Zzot!

Today at work, I was waiting to tell someone who was waiting on a feature that it was in the latest build. While I was waiting for a phone call to end, another person appeared needing to mumble something at the same person. Since I was still working on the “goat” project (and still tired of it) I quoted another sad line floating around in my head:

Welcome now my friends to the project that never ends…

He confirmed that I still need some sleep (and by some strange coincidence is the son of the person who said that about the goat missive). About two hours later, I made his day by prying the strangest computer problem in the building plaque off his door and nailing it to my own.¹ There was much rejoicing (by him anyway).

1. I’ll admit that we don’t actually have such a plaque, but if anyone there reads my blog, we will have one. Tomorrow. Morning. [↩]

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A few weeks ago, I was off on a business trip. It’s hard to summarize what all needed doing, but suffice it to say there was plenty. Much of it was stuff that worked in our lab but not on site. We knew there would be some of that sort of breakage, so our crew included quite an assortment of skills. I mostly provided my own skills at the beginning of the week, and moved onto questionable areas¹ for the rest of the week.

So, on Wednesday or Thursday morning — who can remember which — we were on the way to a nearby Radio Shack for some parts. We were seeing a strange DC bias on one of the lines coming from a component we couldn’t really do much about, so we went looking for some resistors. But that’s beside the point.

On the way there, I shared this with everyone:

I can’t stop thinking that there’s some number n, where if we can sneak
that number of goats into the building without anyone figuring out that it’s
our fault, all our problems go away.

The first response was something along the lines of “you really need some sleep.” I did not dispute that assertion. The second was “is that African or European goats?” Naturally, if makes a difference what sort of goats you use, you don’t have enough of them. Duh.

The guy at Radio Shack didn’t seem surprised that the first item on our shopping list was “2 goats.” They must get a lot of sleep-deprived customers right when they open.

1. Questionable in that I wasn’t really an expert at solving those problems, just familiar with them. Hey, there was a lot of work to do. [↩]

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As I start this entry, it is late Thursday afternoon. Last week, I was traveling on business with four other people, and only today I’m starting to feel like I might be recovering from it all. For those following along at home, that’s six days after getting home before I feel somewhat human again. _Six days_. So if you happen by my website and notice that the dates all seem to be from quite a while ago, that’s why.

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Last week, I decided to fix some of the problems with one of our webapps, so I started reading and coding. It turns out that WMP for the Mac is still built as a CFM object, so communication between it and JavaScript in any modern browser was right out. I had this great idea — QuickTime. It runs everywhere that we have problems with WMP, and is scriptable everywhere.

Except Safari. 1.2 adds LiveConnect, but only for conversations between JavaScript and Java applets, not between JavaScript and plugins. So, I can make our stuff work on modern Mac browsers, except for (arguably?) the most common one. Sigh.

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I spent much of this week trying to get DirectX / Direct3D / DirectShow / DirectCatastrophy to do what I want. When I told my boss that I’d gotten an answer from nVidia about their StereoBLT API, he asked if it was something I would have figured out on my own — the way you trigger the behavior is the most obscure way of accessing a published hardware feature that I’ve ever heard of.

At the end of the week, I’d found several comments that if you’re looking for a graphics API with Stereo hooks that hardware venders use, instead of hacking in their own wacko trigger, you want OpenGL. Too bad that didn’t occur to me at the beginning of the week — it’s been a long time since I used OpenGL, but apparently I’d have been at least as successful. Oh well.

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