Well, hacked on the new router and got it ready to handle IPv6 routing. Put it in place. I’m going to keep an eye out for the wireless drop that Brandon mentioned to me. Said he’d have to go and reset the router every once and a while when it’d puke on him. I upgraded the firmware so this may have taken care of it… if it wasn’t user error in the first place. =)

The upgrade allowed me to boost the wireless signal as well. I’ll have to see if I get better reception at the other end of the house now.

I’m still waiting for confirmation and the new IPv6 tunnel to be established. Then I should be set. *nods* We’ll see what happens.

Now I can get back to ReadyReply. Cool.. one project almost done.

Looks like I’m going to try and update what I’ve got rather than do an entire rewrite. I think I can ‘refactor’ it all into shape fairly cleanly. We’ll see.

Now if I can just get Aiden to keep his fingers off the laptop long enough for me to get some code written. He flipped the laptop off the coffee table today. *cringe* It survived though.

This is the recommended chip

Xenium S.P. ICE

Time to start saving I guess.

Another project…. modding the XBox. We’ve gotten hooked on Lost. Good show.. but we’d missed the early episodes. So I started downloading them and we’d watch them on the computer.. and then through the laptop and on the TV.

I can’t begin to express how wonderful watching dowloaded tv is. No commercials! It’s like Adblock for your television. At least for the show we’re downloading.

So now, if we’re going to keep doing this… I think we should just mod the XBox and use it as a media center. It’s sitting right there, it has net connectivity, it’s wired to the TV… why not?

Now I’ve just got to research and price the best mod chip.

So I got a new wireless router from a friend. I’m looking to emulate the same things my friend did in this post. Let’s see if I get around to it.

More later.

A large chunk of ReadyReply is not neccessarily “wrong”… but it’d work a lot smoother and be more robust if I took another approach. *sighs*

Now… do I rewrite it all or try and gut it and replace the insides? It’s like changing the tires on a car while it’s moving. At this point I’m thinking I could just rewrite it from the ground up faster. I know the basic concepts so well and i’ve been hacking on it for so long.

It’d give me a chance to make sure all my unit tests were written as well. I’d still borrow form the current app… UI and such.. but yeah.. time to rewrite.

Bike gal - Shirow Masamune.

I just finished reading the Ghost in The Shell 2 manga. Pretty slick. When ever I read those sort of super high-tech manga or watch the anime I start to get let down by current tech. Oh well. =)

If you’re writing C# code and you’re not using NUnit, you need to get your act together. NUnit is a must.

If you’re doing any coding and you’re not using unit testing, you’re really making a mistake.

Okay, so the plan is to finish the company web site, get it up and running, and then release the current build of ReadyReply as a beta. Then sit back and let bugs roll in while I work on other projects.

I had one almost complete site. But it looked sad and flat. Then, while looking for icons for applications (a whole other story) I came across some photoshop tutorials for creating sites. So I spent a lot of time whipping up some new photoshopped art for the site. The general concensous was that it TOO was bland and uninspired. So I started on another site design. But by that time I was just tired with the whole thing and stopped for a bit.

Need to get back to working on the site. I also need to set up bugzilla to track all of the bugs the app WILL generate.

Thoughts on ReadyReply itself… I bone headed it and created a whole system for saving topics and such in XML for the XML Datahandler when I should’ve just been freakin’ serializing it all along. *shakes head*

Changing to serializing will require that I change how the data is represented in the app. This might take a lot of care. I need to make sure I have my Unit Tests up to snuff before I attempt that. I’ve already gone through one major reworking of the app and I was lucky to get through it with no unit tests. But as with most refactoring… it’s the way to go for a more robust app.

I was looking at a semi-competitor for ReadyReply and they’re selling their app for $24.95. *shrug* That might be the way to go for the “Lite” version of ReadyReply (with the basic ui and just the XMLDatahandler). Get it into more hands. The value added is really going to be in the form of the more complex UI’s (ASP.NET auto generated knowledge bases, etc.) and Datahandlers (SQL).

I also have to think a bit more about how I’ll impliment the Remoting and web services. Both of which I think the app should make use of.

Oh well.. that’s a fairly good brain dump for now.

Well, Brandon let slip that he’s leaving. But Tony and Sarah are trying to counter with the offer of a better engineering position… so we don’t lose the man power outright.

It’s a double sided coin for him. If he goes he gets to use his degree he spent for ever and gobs of money on. If he stays he gets stability and bennies and… the pleasure of my company of course.

If he goes.. my personal company will get the contract for the installer of the app he’s working on. If he stays.. I get to keep coding and get to work with someone I know and know won’t stab me in the back. The back stabbing having been an issue before.

Oh well.. we’ll see.