From womb to tomb, from basket to casket

My brother-in-law was in town again for the 4th annual Jakson Spire fundraiser for the Ann Arbor School of Performing Arts. We went to it a little late, and caught the end of the Conqueroots with Al Jacques.

After them I was in for a real treat by George Bedard (of George Bedard and the Kingpins) and Drivin Sideways and Bill Kirchen

New Job

Well it happened again. Within a short time I was approached through LinkedIn about a job opportunity, and now I'm working developing software that helps in the management of the global network of a large Michigan based company. Since I have been driving two of their cars, and the group I'm working with made a really positive impression, I decided to follow my feelings and start something new. The commute is a little further than before, but so far not to bad. I get there in about 30 minutes.

On other hands, I ran speedtest today and it came up with this:
result

That's the fastest result I have ever gotten, and it's totally atypically of what I get on my larger downloads. And Chicago, which is not what Speedtest suggest as default is even faster

Shows you how much Comcast's PowerBoosts influences statistics. Meanwhile, AT&T offers a comparable service, for a lot less. I'm thinking about it !

Netbeans 6.0 and C++ on Windows

I've been doing a lot of Java development in the last two months, on Windows and for that I am using Netbeans. Well Netbeans 6.0 got released and it supports C/C++.

Here is a list of what you have to do to get a free C/C++ development environment going on Windows:

1) Download the netbeans 6.0 IDE with Java 6 JDK from here. Pick the all version if you got the bandwidth.

2) install Netbeans 6.0

3) Download MinGW32 and MSys (Minimalist Gnu on Windows) from here. Install MinGW32 to c:\mingw32 and MSys to c:\msys.

4) In Netbeans go to Tools->Options and select C/C++ tab. Then add C:\mingw32\bin and c:\msys\bin to the current path. This should give you all the tools.

Happy development.

The Perversion of the American Ideal

Never mind what Bush is doing in Washington (and for that matter to the rest of the world in the name of this nation), this is about the lyrics of one of the songs on my christmas playlist. Have you ever listened to 'Winter Wonderland':

In the meadow we can build a snowman,
Then pretend that he is Parson Brown

He'll say: Are you married?
We'll say: No man,
But you can do the job
When you're in town.

And what the heck do you think the job is ? eh ? dirty dirty dirty - and that back from 1934

Christmas Playlist

Run DMC - Christmas In Hollis
Alvin & The Chipmunks - The Chipmunk Song
Brenda Lee - Rockin' Around The Christmas T
Chuck Berry - Run Rudolph Run
Perry Como - White Christmas
The Andrew Sisters - Winter Wonderland
Elvis Presley - Blue Christmas
Jose Feliciano - Feliz Navidad
Elvis - Here Comes Santa Claus
Wham - Last Christmas
Kylie Minogue - Santa Baby
Warren Zevon - Werewolves of London
Diana Ros & the Supremes - Santa Claus is Coming to Town

Testing with default arguments

For a while I have known, that testing with default arguments is not the best idea. I mean, it's better than not testing at all, but it's still not a very good test.

Take the following case (which cost me a few hours):

Two systems, one running a web service in Microsoft .NET 1.1, the other a java application written with Netbeans. They communicate their data structures by serializing them in xml. So far nothing out of the ordinary. But since we are talking about two systems, testing needs to include multiple roundtrips. And that makes unittests that serialize and then deserialize on one platform a logical choice. And if you do those unittests with default arguments (i.e. create the data structure, serialize it, deserialize it, and then check the values), guess what happens ?

You catch nothing !

It so happens that the deserializers will create a data structure, which will have DEFAULT VALUES (pardon my screaming, I'm yelling at myself for being so stupid).

So the moral of this story is, if you test, test at least once with non-default values.

P.S. 10 minutes after I rewrote the code, I found another bug (with the test). One element was omitted in the serialization !! Test, Test, Test

Yep That's me

The Race on Belle Isle

Went to the races this week on Belle Isle, here in Detroit, It was just awesome.

Saturday we (Vincent and I) saw Indy Car qualifying and American Le Mans. Had seats in Grandstand 3, right at Turn 1.

The renovated course (little difference to the previous layout) but much better pavement, was excellent. The weather couldn't have been better. Here are some pictures

Oh, and by the way, school is starting this week here in tree-town. Welcome back, especially U of M students.

How fast is your internet connection

A little useful utility here at http://wwww.speedtest.net. Measures both upload and download speeds of your dsl/cable modem etc.

Here's my fastest test . Click on the image to visit speedtest.

Your secret SQL Helper

Ever restored a database in SQL Server. And then had all this disconnected logins hanging around. Logins in the database that got restored, but have no SQL Server login name associated with them. Fear no more, here's the help:

sp_change_users_login

And here's how to use it:

sp_change_users_login @Action='Update_One', @UserNamePattern='dbuser', @LoginName='sysuser', @Password=Null

This will reconnect the database user dbuser with the login name in the system sysuser. Normally both user names are the same.

Enjoy