tively_split

So, not too long ago I finished watching "Amagami SS" (a sort of comedic romance series), which I ended up enjoying a lot more than I'd expected to. Up till the last episode. That's the one which reveals how one set of people planned to play a really filthy trick on someone. And also how another filthy trick was played more than once. For a while I was puzzled, a bit: why is the filthy-dirty-tricks-thing bothering me this much? But then I realized: wait a minute! Of course those filthy tricks bother me! Since such filthy tricks would have been typical of my oh-so-"Christian"-(yeah, right) class mates at East Edmonton "Christian" school. (Or the WECS-ers, when I attended it, to be completely fair.)

So for a while now I've been remembering the filthy tricks that were played on me by those who call themselves "Christian", recalling who did what, realizing a bit more about what a certain backstabbing in grade 9 meant about a former class-mate who left before grade 8, re-evaluating how totally psycho one person's actions reveal them to be, and, in general, been... A lot less laid back about certain things than I usually am.

Someone asked me: what has turned you so against Christianity? Why do I *hate* "Christians" this much? Short A: because of how horribly "Christian" class mates (mostly EECS-ers, also WECS-ers) treated yours truly... For ten years. Without almost any Christian intervention by any of the "Christian" witnesses, teachers, or parents of those around. I plan to write a possibly very long article about that not too long from now. My family has a right to know the truth. And I figure, the evil ones I knew will be continue to get off way more lightly than they have ever deserved, if I don't publicly document the sins they committed against me. But if I do publicly document them, then at least maybe their next potential victims might be a little more fore-warned, and fore-warmed is fore-armed and all that...

So, it's been even more ages and ages and ages and ages since the last time I blogged about anything than I'd remembered. If that bothered anyone, I'm sorry. It was just that work took a turn for *almost* the absolute worst. Which left me not wanting to have to think about that or any other problem after work. So I just stopped taking part in the interactive parts of the 'net. (Except for okaying/refusing friend requests on fb: they nag when you take too long to react, and besides, since that's about all I do on fb I figure it doesn't count.)

After months and months of frustration and not being able to find a bug that had to be found and fixed before the end of the year (as far as I knew then anyway), and despair and mistakenly thinking something was fixed, and more despair, and more despair, I finally did in the end find the cause of a mysterious bug that caused one of our Solaris programs to crash on start-up about 22.5% of the time, but only after I'd marked a certain Solaris problem-report I'd worked on as fixed. Which kind-of seemed to say that I was "the one what done it"... Which wasn't true, but it sure looked like it. It was just a complete nightmare, for way too long. And one of the funny things: my team-leader says he didn't notice. Maybe I'm deficient at showing frustration, I suppose...

I don't really know what more to write about, nothing really fundamental has changed in my personal life. Except maybe the fact that we're now taking care of a dog for the daughter of a chat-friend of Dad's (it's a loooong story). But we've had Deira over as a temporary house-guest/pet for quite a while now, and she's an absolute darling of a "wiener dog" I think Americans call 'em. Anyway, she's smart, loving, and an absolute scamp. But none of us would want her to be any other way...

So, I just saw that my last post was 7 weeks ago. Back then I mentioned looking for a crash-during-shutdown of one of our programs. Well, today I finally saw my custom build of that program execute without crashing. Which is a huge relief, I was starting to think that that would never happen. However, it's also something I've been working on for soooooo long and it's been going so very slowly that I'd reached the despair phase. Had stopped even wanting to deal with any problems other than the ones from work, and those only cause they pay the bill and I hafta...

So anyway, today I'm more optimistic, can maybe finally start working on the AIX port soon. Can't be too complacent yet about the non-crashing-ness of today's custom build, though, since there's at least one problem I sort-of skipped over by choosing the well-if-that-doesnt-work-lets-try-the-next-best-alternative... Which does seem to work (or at least, is not leading to a crash), but... the next-best-alternative isn't the one that's supposed to be correct... So, will have at least a few more things to check before producing a testable version. Work's never done, it seems. But then, better to have too much to do than too little of it...

So once again it's been ages since my last update. Oddly enough *some* things have changed by now!

For one, I'm slowly starting to get used to my new car. I've gathered that the Dutch "Cash for Clunkers" thingy wasn't as good a deal as it was in Germany and the UK, but it did make it easier for me to decide that the time for my clunker had come. And in retrospect I reached that decision barely on time, since a part of the clunker's engine went bust soon after I'd signed the dotted line... So now I have to learn if I *really* have to drop everything and fill-'er-up the second the low-fuel light goes on, or if I can be a little more relaxed about that kind of thing. And how it handles in general, knowing how much it'll accelerate (or not), is it's reported mileage near correct or not and all kinds of stuff like that. One of the harder things to do is unlearning how to shift gears according to that eco-drive stuff, I was surprised to hear that the whole eco-driving is actively bad for any car's engine, which meant that all of a sudden I had something new to unlearn, and also something new to try to remember how-did-I-used-to-do-this-two-years-ago?

Another nice thing is that my UCS2 fixes (that I'd started on working on way back in January) finally got incorporated into the 7.0 Usoft-current-version tree. After which we only needed to fix things so a new daily build would run and all. And now I'm working on adding the same fixes, as far as they apply anyway, to the not-yet-released-soon-to-be new-Usoft-version tree. Unfortunately at least two of the resulting executables crash, apparently during shutdown, which... is interesting, anyway. I'm hoping the same bug is present in the Windows version, because debugging in Windows works *lots* better than debugging on Solaris... But oh well, will see, I hope. Am in a bit of a rush because the 7.0 stuff needs to get ported to AIX soon too, and I'm the "port-guy-for-the-daily-builds" in the team. My team also has a "port-person" for 7.0 on non-Solaris environments, and she and I get to trade tips n stuff.

Another cool thing was Erik-Berndt's birthday barbecue. Only Jurjen and I showed up, but that was okay, I thought, just to get us four talking together again. Erik-Berndt and Jurjen were my house-mates most of the times I was in college, and we all got on quite well together. In the mean time Jurjen independently got into manga and things, and he recommended a whole slew of series I'm going to have to check out sometime. A burden, I'm sure! ;-) He mentioned Pluto (amazing how many people recc this, guess this one I'll really have to give a good look-over), K-on, Sketchbook, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, and also Dragonball (without the Z)... It's going to be interesting, I guess. Not that I mind...

So, it's been forever and then some since my last update. No worries: I *am* still alive. Barely. I think.
Which things have changed in the last 11 weeks?

At work, the project-which-refuses-to-die is finally *almost* done. When I mark it's two parts as fixed, both sets of Solaris builds work, and even the Windows' build's web tests succeed, as they have for a while now... Which is about time, since I've been working on mostly only this since half-of-January. I really want to get it officially incorporated in the production build before my vacation (in two weeks and a bit DV), since if I don't... Lots of colleagues will then discover that they need one (or more) of the files *I*'ve locked, and then when I get back DV, I'll have to do more just to get back to where I am now... Which is make-work I'd prefer to avoid... So now I've been busy taking the same UCS-2 fixes and adding them (as far as seems necessary) to the planned next version of USoft, due out this year. Which is cool, with my different options the compiler has spotted some mistakes that are bad ones, I'm in the process of removing those bugs from both the current released and next-to-be-released version, and, well... it's gratifying to know that what you're doing will improve the program clients are using...

I could go on about other changes, but I'll just leave it at the one biggy I'd never have imagined I'd do: taking advantage of the government's incentive to scrap-older-cars-and-replace-em-with-newer-more-environmentally-better-ones... So, if all goes well at the end of the month I'll have a new car... The thought that now *I*'m going to be the one that's scared of oldish-cars-with-scratches-n-dents-on-'em (instead of the other way around) is going to take some getting used to...

So, it's about time to give an update, methinks. I have been contributing some content at the "Kudo's Bookshelf" wiki, but that's slowed down a lot, since I now plan to publish my original content on a personal web site as well. So I've been reading up on CSS & HTML and designing-a-web-site and even how-to-program-in-Perl (I expect to need Perl for the search-functionality & the dealing-with-CGI stuff; it helps that Perl is also on most of the Unix systems at work, so hopefully that'll be helpful in other ways as well). And that also leads to the question, now that I have a web site, what *else* shall I do with it? Not planning on blogging or wiki-ing or placing a forum, but what else might be cool? Publishing source code? Fan fics? A recommended manga list?

As far as work goes: my current project is still the same, and it's going the same: I just need to do a *little* bit more to get it almost totally done, but that 'little bit more' just seems to keep on going on and on and on... Keep getting further, but keep finding more to do... Reminds me of that 'Littlest hobo' song: "Maybe tomorrow, I'll want to settle down. Maybe tomorrow, I'll just keep moving on..."

Well, perhaps not quite all that... in 1 post, anyway! ;-)

Have had a 2nd cuz from Canada visit us for a week. It was cool to see her again, and meet her two kids. OTOH, she's both an incorrigible tease, and a practicing Christian. Which led me to two discoveries about myself: 1) I absolutely do NOT want to be touched while driving; I was almost flabbergasted she could consider doing so. And 2) I'm only comfortable talking about my faith life with those who have earned my trust in that respect. I don't plan to discuss such things with anyone "only because they're Christian and they think that that entitles them"... Which I'm not thinking my cuz thought, but it's what her attitude seemed to imply.

And finally, am feeling tired at / of work. I'm checking in the current code; no new interesting problems are expected. So I'm downish, which I often am at the end of things. OTOH, it's been a looong project, other jobs might get some rust out...

Oh, and just one more thing: I read "The Day of Revolution" (about an appearance-wise guy who's biologically female, who decides to live on as a fem); it's pretty good, it has enough good jokes, and I ended up liking and enjoying it more than I expected to.

So, it's been forever and then some (almost) since my last post. Hope y'all haven't been missing yours truly overmuch.... ;-)

Recently I've been having 'fun' writing a few private projects in Ruby at home... I'm putting the 'fun' within quotes, cause that's also involved a ... learning experience or three, and those don't usually tend to be too fun at the time... But, have learned at least one new Ruby 'trick' in the bargain, and have also been able to ask myself some questions I hadn't had occasion to before, so that was good. (If anyone truly cares, it involved how to read command line arguments with 3 different Ruby libraries - doubtless super interesting to a fellow developer, but not so much so to anyone else. Have learned, but also needed to eat some metaphorical crow...)

Have also been wiki-ing for the first time ever. The 'new' Detective Conan wiki opened a short while ago, and I've been adding some stuff from the huge list of story-arc summaries I made a huge project out of a couple of years ago, but stopped about a year ago. There's been some eating-crow involved in that as well, as I realized that some of the summaries were way too oriented towards the things I care about most in D.C. (which is: the meaningful interactions between the main characters and what can be concluded from them), as opposed to the details of each mystery/murder case/ or what-have-you. The extreme expression of which was that I'd "summarized" the six chapter 'Hatamoto family massacre on a liner' story arc in to two sentences (about how Ran had described the boy she liked, how Conan reacted, and how Kogoro reacted to that...) Which isn't *bad*, per se, but it was just too lop-sided towards my personal cares... So I had to add a bit more, and did. It was almost funny, though, the guy that started the wiki had found my expressed interest in contributing to other parts of the wiki than my own planned contributions... a bit limited. Well, I think I'll let how things go speak for itself on my behalf, but it's going to be a loooong time before I'm done even just posting all summaries I have, not to mention the 100+ more chapters which still need summarizing...

As far as work goes, I was permitted to do the 2 day SQL-for-beginners course my company offers last week, and was very glad I'd been able to do so, since my SQL-knowledge badly needed refreshing... Since about halfway thru January I've been working on the 16-bits Solaris port of Usoft Developer, so that's about two months long by now. Though a lot of it hasn't been too fun, since 2 or three weeks ago I've been happy to have been able to build not-immediately-crashing builds of almost all of the programs Usoft consists of. It's been good to see a pretty large amount of invested time result in tangible programs which might not always work correctly yet, but... they're also pretty close to working and the partner I've been pair-programming along with and I have already successfully run some Unicode-containing SQL statements against our 16-bit sqlscript program, as well as some simple Unicode-containing-SQL batchjobs against 16-bit runbatch. We still have some ways to go, though, and debugging on Solaris isn't as good as it would be on Windows (the Solaris debugger doesn't display 16-bits string easily, and it also just sort-of locks up for a minute or so at random, while you're using it, which *really* sucks)... There's a progress report planned for Thursday, hope by then we'll have gotten significantly more bugs sorted out...

So, it's been *ages* since my last LJ update. Ever since coming back from our vacation in Japan, I haven't really felt like blogging, because life has just gone on as usual, with the normal ups and downs. I have no significant changes, unfortunately, to report. OTOH, I suppose that's better than having really, really bad news.

So, what have I been doing lately? Well, someone on LJ had commented that fanfiction.org is worthless, so I remembered I still have an account there, logged in, and found an advert for a web site that hosts manga per page online. Which is very, very nice. (when the pics download, anyway: that sometimes glitches) Been able to catch up with the newer Negima chapters from after AQS stopped (well, they claim to still have scanlations in the works, but seeing is believing...)

Since my vacation I've also been vacationing from the learning-Japanese efforts. I'm starting to feel ready to start doing stuff on that again, but don't ask when. And an intention isn't a promise..

Recently one of the things I've been playing around with again is downloading LiveCDs of Linux distributions; my PC's been randomly crashing a lot lately (or at least the Vista GUI has been), so I want to check out alternatives. Kubuntu 8.10 worked very well for me, the only thing that didn't work is it wouldn't access my normal Windows drives (the external USB drives were no prob), and it failed to open .Rar files...

I'm also playing around with other browsers than default Firefox. (Since I suspected relatively large memory use by FF might be a possible culprit for my PC probs). So I'm now running the 2nd beta of Firefox 3.1 (which does use less memory). OTOH, it doesn't work well with Hotmail, so for that I'm using Safari (with an updated WebKit from the last two weeks or so)

I'm also playing around with other stuff. Just yesterday I downloaded and ran a MinGW autoinstaller (MinGW == GCC on Windows). I'd played around with MinGW before, but considered it not-really-quite there yet since it didn't seem to support working with wide characters, which is kind of the minimum I really expect... As well as supporting STL. But I also got the MinGW alpha version of GCC 4.3, and that does seem to support wide-chars out-of-the-box... But it also displayed a supposedly wide string (correctly) as output to a DOS shell (which is *not* what I'd been expecting, I figured I'd see a list of question marks, I think that's how command-line Visual Studio would do). So now I'm trying to figure out how to prove it *is* doing what I tell it to, preferrably without resorting to writing-to-a file (it's easy, but I like more elegant solutions)

So, last night when we were walking thru Kabuki-cho in the evening, some one saw me & my brothers and invited us in English to a strip show. I immediately thought: "no way!"... But since then I've been trying to figure out why even the thought of going to such a show makes me feel empty and somehow a bit dirty. When in a relationship you reach the stage of getting nude in front of a would-be lover (for me, anyway), that creates a certain amount of intimacy: not having any barriers between yourself and your special someone, it's what-you-see-is-what-you-get, but there's also a confidence that what they see won't disappoint them. But seeing someone strip just because money has hanged hands, without any relationship between the stripping person and the viewers, some how that seems obscene.