Recent blog entries for gazook

I was surprised to see how few people have certified Jason Robbins !

I've been very happy with Argo/UML when I've used it at home and school, and I hope it'll get to the point were eventually I'll be convince my PHB's to use it at work, instead of it's outragously expensive competitor.

Fixing broken windows is another habit I've found very useful.
Fixing broken windows is also covered in the good book The Pragmatic Programmer.

The previous link takes you to a local bookstore within walking distance of my house.
Please support your local booksellers !

Jude's suggestion of the day: Check out the Testing Framework software at the Extreme Programming site. I've been using the JUnit package for a couple weeks now, and it's proved really helpful at catching all sorts of problems as soon as they occur. It's a little bit of a pain to start writing the unit tests, but now that I've been doing it for a while, I can't see myself going back to not doing it. It's almost fun !

Folks interested in skill/trust metrics may want to check out the Perl Monks site. They have a voting/experience system set up that looks like it's modeled on an RPG (experience points and levels). They also have a "Quest" system setup where folks can earn experience points by fulfilling various site-specific tasks. I'm not suggesting this approach for Advogato, but it may be an interesting approach for a more development-centric project

I've been pretty lame lately.

A while back, I got stuck in a hotel on Solomon's Island for two days during a blizzard with nothing to do except rip the internals of the pwan parser apart. That and listen to a lone Radiohead CD that just happened to be in my laptop.
I haven't quite gotten around to putting things back together yet... There's going to be a lot more code...

I have had time and energy to submit an entry in to the Viridian's Dead Mike contest.
Enjoy. Personally, I think I'm a shoe-in. Let me know what you think.
Other Viridian stuff is here.

Let's e-play "e-count the e-references" at this Rational Press Release My favorite: "e-software". Blthhhhh.

Speaking of Rational, due to the moronic license tracking software Rose 2000 is using now, I can't bring work home anymore. This manager doesn't allow licenses to be checked out to laptops and checked back in again in the morning. Folks are forced to spend extra money for a "fixed" license intead of a "floating" license. So I spent the last couple days looking for other UML modeling tools.

This has led me to the Argo/UML package, which I assume everyone else in the universe already knows about and is using. I haven't actually got this up and running on my Linux box, but it looks really sweet under Windows. I love the cognitive support stuff. I hope it eventually supports the ability to extend this support so you can pop up my own warnings ! It doesn't seem to have any sort of Corba backend to compete with Rose's REI, or C++ code generation, but all things in good time, I suppose. The pwan whole heartedly supports the Argo/UML project, and hopes to make good use of it in the months to follow !

Other news from the pwan is that the bison test coverage script has fit the wall. I got the script to run so it was covering the parser states like I wanted, getting a little more than 600 test sentances spit out, but it turns out a lot of them don't actually parse in OCL. I've already typed way too much here, so I'm not going to go into why, but it looks like to do this script right, I'm going to have to ignore the .output file, and actually go in and work off those arrays in the ocl_parser.c++ output from bison. I'm not looking forward to this, so I'm working on the documentation a little. Eventually I've got to start writing the type-checking code....

As for the physicall world, I've got a security system installed in car, and no one's stolen it yet, so I'm relatively happy. The job situation is still up in the air though. I talked to someone from a project in another department, but that project is steeped in Microsoft "solutions" that feel wrong. I think the long term solution is to look to another company.

Thanks to the folks you certified my as an apprentice !

Well, my car was broken into Saturday night, and my CD player was stolen. This happened right in the garage of my building ! How lame is that ! So, I drive into work with the broken window, seeing I was already over 30 minutes late as it was. I get to the office, moan and groan about my misfortune, pull down some files from the network, and go home to get the window fixed. I don't feel like driving the 20 miles back into the depths of the Shenendoah's so I chug along on the laptop for a couple hours, finally I call into the office to ask some questions, and find out the project's been canceled ! They've told me not to worry, and that they'll find another spot for me in the company, but ye gods, what a sucky day.

Besides that, worked on the bison_coverage.pl script for a while. I have it so it's spitting out it's first test sentenance of the OCL grammer, but I'm having some problems after reducing states. This should be cleared up after a night or so of working. Then I should have a set of preliminary test sentenances in OCL that I'll be happy with.