Public Class GeoffAppleby

What I did on my vacation

I came to write this post feeling a bit like I'd just come back to school and stuck without writing that ol' essay about what I did during the break.

And I hated doing those sort of essays. So I've been putting it off.

Since I've been back at work, things have really busy. REALLY busy. So I've been putting it off.

In the time since my last post, I haven't really had any new and funky bits of code that I found useful that I could post. So I've been putting it off.

But that's not it. It's been a while since I've posted, and the end result is a sort of writer's block. It's not actually a full block, just some friction slowing me down, basically it's needed a big chunk of effort to open those gates again. Lately it's been feeling a bit like raising myself from the dead :) (Ben seems to have had a similar problem lately, put it pretty well in his post about a very similar subject - although he's not so much interested in reanimating corpses as he is on getting buff at the gym).

So there's really only one response I can make to it all - Sink or Swim time :) I post, therefore I repost, therefore I am...a blogger!

For those of you who liked sitting in English class listening to other people's 'What I Did...' essays (you sickos!) here's a flash of random events over the last few weeks.

• Made the drive to Melbourne (from Canberra) for Easter to visit my parents and my big sis, who had her birthday on Easter Sunday. Was a good trip, and all the important things were done (convinced Mum to make me a batch of Lamb's Fry -  which I can't cook myself - yum! Got some flake from a decent fish and chip shop - you can't get it in Canberra, and we visited the USA Food Store for a fix on Wild Cherry Pepsi)
• Saw Ross Noble live at the Melbourne Comedy Festival. Visiting Melbourne over Easter is always good timing in that regard. This is the 4th time I've seen him live, and he's freaking awesome.
• Got back to work to find panic stations - 'This new customer X's stuff needs to be delivered by Friday, and we forgot'. Gotta love it :) The best bit was that we shipped on time, and it required working back late for only one night.
• My team leader has abandoned ship for two weeks. I've just completed day 2 of my solo voyage, and so far so good - however I don't recall as many things going wrong as they have in the last two days :) For all that I must be doing something right - management do nothing right? Well on Monday I only got 1 line of code written (and that was a bugfix on an existing line), and wrote zilch today.
• Got my hands on the album by the Dissociatives. If you haven't heard this band, you MUST. Here's a sample of one of their songs, Horror With Eyeballs :) Seriously, it's a fantastic song. I also updated my collection of Weird Al Yankovich songs.

Things have been fun. I much prefer working under pressure - if there's no deadline looming closer and closer I seem to get less written. Crunch time has come this week having realised that a pet project of mine (a management utility prototype I wrote last year for configuring other applications, and left in that shaky state) is being demanded more and more needs to be extended more and more. Besides the obvious fact that it needs a complete review of the both the code and the framework behind it, it needs to work NOW (besides the fact that waiting for Whidbey will mean that I can remove the large chunk I wrote that pretty much does all that ClickOnce gives us), and needs to pull in some assemblies from each of the applications that it's supposed to manage.

That last point is going to cause the biggest problem - to do this effectively, what were previously assumed to be application-specific class libraries are going to need to be spit out into sharable locations within our source control system, and version maintenance is going be a much larger hell.

And Clear Case sucks ass. I would be very interested to hear peoples stories on how they handle version control and sharable reusable code within their systems. We currently deal with 4 main in-house-built systems, each database driven in their own right, and we're slowly working towards getting some automation happening between them. The problem here is that a new instance of the applications are setup for each customer, and 2 of the 4 have a lot of customer specific modifications made to them. On top of this is the fact that the database scripts for each of the applications need to be mostly the same over the different customers, but bits and pieces will be modified, and so keeping track of different database schema versions is worse, in that you can't inherit from a base stored procedure :) For .net code (2 of the applications) we at least have the luxury of inheriting from the base shared class and making customer specific modifications in the override. Anyone got any stories for me? I'd enjoy the read.

I've been reviewing RSS readers too. I read a lot of blogs, at both work and home, so keeping track of stuff has been a bit of a hassle. I've been using Omea Reader for a long time now (before the official 1.0 version was released) and it's the best I can find out of the desktop apps around, but there's little things in there that shits me off a lot. For the last week or so I've been trying out using bloglines. Result? It sucks too, so I'm going to switch back to Omea for now. Bloglines doesn't render right, and it's been duplicating a lot of feed items, so i keep on getting notified of the same post as being new a few times.

Closing thought: Kudos to Brendan for his work on bugfixing and customising our Community Server setup. I've been so damn busy lately that I haven't been able to help, and it's not likely to let up for a few weeks, but sometime real soon now I'll be in hacking and slashing my way through my share of the bugs. Brendan's been working hard meanwhile, and he's doing a fantastic job!