Musings, Written on Infinite Tape

Moving...

2006-04-13T06:43:00.000-07:00

I want to do some nicer formatting and control for my images from photography, so I'm shifting this blog over onto my new wordpress setup. http://www.infinitetape.com/wordpress/

SQL Server 2005 for Developers

2005-11-09T15:16:00.000-08:00

I really enjoy Euan Garden's talks. I know a fair bit about SQL05 already, but how can you miss the guy in the Hawaiian shirt.

He had some video looping when I came in. One was apparently from the SQL Server 05 launch event last week. The promo video included the crew at Orange County Choppers and their 'experience' with the tool. Mikey: "SQL Server is .... more ... better than Oracle." Apparently, they had a contest to give a custom Microsoft bike to the best transition project from Oracle to SQL05. The winner had a 9TB database that they migrated.

Camtasia and VPC do not get along. The demos will be on the blog. http://blogs.msdn.com/euanga.

He has 60 slides. Anyone want to see them? No? Go figure.

Euan shows off the Management Studio. Pretty graphs showing resource usage across the server, sizes, etc., all built into the Studio. Trace rights are now a grantable right, so you don't need to be sysadmin to use Profiler. There is more security control, but alas it's now more complex.

"I wish we had Intellisense in T-SQL. Oh wait, I'm the one who cut that feature. I really regret that every time I have to give a demo."

He mentioned that it's a bad idea to prefix your user stored procedures with sp_. That's not something I'd heard of before, but I found some more info here.

Integration services inside Studio. He's using the neat graphical workflow stuff to pull the classic Paradox FishFacts demo db into SQL05. You need a couple of tricks. Use the Jet engine for input with Paradox 5.x as the External Parameter and the folder for the database in the path. Connect the Source to a Sql Server Destination node and hit run. All done. The integration services engine is so powerful that they're developing an 8 day training course.

Next year, there will be a Reporting Services Express server that comes with SQL Express, including a lightweight report builder. The restriction is that the data for the reports must come from the local SQL Express instance. Report Builder lets the dba/developer define a metamodel for end users. This metamodel understands the relationships in the db, hopefully preventing the users from creating huge, bad queries. The Report Builder control understands anything in a DataSet object, so you don't need SQL Server to use it.

Effective xUnit Testing

2005-11-09T09:00:00.000-08:00

It was really hard to get out of bed this morning. I skipped breakfast and went right to my first talk.

Charlie Calvert was talking about using DUnit and NUnit to do unit testing.

(work in progress)

Vendor Reception and Meet the Teams

2005-11-08T21:00:00.000-08:00

The vendor reception was set up with a variety of food buffets scattered around the exhibit hall. Not a bad idea, except that the room is barely large enough to hold the exhibits, let alone food and diners. The food was mediocre, though not as bad as the cheap sheet pizza they've had for this event the last two years. The desserts were great!

I can't really say the same for the Meet the Teams. Last year, they did the Delphi team as a casual, science-fair layout. You could visit with any of the groups within the Delphi team in a casual forum. They tried it this year for all the teams, but they did it in a relatively small room (smaller than the exhibit hall, with a lower ceiling), so it was very noisy. And, we were all standing, so there was no way to stay comfortable.

I did get to ask Randy to clarify a couple of things. First, they do have a WinForms client, and they seriously thought about releasing it this year. However, they determined that it would be too confusing to have three different clients for Windows, so the elected to hold it back. He said they'd revisit that when they retire the Win32 client, based on how good the CPC looks when it finally has all the features of the Win32 client.

We also talked about using .NET for Alternate Property Editors. That's in the works, but even better, they've already got an implementation for faster APE display now, without the form server. For simple workflows that don't need a lot of heavy logic or external calls, you can design your workflow in an XML based format, and the client can render from that source. This is the same technology that the Web client uses.

Tiny Lab This Year

2005-11-08T20:30:00.000-08:00

Developers, Sugar, and Marketing

2005-11-08T20:00:00.000-08:00

Randy Listens to Bug Reports

2005-11-08T18:00:00.001-08:00

StarTeam SDK New Features

2005-11-08T18:00:00.000-08:00

The R2 release adds several new SDK Features.

SDK apps now have access to the credential storage system in the StarTeam toolbar. The server object has new static and instance methods to let you determine if a cached authentication is available and allow you to log in using the stored credentials. You can't actually get the credentials in your code, but you call do server.autoLogOn() to use them. Randy mentioned that there are anti-spoofing mechanisms in the toolbar to prevent people from getting at your credentials.

There are a new series of objects collectively known as the CheckoutManager that give you access to capabilities previously reserved for Borland apps. For example, you can now enable MPX checkouts from the SDK. You can also get checkout events and exceptions. You can route checkouts to java or .NET streams rather than files. You can intercept the data, munge it with a Filter, then pass it back to the SDK (carefully...if you're doing MPX, your filter needs to be thread-safe, as the downloads can be happening in parallel). And, you can cancel a long set of downloads at any time.

There's better support for dealing with Not-In-View items or folders. There's also work in progress for the client and SDK to notice the difference between Not-In-View and Deleted-From-Project (aka Obsolete). Currently, the SDK can't tell the difference.
You can now do eventing without MPX, sort of. The SDK provides you with classes to handle the polling you would normally do in the background with heavy optimization.

Randy dropped a couple more hints. The new merge tool will definitely be useable from the SDK. They also have a WinForms implementation of the CPC in house, and they're debating what to do with it. They're looking at doing view merges in a temporary workspace, allowing you to build and test your merged code before committing it to the repository. Sweet.

New Features in CaliberRM

2005-11-08T16:30:00.000-08:00

The new Tracer allows you to trace from Caliber into StarTeam, against any of the objects that live there. The new Publisher allows you publish Caliber requirements into StarTeam requirements, and then keep republishing them as new baselines are created. The updates change the original StarTeam requirements rather than creating new ones. You can also customize the field mappings.

There will be a CaliberRM 2005 R2 SP1 in about 90 days. It will add a first-class integration for Test Director and Quality Center. Tests will show up in the traceability matrix. Published requirements will come over as native TD/QC requirements, including the tree structure.

In 2006, they plan on adding improved baselining as well as making usability refinements.

New Features in StarTeam

2005-11-08T15:00:00.000-08:00

John Sileski talked a lot about the 2005 and 2005 R2 features. I already knew those, so I'm going to skip them. There are some good things coming, though.

The VS2005 integration is 'coming soon'. I'll find out more tonight. There will be a stronger integration with Test Director and Quality Center.

There is a huge new focus on the SCM functionality. For the past year, they've been focused on doing integrations with the other Borland products. Now, they turn back to the core. The next major release will come next year. Atomic transactions and commit sets. Better view merging tools. Eliminating the Win32 client, and bringing all the functionality to the new multi-platform client. They are running a field test, and I intend on getting involved. Of course, if I do, there are likely things that I can't say anymore.

Oh, and they're replacing Visual Diff and Merge. They're developing a brand new tool, based on some heavy-duty algorithms (some of which they licensed), and accessible via the SDK. It's about time!

Question: Will there be updates to the EA workflow designer?
Answer: No, but there may be new features introduced as part of CoreSDP.

Question: Now that there's a .NET SDK, can we do custom forms in .NET rather than Java?
Answer: Not yet, but we plan on fixing that.

Question: Are you really killing off the Win32 client?
Answer: Yes

That last one left me with some trepidation, but I got the 2005 R2 version of the CPC, and they've fixed a lot of my issues with it. Maybe I'll try using it for a while.

It's Hard to Get a Picture of Marco

2005-11-08T12:05:00.000-08:00

The man just doesn't seem to stop moving. :-)

New Features in Together

2005-11-08T12:00:00.000-08:00

This had me confused. The vast majority of developers at the show are Delphi programmers. So, why is the lion's share of Together and CoreSDP effort focused on Java?

Oh, and if you're a JBuilder user, you're out of luck for Together 2006. They scrapped it in favor of the Eclipse version.

The 2006 versions bring support for UML 2.0. The .NET versions now support LiveSource technology for both Delphi and C#, in BDS or VS.NET. The VS2005 update is coming in Q1 2006. The version that will bridge between UML and Microsoft's new DSL modeling language should be out in Q3 2006.

Performance for the VS.NET version should drastically improve, since it now shares the code base with the Delphi integration.

Michael Swindell on the Capabilities of BDS

2005-11-08T09:00:00.001-08:00

Opening Session

2005-11-08T09:00:00.000-08:00

Ended up at breakfast an hour early, and I gave a demo of our software to Joe Hendricks of Thoughtworks and Marco Cantu (yes, that Marco). Joe wants to introduce me to John Kaster tonight at the vendor show, which I guess is a good reason to stick around for it rather than just wander off to Metreon.

This would have been live, but they shut off the WiFi in the room. No, I don't know why.

9:05 AM
David I takes the stage. This conference is all about the developers.
Chief marketing guy on stage. One year ago, the SDO vision was launched. We're going to show the 2006 tools, as well as the future vision. Tomorrow, Boz will show us Tempo and 'project Maya', a new system for requirements engineering (different from requirements management). Core SDP is the entire suite, multi-language, multi-platform, based on Eclipse.
9:15 AM
New president and CEO (as of today!), Tod Nielsen. Software developers rule the world.
Mission: Deliver business value through successful software projects.
9:22 AM
David I again.
Customer of the Year: Cintas Corporation & Visa International Asia Pacific
Partner of the Year: EDS
Borland Technology Partner: AutomatedQA Corporation, Raize Software, Extended Systems, BuildForge
9:30AM
David I. 'Who wants to see some source code?' Huge roar.
'Who wants to see some Java source code?' Small applause and some groans. :-)
Charles Overbeck and Ken Chan, JBuilder R&D.
JBuilder has a "Peers" window, which integrates a IM client in the IDE. Can share a live coding session. This includes the GUI designer. Diffs are shown within the IDE coding window, rather than in a separate app, including recent history (without source control involved) and including remote edits.
9:40 AM
David I: 'Who wants to see some Delphi and C++ code?' Huge roar again.
Michael Swindell: 'Delphi AND C++ Builder' -> Borland Developer Studio. Also Delphi for .NET and C#Builder, all in the same IDE. Faster IDE performance (big applause). "VCL Live Guidelines", another good steal from Apple's XCode. More built in refactoring tools. Quality Central access within the IDE. StarTeam and Caliber integrations. Full Together featureset for Delphi.NET and C#, including LiveSource diagrams.
The Caliber support in the IDE allows you to insert the requirement text as a comment in the source file, and you can do a Requirements~Update to pick up any changes.
Borland is now using Caliber and StarTeam for their internal use.
10:12 AM
Allen Bauer: Chief Scientist for Delphi IDE.
Live templates dynamically insert code. (I'm not sure if that would be helpful or irritating.) Ok, maybe it is helpful:
Type in C++
switch (BorderStyle)
and get
switch (BorderStyle){
case bsSingle: break;
case bsSizable: break;
...
default:
}
It can also automatically declare variables if you forget, running the refactoring tools in the background. The Delphi IDE will let you declare a variable anywhere in the code, and when you finish with the declaration, it will move it up into the var section.

David I... I must be at BorCon

2005-11-08T08:05:00.000-08:00

The Giant Letters! Sponsored by Microsoft!

2005-11-08T07:32:00.000-08:00

Yes, It's a Software Conference

2005-11-08T07:30:00.000-08:00

Tasty...

2005-11-07T22:02:00.000-08:00

....but a bit out of focus. I was too tired and sore to go out Monday night, so I ordered in from the Japanese restaurant on the corner of the hotel. Great accompaniment to a Colts win!

Reading Tea Leaves

2005-11-07T18:00:00.000-08:00

Reading Tea Leaves is a talk that was first given by Danny Thorpe in 1999, and it used to be a 1-hour session. Today, we did four hours worth, and it was still a bit rushed. For those who don't know, Danny is the lead coder for the Delphi compiler, including its refactoring into a .NET compiler. He also wrote the old Tomes of Delphi books. This guy knows his stuff. Side note, the Delphi compiler is 3.5MLOC.

Key number one: you need to separate what you know you wrote from what it's actually doing. To be effective, you have to forget that you wrote the code.

Multiprocessing is the biggest potential hurdle for developers in the future. Since processors are not going to get much faster, you're going to encounter more cores. So, if you've got a mutlithreaded app, you must test with multiple CPUs where your app is sensitive to contention. You can get away with HyperThreaded if you don't care that your on-chip cache is shared. You can get away with dual-core if you don't care about PCI bus contention. Going from 1 processor to 2 is the big jump...n-way is only incrementally harder.

He described a scenario where he's seen a user move the mouse rapidly and crash the software. Now, he underestimated just how rapidly. This must have been a Quake player, because they shook the mouse so fast that the message queue ran out of memory. Yikes!

I don't want to cover everything, because you really need to hear Danny speak. (I'll relay more to my coworkers in my trip report.) Here's some highlights:
App disappears? Likely, you overflowed the stack and the object whose exception handler was supposed to be called is actually already gone or corrupt. If Windows can't locate a valid exception handler, poof!

Bug only shows up when you turn on Delphi's compiler optimizations? Turning on optimization causes the compiler to do lifetime analysis on local vars, holding them in registers where it can. Sounds like you forgot initialize a variable later in the method, where the compiler has mapped that variable into a register that was already used further up and probably non-zero.
CPU view is your friend. If you see an address in $004nnnnn, it's probably data in your code. $7Cnnnnnn is Windows code.

Need to inject code into a process? Send a system-wide message (like change wallpaper or resolution, etc.) that gets sent to all top-level windows. This will cause your dll to get loaded into every process that message hits. Great for hacking network games...not that Danny would do something like that.

I've got 3 more pages of notes. Come to the conference next year if you want more.

Danny Shows Off the CPU View

2005-11-07T15:00:00.000-08:00

Use Case Modeling

2005-11-07T13:58:00.000-08:00

The alarm sounded too early, at least from my perspective. My adventures last night left me energized, which meant I didn't get to sleep until closer to midnight (sleep+24 hours).

I wandered downstairs about 45 minutes before the morning session. Since there was no conference session today, the line at the restaurant was quite long, so I hit the deli instead. Now, this is still inside the hotel, so don't think this is like the deli in Palm Springs with the wonderful breakfasts and desserts. No, this is your choice of day-old mixed fruit and stale bagels. I grabbed some yogurt and the 'breakfast sandwich'...a croissant with sliced ham and american cheese, expertly microwaved to order while in plastic wrap, creating a greasy mess. Ugh.

The Use Case session was only moderately interesting. It was a basic introduction to use case diagramming, setting you up for all the wonderful tools that Borland offers, though not in a sales-pitch sort of way (thankfully).

I think the things to take away are that people should be aware of the basic diagrammatic grammar (so we can communicate in a common language), and they should use the use case diagrams as a magic mirror. They are a transform that you can use to discover what plain text may not be able to express. Whether the end result stays as a diagram or goes back to text is up to you.

One interesting fact that dropped: remember all that talk about SDO tools from last year. You know, the future vision for their suite? Well, at least for now, it's all based around Java and Eclipse. If you're in Win32 or .NET, you're out of luck, at least for the forseeable future.

Con Lunch

2005-11-07T13:30:00.000-08:00

This looks tasty, but somehow, they always manage to remove any flavor at these events.

Mmmm....

2005-11-07T11:20:00.000-08:00

Traveler or Tourist?

2005-11-07T11:16:00.000-08:00

"Be a traveler, not a tourist." That's the tag line of Tony Bourdain's current show. He goes traipsing around strange countries, looking for what's good (read particularly odd to outsiders) for locals, not the average tourist. His intent is to show that tourist fare is primarily homogenized garbage, leaving you without a real feel for the country or its people.

I spoke with my father a few weeks ago, and he related his stories of business trips to San Francisco from decades past. His key piece of advice was to not walk anywhere. The people who were actually walking at night were the ones that had nothing better to do and no place else to go. He described his brief attempts at being a walking traveler in SF to be an exercise in (sometimes-scary) oddity. There were people who scared you off with odd demeanor, as well as those with outrageously large odor radii. Of course, my dad at the time was walking back to the hotel with as much alcohol as he could carry, at the order of the company-owner's-son-slash-VP for a customer party.

So Sunday night I had a dilemma. Do I venture out on foot to find a meal, or do I hide in a taxi? I wanted to get a feel for the place, but I probably look like a slow moving gravy train to the wrong sort of people, and I'm on my own. I decide on a hybrid approach. I've been wanting to try Roy's since my last trip to San Jose. So, I made a reservation, figuring that I'd get in less trouble if I had a targeted destination in mind. I memorize the turns on my map, as there were only 2 of them, and headed out. I carried only my phone, license, corporate card, and a handful of dollar bills in case an impromptu tip was required.

On the cab ride in, there were some pretty scary folks on the street, and this was daytime. This was maybe a step beyond what I've seen on the far south side of Chicago or in DC. I figured I would just march straight ahead with a purpose. When I stepped out of the hotel, I was pleasantly surprised. The area it's in is the 'Union Square' part of town, which means it's where the high-end shopping is. On my walk, I passed places like Tiffany and Bulgari. The streets traffic was reminiscent of Michigan Avenue in Chicago...a couple of panhandlers but nothing out of hand.

Until I unknowingly passed the restaurant.

The more gleaming facade gave way to an environment where the old, established businesses were struggling, and many others had already given up under the crusing weight of city real estate. There was nothing flashy, just honest. A nice little Japanese place, family owned, that looked far more welcoming than the sterile joint inside the hotel. A Thai place filled with local couples. The local bookstore, independant after all these years. Now, I won't lie to you, there were some shadows down the alleys. I was definitely off the designated path for outsiders. But, it was well populated and friendly on the street without being cloying and commercial.

I did find my way, and I had a spectacular meal. The sashimi plate with house sake was tempting, but I knew I should have my mind clear to walk back. I instead started with Lobster Potstickers, which were interesting but ultimately a diappointment. The outer shell and peanut sauce drowned out most of the subtle notes of the lobster. The main course was a local halibut, pan seared and served with a dashi creme fraiche. The fish was fresh with a hint of sweetness, with the dashi (bonito broth, likely first pass) adding a rich, salty accent. This was accompanied by a rice pilaf made with short, red Himalayan rice with a pleasant, mixed texture. A side of string beans added a strong, earthy counter to the overall richness of the meal. There was also a blanched leek, which I felt only distracted from the rest of the course.

Now, before I even started on my entree, the waiter asked if I wanted dessert, because it would take 20 minutes to hand prepare. I ordered the chocolate lava souffle, which came served on a splash of raspberry reduction with a scoop of vanilla. There are only a handful of ingredients here, but the execution was flawless, including the fresh-from-the-oven molten chocolate core. At the end, just to remind you of the link to the everyday sundaes, there were slivers of ice cream cone hidden under the vanilla.

When the dessert arrived, the waiter brought me a handful of treats on a side plate. He said he had forgotten to bring me a second piece of bread, so he made these as an apology. I should ask busy waiters for bread more often, I suppose. Some fresh berries, along with two tarts and two cookies, all bite sized. The first tart was a standard lemon cream. The second, which I thought was chocolate, turned out to be hazelnut, a nice surprise. A pinwheel cookie, which expected to be chocolate and vanilla, turned out to be chocolate and orange zest. And this finished with a deeply caramelized coconut cookie. This was a wonderful meal compared with the hurried two-slices-of-chicken-on-white I had grabbed from the picked over feeding line as I rushed into the hotel.

On my way back, I took another wrong turn. (Stupid streets that don't meet at right angles...) I was tired and wanted to get back (sleep+21 hours), but I also was curious about what I might find. Unfortunately for the adventurous, all I found were more chain shops, though I now know where the Walgreens is for some Advil, and where Ghirardelli is for Marti's chocolates.

So am I a traveler or tourist? Well, I never was brave enough to wander into one of those out of the way places, but I probably wouldn't have any trouble doing so. That said, this is still the US (sort of), and I'm not sure I'd be so brave if I weren't speaking the language. Only time will tell.

Using StarTeam Effectively

2005-11-07T08:56:00.000-08:00

This was an odd session. The room was full, about 25 people. The speaker, Scott Green, started off with a lot of what I considered to be pretty basic stuff. This was listed as an intermediate session, wasn't it? He actually walked through all the options in the client, explaining what they did. Wasn't it obvious?

After the first hour or so, I was ready to write this off as a refresher course. It was obvious from the "how long have you used StarTeam" survey that the only people in the room with more experience than me worked for StarBase or Borland. The teacher, an ex-StarBase guy, obviously knew his stuff, but he wasn't very smooth, which made the experience more frustrating.

Once the first break came, it was like a switch was flipped. Everyone gathered on their own into little groups to discuss things in more detail, and they did so spontaneously. this was the mental wakeup call I needed. Some good discussion, some caffeinated beverage (I'm at sleep+16 hours now), and some friendly people in an environment that would allow us to laugh about our big mistakes. When the break ended, Scott mentioned that one of his conversations is that users aren't being trained well enough to realize that file status actually work, which is why people use the file locks to go back to 'SourceSafe mode'. There were a few people in the room like that, and you could see the light bulbs turning on.

Things continuously got more interesting. The speaker started going into the ten types of views, along with the business cases for using them. While he wasn't always totally clear with his points, the crowd was awake enough to draw the necessary details out of him with a good discussion. At the end, the topic of backup came up. The discussion came down to myself, Scott, Steve Reynolds, and Joe Schulz. People are still fascinated that you can move to a 0-downtime model.

Quote of the session: "Hokey-Pokey Build Process". This technique is where you use moveable build labels or promotion states to include or exclude items. You put the CR in, you take the CR out, etc.

Trips are Never Smooth

2005-11-06T15:16:00.000-08:00

Wake up at 5 am. (Ok, really woke up at 3am because of the big storm.) Shower and dress. Drive down to the airport. My low fuel light turns on just before I get in the parking lot. Something else to take care of when I get home.

The American counter is all hosed up. It took me 30 minutes to check in. Ran into Frank while I was there, and we actually were on the same connecting flight to Dallas. Of course, he was in first class, row one, so we didn't talk much. He was visiting Fullerton and Brea.

Flight left a couple minutes late, but not bad. There was a college soccer team heading home from Terre Haute, with all the bluster of a typical soccer team. They were a fun bunch.

Finally got some (bad) food at DFW. There's a new tram at the airport. Their innovation is apparently that seats are no longer necessary. That, combined with a very jerky track (given that it's brand new), made for a jerky, uncomfortable ride. Then, the plane we were waiting to board didn't get in until 30 minutes after we we're supposed to board. Whaddya know, they had to fly around the big storm. Is it that hard to anticipate these things.

Then, we sat on the runway for more than a half hour (or so...I fell asleep) waiting for clearance to leave. Ooof. So, that put me into town more than an hour late. The typically-agressive cab drive got me to the hotel with 45 minutes to spare before my first session. Would have been quicker, but there were three cars broken down on the expressway near Monster Park, including one that was very much on fire.

The Typical Room

2005-11-06T13:30:00.000-08:00

Tournament for Charlie

2005-07-17T15:49:00.000-07:00

Played in the PokerStars "Tournament for Charlie" today. It was a $20 buy-in event for charity to honor Charlie Tuttle (Who's he? http://msn.foxsports.com/other/story/3710354). I figured it was a good chance to practice against some experienced players, including some of the well known bloggers and at least one star that I recognized (Wil Wheaton, who's a very skilled player). Can't say that it went well. I finished in 131st out of 145. Granted, this was my first online tourney aside from play money games, but good grief! Looking back over my hand history, I got nothing but junk. My best high card hand was A-Qo, and two of the three pocket pairs I got I won before the flop . They were low pairs, so I bet 3xBB ($60 at the time) and nobody took me up on it. The other pair was 7's, and I lost to a guy who made top pair with Jacks on the flop.

Oh well. It was for a good cause. I'm observing Wil now, and he's gone from 210 to 2100 in about 8 hands. He started with a nice double up on A-10 vs A-9.

People are coming over tomorrow night for a home game. Can't say I've gained any confidence from today's experience.

BTW, finished Potter #6 yesterday in one sitting. The ending is like a boot to the chest. It's a well written book without all the whiny behavior from the last one, but she's clearly setting up for the last battle. She could have left out the Peter Parker moment in the last few pages. By putting it there, you can almost guarantee that arrangement won't last. I'm not sure Voldemort is still going to be considered the most evil character after this.

TMBG

2005-07-17T15:36:00.000-07:00

Went an saw They Might Be Giants at the Music Mill the week. The music was great. The organization was spotty. The gap between the opening act (Corn Mo) and TMBG was over 40 minutes. This made the night seem a lot longer than it was. They did a good mix of stuff from various albums, including a couple off their childrens' albums. Kathy described Corn Mo best...a mix between Meat Loaf and Jay (as in Jay and Silent Bob).

Been a long time...

2005-05-23T19:58:00.000-07:00

Guess I should write something here. Yes, I got the Mac mini. It took three weeks, but I've been using it, and it's pretty nice. They got me with the halo effect, too. I picked up an iPod last weekend. I'm a sucker for shiny toys.

So, what do I think? I love the user experience, though I wish it were a bit peppier for WoW. The game is playable but not much more. I picked up a USB-midi adapter so I could hook up my old keyboard. Now I just need to find some time to mess around in GarageBand.

Denied...

2005-03-03T14:44:00.000-08:00

"I'm headed out to the Apple Store tonight to buy a Mac mini..."

...but I didn't come away with one. Turns out that if you want a configuration they don't have in stock, you have to order online (at least at the Indy store). So, I placed the order. It should be 3 weeks or so. I think I've already checked the status page 50 times or so. :-)

After some experimentation, it looks like I won't be able to use my good ole' keyboard, a Microsoft Natural Keyboard from the first generation. It's PS/2 only, and neither Windows nor OSX recognizes it with a USB adapter. Rats. The original NK was no-compromises. It has full sized, regularly spaced arrow and nav keys and takes up a huge desk footprint. I'll keep my eye out for solutions, but I may have to swap keyboards with Kathy.

Linux Status

2005-02-28T14:14:00.000-08:00

I owe it to myself to write down something about the Dear Friends concert. It was a very good trip.

So, after a few weeks of poking around, here's what I've determined running linux on my laptop:

Two window managers == too much. I kept getting frustrated by the fact that the apps I wanted to use looked best in Gnome, but KDE had the built-in laptop support widgets.
Wifi for my laptop still isn't quite stable. For example, to get it working I had to load, unload, then reload the kernel module. Also, I never got it to authenticate properly with the work wifi network.
World of Warcraft is barely playable, and only some of the time. I broke down and bought a 3-month Cedega license, and they basically say, "Well, you're running an ATI card, so we've done the best we can. Sorry."
Half-Life 2 == 0.5 FPS under Cedega 4.2.1. Inconceivable.
Fought way too long just to get my mouse and touchpad to both work at the same time without accidentally trashing my video settings.

Compounding all this is the fact that my primary Windows PC gave up the magic blue smoke last week. Athlon XP chips apparently don't like it if the thermal paste dries out. At least none of my data was damaged. So, I'm now left with my laptop as my primary PC, and given all the facts above, I'm not inclined to fight linux any longer.

But this still leaves me hankering for a cool new PC experience. Given that my biggest complaint about my primary PC was having good programs to deal with the gigs of videos, pictures, and music I have lying around, I needed a change of scenery. I was hoping linux would be good enough to satisfy my tech cravings, but it just frustrated me.

I got my performance award letter today, and I filed my tax return last week, so I've decided to try a more expensive experiment.

I'm headed out to the Apple Store tonight to buy a Mac mini. Wish me luck.

Wild Swings

2005-01-25T18:36:00.000-08:00

A cautionary tale...

I use my debit card an awful lot in public, saving my credit card and it's federally mandated fraud protection for the web. I wouldn't say I act irresponsibly with it, and I feel I tend to be a pretty harsh critic in that regard. So, I was quite surprise when I went to buy lunch, and my card was declined.

Following lunch, I called the bank and they said that someone in Turkey had used my card, so they had put a hold on the number. I told them to go ahead and cancel the card. The two offending transactions totalled over $3500. To my bank's credit, they corrected my account within three hours. To my bank's discredit, they had tried to contact me about the situation (before I was aware of it) at home during working hours, when they had my work number on file (I asked and confirmed it). They did this twice, on two different days. I hate to think what would have happened had I been pulling an all-nighter.

Color Me Wrong

2005-01-25T18:28:00.000-08:00

So, here I sit, writing this entry from my once-abandoned Debian install. It appears that, for whatever reason, the AP in my office just didn't get along with my card that day.

I decided to give the wifi ndiswrapper one more try. So, I downloaded the bleeding edge of the ndiswrapper source out of CVS and gave it a shot. It compiled, but I could get nothing out of the tools but 'bad interpreter'. So, I switched the install back to 1.0rc4 and gave it another try. It came up as soon as I told it the WEP key.

Further experimentation is merited...

It's Still Not Ready

2005-01-23T13:41:00.000-08:00

Flush with a bunch of shiny new drive space on my laptop, I decided to give linux another try. They'd made a lot of progress, right?

For those who don't know, my laptop's specs:

Dell Inspiron 8200
1.8GHz P4
512MB of RAM
Mobility Radeon 9000
TrueMobile 1180 internal 802.11b card

If you know anything about linux, those last two items throw up gigantic red flags. That's where I was hoping to see improvement.

One bonus find was the partitioning tool in Knoppix. Now that was a good open-source experience.

I tried out Debian. I'd heard good things about it for years, and I'm not a linux newbie, so I'm not afraid of the command line. I did the network install, which was pretty cool (especially since I got a bandwidth bump...sustained 560KB/s is sweet!) The "stable" release couldn't even get X to start, no matter what I tried, so I jumped up to the bleeding edge. Turns out that was a lot better, though I was stuck in 800x600.

The video card was easier than I thought. Get the driver from ATI, convert it from a .rpm to .deb with alien, force the install. Looked good, but the module wouldn't load. Turns out you have to still compile it, which was easy enough. I spent 20 minutes figuring that out, where a note from dpkg saying "hey, compile this!" would have been helpful. Apt-get spoils you.

The wireless network was the killer. Turns out the TrueMobile 1180 is made by BroadCom, a company who has never released their wifi drivers for linux. That should have been ok, since there's a nifty tool called ndiswrapper that's supposed to let you use the Windows drivers for the card. However, 2 versions and 5 hours of trial and error lead me to believe that it's just not going to work. I got the radio to turn on once during that time, and it would authenticate and get an IP address, but it still couldn't talk to anything but the router. From my research, it's probably because everything on that laptop is geared to go through IRQ 11. Without wifi, the laptop is useless to me, so the experiment ends there.

So, this ordeal had similar results as trying to load linux on my old Soundwave...frustrating. The Soundwave was never really able to get X to work correctly, because of a horrible NeoMagic video chip. Sorry to the ubergeeks out there. I like my web with links I can click...you know, with a mouse.

People In Glass Houses...

2004-12-21T07:44:00.000-08:00

...get really cold when the furnace goes out. Yikes!

It got down to 5 degrees the night before last, and that was the night that the upper limit sensor on my furnace broke. When I woke up, it was 54 degrees in the house. When I asked my wife about it a little later, it was 52.

A couple of hours waiting, 15 minutes of work, and $160 later, I now have a warm house again. The diagnostic LEDs and the simplistic repair made me wish I had just bought the part and install it myself. It was just 2 screws and 2 quick disconnects. But, the guy did check a couple of things to make sure the failure was in the part and not a problem with the furnace. I wouldn't have been able to give myself that piece of mind.

The offending sensor is now sitting on the kitchen table with a festive bow on it. I'll be sure to put it under the tree.

A Beautiful Fall Day

2004-10-31T20:11:00.000-08:00

Dave and Sara got married on Saturday the 23rd. It was an elegant wedding mass followed by a graceful reception on a sunny Atlanta day. Sara and Dave did an awesome job of pulling everything together on such a short schedule. Despite their insistance that it was a 'low-budget' affair, you'd never know it. (Possible exception: my laptop pulling its second gig as wedding DJ.) The sites, the food, the cake, and the staff were all exceptional.

We haven't heard from Mr. and Mrs. Luebke since they drove off in Dave's blue (BLUE!) coupe. I hope they're enjoying the wonderful piece of mind that comes from the success of planning their wedding...

...at least, until the bills come. :-)

2004-10-31T14:33:00.000-08:00

"I can't believe Brian had to loan me his black socks."

2004-10-31T14:31:00.000-08:00

One Luebke down, one to go. April will be here in no time for Derek and Loree.

2004-10-31T14:27:00.000-08:00

Sugar!

2004-10-31T14:25:00.000-08:00

"It's ok to cut it now, right?"

2004-10-31T14:22:00.000-08:00

Yes. It really did happen. Finally.

Things for a Bachelor Party in Chicago

2004-09-27T09:14:00.000-07:00

A Show
A Sports Bar
A Pizza Parlor
A Card Game
A Fun Restaurant
A Bar
A Game with Pain

Marco had a better camera...

2004-09-17T15:00:00.000-07:00

marcocantu.com Borcon2004

He got much better results on his low-light photos. :-P

2004-09-15T17:22:00.000-07:00

Now I just have to fit this all in my bag!

2004-09-15T17:21:00.001-07:00

...and David with two!

2004-09-15T17:21:00.000-07:00

Dale with one t-shirt cannon....

2004-09-15T17:19:00.000-07:00

Dale reads off the first Borland Buck.

Denouement

2004-09-15T16:54:00.000-07:00

I can't tell you how glad I am that the Borland crew ditched the Sting music from last year in favor of techno. This session signalled an escalation in the long standing war of the t-shirt cannons. While David I. drew Borland Bucks out of the box for the giveaways, Dale crept to the back of the theater and started the t-shirt barrage. A little while later, while Dale was giving out leather jackets, the lights dimmed, the fog started rolling out, strobe lights flashing, and out came David riding a giant tower and brandishing dual t-shirt cannons.

No prize bags this year (again), but I did get a t-shirt and hat. One guy had a t-shirt land in his prize bag, and another had a thrown baseball cap land right on his head. A good time had by all.

Was it worth it? Yes.

There was a great deal to learn about StarTeam 2005 as it's a major shift and it's new architecture goes against all SCM work in the last 20 years. The idea guys didn't think it would work, the architects didn't think it would work, they didn't believe it when the prototype worked, they didn't believe it when the real implementation worked. They didn't feel fully confident until they actually grabbed a few customer systems and saw that it worked. Randy said they've never done more design reviews, code reviews, or testing on any other project like they did with this.

Tom and I both made a lot of good contacts, both in Borland and in the industry. It looks like there's momentum for a StarTeam User Group to form, which can only be a good thing.

Would I come back? It depends on the content for next year, whether there are new topics or products to discuss.

Now I'm looking forward to a tasty meal tonight and a quiet flight home. I just hope I have room in my bag for all this stuff!

Three for the Road

2004-09-15T13:15:00.000-07:00

Went to a talk on Software Maintenance and End-of-Life. The one thing I want to try from that session is some of the metrics. He's suggests tracking whether CRs come from missing/incomplete/incorrect requirements, analyst error, coder error, etc., to try to predict how difficult maintenance will be in the future.

We went over to a talk by Ambient Devices. It was basically the same pitch they had at the booth: For simple data, push techniques (phone, pager, etc.) are too intrusive, and pull techniques (web search, newspaper) require too much effort. Ambient data delivery provides a certain level of elegance and simplicity.

Grabbed a turkey sandwich for lunch, then picked up a couple of books. One, called "Hacker's Delight", has all sorts of goodies to coax performance out of code and understand things like numerical representation. The other one is .NET Patterns, which is what it sounds like. Randy was in the booth, and I asked him where the StarTeam books were. He said maybe he could do a sabbatical to write one, maybe in Hawaii. Yeah, Borland would go for that, right?

The last talk was about using ANT and StarTeam to automate builds. Unfortunately, it was pretty deep on the Java side, so I didn't get as much out of it as I wanted. Ah well, my mind was pretty full anyway.

CLR 2.0 Toys

2004-09-15T13:04:00.000-07:00

Brad Abrams, Microsoft's Lead Program Manager for .NET, gave a talk on some of the new features of CLR 2.0.

Console apps are going to get color, transitions and 'animations', keystroke events, and some other features to allow for real .NET console development. He made up a "Console Invaders" game as an example. (That should be on his blog shortly.)

He talked more about the support for .NET stored procedures. SQL 2005 pulls this off by actually hosting the CLR in-proc, and they had lots of demands on the CLR time to provide maximum uptime. When you've got a problem to solve, he recommends taking a close look at whether to use T-SQL or a .NET language, because each implementation path is better for a specific subset of problems.

Delegate invocation is now up to 2 times faster.

They've added, for example, int32.TryParse, which returns a success boolean rather than throwing an exception when it can't parse the input. Much, much faster.

They've added the ability to notify the garbage collector that you've allocated a big chunk of unmanaged space (GC.AddMemoryPressure), causing the garbage collector to dispose of the object more quickly.

Classes can now have some special debugging attributes. DebuggerDisplay allows you to replace the ToString display when inspecting an object with a different format. DebuggerProxyClass allows for a reformatted, easier to read list of fields in the debugger (though you can get back to the raw view with a click).

2004-09-14T23:30:00.000-07:00

Martin Frid-Nielsen, VP of the DSP unit, kicks off the Meet the Team session.

(At this point, I'm really frustrated with this camera (my wife's Digital Elph), especially the white balance and flash. Most of these rooms are dim, and all the flash seems to do is illuminate something I don't want, like the projector in this case. And, since I don't have RAW format on this camera, I have a lot fewer bits to work with for contrast correction. Not sure what I could do about it, though. I really didn't want to carry a heavier camera.)

2004-09-14T23:27:00.002-07:00

Goodies, part 3....

2004-09-14T23:27:00.001-07:00

Goodies, part 2....

2004-09-14T23:27:00.000-07:00

These guys sure know their audience....

2004-09-14T23:26:00.000-07:00

This looked like a really tasty sandwich, but the beef tasted like _nothing_. Tom agreed.

2004-09-14T23:25:00.000-07:00

Definitely NOT what I want to see on a monitor in the "Virtual Operating Room".

2004-09-14T23:24:00.000-07:00

One of Zigon's favorites, the Visible Human project. Alas, they restructured the DNA exhibit, so I didn't see the Beckman centrifuge this year.

2004-09-14T23:22:00.000-07:00

Tom is stunned by David I's shirt!

2004-09-14T23:21:00.000-07:00

Come to think of it, this IMAX theater is like being inside an Ambient Orb, especially when they cycle the colors of the base lighting...

2004-09-14T23:20:00.000-07:00

Tom tries to find out if he can hook an Ambient Orb to his Unreal Tournament stats.

2004-09-14T23:19:00.001-07:00

Your typical session crowd.

2004-09-14T23:19:00.000-07:00

Randy Guck, Chief Scientist for the DSP unit, gets ready for a talk.

2004-09-14T23:17:00.000-07:00

Lots of people wanted to see Delphi Diamondback. This is about a third of the room.

Meet the DSP Team

2004-09-14T23:11:00.000-07:00

We had a Q&A session with various parts of the DSP unit, including their VP, Martin Frid-Nielsen. It was a very upbeat conversation, and they really were trying to show that they were listening to their users. An important note is that they were going to focus next year on Caliber performance just like they spent the past year on StarTeam. In fact, they let slip that they are going to end the separation between StarTeam and Caliber requirements and try to house the Caliber requirements in the StarTeam repository rather than a separate db. I asked a couple of questions:

Q: What will the StarTeam integration into VS 2005 be like? Will it be better than the current integration?
A: Have you seen the JBuilder or DiamondBack integrations? The ones where your StarTeam client is basically another pane in the "developer dashboard"? That's what you'll see in 2005.

Q: In 5.2, there was a new connection type called "XML over TCP/IP".
A (from John Sileski): We wanted to see how slow we could make our client. :-)
A (from Randy Guck): We had users who needed to route all their StarTeam connections over port 80 for firewall compatibility, and this was a way to do it. Unfortunately, it's incredibly slow. It's so slow that we took it out rather than continuing support. We plan on doing something SOAP-based instead...when we get time.

I also need to look at Estimate Pro sometime, which is a product Borland just bought. I mean, Tom's great with Excel and all, but a better tool for project estimation couldn't hurt.

Distributed StarTeam

2004-09-14T23:08:00.000-07:00

<quimby>First I'd like to take this opportunity to offer equal support for all breakfast meats of all creeds in the quest for the ultimate morning meal democracy.</quimby>

Another example in this session of how the new vault design turns conventional SCM server techniques upside down. So, there are no deltas stored on the server. But, to increase performance for clients over slow links, deltas are generated by the server to send to the client if they're out-of-date or merge.

A good description for the way cache agent works at remote sites is that it's a "trickle charger" for remote teams. The cache agents are read-only, since making them writable would cause the potential for merge conditions. They send data in encrypted streams and store the data encrypted on disk. They've also added a new multi-threaded, multi-connection checkout system to try to parallelize some of the checkout behavior. There's also the ability to import and export projects and views between servers, a feature that will let us finally get rid of the old Orchid server.

Future versions will be able to cache all artifacts and metadata. You'll be able to configure each cache server to only cache certain projects (cache agent 1.0 will get all file changes to all projects, and flush files from the cache using an LRU algorithm). Another goal is to have a StarTeam offline mode that makes it act like a PDA: You get your files, work on them offline, then reconnect to the network and resync to the repository.

Birds of a Feather

2004-09-14T14:55:00.000-07:00

This ended up being more of a "meet the team" session, where we could all collectively complain about our favorite problems. Randy Guck, John Sileski, and Ron Sauers were there, as well as some ex-Starbase guys like Steve Reynolds. It was proposed that we start a StarTeam user mailing list to provide some peer-to-peer support. Some of the highlights:

Setting up LDAP is a pain, because there is no built-in tool (yet) for doing mass DName association. You either have to do it one-by-one or write an SDK app.
Support, for those who don't have a platinum contract (w00t for us) is not as good as it used to be. Borland has added more tiers, so the Starbase experts are now a couple of levels deep.
We need better SDK docs.
The integration between Caliber, StarTeam, and TestDirector may have trouble getting all the links to work bidirectionally.
The nAnt StarTeam tasks are quite broken. I may start working with a couple of the other users to help fixing it.
They may move to a "major release per year" model.
People want what VSTS is calling a Shelf, a lightweight personal view. They want to check in code into a secure place at night, but not publish their code to the mainline.

They also dropped one goody where they said, "When the PM announces it tonight at the Meet the Team, pretend you're suprised." It's a good thing, if we were using Caliber.

Five Nines

2004-09-14T11:24:00.000-07:00

Randy Guck, chief scientist for StarTeam and CaliberRM, gave a great talk on increasing uptime for StarTeam servers. Most of it was fairly industry-standard stuff: backups, recovery plans, failover, clustering, etc. The cool part was his description of how the new StarTeam 2005 vault works.

First, the old vault (VaultI). Each file in the repository is stored in the vault archive. The initial file is stored in full, and revisions are stored as deltas (except for binary files). That composite file may also be compressed, based on filename extension. When you check out a file, the server looks up the correct offset into the composite file in the database, reconstructs the file, and places it in the cache, where it is then streamed to the user. If I need a different revision of that file, we go through the same process all over again. The fact that you need the database to be in exact sync with the files at all times, because of the offsets and deltas, is why StarTeam has to be locked to perform a backup.

Here's how VaultII works: Each instance of a particular file is stored on it's own, with a filename that is also it's md5 hash. The database then tracks each revision of a file by its hash, rather than by a name and offset. The server, when the file is written, automatically determines if compressing that file would have any benefit and chooses the compression type on a file by file basis, so you'll have files in the vault that are just "md5", and some that are "md5.gz".

But doesn't this mean we have a lot more files? For any given set of file contents, there is only one file in the vault. So, if you have the same file checked in to multiple projects, or if you check in identical revision content, the database points to the same vault file because the md5s all match. Their research with customer-donated databases found that 20-40% of files in the vault end up being redundant, so a lot of the space concerns are offset. From a user perspective, this means that, at most, the file may have to be decompressed before sent over the network (unless the user has link compression turned on).

How does this help with backups? Well, when you do a backup under the new system, you first do a backup of the database (which can be done while the db is live). With that snapshot, you can then copy/replicate/backup the vault archive at will, since any new content that goes to the vault is not referenced by the database. Sure, you may have a few extra files in your vault backup that aren't in the db, but that's ok. If you had to restore from the backup, the user would have to check in any work that occurred since the backup, but the server would notice that those file contents were already in the vault, so it links the file that's already on disk, and you don't end up wasting space (unless a user doesn't bother to check in something that was lost in a failure, but that's his fault).

But, there's lots of revisions we don't use. Defaultworld.wld in Biomek, for example, has over 900 binary revisions, and we don't use that file any more. Isn't this wasteful? Turns out they've added a feature where you can ask the server to archive old revisions. The admin can then burn those to disk and store them away. If a user tries to reference that revision, they get a message saying that they need to get the admin to restore that particular revision to the server. The admin restores the file, and the user is happy, all live and without downtime.

I've got some good pictures of this in the slides, and I'll cover it in more detail if people want. I'm going to a "Birds-of-a-Feather" session for StarTeam users next, and hopefully I can get some more detail out of the devs. There's a meet the StarTeam developers session tonight as well.

(Oh, and if you have questions, throw them in here as comments, and I'll try to answer them.)

2004-09-14T11:23:00.000-07:00

Note to Troy: probably not the best example of graphics within an installer. Something just ain't right with that.

Need more meat!

2004-09-14T11:06:00.000-07:00

Tom and I skipped breakfast at the convention hall and ate at the hotel instead. If I'm going to break with my normal routine and actually eat breakfast, there had better be bacon involved.

Installing the DiamondBack stuff in the background as I type this. I've got an hour or so break, since I had no desire to see the Java keynote.

My first session of the day was entitled "Automating Code Reviews". Sounds pretty cool, eh? Well, my first impressions weren't good, as the presenter showed up five minutes late. Then, he lead off with a 30 minute spiel on what code reviews are and why they're important. I'm sorry, but if you give your talk the title "Automating Code Reviews", you should assume that your audience had done code reviews and recognized the need for some automation. This talk was another sign that the conference committee needs to more closely regulate their level structure. It was listed as "advanced", and we barely even touched on the tools.

The speaker also didn't field questions well. One user expressed displeasure that the JBuilder wizard generated code, unmodified, does not pass the default metrics and audits in Together. The speaker kept thinking the user was complaining about Together, when in reality it's the JBuilder guys who need to tighten up their wizard code (eat their own dog food, etc.). Another person asked if Together would support annotating a block/method/file to tell the audits and metrics to skip that code for a particular test. For example, ignore for a given method that it has too many parameters, because we have manually examined it, blessed it, and don't need the tool reminding us every time about it. The speaker kept saying, "Well, you could disable the rule," and "You can adjust the boundary conditions of the rule," but those changes apply across the project. He never quite got it.

In retrospect, I wish I had gone to Danny Thorpe's talk on new features in the Delphi compiler instead. (Tom expressed some interest in seeing what would happen if you put Danny and Bob B into a room together and asked them to design a compiler. Sounds fun to me!)

2004-09-14T11:04:00.000-07:00

Even my early, non-Terp-ified version of our Bootstrap utility looked better than this...

"And I got the bits to show for it!"

2004-09-13T23:59:00.000-07:00

After a horrible dinner (Bad, evil pizza-like substance. Think spaghetti sauce on inch-and-a-half thick bread with barely warmed cheese and pepperoni. All the "crust" was good for was soaking up the grease. Tom and I abandoned it after a single slice.), everyone jammed into one of the rooms for a whirlwind tour of DiamondBack, their new combined IDE for Delphi.NET, Delphi for Win32, and C#. Yes, finally a new Delphi Win32 compiler. They covered a lot in an hour and fifteen minutes, so much that it went by in a blur:

Function/Procedure inlining, both in Win32 and .NET. (The Borland .NET compiler does some extra inlining analysis that goes beyond what the JITer does.)
Finally, a "for x in List do" construct. Only a few years behing there.
The Delphi 8 IDE got rid of the floating designer. The new IDE brings it right back, to many cheers.
A new goody called SyncEdit. Select a bunch of code, and terms that show up more than once get underlines. Change one of those underlined terms, and all instances of that term in the selected block change right along with it. This can be a lazy programmers dream...Write up a function with a loop that uses "i' for the counter variable, then change all the i's at once when the code's done to myFancyCounterName. That saves an awful lot of typing.
Better Undo and Backup stacks, including revision history without StarTeam. The IDE will save a user-definable number of past versions, and you can scroll back through them, revert, and diff revisions, all in the IDE.
The same IDE debugs Win32 and .NET code, in the same solution, at the same time.
The CPU view for .NET shows, in one place, the line of Delphi code, the generated IL, and the JITed assembly. Shiny.
ECO (their model-driven architecture) can now pull in an existing DB and generate business objects and models from it. They did the Northwind DB as a live demo.
dUnit and nUnit built into the IDE.
StarTeam built in, too!
ASP.NET deployment tool looks like Araxis for FTP, highlighting files that are different, missing, etc.
Built-in "Extract Method". Using that code a lot? Highlight it and click extract, and it generates a method out of it, including figuring out the parameters and their in/out requirements.
Forget to declare a variable? Right click on it to add it to the var block (and add the var block if it wasn't there).
Forget to declare a field? See above.
Got a string literal? Right click to make it a resource string instead.
Need to rename a class? Ask, and you get a list of all the references to that class, and a confirmation that you want to update those references with the new name.

That's a lot of stuff, and I didn't even mention the 10 minutes of DB-related material. It was hard to take it all in, but they handed us the latest build on the way out, so I now have something to torture on the way home.

Tom and I grabbed a better dinner at a diner down the street. I've got half a ham-and-cheese sandwich ready so I can avoid another lame meal.

Squeezing Performance Out Of Custom StarTeam Apps

2004-09-13T23:57:00.000-07:00

Most of the expense in SDK apps comes from round trip transactions with the server. The SDK is set up to cache as much as it can, but you can easily throw the gains away if you're not careful.

To start, if you've got a performance issue, the SDK has a NetMonitor class. When turned on, this class provides detailed timing and bytecount information for each command. This data can be used to help identify chatty code.

When you read a property on an Item, the server grabs all the properties on the object (figuring that's the common case). If you're going through a thousand objects, this can be really slow since each object is handled individually. Instead, the populateNow() method should be used to select a subset of properties and grab them all in one shot. You can use that method on folders, including a depth parameter, or you can use an ItemList to gather objects from around the project regardless of folder structure, or for digging through object revision history. NetMonitor provides some extra help here to, noting in the log anytime a property is retrieved on an object that wasn't cached.

Of course, MPX would make this all very cheap, as changes to the properties on an object would be pushed to the client rather than pulled from the server. MPX also lets you do events (right now in Java, SDK 2005 adds support for COM and .NET events).

Enterprise Advantage Details

2004-09-13T23:56:00.000-07:00

Steve Reynolds, former Starbase employee and chief architect of what became EA, talked about the customization features in EA. Custom workflow and custom forms allow for users to change the StarTeam UI to fit their process directly. There are also UI widgets that are pushed out to individual StarTeam users (if you use the Cross Platform Client).

For us, the custom workflow and the included MPX server are pretty compelling, though it's a significant investment. Custom forms might be useful, especially for CRs, if they can be applied on a project by project basis. Imagine a UI where Biomek DCRs have fields like "firmware version" and "instrument serial number", while SAMI DCRs have a required method and .spack fields.

StarTeam 2005

2004-09-13T17:00:00.000-07:00

Let me see if I can get your attention....

A new SDK built natively in .NET.
A new client built natively in .NET.
Hot backups, so no more downtime.
Vaults can span disk volumes, and you can have multiple vaults
Archive and restore projects (and, as a consequence, move projects between servers).
Files no longer stored as deltas, which trades space for a huge speed boost, and....
Automatically chooses the best compression method, and....
Files in the vault are identified by MD5 hash, so the same file checked into two different projects will only be in the vault once as long as the hash matches.
MPX cache servers, which extend the MPX architecture to include files rather than just metadata. This will be a huge win for our remote sites, especially Salzburg. (When we get the MPX addon, that is.) The system is smart enough to find the "closest" cache server that's up and running, making it work even for less-stable connections.
A new bulk checkout utility that takes advantage of new streaming techniques and the cache servers to increase check out speed by as much as an order of magnitude.
It used to be there was a 4GB limit per archive file (tip and all revisions for a given file). This was awful for people who had media assets. The new vault structure has a limit somewhere in the petabyte (2^50) range.
Penalties for deep reference trees are gone.
Session timeouts are gone for users with fixed licenses.
No more client activation keys. You license is managed by the server.
The upgrade to version 2005 can be done piecemeal. The upgrade can occur in the background (at a performance penalty, of course) or on demand.

The quote from the development team when their own server was upgraded to ST 2005 was, "Did we buy a new server for that? No??" Look for it in November.

Lunch with a Borlander

2004-09-13T15:28:00.000-07:00

We had lunch with Joe Schulz, a senior Solutions Architect. He's kind of a sales guy, but he also sits in technical teams, so he had some interesting perspecives. He was one of the founding members of the company that created CaliberRM, so he's very familiar with it.

Lunch was at a nearby Italian place. Tom got a calzone that ended up being as big as his head. In all, a much tastier (and quieter) lunch than the standard conference fare.

I'd like to discuss with Tom what I should place in public view. More later.

Biased Benchmarks or Cool Code?

2004-09-13T15:18:00.000-07:00

The Microsoft keynote...always a good place for grand exaggerations. There were two topics of note here.

First, they talked about .NET usage in SQL Server 2005. They wrote a "stored procedure" into a Delphi.NET class, which rifled through some rows, parsing for a particular substring in a column. They compiled the assembly (dccil has a --clrversion switch where you can target any CLR you want) and uploaded it to the server. They also had the "equivalent" implentation in T-SQL. When run (including a cache clear to remove any accidental optimization) the .NET implementation took ~200ms and the T-SQL implementation took about ~20,000ms. I don't think I trust those numbers, and hopefully Bob Z and I can do some experimentation.

That took long enough that they went through a hurried demo of Team System with Caliber. It looks like Caliber requirements are first class citizens in VSTS. Too bad we won't be using them.

StarTeam Security Untangled

2004-09-13T15:15:00.000-07:00

This was an interesting session, once the speaker turned his mic up. I won't bore you all with the details, but the complexity of this topic illustrates why I don't let anyone else work with access rights. They don't quite work in the same way as traditional, Unix-style permissions.

One neat drop, though, is that the StarTeam 2005 SDK will have new tools to provide a human-readable reasoning for why a user does or does not have access to a given object. There were also more hints about the .NET version of the SDK.

"Software creators are gods..."

2004-09-13T15:01:00.000-07:00

The morning kicks off with the standard, sub-standard breakfast. I'd forgotten how much I didn't enjoy it last year.

The first general session started with a local Taiko drum band playing, with David I joining in at the end. (This time, he wasn't hamming it up. He must have put some decent practice into it.) The stupid spotlights are still in my eyes.

The session was about Software Delivery Optimization (mmm...buzzwords), given by Boz Alloy, the head of their R&D department. The new goal is to not just have ALM, where development data can move from phase to phase, but to use that data to add "focus, precision, and control" to the lifecycle. Boz points out that we're like the cobbler's children. We write great tools to make other businesses work better, but we haven't had time/money/etc to write tools to optimize our own business.

They are rolling out three initiatives in parallel to provide more useful data to all stakeholders:

Project Themis: Teamwork foundation for Analysts, Architects, Developers, and Testers.
Project Hyperion: Visibility and predictability tools for Project Managers, IT, and Operations.
Project Prometheus: "ERP for Software Delivery" Tools for managing external forces for Business Managers, CIO, CFO, and other executives.

What they hope to provide is a better dashboard for all the various roles in the project: "in the weeds" view for the developer all the way up to "pretty pie charts" for the CIO. At the end, they also announced the following soon-to-be-released products:

JBuilder 2005
StarTeam 2005
CaliberRM 2005

2004-09-13T11:41:00.000-07:00

David I on the Taiko drum. This is a great way to wake people up in the morning, but probably not so great for those in the audience with a hangover from last night.

2004-09-13T11:40:00.000-07:00

Tom has no touchpad-fu.

Can you tell I brought a camera this time?

2004-09-12T22:16:00.000-07:00

(Ok, total aside here. I get back to my room after the opening party, and what does NBC have on? The Perfect Storm. Is it just me, or is that just wrong given recent meteorological happenings?)

Tom and I headed over to the convention center about a half hour before the show starts, and the place is a ghost town. By this point last year, it was packed. So, we sit down and have a snack. A friend I met last year, Ben Hayat, comes by. He echoes my concerns, "Where is everybody?" Ben pointed out that there wasn't going to be the same number of product launches this year and that this wasn't a PDC followup. Fair enough. We discussed some of the shiny new things we were looking forward to in VS2005, especially Click-Once.

So, about 5 minutes before the start, a crowd materializes out of thin air. I swear I didn't see them come in. It's still a smaller crowd than last year, but it's certainly a quorum. The doors open, and we walk into what can be described only as one of those 1337 assembly demos. Various ambient and techno songs and shiny 3d imagery filled the room. As the start time passed, the music shifted to Blue Man Group, which improved my mood greatly. Tom, on the other hand, still had a plugged-up ear from the flying and was having trouble hearing anything but bass.

So, the room crew tried to get the crowd going with Your Attention Please by BMG. Then, David I stirred it up a little more with It's Time to Start. (I may have the wrong titles. Check the BMG album "The Complex".) When he got on stage, he was (unexpectedly, by his account) joined by two dancers in red foil wigs and platform shoes. (My only pictures were really blurry.) These people have way too much fun thinking this stuff up.

The theme for this year is "Software Delivery Optimization", a theory the CEO of Borland describes as "ERP for Software Development". As soon as I figure out what the hell he meant, I'll let you know. The big new toy at the show this year is Delphi "DiamondBack", the next version. And this time, they really, truly swear that there will be a new Win32 compiler this time. They showed a brief video of DiamondBack, but the launch is tomorrow night and the text in the video was so blurry that it was illegible, even on the huge projection screens.

The new CTO, Pat Kerpan, showed off some concept work of the "Developer Dashboard." Some of the highlights:

Chat avatars that change "mood" based on that person's current ratio of open to fixed CRs.
Audio-based cues to code quality. Run a static analyzer against the code, take the results, and feed them to a music randomizer. The more problems, the more "off" your music sounds.
Ambient Orbs (or their onscreen equivalent) to represent current project status.

That was the shiny stuff. The awards followed, most notably the announcement of a $1 Million gift to Carnegie Mellon.

Then, Dale Fuller started firing t-shirts into the crowd with his air cannon, at which point we darted over to the welcome reception. It was pretty similar to last year. Video games, air hockey (Tom's an animal, and has the bruises to prove it!), foosball, and gaming tables. Along with the meal tickets was a 500 chip ticket, so I played some poker hands. Got down to 50 chips, went all in with A-c 9-c, and (as Dr. Sherman would say) lo-damn-and-behold, 3 clubs on the flop. Took 250 with that hand and cashed in for the impending raffle. No win for me though, so I headed back to the hotel so I could share my exciting evening with my loyal fans :-)

And yes Payne, that roast beef was really tasty.

2004-09-12T22:15:00.000-07:00

DAAAY - TO - NAAAA! (Worst...one word video game song...ever...)

2004-09-12T22:13:00.000-07:00

This one's for Payne.

2004-09-12T22:12:00.000-07:00

This was the "Future Development Dashboard" idea. The three orbs in lower right are Ambient Orbs. If you don't know what those are, get thyself to Thinkgeek!

2004-09-12T22:10:00.000-07:00

David I. does "Rock Concert Movement #3." Ready? Go.

2004-09-12T22:08:00.000-07:00

"There are four lights!" Err...no, there are quite a few more, and THEY'RE ALL POINTED INTO MY EYES!

2004-09-12T22:07:00.000-07:00

Tom ain't buyin' the hype, foo.

2004-09-12T22:06:00.000-07:00

So, what do they do with those letters between shows? I mean, do they keep them in a warehouse, farm them out to smaller shows, or are they freelance?

2004-09-12T22:04:00.000-07:00

"Through the gates of Mordor...." Oh, wait, that would be a PDC, wouldn't it?

Duck!

2004-09-12T17:09:00.000-07:00

8am flights stink. Biscuits and gravy make it a little better. Watching Tom smack his head into a bulkhead on the plane adds to the hilarity. Oh, and don't forget the delay on the connecting flight...the air conditioner died on the previous flight and sent condensation water out into the bulkhead where it could drip on people. Luckily, most of it was gone by the time we got on the plane.

Now, could someone remind me why there isn't even a McDonald's in sight of the convention center?

2004-09-12T16:01:00.000-07:00

Tom gets all broken up after realizing that he won't see Wayne for a week.

2004-09-05T16:22:00.000-07:00

So, I've been playing in the WoW stress test, and it's been moderately smooth. It lags every once in a while, and there are the occasional server and client side crashes, but it's been nothing unexpected. Today, the server went down, and this was the result of the Choose Realm screen. That's what I call stress!