Rick's Tech Talk

While teaching myself Microsoft DirectX, I fell into an issue that is best described as "invisible geometry". This is the unfortunate situation when lines aren't appearing when and where you expect them to. You've told DirectX to draw something, but you don't see it. The difficulties with getting this simple "two-faced triangle" to draw seemed to represent the difficulties with working with DirectX in general.

I added a tag cloud to this BLOG. It looks quite nice, and I was happy with the tags except when I saw that that they didn't accurately reflect my content.

When I first deployed this change, the biggest tag was for "drupal", but when you clicked on that tag, you saw only one story. And conversely, the "c++" tag is smaller than the "drupal" tag, but there are three "c++" stories. Why was the "drupal" tag so large? And why was the "c++" tag so small?

I've been on a roll with my Tetris development the past few days. Of late, I've implemented "pause" and "fast fall" (or "fast drop"). I've also added the ability to build a "mound". While working on the code to make the mound (the collection of pieces that pile up on top of each other), I found it helpful to dump the contents of my "grid" to a file. Here's my grid after playing the game for a few minutes.

In the world of Java development, you're bound to throw some projects into Eclipse that fill up the Problems View with so many issues that this view becomes unusable. That happened to me, and it quickly reduced my productivity. This view lets you find compilation and build issues that require fixing. The team leader on my project said "you've got a lot of errors there; let's filter them." He showed me how, and I was amazed. Apparently, this great and obvious piece of functionality was available, seemingly right under my nose!

I spend a lot of time in the DOS Command Window. And I spend a lot of time being curious about my Windows PATH. Examining the directories in your PATH can be a demoralizing exercise, but a Perl one-liner makes reading it very manageable.

My electronic notebook saved me today. I had a technical problem here at work, involving some old internal software. I vaguely remember using this software, but instead of rummaging through old e-mails or polling my co-workers I grepped my electronic notebook. I was able to find notes from the first time I used this software nearly two years ago. Rereading these put enough details into my head to be back "up to speed." I felt pretty smug. Electronic notebooks are my personal "best practice."

Shakespeare asked "What's in a name? A rose by any another name would smell just as sweet." But he never worked in XML.

A co-worker asked me how my current project was going, and I said it was a slog. He apparently hadn't heard of this word, but a few days later he asked me how the slog was going. I had to smile.

I am headed "on the road" soon. Part of my job involves doing "onsite client work". This means I do installations, configurations, development, even training. It's part of the typical technical consultant's life: visiting the corporate back offices and IT departments across the nation (and for some, around the globe).

Today I was in RPM Hell, a punishing landscape even when you know what you're doing. And unfortunately for me, I only barely know what I'm doing.