Managed World

Yikes, I didn't realize just how pathetic I've been lately with my blog. One blog post a MONTH?!? Geez, perhaps I should have gone to a support group or something.

What has probably been obvious to most of you out there is that I have been posting very infrequently lately. Part of it was because of a serious addiction that was caused by someone else. Another part of it was just my funk I get into every once in a while. You see, a couple of times a year I get into a downer where I don't do anything and totally withdraw into my cave as a hermit. Of course, it doesn't help when the cave you withdraw into has a stash like the one I had in it.

So, now I appear to be coming out of my doldrums which is a good thing. Unfortunately, this latest round lasted a lot longer than it has in the past. Hence, I have lost touch with a bunch of friends that I need to see again in order to start feeling somewhat normal. So, I guess it's time for me to get off my rear and start attending Padnug and Nerd Dinners again (I'm sure it's been somewhat quiet without me since I tend to be the loud one (my volume is directly proportional to my size)).

What does this mean for any of you out there? Probably absolutely nothing. I'm not going to say that any of my past projects are going to be picked up again or not. After all, I'm a roamer or wanderer. I do some to learn something from it. And as soon as I have learned it, I lose interest and move on to the next project. That's just the way I am. However, I would like to move BooM to VC# Express 2005. Although I have no current plans to revive the articles (it really depends on whether I am going to have the time to do it or not and still live a peaceful life).

I hate stress, and I induce it on myself way too much. So, perhaps if I avoid that this time around, I can go longer without getting burned out. I'm not like some other people I know that can do everything under the sun, meet all their deadlines and commitments, and still find the time to save kittens out of local neighborhood trees (although I'm of the ilk to believe that these people are actually extra-terrestrial beings (aka Aliens) who don't need to sleep and hence have an extra 6-10 hours everyday that *humans* don't have in which to get things done).

Well, hopefully you will actually see some blogging from me now. My blog hasn't died completely yet (although it's come close a couple times). I have no intention of letting it die anytime soon either (which brings up another point: on some of these community sites (like GWB (just for example)), have you noticed how many blogs there are with only one or two posts? Perhaps, that means that I'm actually already ahead of the game in some regards (or maybe it just means that I have more time on my hands to blog than other people do because they are actually responsible human beings)).

l8r (<--- hehe, l337 speak I learned in WoW, =P)

Well, after downloading Beta 2 of Visual C# Express Edition 2005, it didn't take long for me to come across my first annoyance.

The first thing I did was to create a new Console Application to mess around with the new features of the Console class (which happen to be pretty cool darnit). In .NET 2.0 you can now place text anywhere on the Console, change the background and foreground colors, programatically change the cursor position, etc. Basically, you can now achieve Curses-like development (not quite, but sort of) using the new Console class. You can just go ahead and check out Heroic Adventure by Chris Williams to see an example of it in action.

So, what was my annoyance? It was the fact that I wrote some simple code that didn't work:

Console.CursorVisible = false;

Console.Clear();
Console.SetCursorPosition(12, 12);
Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Cyan;
Console.Write("A B C ");
Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Red;
Console.Write("1 2 3 ");

Console.Read();

I was eagerly awaiting for this to run to see my new baby in all its beauty and glory (aka Ugly Programmer Art). So, what was I greeted with when I hit F5 to see this baby run in the debugger? Well, I was greeted with a nice and warm "IOException: Handle Is Invalid." Oh baby, that wasn't intuitive. So what the heck was going on here?

I changed the code to do a simple Console.WriteLine() and found that the output in Debug mode was not to the Console window as I expected, but was to this "Quick Console" window in Visual Studio. How nice, huh? So, when running under the debugger, my Console was not the Console I wanted to use.

Luckily, it was an easy fix. What happened (at least for me), is that when VC# Express was installed, there is an IDE option called "Redirect all console output to the Quick Console window" that was checked by default. To fix this, all I did was uncheck this box (Tools -> Options -> Debugging -> General).

What is slightly more annoying is that this is a breaking change if you have legacy Console applications that you wish to debug, I believe. If I recall correctly, this is a new option/feature that was introduced in 2005 and is not present in VS2003 (at least it's not in the same place in my installation at work).

So, even though you created a Console Application, it will not behave like a Console application did in 2003 in Debug mode until you un-check this checkbox. Far from being intuitive I say. I'm just laying this out there in case anyone else comes across this.

Now, onward ho!

As some of you may have heard, Chris Williams announced that he has been named Chairman of the INETA Marketing Website Committee. Basically, this committee will be in charge of managing the content on the new, redesigned, DotNetNuke-based, up-and-coming INETA website (still under development).

Well, to make a long story short, Chris gave me the honor of being one of the members of this committee. I only hope I can live up to the expectations that Chris probably has for everyone on the committee :).

Oh, and if you happen to be an awesome artist and are interested in contributing some of your time and talent to INETA, contact Chris and let him know you're interested :).

[UPDATE: It looks as though the name JayOS is already taken. Now time to find a new name =P]

Okay, I just did some chatting with Blogus Maximus and I've gotten back into the mood to write on this blog (for the time being at least). I've been too much of a lazy bastard lately. Of course, I'm just the kind of person who likes to go in his cave and not interact with the rest of the world. So having me blog in the first place is its own sort of Christmas-day Miracle (except for the fact that it's neither Christmas or a real Miracle).

So, what have I been up to? Well, I'm finally starting to settle into my new position at work. It's a bit daunting at times to be in charge of a team. I know it's helped me identify some problems I have and some short comings I need to make up for as a leader. Other than that, my personal projects have largely been World of Warcraft and my current "baby" project.

Before I talk about my new baby, I should confess (as if you don't already know) that I don't exactly follow through on private projects. Following through at work isn't a problem, but I get passionate about something at home and then when the passion goes away, I move on to my "next thing." Instead of getting down on myself for that, I'm just going to say screw it and do it. I don't care what any of you think (of course, I'm just kidding there because I love every single one of you (except maybe *one* person out there (yeah, you know who you are (or perhaps you don't since I'm just making that up in the first place)))).

So, my new baby is JayOS. I've been wanting to get into low-level programming for quite a while. Some may think I'm simply torturing myself (especially those who *had* to do it for work in the past) but I find it is something that I enjoy. I enjoy knowing how something works and why. In that sense, I have gotten into Operating System development lately. It's certainly forced me to learn about how the BIOS works and to learn pedal-to-the-metal assembly programming. So far I have my own bootloader that actually loads the kernel I wrote in C. Of course, the kernel just prints "Welcome to JayOS" to the screen, but it's certainly a start. You don't realize how much you don't know until you start trying to do these kinds of things, that's for sure.

I think the first time I realized what I got myself into when starting JayOS was when I started writing the Kernel. Since the kernel was in C, I went to write "malloc" and then I realized there IS NO malloc. Since malloc is part of the runtime library, and since I'm writing my own OS, there is no malloc :). So, I had to write my own routine to allocate memory. Of course this has lead me down the road to investigate all sorts of memory management schemes. Oh boy, was that a never-ending rabbit hole. And that was simply one rabbit-hole of many when it comes to OS development. I've enjoyed it though :).

Anyways, that's what I, your most favorite and endearing slacker, have been up to lately. Ciao!

Mr. Maximus left a comment on my last post asking me to at least let people know that I'm still alive. Yes, I'm still alive. Yes, I'm spending a bit of my time still playing World of Warcraft. If you're a player, you can catch me on the Skywall realm and I am a Troll Mage named Mahku.

However, WoW isn't the only thing consuming my time. I have been moving into a new position at work. I am now an official "team lead" for the Production Systems team. It feels kind of funny (and it does come with more responsibility) but it feels really great.

Outside of work and WoW, I've started messing around with wcurses and Python programming. The goal is to mess around writing a text-based rpg like Chris Williams has (based on the Rifts universe). However, I am merely doing it as a learning tool to learn Python better. Why? Because I feel like it damnit!! No really, the reason I'm learning Python is because a couple of coworkers and me are starting to put together a set of Python libraries to help troubleshoot production support issues. Why Python? Because it is a scripting language, and because it is has a lot of community support.

So that's what's going on. Not much but a lot at the same time. Take it easy peeps.