary items such as oil, filter, ramps, pan for the old oil and some rags. You then set in to change the oil in your car. You drain the oil pan, take off the old oil filter, put the new one one, close the oil pan and start to dump the new oil into the engine. About this time, a voice that sounds like God but is really Charlton Heston begins to emanate from the bowels of your car and tells you that the action you have just done requires you to get new tires. God (or Charlton Heston) would then get in your car and drive it down to Firestone and have four new tires put on it without even asking you to come along. Would that make any sense to you? Would you think that was just a tad presumptuous of old Charlton? Shouldn’t you have control over actions that are completely unrelated?
TFS (and by very close proxy, Microsoft) doesn’t think you should. Yes, the TFS rant continues which is completely meaningless to 85% of my readers but it just drives me insane. Getting latest should NEVER require a checkout of the solution. These two actions are as unrelated as changing the oil in your car and getting new tires. You should be able to control them independently and yet, here I sit with a checked out solution that I’ll now have to undo because I have no idea why it checked itself out in the first place. This goes back to the tight integration between TFS and Visual Studio and tight integration is almost always a bad thing (except to Microsoft who can then sell you more stuff - it’s really all about Microsoft anyway) but it’s infinitely more bad when it comes to source control.
As usual, TFS gets in the way. It’s a ham-handed attempt to steal market share from Rational and it’s just as painful to deal with. I never knew how awesome Perforce and Subversion were until now.
You Can Tell It’s A Bubble By The Idiots
I’m gonna give you a quote I just read on Money.com. You just let it sink in for a minute (emphasis mine):
“At $2 a share, you might as well just let them go bankrupt,” said Fred J. Wallace, a Houston retiree who owns 1,500 Bear Stearns shares, which he bought last month. Wallace, 62 years old, said he bought the stock with his retirement money when he heard a Bear Stearns executive on television saying the company was sound financially. “If I get contacted for a class-action (lawsuit), I’m interested in being involved,” he said.
Ahem. Let me get this straight, Mr. Fred J. Wallace, you bought 1500 shares of a company’s stock because said company had an executive who said the company was sound financially?!? Faulkner couldn’t come up with words to express my level of amazement. People in Houston must be bloody idiots after Enron and now this guy. Wow. Just Wow. You bought a stock that had to have been priced in the $80s that was so overexposed to the subprime market, any idiot with a stock screener could have found it, and you now want to join a class action?
We’re in for some bad times economically speaking, folks. This is the exact kind of crap that happened during the last bubble when Enron and Tyco and Global Crossing blew up in our faces. It’s going to get uglier and IMNSHO, it’s going to be a long recovery. I really hope I’m wrong but when you have average investors like Fred J. Wallace showing up in the articles, I don’t think I can be. I’m no expert but I can tell you that I sure wouldn’t want to be too exposed to the market over the next 12-18 months.