Eric just pointed this out to me. (Guess what’s there =) ) Holy cow Google! What next? I guess I’m glad I didn’t pay any money for keyhole. Now I can do everything I’d would’ve, for free.

I noticed an image for mono on some sites - I believe there’s one on Miguel’s site - that says “Project Contributor”. All full of self adulation for my first contributions yet still respectful of how minor, I thought it’d be funny to toss the image into photoshop and, in red, add a caret(^) and “Slight”.

These are things that creep into my brain on that lonely hour long drive back home after the meetings.

And these are the things I post when I should be refactoring.

How it’s more fun to do non-paid work some times? I want to whip up some unit tests for smuggle when I should be hooking the database manager assembly into the deploy manager at work. Oh well…

I sat down to post my follow up but quickly got sucked into everyone elses blogs. There is too much, let’s sum up. Chris covers a lot of it.

Other things I did last night… The ReadyReply rewrite was to the UI stage last night and I didn’t particularly feel like spending the evening in XP. So I decided that I’d just wrap up the project and move it to linux where I could work on the UI in GTK# and also try and be a bit more helpful for the rest of the gang (Eric didn’t have a new build of Meshwork to test in Windows). As it turns out I had the project handy to shout a few lines of my assembly handling code to Eric as he typed away on the box with the projector.

I like the projector method of group hacking… everyone can see what’s happening and it’s a little more comfortable than all standing hunched over someones shoulder. We were all able to watch and learn and have a hand in directing where we were going. We were so XP! *laughs* Sans the unit tests though - and a lot of stuff. Now that I mention that. Part of my home work is to come up with a NUnit presentation for next time - should be easy, there are what? Like 6 attributes to remember? I should just write some unit tests for the core and the interface and have those ready for the presentation. Then the “in class practice” can be writing channel specific unit tests. =) My.. what inspiration.

My other bit of home work is to come up with a channel for our smuggle app. I had a few ideas… a pricewatch channel or a product review aggregator. I had another, but now it’s lost to me. Damn my shotty mind.

I wasn’t as attentive to the project as I could’ve been for a bit because Justin noticed that I’d gotten a comment from Rob Mensching. If you’ve ever had to cross paths with install and MSI then this a fairly cool happening. Sure I’d emailed before, but now I’ve got a comment on the site? (Justin steals my thunder by telling me that doing a search on WiX Mono and a couple other key words and I come up 4th) So anywho, I spent a while composing my response. I’m long winded.

I still need a web page for the company site. I’m utterly uninspired. I might have a look at mojoPortal. They just had a new release. But interesting as it looks from the outset, it doesn’t seem to me to have that company feel to it. But then again.. what do I know? I think I need a designer and not worry so much about an engine.

Oh, and I noticed while trying to compile ReadyReply on Mono, that… well never mind. I was going to say that System.Security.Cryptography.Xml wasn’t implimented. But it shows as being 99% complete. I must’ve missed a reference last night.

I just saw - while trying to make myself show up 4th with a google query - that Rob’s presentation at OSCON 2004 was done with WiX on Mono. Oooh man. I need to talk to him. One step closer to a Main linux box at work. Sure I’ve got a secondary box running linux here but… Don’t tell IT.

Rob asked me about why we/I use WiX in a comment on my post.. I started writing and couldn’t stop.. rather than have a nested reply… I thought I’d just make it it’s own post:

Our current run of installs were created with InstallShield. I think it makes for sloppy bloated MSIs and it allows people to get away with knowing as little about MSI as possible. It allowed people where I work to write jscripts for everything rather than knowing how to have MSI itself to what we wanted.

Then when we had new people install InstallShield our project files (MSI with extra tables and the extension switched to .ism) would corrupt and installshield would go into a looping crash randomly.

I think WiX is the better solution for a serious dev house. It’s making some of our developers have to stop slacking though. Unfortunately my managers have done a LOT of rolling over to make it easier for developers in the past, so it’s going to be a struggle to get them to start diong things right - currently we let them get away with not providing a file list, we just have to back engineer a “working machine” and look at build output and the occasional email notification.

My problem is I have suits waaaay up the line with no idea what’s involved in installs making demands. =(

I had written a C# app a while ago that would read an Xml file to do a quick 2 file one off web download update for them. Then they came to me and asked if I could extend that to do a major upgrade. I freaked out and managed to convince them that this really should be handled by MSI.. that it was an install. So I wrote a generic update framework in WiX and that was our proof of concept. (I emailed the mailling list about the escape characters in SQLScript bug and opened that).

So now they believe me when I say wix is the way to go (even though they want their dynamic file linking back because, as I said, they roll over for the devs.) So my project is to port the 4+ Nested MSI install we have into a single WiX build MSI. And I’m the only one doing it because my friend left.

But now I’m up to my eyeballs in C# code at the mono meeting… so I should get back to it.

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Was it worth all the work? =)

Woo hoo for me. It was a dinky little bug - you could overwrite an existing file without being asked - but it was my first time through the process on MonoDevelop. Made the patch… submitted it… closed out the bug in bugzilla.

Very cool for me. What’s next?

Got Beagle installed on the laptop. So far so good. We’ll see if it makes bug hunting easier. I don’t notice it scanning my web history. But, it’s installed and I can fiddle with it more later, that’s what linux is all about right? =)

Running two+ builds at the same time, updating ubuntu, browsing the web, and indexing with beagle is really punking my poor Cel 466 laptop. Maybe after little Locke is born I’ll pick up a new laptop. Yeah…. riiiiight. =)

Tried out QEMU at work and was really surprised at how well it worked. But I grabbed the latest beta of VMWare (5) to run XP on the AMD64 when I get things switched. I’ve still got a few things to do first.. like get my SVN repository off there. Fortunately I did the flat file storage rather than berkley DB.

Brandon left this week. Fortunately my pro-active of my two demi-bosses took the week off so I wasn’t immediately overwhelmed with requests. Oh.. but the one I did get made me want to follow Brandon to his new gig. They asked me if I could quickly extend MSI’s functionality so that it would let you roll back our installs on an uninstall. So say someone installs an update to our product.. they want to be able to remove the update and have it put the original files back - by the next release - July 1st.

While this might seem like some cool functionality and handy… it’s not the way MSI works. You install a patch to a product and you’ve got to remove it all and reinstall the original package to go back. But yeah.. it’s not trivial.. and I’m already trying to finish the System Management application I’m working on and make all the changes to the current installs. And find time to switch the build system to NANT and all the installs to WiX.

Okay.. enough boring MSI/Install stuff.

No real forward movement on ReadyReply this week. I got maybe a couple methods in. But now I’m into the meat of defining data handling methods and the UI rewrite. I’m thinking I’ll get a large chunk of work done at the Mono Meeting this Sunday. This twice a month thing is a good idea simply because it’ll get me to focus more.

Oh and it doesn’t help that I’d rather spend all my time booted into ubuntu when the project is on the win partition of the laptop.

Ever since I installed netapplet I’ve had problems with wireless in ubuntu. I’ve since ditched netapplet..but it’s now a chore everytime I boot the system. It’s not persisting key information at all (should it be?). And to get things connected I find myself having to throw it in by hand with iwconfig. Not such a big deal.. but it takes for ever for it to take and actually get up and running. This kind of “this can’t be that hard” problem makes one feel like a real feeb.

So I installed KWifiManager after reading about it in Linux Magazine… sucked. Wouldn’t even bring up the configuration menu. And, even though it showed I was connected to my AP… when I ran a scan for AP’s.. it said there weren’t any. Hmmm. SO I scrapped that. Anyone have any suggestions for wireless managment? It can’t be that Windows handles this better.

Oh and Chris and Eric are right.. KDE ui blows.

And, I’ve yet to grok the multiple desktop system. I just don’t tend to use it even though I’m obsessed with desktop realestate. I like to have enough room to see everything in one window. If it’s off the screen I run the risk of forgetting about it. But perhaps that speaks more to my scatter brained approach to things.

There’s an app called Skippy which apparently spaces out all the windows so you can pick one and then collapses them back with your selected window top most. Kind of like in Nat’s demo at BrainShare this year. Maybe I’ll install that and check it out.

Oh well.. I’ve babbeled enough.. MonoDevelop is done building… time to start hunting bugs with Beagle. =)

I’m still trying to get through this first issues which Justin was nice enough to give me.

It’s one of the few magazines I feel compelled to read from start to finish. Okay.. well I skipped the “Monorail in your back yard” section. But, being from the Seattle area, Monorails are a sore subject with me.

Well, Saturday night we finally got some pretty good proof for my theory that cilantro *spits* gives me terrible migrians. And apparently the fresher the cilantro the worse the migraine. Fortunately for me in the last couple years the pain has started to get more mild. (I’ve probably burned out enough brain cells with the mini-strokes that are the migraines).

I get the aural precursors with my migraines. I was about to dive into a detailed description when I realize that the wikipedia link gives a pretty good description of what happens. Reference that.

So, I was treated to wave after wave of aural assults until I finally gave up hope of recovering enough to sneak off and play FarCry - my current time waster - and I climed into the shower and stood there until it went cold. Then I crawled into bed and mercifully collapsed. If I were smart I would’ve chucked up dinner and it would’ve stopped sooner, then I could’ve just passed out. But I took some tums to stop my stomach from lurching and bubbling, thus prolonging the whole circus.

The auras give me a warning of things to come so as soon as I start to lose my site I usually run (literally) for the recipe that seems to help best in combating the inevitable pain:

Excedrin Migraine - If you look in the ingredients this is a cocktail of 2 pain relievers, something for swelling, and a big dose of caffine.

Coffee - Just start drinking. I should probably throw Orange juice into the mix to help bust the caffine.

Then an try and fall asleep before it comes. My wife also rubs Tiger Balm into my temples from time to time. But to be honest I don’t know if it’s the tiger balm that makes me feel better or just getting a temple massage from a beautiful woman. =)

I still have a small blind spot I’ve been trying to look around all day and it’s driving me nuts.

So, no more cilantro for me. Which sucks because I love salsa and in the last 5 years or so the only salsa you can seem to get without cilantro is the Mango Pineapple kind. Yeah, thanks to what ever So-Cal trend-master decided that cilantro was the hot new thing that needed to be in everything. Probably the same guy who is responsible the Chipotle fad. Or Lime - (insert cola product here).

This post has all the flow of a pillow case full of bricks. Oh well.. migraines screw with my thinking.