November 2004 Archives

So we've had an internal network problem where our network would go down every 10 minutes or so from a DoS attack coming from within. It was really annoying. So Mike and Jason started looking into the issue yesterday about 11am and couldn't find it as of 6pm. They came in early again today, and limited the problem down to 4 possible Windows boxes. Whenever one of those boxes would get plugged into the network, poof, everything would die. The problem was, no virus scanner (with updated definitions, etc) could find the damn thing. So I go and sit down

I've been in Minnesota since Nov 19th, and tomorrow afternoon I'll be leaving to head back to Austin. It's been a great (almost) two weeks spent up here. The highlights of my trip are: Geek nights with Lou playing Worms 3D Spending Thanksgiving Day at my uncle Paul's house with a lot of the family on mom's side Spending Black Friday at my grandparent's farm, laughing at the people crazy enough to go shopping Watching Law & Order: SVU with Adam, Andrea and Krista for an entire night Bowling night on Saturday with a lot of my friends Relaxing, loafing

I had a great time bowling tonight -- Lou and I got there around 9pm and hung out, BSing with people until about quarter to 10 when Dan & his gf Kim showed up. Pretty soon after that, Joel and Scott arrived. Then the bowling began. It was just Lou, Dan, Kim and myself bowling (Scott and Joel came along to BS). We bowled a few games until Adam & Andrea showed up. They sat around BSing with everyone as well. Then Becky made it after her long, crappy day. She only stuck around for about 15 minutes because she

Shopping list Wild rice 1 medium white onion 1 small can sliced mushrooms Boneless chicken breast 3-4 stalks of celery 1 green bell pepper 3 cans cream of mushroom Chicken bouillon Butter Toys needed: Small bowl to soak rice in Dicing knife and cutting board Medium sized skillet Large stew pot with lid How to make it: Soak wild rice in a bowl of water overnight. You know it's ready to use when you start to see the white fluffy center of the black rice Add 3 Tbs of butter to the skillet and saute 1 cup of chicken Dice

I had a really nice Thanksgiving dinner at my uncle Paul's house this Thanksgiving. A lot of mom's side of the family showed up, including: Patty & Mike Sr, Dan & Sue, Ben & his girlfriend Jade, Melanie, her husband Chad & their daughter Brianna, and of course Paul & Cathy + their kids (Jake, Josh and Laura). After the dinner, Laura and I played a bunch of pool (which was a blast) & Jake and I played Medal of Honor on their PS 2. Then we stayed at a hotel in Lakeville (got NO freaking sleep) and headed down

I am thinking that this vacation's bowling party is going to be held at Sartell Lanes (in...Sartell... for those of you who may be new to the planet...) at 9pm on Saturday. I'm thinkin that if there's enough interest, we may start a little early and chill in the bar (darts, sports TVs, drinking, BSing). Feel free to invite any friends along that you'd like, it's an open party as usual. IIRC, it's 15$ to bowl all you want (either from 9-1 or 10-1, I can never remember which), and 2$ for shoes. Don't hold me to those prices though

Where was I born? What's my middle name? What kind of vehicle do I drive (color too!)? What is one permanent part of my wardrobe? What's my favorite OS? What are my parent's names? And my cat's? Where do I live currently? What's my favorite sport to watch? What's my favorite sport to play? Will I ever go skydiving? Will I ever go fishing? Who am I dating? Who's my dream wife? What are my thoughts on TV? Where have I lived? So here's the deal -- you fill this out about me, and if you have a blog

Here's my wishlist for networking improvements I would like to make "in my spare time". It's not a feature list, and not a single thing on here is a scheduled feature. It's just the sort of thing I'd like to see done at some point because it bothers me for one reason or another. Also, they're in no particular order. Full interface support Currently, we only report back interfaces that you can do something sensible with in terms of sockets, that we've been able to test. This means that the only interfaces we report are active ethernet interfaces (eth0, en0,

Today was a rather fun day. I slept in, which was really nice. Got up, got ready and went to pick up my cousin Maggie from SCSU. She came and joined mom & dad for lunch. We had brisket! MMmmMmMMm that's some good food! We sat and watched the Vikings win (for once), which was also pretty cool! :-) After BSing for a while, I took Maggie back into the house and came home. Then it was time to put up Christmas lights with dad. We both went up and put lights up all around the house, just like we

I fly out around 4:45pm today to head back to MN for a vacation that lasts until the end of the month! I'm pretty stoked!! Not only because I need a vacation due to my brain melting lately, but I get to go home and see friends + family. :-) We're having a huge Thanksgiving dinner at my uncle Paul's in the cities, and then I know we're also going down to the farm to see dad's side of the family as well. And of course I'll be seeing as many friends as I can possibly fit in. I dropped

I spent part of my night last night reformatting and reinstalling the laptop at home. I took Windows XP Home off the laptop due to it running less-than-stellar, and I replaced it with Windows 2003 Server. No real reason for picking that OS over anything else -- I just figured I'd give it a shot to see how it went. The reformat went fine. 40 GB hdd, so it took its sweet ass time formatting the drive for NTFS. The install of 2003 went pretty smooth as well. Of course, it didn't auto install my wireless (or hardline) ethernet and

I'm having a hard time getting on the ball today, and I think it's due to lack of sleep and the weather. It's been raining pretty much non-stop for the last 12 hours or so (probably more, I'm too lazy to think about the numbers right now). And I don't mean a gentle rain like I used to see living in Vancouver or Redmond. I mean a decent rain for a while, then torrential downpours for a while. When I drove home from Elissa's last night, I had to drive the truck thru a few streams in the road where

Wahoo! So after about 1.5 days of working on it, I have the prefs dialog UI complete (for the most part). It's not hooked into the main project yet -- I started it as a separate project -- but hooking it in won't take too long. I figure that plus making it actually store/load the preferences should only take about another half day to complete. Making the rest of the project actually use the new preferences, however, will take considerably longer. It's kind of fun trying to figure out what things are going to have preferences (and what they look

So I've been having troubles sleeping lately, and last night was no different than just about any other night this month. I go to bed at a reasonable hour (though I must admit, I did nod off later than usual last night) and I wake up feeling tired; like I didn't get any good sleep. Yech! Every once in a while, I wake up and things are different with the apt. The alarm clock is set to a different time, or is not set at all. The radio is turned on even though I didn't turn it on before going

So I got up this morning, and what do I find? A ton of fog. Oh goodie, a nice long drive to work for Aaron. ;-) Actually, taffic was a breeze going down Southwest Parkway, which I was kind of surprised about. But when I got up to MoPac, I realized that people weren't going anywhere anytime soon. But!!! It only took an extra 10 minutes to get into work, so I was pleasantly surprised. Traffic moved faster when people can't see the car in front of them than it does with a light drizzle. Go figure! Oh well, I

...is cleaning! Yup, that's right, it's not quite spring, but it's time for me to clean the apt from top to bottom. So I queued up the best cleaning music I could think of (every albumn from the Tea Party, some I Mother Earth, some Econoline Crush, and of course, some Our Lady Peace) and sat right down to tell you all about my day. Lol, off to quite the start, eh? ;-) I feel bad for Lis today. It's miserable weather outside (like 40 [which is "cold" for down here]) and raining. And she's working outside at the zoo

Shopping list: Shortening 15 oz can of pumpkin filling Sugar Flour Salt Baking powder Baking soda Ground cinnamon Ground cloves 4 eggs Toys needed: Large mixing bowl Measuring cups Hand mixer (like you use for making cookies) 3 bread pans How to make it: Cream 2/3 cup of shortening with 3 cups of sugar and all 4 eggs in a large mixing bowl Then add the entire 15oz can of pumpkin filling and mix well Add 2/3 cup of water to the mix Add 3 1/3 cups of flour, 1 1/2 tsp of salt, 1/2 tsp of baking powder, 2

The first thing I noticed was the wonky install process.. but ya know what? That's fine. So what if Disc 1 isn't where the install starts... at least it told me what I needed to do to get the install going. Peachy! So I get everything installed, and I get to the step where it's going to search online for update. w00t! This thing says 2003 in the name, so surely there are updates for it. Oops, it can't seem to connect to microsoft for whatever reason (yes, my internet connection is fully functional). There's no error message, just a

So I was asked to impart some wisdom the other day as to what name mangling is and why it's needed, how it happens, etc. So I'm going to do my best to explain what happens when the compiler tries to grok a piece of code. Well, there's really two questions to answer -- one is why name mangling happens historically, and the other is why does it still happen in modern compilers? But first, let's talk about what it actually means. Let's say you have a class named Foo and looks something like this (in our imaginary language): Class

I dreamt that I was living by myself in my old house in Sartell (the house over by the Middle School, on 2nd Ave). It was just me and Pixel. But I had these neighbors in the house next door (Peckscamp's house) who were Mexican -- and they were total assholes. Aside from the huge number of people living in their house (it's a two-story house, about 17500 sq ft, and there must have been 50 people living there) who kept really weird hours and listened to their music cranked way the hell up 24 hrs/a day... they had a

I've been having a really interesting conversation with Val and Avonelle about what it takes to get hired in the software industry (Jake has chimed in as well with his thoughts). It's an interesting read, so I'd suggest going and checking it out. I'm not going to steal Val's thunder, so go give it a read if you're interested. Work was rather boring today. I finished up a few more regression tests and then started back in on v6 features. I finally got rid of the annoying internal "hidden" events showing up in the code browser, so I got the

7:00am: woke up to the alarm clock and the cat 8:00am: woke up again to the sound of three firetrucks and an ambulance hauling ass thru my small, winding parking lot 8:45am: left for work, picked up breakfast from Rudy's 9:10am: got to work, sat down and stared at email. Started writing more testing suites 11:15am: Meggan called, so I talked to her for a while 11:30am: Alpha meeting for a while 1:00pm: Called Meggan back so we could finish our conversation, started doing more testing 3:30pm: Started writing this blog entry as a break from testing ------- From here

So I was feeling like writing a creative story today, since I haven't done one of those in a while... and just as I was about to start writing, Cortis came into my office and we had a discussion about work stuff. So needless to say, all creativity was drained out of my body while talking about work, and so you are now lacking a story for the day. Tough. I've spent most of my day fixing random bugs and adding a ton of tests to our regression suite. The main test that I'm trying to add is one that

In my lifetime, the gaming industry has done everything in its power to destroy good video games. Yeah, sure, there are good games that come out every month such as the upcoming Halo 2. But how long do the games put out today really entertain you? What's their replay value? I can't think of a single game (even Kindgom Hearts, from the previous post) that's captured my imagination for longer than a single pass thru the game. And even after beating the games, I just feel like an empty husk of a gamer. There's no heart in games anymore. And

So I did something this weekend that I haven't done in ages -- I spent almost the entire weekend playing a video game. About 8 months ago, I started playing a game called Kingdom Hearts (by SquareSoft and Disney) -- got about 5 minutes into the game and was distracted by something shiny. I put that game down to play other games (Disgaea, Castlevania, NHL 2004 come to mind). Well, this weekend I pulled it back out again and decided to give it a serious shot. Holy Hell. It's not often that I get enthralled with a game to the

Man, it's absolutely beautiful here in Austin today. It's about 70-75 degrees outside with a slight breeze, and a crystal-clear sky. Lis and I went out for a walk around the apts for a while to enjoy the sun. We liked it so much that we decided to go for a drive around Austin. We took the back road in towards where I work (thru all the million dollar and up homes in Hill Country). Once we got over there, we decided to get some Amy's Ice Cream. We ended the day up by chillin around the apt. I managed

For those of you who've never done one of these before, it's called an Aaron Thinger, and it consists of random questions that you've probably never been asked before on a survey. The entire concept started out one afternoon while reading the 5th or 6th "email survey" I got from various friends. Basically, I got annoyed because they all asked the same questions over and over again. So I came up with my own survey (called a "Thinger") with random questions that really made no sense. Pretty soon, Aaron Thingers became a fad. I knew this the day I got

I finally got console applications compiling in RB 6. I ended up sticking my fingers in over 30 files spanning four different projects just to get this one little feature done. I ended up having to modify the plugins sdk, modify our plugin converter plugin (boy, isn't that a brain-fuck? An RB plugin that converts RB plugins into things the IDE can grok), the IDE itself and of course, some more compiler tweaks. All in all, this "3-day project" ended up taking almost two weeks! Yeeps! I guess that just goes to show that a WAG (wild-assed guess) really is

Bush has supposedly won the election... which I find interesting since Ohio still hasn't weighed in one way or the other, and I don't think ANY state has counted all their ballots (including absentee and provisionals)... But whatever. Bush Wins = Aaron Hates America for 4 more years. Work has been really slow going lately. I've got about 4 projects open and modified at once because I'm adding some functionality to our Plugins SDK. Yeesh that's a PITA! But, it's needed -- otherwise it's almost impossible to get console support to work. Yup.... still working on damn console support. Had

Shopping List: 2-3 lbs chuck or arm roast 1 medium white onion 3-4 medium russet baking potatoes 4-5 carrots 1 head of cabbage 1 garlic 4 bay leaves worcestershire sauce barley paprika ground cloves sugar salt & pepper Toys needed: Sharp knife Cutting board Meat scissors Large stew pot A garbage bowl or can to throw stuff away in How to make it: 1) Fill large stew pot half-full of water 2) Rinse roast well, then cut roast into small strips (be sure to remove as much fat as you can), then take the meat scissors and cube the meat

So after having a fun conversation with Lou and Jake, here's a list of available domain names we've been thinking of registering for giggles. All of these are open as of Nov 01, 2004. Most of them are just sick, twisted, and wrong. But hey, it's a Monday night, and the three of us were feeling bored. Aaron - www.ihadyourmom.com Jake - ww.yoursisterforgothershirt.com Aaron - www.longlostonenightstands.com Jake - www.yourmomtookmeinafigurefourleglock.com Aaron - www.mormonloving.com Jake - www.godblessthosepagans.com Aaron - www.godhateschristians.com Jake - www.evengodhatescreed.com Lou - www.godhatesgeorgewbush.com Aaron - www.goatmolester.com Aaron - www.creedsucks.org Lou - www.sheepviolator.com Aaron - www.whatisupmyhomey.com Lou - www.strongwhitechocolatebrother.com Lou

So I finally got around to getting some newer pictures of the cat online. You can view the entire gallery here, but I want to know what picture is your favorite. I'll quietly post more pictures to that gallery as I take them, but since I'm not constantly following the cat around with the camera, the updates will be few and far between I suspect. Enjoy!

Last night we celebrated Lawrence's bday over at my apartment. We had a small gathering (just Lis, Lawrence and I) that started about 5pm or so. Lis made this awesome cake -- it was 2 layers and was RED! It was a goofy looking piece of food, but damn did it taste good. The whole thing was homemade (the cake, the icing, everything) and turned out great. I was in charge of making the salsa which turned out better than normal. I didn't leave it chunky like pico de gallo, but I didn't blend it either. It was basically hand-crushed

I enjoy cooking I hate cleaning, but I'm a wannabe neat freak I believe in evolution over creationism I own a Compaq laptop which is currently running Windows XP, a Dell desktop running SuSE 9.0, an iMac running OS 9/10.2, another Dell desktop running Windows XP/RedHat 9.0, and another iMac running OS 10.1/10.2/10.3 I made homemade Old Time Beef Soup this weekend, and it is delicious (perhaps I'll post the recipe later) I dressed my cat up for Halloween as a witch. She loved it. Like she loves going to the vet I think overalls on girls can be