danielcolomb.com » tech

New Camera and weekend exploits!

Dan — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 02:12:06 +0000

Ever since the trip to North Carolina I’ve been wanting to get a new camera, a DSLR to be precise. I’ve been looking at different cameras for the last week or so, trying to decide between a Canon T2i, a Nikon D90, and a Nikon D7000. Well, earlier this week i finally settled and got the D7000. And thanks to my friend Angela, who hooked me up with a Amazon Prime trial I was able to get 1-day shipping for 4 bucks! Order the camera, get it within the next two days, that was the plan anyway. The first day I get home from work and see a note on my door. The package required a signature on delivery, so they couldn’t just leave the camera on my door step. I guess that’s smart of Amazon to do, require the signature on expensive items. I’d never had that happen before, even on things i’d bought from Amazon. I decided that the second day i’d take a half-day from work so i could catch the delivery truck and get my precious new toy. No such luck. I get there 15 minutes too late and get another note stuck on my door. So, what i did was change the package to be held at the UPS Customer Center, so i could pick it up that day. I didn’t want to wait another day. I NEEDED MY PRECIOUS!

Saturday, after staying out a little late the night before after picking up my camera and going to judo, a few friends and I decided to go out for drinks and eat sushi for dinner, aka an awesome chance to try out my new camera

Osaka is delicous, it’s actually one of my favorite places to get sushi at. But before we get to that we take a little detour. On the way up to Osaka, we get a phone call from Daphne, saying she has to work late. FOR AN ENTIRE HOUR!

Sarah and I take this opportunity to get some delicious iced beverages at the Zen Tea House while we waited.

After we ate at Osaka, we decided to take a little walk to help our food digest and to use up some time before heading out to Sergio’s World Beers. On the way, we saw this old house in very sad shape.

After our walk we headed down to the bar where we partook in some delicious beverages. it was hot so a Radler was totally in order

Sarah found this adorable beer hidden in one of the fridges. It was quite good actually.

Mary decided to take a shot and try one of the Fruit Ale’s on draft, it was a Strawberry Ale. Oh man, that was good! Very sweet! We stayed for a while chit chatting about this and that and eventually went home, I took a nap on the drive back :3

Sunday. Mary and I decided to meet up at Berheim Forest to practice with our cameras (Mary has a D90). We walked around taking pictures of all sorts of things.

These geese were protecting their goslings from other geese trying to steal the food people were throwing at them. Geese can be VICIOUS!

Typical, insect doing something with a plant picture. Also, .

Mary. I don’t care what she says, I like this picture After Bernheim we went and ate at Saigon Cafe, which was delicious! I’m really glad i got introduced to Vietnamese food, it’s so good! Then it was off to Heine Bros for some coffee before the trip home.

Once i got to my parents that evening I played with my camera some more, mainly taking pictures of the dogs.

Nero begging for food. Can’t you tell? He hasn’t eaten in minutes!

Papa just wanting attention. Who can resist those eyes?

One thing i’ve noticed is that Nero and Papa are very photo conscious. They’re quite good at looking at the camera and being adorable.

Homer on the other hand, couldn’t give two licks about cameras being pointed at him. He’s too busy making sure there aren’t things that need to be sniffed or chased in the yard.

Dependency Replication in TFS 2010

Dan — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 17:47:04 +0000

I’m not sure exactly how many people do this, but it seems like there isn’t much documentation out there on how to do this exactly. So after lots of trial and error I’ve finally gotten dll replication to work for our TFS environment.

So, first i’ll go over the general overview of what needs to be done to enable TFS to replicate files during a build. Just a reminder, this is for TFS 2010, not any previous version of TFS.

1) You’ll need a custom build template
2) You’ll need a custom TFS Activity

Second, I’ll let you know i basically followed the tutorials by Ewald Hofman and then modified things to work the way I needed them to.

So our scenario is that we have multiple products that use dll’s from a core product. When that core product gets changed, we don’t want to have to copy the dll’s manually from the build location to the locations needed by the other products. Each one of our products have a folder called SharedBinaries, this is where those dll’s live.

Now the question is, how do we do this? If you’re using TFS 2008 or 2005, you can easily just acquire TFS Dependency Replicator, it will handle all that for you. For TFS 2010 however, this doesn’t work anymore. Or more precisely, I was unable to get it to work. So, time to learn how to use Windows Workflow. At first this seems very daunting, but after you take it a bit at a time, things start to make sense.

I would highly recommend you take a look at the tutorials i mentioned earlier, they will give you a good base to work from. And if i were to go through and document the whole process here, i would feel like i’m plagiarizing someone else’s work. Go at least as far as Part 4 – Creating your own activity, this is where i’ll start my documentation.

I created a new Code Activity and called it ‘ReplicateFiles.cs’. You can download it here.

You’ll want to add three Arguments to your custom template.

In the Metadata Argument, you’ll want to add those three Arguments as required fields.

In the custom template, I added the custom activity just before the gated check-in process.

Lastly, you’ll want to add the three Arguments into the appropriate fields on the custom activity properties, as well as specifying the BinariesDirectory as the SourceLocation to copy the files from.

While setting up your build, you’ll want to make sure you fill out those newly required fields in Build Editor Process Section.

Before you go wild and start running builds, go through this checklist.

Does your build controller know the path to the custom binaries you’ve made (for the custom build activity). (reference)
Have you checked in the latest version of your custom template, as well as the custom activity dll

The required arguments in the ReplicateFiles.cs are what you pass into the class from the custom template you’ve created, make sure those are filled out in the build template.
Make sure you have the correct path to your TFS server for tfsName in ReplicateFiles.cs.
Make sure that the user you run your build service under has file system permissions for the location where you want to create your temporary workspaces.
I had this issue, and it almost drove me nuts! I kept getting access denied errors when trying to overwrite the files in the target branches. Make sure that the files being replicated ARE NOT checked out and locked!

If you have any corrections, feedback, or ideas! Please comment and let me know!

Tupperware Computing!

Dan — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 00:16:20 +0000

A few days ago my roommate got a box of random electronic parts donated to him. Most of the stuff was junk, only good to salvage parts off of. But there were two items that we did find of interest. Two motherboards that seemed like they were still in pretty good condition.

What if we could get them up and running again?

And so our weekend project was started!

First we got an old power supply and some old RAM we had laying around and plugged everything up to see if it would even turn on. That turned out to be a bit more trouble than we initially thought we’d have. Sean searched the internet for the manual to the motherboard and we found the pins that the power button was to plug up to. One small problem, we didn’t have a power button. So while Sean got something together, we used a set of hemostats to bridge the pins and power on the pile of parts. Something was wrong though, the monitor we had hooked up to it didn’t show anything. and since we didn’t have a PC speaker, we couldn’t hear beep codes. We almost resorted to the ancient art of poke-at-it-with-a-screwdriver when i noticed a jumper in between the two RAM banks. I pulled it out and tried the power and BAM! POST! By this time Sean had gotten a power button and a light soldered together for us to use. Now we needed some sort of boot up medium, and we decided that a USB drive would be optimal. We got a 2GB drive from Walmart and loaded it up with Lubuntu.

After tweaking the BIOS settings a bit we finally were able to boot off the USB drive and get to the boot menu for the drive. On our first attempt to boot from the drive we got a kernel panic so we decided to test the RAM. That ended up being a good idea, since we discovered all of our extra DDR RAM was bad. Into the trash with that stuff! Luckily there was a second bank of RAM slots on the motherboard which supported SDRAM, an older format of RAM.

Sean pulled out the motherboard for one of his first computers, Jenny, and luckily it still had RAM in it’s banks! Thank god for hording computer parts We pulled out two of the ram sticks and tested them. They were good to go! We booted up and tada! We got a loading screen. It seemed to take forever to load, then we noticed we’d forgotten to put in the second chip of RAM, whoops :3

Now we’re in the process of updating the Ubuntu core and then we’re going to see if we can get some sort of clustering up and running. It would be neat to get a farm up and running.

There are more pictures on my flickr account

TFS Builds and Build Servers for TFS 2008

Dan — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:38:46 +0000

It seems that a lot of companies have become a fan of virtualization. I can understand why. Instead of having 5 single machines — and as such 5 sets of hardware — all doing one task, you can have one machine run 5 virtual servers running their one task. It saves space, power consumption, and in the end money.

There’s a problem though. If those servers are chugging along doing their thing and needing to utilize CPU cycles or I/O to hardware, things slow down. A lot. We’ve run into this issue lately since we’ve started doing a lot of parallel development — developing on multiple projects that are releasing at different times on the same product. We have code check-ins happening at all times of the day — we also have an offshore team hard at work — and as such we have continuous replication builds firing off all the time as well. If multiple products or projects are being worked on, then all those builds queue up, which normally isn’t a problem. It’s once we need to move a product to another environment (ie: Integration Testing) that things become evident that there is a problem. Once we start a build which also stages files on a different server (but happens to just be another virtual on the same physical machine) everything creeps to a halt. Coupled with other builds trying to run while large amounts of files are being transfered from one virtual to another things get even slower.

Solution time. To help take the load off the Dev environment server, we thought of getting setting up a new build server on its own physical machine. Makes total sense. But we’d have to go through all the bureaucracy of getting approved hardware, putting in requests, blah blah blah. Developers don’t have time for that kind of thing! So we thought about what we could do, and it struck us! Why not use our own machines? Release management has three members in it, that could be three extra build machines!

So I used myself as a Guinea pig and installed the build service on my machine. I configured it and with a few minor tweaks was able to get builds running on my machine without too much impact on performance. Since then, we’ve planned to take our workstations and dedicate them to one product each. This way we can have 3 CI (Continuous Integration) builds running at a time. We’re still planning on keeping the staging builds local until we get all issues ironed out — because I’m sure there will be issues that will come up.

So far, so good though. Everything seems to be running well, and our Integration Testing push times have been cut in half.

Links to pages i used:
How to: Set up and Install Team Foundation Build (for TFS 2008)
How to: Add the Build Service Account to the Build Services Security Group
How to: Create and Manage Build Agents

Some notes:

If you have existing builds that use special build properties (ie: use VB6 to compile an executable) make sure that VB6 is in the same location on all build machines that will be used for such builds.
If your initial build server has special properties for MSBuild, make sure you copy the MSBuild directory to your build machines. This will help with issues due to certain Imports not being available.

funny fings i’f found on dah intarwebs

Dan — Wed, 05 May 2010 02:30:47 +0000

Entertaining and funny stuff

break dancin’ kitteh

my car is a canoe!

attack of the ROFLCopters!

popup kitteh

lol priest

lookin’ for wild womens

step away from windows XP

fwendship

Less funny, more interesting or cool

Ok, something i found that’s not really funny. Just really awing. I mean, i don’t consider myself rich. But in the big picture, maybe i am?
How rich are you?

Also.. We have tons of nukes out there. Kinda scary. What’s scarier, is thinking about how many are unaccounted for?
Just how many nukes does the US have?

I wish i could do cool shit like this.

Some things new, some things old

Dan — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:25:19 +0000

So, yeah, i know.. it’s been a while. It’s been a combination of things that have kept me from posting anything; mainly laziness i think. But i have my laptop at work today, and it’s lunch time, so i figured.. why the hell not? It’s about f-ing time.

//Work

First up is work. Things have been going great! I’m still learning more than my brain can handle every day and I’ve been put on a multitude of projects. Well, one project but a bunch of tasks. The issues i thought i was going to have for a while, like understanding how everything is layered and how they like to structure things have come and gone. I’m really starting to understand the bigger picture of how everything works together. Things are picking up now though, there are release dates that have to be hit, and code that needs to be pushed. And there’s a new guy. He seems pretty cool, and seems to know his stuff. And most of all, has replaced both Zach and I as the new guy. Though we’re still noobs.

//Eve

I’ve become re-addicted to Eve. I know, i seem to say that a lot. But this time does seem a little different. ONYX Heavy Industries has a good bunch of people in it, and I enjoy hanging out with them while online. Heck, there have been a few time when i wouldn’t even be in game, and i’d just be doing my thing (programming or whatever) and chat on teamspeak.

//Development

Speaking of development, that bug has bitten again too. I’ve been working on this http://www.blackmesacorp.com/eveCharCheck. It’s going to become a site that allows directors in corporations to check character’s Limited API keys and see if they can really do all the things they claim (based on the skills and certificates they have). There is currently only very limited functionality, but i hope to expand on it soon once i figure out some major bugs. Something between the ale Eve API libraries and my database libraries is colliding.. and i’m not sure why it’s doing that.

//Social gatherings

I’ve been hanging out too. Not as much as i used to, but i think that’s good too. Sometimes i just want to be alone at my house. I went and saw The Crazies the other weekend. It wasn’t a bad flick for a horror/thriller/action-ish movie.

//New computer parts

I bought a new monitor the other day, it’s wicked. I am now rocking two 22″ LCD monitors! So much desktop space! They’re Acer x223w‘s and they’re fabulous!

A New Start

Dan — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 09:18:51 +0000

Today was my first day at iPay. We did the usual stuff you do when you start a new job. You fill out paperwork, you get oriented to where everything is, you meet your supervisor and the people you’ll be working with, all that fun stuff.

Tomorrow (or actually today since it’s 4am and i can’t sleep for some reason), we’ll be doing more onboarding as they call it. And we’ll also go more in depth into what the company does and how i’ll be part of that. The setup they have is similar to where i worked before in a few ways. First it’s a secure site, meaning only people that work there or have business there are allowed access. Second, they’re watched/audited quite a lot since they deal with moving money (electronic payments, not literally moving cash).

I’m a little anxious to actually start looking at code and tables, I want to know how big my learning curve is going to be. It always sucks knowing that you’re going to have to play a bit of catch up, but you don’t actually know how much.

Ugh. My brain is tired but my body isn’t. WHY IS THIS?!

Anyway, tomorrow is day two! I can’t wait to get in there and start doing stuff!

I have my computer back!

Dan — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:42:06 +0000

So at work they’re distributing a new baseline for all the computers. My machine got it about 2 weeks ago. The updates were pretty simple, upgrade from Office 2003 to 2007, IE 6 to 8, Security Updates etc etc. Last week at some point my computer died, it would start up and as soon as the windows loading screen would appear I would get a BSOD and the computer would reboot. That was on a tuesday. Wednesday, Desktop Support comes and picks my computer up to try and recover the machine. I don’t have a computer for the rest of the week.

Over the weekend I didn’t do much, played Eve on Friday and Saturday morning, then ran some errands and in the afternoon drove down to Nashville to see a show. The show was alright, the venue could have been better, but the bands made up for the fact that there was no drinking, smoking, moshing, crowd surfing, cursing or any other fun activities that one usually partakes in while at a show. Rcktwn is the fail. On sunday we drive back and once i get home I play some more Eve

On the topic of Eve, i figure i’ll give an update of the goings on of Krandor delMarniol. Krandor’s left Legion of Black Mesa because many of the members have left or stopped playing. Krandor has found a new home with some old friends in UKM (United Kingdom Mayhem) who have many more active players than Legion of Black Mesa did. So far things are pretty good, besides the whole Circle-of-Two getting reset by Northern Coalition thing. While things are pretty turbulent up there UKM has decided to pull it’s industrial assets out of 0.0 and try to find a good empire home for them. After that is done, I think i’ll take Krandor back out to 0.0 to help in the effort to keep our home constellation.

OK, back to real life. This week starts and i still don’t have a computer. I don’t get it back until Wednesday (a whole week later). So I took some half-days and went home early, did laundry, ran some errands, etc.

Now it’s Thursday and I have my computer back up and running (though still not completely updated). It’s good to be able to get back to work

Father’s Day Weekend

Dan — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:29:47 +0000

I’m not a dad, oh no sir. But my dad is

Let’s start back on Friday. I really didn’t do much, mainly read, nap, play video games, mow the lawn, drink beers. Speaking of the lawn.. a few days earlier we’d put down some weed killer and it seems to be working. Now all that needs to be done is get the lawn feed out and get that grass back to being the dominant plant in the yard. I’m serious, half the lawn is brown with dead weeds atm! Anyway, back to the weekend.. I got a call from Michelle! It was the first day they were allowed to use the phone, so that was pretty exciting Friday night i went out with some friends. First we went to BW3′s for dinner, which was delish and then to some bar in Louisville, The Electric Cowboy or some such. It was ‘eh’.. Not really my scene. Lots of cowboy hats and older people and yeah well you should get the picture. I left pretty early, it was only midnight i think, and went home.

Saturday we had our weekly SoNotSoft meeting. We talked about what kind of moves we want in our game and tried really hard to come up with a lengthly list. There’s only so much you can do with a pencil i guess. After the meeting Josh came over and we played Counter-Strike, we both suck horribly and soon decided that food was more important than video games. We ended up going to Kanzai in E-town. Man i love sushi! The Thai Chilli Roll was exquisit! I was invited to go to a River Bats game with Sarah, but to be honest I didn’t feel like driving all the way back up to Louisville. So I went back home and played some video games and took a nap.

Sunday I was up early and hit Walmart first thing. I’d heard that ammunition supplies were low (besides every gun owner always saying ammo is low). It was true, there were only 4 boxes of .40 S&W left. I bought three of them. I got back to the house and got out my pistol and made sure that it was clean and not covered in rust My dad came over around 12:30 and showed me his new rifle. A sweet M1903. We headed out and got to Knob Creek Gun Range around 1. I fired a few magazines of ammo through my pistol (Springfield XD-40) and then tried my dad’s new rifle. Man does that thing kick! After only 5 rounds my shoulder was pretty beaten up.. After i found out later because i wasn’t holding it quite right So now i have a nicely bruised shoulder. After we’d finished we went back to my place to clean our weapons and eat some food. Sean started up the grill and put burgers on. Things took too long i guess, so dad left, since he still had to go take the dogs on a walk. And then Kristina came over and kidnapped Sean for dinner. So i was there with a grill full of burgers. There’s no way i could eat them all Instead i played some Eve. We were trying to run some wormhole plexes.. we didn’t do too well. Apoll0s lost his domi and Scab lost his apoc. I got a bit frustrated and logged pretty much right after that. I went back to reading a new book (Relentless) for a few hours before i went to bed.

Now it’s back to work for a few days before the next weekend, which will be pretty busy too. Family is coming in starting on Thursday for the family reunion my dad is hosting this year. Saturday we get a tour of the Heaven Hill Distillery in Bardstown.

New Case!@

Dan — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:25:03 +0000

So my new case came in! It’s huge! After I came home from work i pretty much went straight into the transfer. I took out all my old components from the old case, marked all the drives and cables in the order they came out (so i don’t mess up my RAID setup), and put it into the new case. All-in-all it took me about 2 hours.

So far i’m very happy with it! There are a few things i need to fix, like getting the front peripherals hooked up properly (USB, Headphones, etc) and getting a few extra fans for the extra fan spots. But other than that it’s perfect! It’s much quieter than my old case. This is mainly due to the fact that it runs much cooler than my old case and the graphics card doesn’t have to spin up as much.

It’s very nice, very black, and very sexy

I’ve uploaded a few pics to my flickr, go check them out!