We did one of our monthly releases at work this week. Releases can be stressful and frustrating, and take a lot of methodical preparation to get right. It can be thankless work too; the only time a user notices a release is when it goes badly. We do our releases early on a week day to minimize impact, so if anything does go wrong, there’s not many bodies around to help out. It’s not much fun, but ...

I’m working on the code that parses VCalendar data so that it can be processed. I’m copying the data I care about into a simple data structure that can represent a calendar request in any format. Any logic that interacts with calendar requests would use this internal structure. I want it to be simple, only having the stuff that I need, but I don’t want to completely re-invent the wheel either, so ...

My company runs a 24/7 site with a substantial number of users and connections to partner systems all over the world. We do what we can to make the system fault tolerant, but problems can still appear at any time of day or night. Ideally we would have a technical support team that’s staffed around the clock, but that not in the cards for now. We used to have a system where anyone that could f...

My next goal for the Themis project is to parse an invitation from an email. I am starting with invitations generated by MS Outlook because that’s my target audience, but a peak inside of a Google Calendar invitation gives me hope that I’ll be able to support multiple calendars without much trouble. Outlook invitations are sent in the VCalendar format, content type “text/calendar”. The standa...

I found my first 64-bit bug at work. I was moving a windows service built for the ‘Any CPU’ to a 64-bit server. It started fine on the new server, and gave no indication of poor health in the logs, but one key function was malfunctioning. I’m not exactly sure what the cause is, but I know that the hash of any binary file was resulting in the same value. The service does some direct memory manipula...

My wife and I have been taking a Japanese class. I’m enjoying it quite a bit, even though learning languages has never been easy for me. I need to work hard to memorize all the new words, and that means lots and lots of practice. My wife bought a pack of index cards. This is what a normal person would do. To me, it seems like defeat. Why use paper when there’s a computer in the room? While she’s a...

I decided to give IE9 a try. What’s not to like about a browser that’s supposed to be faster, cleaner, and support new HTML features? They really nailed the faster and cleaner parts. I didn’t find the user interface in IE8 too busy, but seeing the improvement I’m happy for the extra space. Plunking a site onto my task bar like it were an application is pretty awesome. There are a couple of website...

I’m charging forward on the Shared Resource Schedule Service. There are a lot of things I’m getting into place before I start writing code. Don’t try to tell me that I’m not being agile either, you always need to design a little to write good code. The key to being agile is designing only as much as you need, and being prepared to change your mind later. The NameThe first order of business was to ...

I’ve been spending time on the first part of the shared resource service project: “Receive event invitations by email and send an acceptance email”. I hadn’t considered the difficulty I would face receiving emails. This is the most important part of the application, and if I can’t make it work, there’s really no point to continue. I don’t want to write my own POP3 library, I’ve done that before an...

The time finally came for me to replace my iPod with something new. I was using aniPod click wheelthat I got as a warranty replacement back in 2004.It was good to me, but I felt that it was time to look at other options.If iTunes ran a little better on my PC, I probably would have just bought another iPod without a second thought. HardwareIt took me quite a while to choose a new device. I did look...