graham.reeds/

Long time…

It has been a long time since I posted. Mainly due to work and a lack of excitement to write about.

I am writing this on my HTC Desire phone which less than 24 hours ago deleted all my text messages, some 6,000 in total. Most were boring ‘What time will you be home?’ type messages but some were important (pictures of my cat that passed away earlier this year, addresses, etc.).

This fault has been around since 2009 and if you do a Google search for ‘android deleted all text messages’ the amount of results are frightening. The issue on the Android issues forum has 760 (at the moment) posts complaining about this problem but it has only been given Medium priority. Part of the problem is that people don’t have the sdk installed to get the debug info once it occurs and since it seems entirely random it is nigh impossible to reproduce.

So I now have a backup plan in place (shouldn’t the message system have that to begin with?) but no way of recovering those lost memories.

I think I have been burnt too many times by Android now. Apple have had a few problems but nothing as major as deleting all a users texts and when Apple do have publicized issues the are fixed fairly quickly.

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Update

Updates are supposed to bring about improvements but the latest Android updates have been a definite step backwards.

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Birthday

Would of been Gizmos birthday if she was still with us.

Still miss the little one.

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Crowd source pavements

Just looking at where Google would have me walk to get to a local dry cleaners. It’s literally across the bridge an turn right and that isn’t taking into account turning off early and heading across the park. Surely some enterprising Googler could add a feature where pavements and cycle paths could be manually added and voted on for reliability?

Employ me and I would do it for you!

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Object of desire

This post and the one that came previously, were written on my HTC Desire.

The WordPress app will allow me to write posts as and when they occur to me instead of what happens now which is they occur to me but are forgotten as I am not near a keyboard at the time.

A big hurrah for modern technology!

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Resize a VirtualPC disk

My 10GB disk on my VirtualPC was nearly full to overflowing so I went looking on how to resize the virtual disk. There’s a free product that does this for you, but to quote an old song “I waved that thing all over the place, my boomrang won’t come back”. In fact I was using the app correctly but not understanding what the app actually did. This guide showed me the way.

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Update

It’s been a while since I posted, so what has been keeping me busy?

Work, it’s getting easier – I think I am getting into the VB6 mindset, but I still hate VBA with a passion. When is the nice .NET extension becoming available? Is it already, and could Reporting Services save our souls (not to mention our sanity)?

Space is coming along very slowly. Any time I sit down to work on it I have to spend about an hour refreshing my mind on what I have done – and I only have about 40 mins to do it in.

Had my birthday: One of my presents was an iPod from Mrs Bear – which gave me a lovely opportunity to hate iTunes all over again. This time I accidently deleted my play list, there is no undelete and then it synced it – wiping it. I’ve installed iTunes 9 but I don’t hold out any hope for them fixing all the problems with it. Another present is an ant farm – so along with my Sea Monkeys you could say I have Surf’n'Turf.

Another side effect of my birthday was my the choice of venues for a meal.  Since I’ve always wanted to eat there I picked Kaminaki and had some of the nicest fish I have ever eaten, and definately the nicest pitta bread ever. All this and despite the grumblings of some of my friends.

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VB6 and VBA

My employer of nearly 3 months is slowly moving to VB.NET. However a lot of their ‘legacy’ apps still need to be maintained and extended to support new methods, etc.

This involves VB6 and VBA.  I was always in the position that VB6 was a mickey-mouse program for throwaway apps but not really suitable for real dev work – I was an elitist C++ programmer basically.

My view has shifted – you can really write large enterprise class apps in VB6. But one thing I can’t seem to shake off is the contempt the people who wrote VB6 IDE had for their users. Having used VC6 for a number of years you get used to certain things: Like if you start editing a file that isn’t checked out it will ask you if you want to start editing and then when checked out your caret is where you want it to be.

Not in VB6.  You are informed that the file is locked.  So you then have to right click on the file and manually check it out.  But now the file closes itself and reopens with you looking at the top of the file.

Should I mention the 255 control limit? Who picked that as a number? (As an aside why is Excel 2003 limited to 1026 rows? Why 1026 and not 1024? Is that a typo?)

“Out of memory error”. I have 4gb in my machine.  Why am I out of memory and why does that stop you from saving my last 15 minutes of careful debugging work?  Why must you lose my break points?

And the mouse wheel doesn’t work.

This isn’t to say VC6 was all roses – far from it – but it makes you wonder if the VB6 team actually a) used it for anything b) gave a damn.

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Onwards and upwards

Life continues.

Slowly getting used to the way my new employer does things. It’s a little more strict than previous places but this is the largest organisation that I’ve worked for under one roof. Using VB after a break of 5 years is a real pain but apparently it is only going to be for a short time. There are plans to rewrite (why do I cringe when I hear that word?) the apps in VB.NET. Oh joy of joys. Between now and then I can try and wheedle my way into getting C# used. Meanwhile I am learning to swim again by being thrown in at the deep end. As a plus I don’t have to get up/leave so early and I get home an hour earlier too.

While this is going on I am still working on Space. Or rather trying to get Space to work on a local VM. There is little point in pushing forward with changes when the changes are so hard to implement, and the only way to test is on a live system. That’s just folly: If something breaks then we start to lose real money. Better to make a VM and play safely in there.

That means learning Linux. Which I have now installed a dozen times. Even the book on the subject doesn’t work the way it is supposed to. Fortunately I am savvy enough to figure out my way around where the book misses out one of the hyphens in –dport.

With learning comes confidence so I went and reinstalled selecting server as the install option and doing everything manually. However with Virtual PC as my VM I kept getting the ‘i8253 too high – resetting’ all the time which made working in Vim a nightmare. So I decided to give VirtualBox a try.

Oh my God! How fast is it compared to Virtual PC!?. It just rips along. The boot is a blur, the install of the OS is twice as quick and UI is feels more responsive. As a plus I haven’t seen the i8253 bug yet.

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Clean again

Just finished my first week back in work and though it wasn’t a full week, does give one some confidence once again.

However, the job isn’t my ideal one – working with mess that is classic VB (could be worse might be PHP) – but it is a job all the same.

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