I sent the following to my father earlier today and I realized that it might be useful to other people:
I got some new stuff for my computer yesterday…. I got “rounded” IDE and floppy cables… They are way easier to manage than regular ribbon cables and improve airflow in the case (and look cooler). Some people at work were ordering them so I got in on the cheap bulk price… It was like \$5 a cable.
In the same order I also got the little add-on board for the onboard sound on my motherboard… The add-on board gives me 2 RCA SPDIF connections (one in/one out) and 2 Optical SPDIF connections (one in/one out).. It was hard to find, and it was only \$20… I removed my old SBLive! from the computer so now I have another spare sound card.. :)
When I removed the sound card, and moved the jumper for the onboard one, Windows couldn’t install the driver… It kept saying “Data is invalid”,
which is ever-so cryptic… :)
I had to search online for an hour or so, but I finally found the answer… Apparently some badly written driver installers set certain branches of the
registry to “read only”, so they can’t be modified… This would (probably) be fine if the vendor did that on “their” branch, but these badly written
installers do it to other branches (sometimes all of the branches)…
Apparently the manufacturer of my video card (Leadtek) is notorious for this.. :)
Just got back from lunch at Boca Grande…. It was surprisingly sub-par… They didn’t have any ((Chicken (Colorado || Ranchero)) || Chorizo) so I had to have a Carnitas Burrito, which was dried out and crunchy.. I guess we went a bit too early.. :)
Today Carlos made our first QA build of MM27, which is looking surprisingly good… Our xml-rpc response parsing performance was looking a bit crappy under the debug builds, and I was starting to work on reimplementing that part in C++, but in the release build it is very snappy… While I still will reimplement that bit in C++ during the next milestone (time to dust off my expat knowledge), I would rather not make any unnecessary binary changes this late in the game. We are only delivering a “preview release” anyway, so as long as the performance is acceptable no one will whine about it… I get to tune for performance over the next milestone, which will be fun… The current mozilla trunk’s contains Venkman, the JavaScript debugger… Better than that, though, is that Venkman can also profile JavaScript, so it will make it easy to rip out that infernal scripting language where it is particularly slow and replace it with C++ XPCOM objects…
Adam stayed home sick today…. I hope he feels better..
It only took me 6 years to use 200 checks…. I guess it is time to reorder.. When I opened the account at Fleet the lady tried to talk me into getting more checks, to “save me the inconvenience of having to reorder all the time”…
I went into work today from 12:30-3:30, but I didn’t actually do any work of my own… I spent most of the time helping Adam find workarounds for problems in our ancient Moz source base… I am so glad that moving to a modern version of Moz is on deck for our next milestone…
Tonight Rory, Matt, Brian Minier (who is in town for a concert) and myself played 007: Agent Under Fire for like 5 hours (we just finished)…. That game is pretty fun multiplayer, even with the 4 way split-screen… Of course, it probably helps that we were playing on a 36" TV… :P
Omar and Pedro checked in the client authentication code to our trunk, and now things are seriously broken… Not broken in the sense of “Our Product’s Screwed”, though. Apparently our Client Auth code is a native library that they are calling from the server via JNI. I don’t fully understand the situation, but apparently JNI will only load a library once… This isn’t a problem for a production setup, but since each developer here has their own set of servlets and clients, it turns out that the first set of servlets to call the JNI methods is the only one that will work with the JNI methods until Tomcat is restarted…
Again, I don’t fully understand the problem, but the effect is that we are having to timeshare the server today (one developer working at a time) until Omar develops a workaround…. This sucks so badly…. I am actually trying to work on something cool today…