It's an ADD World

With informatin overload these days we've become a bit of an ADD culture.  I definitely feel that way myself when it comes to my hobbies, and life in general.  It's the "Ooooh Shiny!!!" sindrome.  I've definitely been guilty of that with programming, video games, table top games, etc.  I think some of it is just the age old addage "The grass is always greener on the other side".  As people, we are fascinated with new things, and that's not necessarily bad but perhaps we should also try more to focus on the tried and true as well.  Along those lines, I'm going to force myself to focus more on some of my neglected projects over the next few weeks.  My C/Side project certainly deserves a publish of the latest build.  I think I'll make myself a big bullet list of unfinished projects and see how much I can accomplish when I organize myself.  I'll probably be surprised with the results as would most people if they did the same I suspect.

A cold day in hell

Yes, it has indeed arrived and I am actually posting again.  I really need to force myself to write more often.  I am finally working on getting my last changes to the C/Side utils rolled up and published.  my target date at this point is 2/12/11.  Lately (and by that I mean the past 2 months) it has been difficult to force myself to work on my editor project.  I suppose that is the problem, that I feel as though I have to force myself.  I'm finding it difficult to muster the enthusiasm to work on my own projects outside of work after putting in a day coding AT work.  This must be kind of what it feels like to be a professional writer.  Sometimes you just have to force yourself to put pen to page.  Last night I modified my Navision object parser library to allow writing out of objects without ID numbers attached to variables and methods.

The editor progresses

Work continues on my editor, albeit at a slower pace than it should.  I have a working database explorer control prototype done my editor.  So far it recognizes any running Navision instances, pulls their server and database info and adds it to the explorer.  It then allows browsing of information for any object in any of those databases.  The treeview control itself is from an open source project (which can be found at CodeProject or SourceForge) called TreeViewAdv, written by Andrey Gliznetsov.  I have to say it is a very nice control and I recommend it to anyone who needs a treeview that supports "load on demand" or columnar data.

In the process of writing this control I recognized problem in my CSide Utils project.  Apparently version 5.0 Navision clients (and I'm guessing those prior) return time data fields with a fractional decimal of seconds on the end (such as 12:00:00.344).  Apparently you cannot pass a value like this back to the cilent even though it returned the value in the first place.  I added a clean little compiled regex to deal with this into the project.  I will be updating the primary source trunk for my project and uploading it to the website soon.  I will also update the download on Mibuso with this latest version (skipping 1.1 altogether).

New C/Side utility release

I've been working on my C/Side Integration Utilities over the week and I finally have enough for a 1.1 release this weekend.  I'll be packaging it up soon and uploading it to my site, so hopefully by the time you are reading this post, you'll be able to download the 1.1 source.  I have improved the objects as well as worked out another one of the unknown methods that I think folks will find cool (that method is EndTransaction, which also makes COMMIT possible).  I'm going to do a little more testing in the next few hours and then publish the new version.

Update on Saturday, December 4, 2010 at 5:45PM by Thaddeus

The .Net garbage collection is quite aggressive it seems, overly so when it comes to marshalled COM instances.  It's proving impossible so far to properly unhook the events in my Client class via the Dispose method (or at least when the GC calls it).  I'm sure if I call it pre-emptively it would work fine but it's rather annoying that the garbage collector is preventing me from cleaning up properly.  I'm going to continue attempting to resolve this before I post version 1.1.

Update on Saturday, December 4, 2010 at 8:16PM by Thaddeus

Version 1.1 is live :)

Unforunately the original known bug is still unsolved, but I fixed many others.

Freedom to do what you are told

It seems like every day I become more disgusted with my own government.  It's no wonder a lot of the world hates us, because the US government behaves like assholes a good deal of the time.  Since when did the legislative branch of my government become the enforcement branch of the entertainment industry?? ...pardon my french ....but WHAT THE FUCK??  Our government abuses it's power more every day as time goes on and I'm getting very sick of it.  Our tax dollars get wasted on bullshit bills like COICA and it infuriates me.  Recently immigration enforcement agents were used to sieze a number of domains that were accused of trafficking in pirated and counterfeit material.  Now I'm sure some of these sites were legitimately bad but some of them, it seems, were just sites that the entertainment industry would rather didn't exist and I'm sorry, but that is not grounds to sieze their domains.  Also, COICA hasn't passed yet you bunch of numnuts beauracrats!  On top of all this, when did it become the customs and immigration agents' job to take pirate content sites offline.  Lastly, most of these sites were back up under other domain names in little to no time at all, so all of those tax dollars accomplished what????

Now back to my original point of abuse.  ICANN, while run in the US is supposed to be a nation neutral maintainer of internet domains.  It's no wonder other countries don't want us mainting the primary domain registrars when we abuse them so horribly for our own bullshit selfish agendas.  I suppose I should be used to politicians abusing power, but I'm not, it just makes me angrier every time they do so.  I think the founding fathers of this country would be disgusted with the gestapo tactics our government sometimes uses these days.