small changes

WARNING!
This post is not about tech. It's a rant. You have been warned.

<RANT>
I remember thinking when I started this blog that I would mostly talk about the projects I was working on and not about my personal life, opinions, and philosophy. But the more I've worked on this the more I realize that it's not that cut and dry for me. My moods, philosophy, and physical state greatly affect how I approach work and when I decide to work on projects. I say this because I've used the excuse "I'm so worn out after work" so many times it's even annoying me.

Worse is when I'm at work after a short night because I got caught up in a show or game that I lost track of time. Take this morning for instance: I had less than 6 hours of restless sleep, didn't have time for a shower, had an email stating a form hadn't been updated yet due to a computer being stupid (not the user), and just my general dislike of mornings. To say I was irritable would be an understatement, but to say how I was feeling would be crude and uncalled for in this blog.

So I took a walk around the building. Twice. The second time around I stopped at the coffee shop in the science building. I bought a hot chocolate and went back to my desk. An hour later, I feel worlds better about myself, the problems before me, and the universe in general. It's amazing at how such a small change alters so much.

I've been trying to make these small changes in more ways than improving my immediate mood as well. Lately I've been trying to make small changes to my eating habits and it's working quite well. I've managed to reduce the amount of food I eat, change the general type of food to more healthy options (this means a lot less cheese), and even lose a few pounds while doing this. It's quite nice.

The place I most frequently fail, however are my gaming habits. No, not gambling, video games. I play them a lot. Like, it's my other full time job a lot. And it's been getting in the way of accomplishing other things like, laundry, cleaning my room, showering, and even superseding food. I spent more time this weekend setting up a dedicated Minecraft server with modifications than anything else this past weekend (read: this is why I didn't sleep well). Like my excuse I've been overusing, it's starting to annoy even me.

Video games are the one thing I'm wondering if small changes will even work for me. I often wonder if I should go through an addiction and detox process just to curb how much I play. Worse yet is Minecraft itself. The game is evil in that the possibilities in the game are incredible. It even takes over my desire to play other games. And thus I arrive at the conclusion that it is time I cease playing games and re-discover... reality.
</RANT>

If you've made it this far, I commend you. Listening to me rant about myself probably isn't the most entertaining, but I thank you as well. I thank you for being considerate of my thoughts and should things go well over the next two weeks, I may actually have some tech to write about. So in light of my rant...

Until next time:
Work hard. Play less video games.

follow through

/EXISTENCE
Lately I've had a general desire to slack off when I get home from work. This comes from the fact that work is actually quite draining and the fact that I'm now working 40 hours a week. As much as I dislike working 40 hours a week, I know it is a necessary at this point while I look for other opportunities and pay off my school loans. But I can't help wish I had a bit more time for my own pursuits.

Those who know me might assume this purely involves gaming and as much as I love video games, this isn't entirely true. In truth I even have a lot of things outside of technology I wish to pursue. My "bucket list" if you will, has things on it like visiting Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, India, the Canary Islands, most of Europe, learning Japanese, living on another continent for a while, and even more things that I can't think of right now. It is an incredibly ambitious list and perhaps I should refine it a bit.

But admittedly I fall back on gaming and general slacking off most of the time. It doesn't help that a couple games I've been looking forward to recently came out (Borderlands 2 and Torchlight II) and several more are coming out in the next few months (Okami HD and The Banner Saga). There are 3 more that I have no idea when they are released coming as well that I have already invested in (Double Fine Adventure, Wasteland 2, & Auditorium Duet) or just have a general love for (another Ratchet & Clank game).

/TECH
It is honestly hard for me to pry myself away from the distraction of gaming. But there are a few things that have managed to capture my attention away: namely working on Doppelganger and getting new things set up. In fact just this evening I finally decided I would attempt to set up a media server using Ubuntu Linux and Plex Media Server. And to my great surprise it was pretty easy. After creating a new container, it was a short process of adding another source to the sources list, updating apt-get, and installing "plexmediaserver" with all of it's dependencies. Not much longer after that I had Samba working and some files transferring to test it out.

I'm pleased to announce, it worked fantastic. Not only is Plex Media Server easy to install, it detected the files I uploaded easily, downloaded artwork for the TV show, and even played the theme song while I was choosing the episode I wanted to watch. I experienced this using the Plex Media Center client which was equally easy to install and use.

/PHILOSOPHY
So I watched a couple episodes of Top Gear tonight and as I was watching their star in a reasonably priced car go around the track, I thought about one of the parts of the lap: the follow through. If you haven't seen the show, the follow through is a section of the lap where the driver is supposed to keep the gas pedal to the floor. And it's made me think about how I should approach my bucket list. Is it wise to go flat out through life, the universe, and everything? I think I have that answer in my sign off. So...

Until next time:
Work hard. Play harder.

digging

I did a little bit on Doppelganger last week, namely setting up Warg which is running Windows Server 2008 R2. But most of my tinkering has been at work with a form and on Balrog playing more Minecraft.

/TECH
But let's talk about my tinkering at work first. I need to begin by describing a form that I'm working on migrating from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. The form in question deals with allocating a funds to an employee for cell phones. As such, the form needs to be able to do several things right off: recognize the employee filling out the form (that's easy); query a list of current allocations and find all that pertain to said employee (hmm... okay); and check to see if the employee has submitted any forms for allocations during the current fiscal year (right).

The first part requires using the userName() function and then querying the user profile service to get their name and ID number. No problem.

The next part requires finding all the current allocations for the employee queried. All current allocations sit in a custom list which is easy enough to get to with a data connection, but how does one get just that employee's entries? Well with SharePoint and InfoPath 2010 it is now much easier to query list data connections that you receive data from. So by creating some rules that trigger on Form Load I set a field in the connection to equal the employee and then tell the form to query the connection. Boom! List of lots of allocations is now just 0 to 2 entries. This short list gives me information about each allocation along with how many allocations an employee already has. The form then presents pertinent information to set up a new allocation, update a current one, or renew an expiring one.

The last trick actually requires receiving data from the very library submitted to. This action allows us to see what other forms the employee has already submitted. But we only want to see ones submitted in the same fiscal year. Like the current allocations query, we query the forms library using the employee and also add in the fiscal year we want.

It's interesting to note that when I first modified and expanded this form that the data connection would return ALL information in the list or library and we used filters via rules and default values to get the information desired. When I looked at it this time, it just didn't make much sense to do it that way. It also helped that every one of those default values exploded in the conversion from 2007 to 2010.

Overall, I have to admit that I like SharePoint 2010 much better than SharePoint 2007. There are a few things we've had to adjust, some more annoying than others. For instance in InfoPath 2007 you could set a rule to check a condition and then do nothing except prevent any further rules from running. InfoPath 2010 doesn't allow this, but rather then just marking the rule as invalid it completely removes it without a trace. This is but a small pain though in comparison to the benefits that 2010 offers, like having a data connection sort the data returned by the field you specify. Drop-downs are now alphabetized even if the ID numbers of the queried data are out of order. The fact that data connections also have a separate set of "fields" for querying is also incredibly useful and is what inspired my recent redesign of the form mentioned above.

/EXISTENCE
As I mentioned in my intro, I haven't done much on Doppelganger recently except get one VM setup. It has really been running smoothly and I hardly have needed to mess with it since getting things set up. I guess I did move my TeamSpeak server to a new container called Raven where I now also run a Mumble (Murmur) server. But it wasn't hard and I didn't really learn much.

What I have noticed however, is that I get home from work in varying degrees of worn out--mildly to exhausted--and frequently just want to relax and not think about much. Enter Minecraft. Though it can be a very deep game with basic computer architecture simulation ability using redstone, it can also be one of the most mindless experiences out there.

It's such a strange game in that regard. it just places you near the center of 60 million square meters of blocks with a max build height of 256 meters and says, "Do something." At first you just stand there going, "WTF?" Then you move around and try punching something. You collect some dirt. If there are animals around, you might punch them a bit. Then you punch a tree and get wood. Eventually you're building a replica of Neuschwanstein castle before you come out of your stupor realizing you just spent 3 days of your life playing a game. All at once. Even forgetting to eat or sleep. (I'm exaggerating, but only a little.)

Only just today have I come up for air and realized that I need to get off my butt and get some exercise. At an embarrassing but not ungodly weight I realized that work is not going to get me moving around, rather it will keep me firmly planted in front of a computer so that I can earn strange pieces of paper-fabric which I can trade for silly and entertaining things like Minecraft, which is just more sitting in front of a computer. So today I actually went for a walk after work and managed to make it nearly a mile in 18 min. I don't know how many calories I burned, but I have a new sense of accomplishment and have set a goal down to get to 190 lbs again.

Until next time:
Work hard. Play harder.

expansion

/PERSONAL
I'm a little late posting this entry, but I've actually been quite busy recently and when Monday evening came around all I wanted to do was relax. Even now, two days later I'm tired and kinda want to go back to bed. But today is a special day and I decided that I needed to get stuff done, this being one of those things on my list. Now on to the tech talk that I normally spout.

/TECH
After some deliberation about where my best hardware should be I finally decided to put my better hardware in Doppelganger. So as part of my Independence Day festivities I took down Doppelganger and Phoenix and swapped their hardware. I made backups of Pegasus (my current TeamSpeak server) and Balrog storing them on my external HDD. At first I thought I'd just swap the HDDs between the cases, but then I remembered a critical detail: my video card, the only part not going in Doppelganger, doesn't fit in one of my cases. Motherboard switch it was! Later I realized another small detail that the Sabertooth 990FX motherboard doesn't have on-board video. Low-powered NVidia video card to the rescue once again! I always knew it was good to keep that.

Now Doppelganger has a beautiful rich-featured motherboard, a quad-core AMD FX processor, and 16 glorious GB of DDR3 RAM. I'm especially happy about the RAM. Eventually I'll get another server named Raven setup where it will automatically boot with Doppelganger and launch TeamSpeak Server, Ventrilo Server, and Murmur Server giving me and my friends a full range of voice-over-IP choices. Balrog is happily running along with several scripts I wrote to help me manage it more easily including a pretty sweet update script that downloads the given update, replaces the server jar, updates the message of the day in the server settings, and automatically restarts the server. But between the two VMs I'm hardly utilizing Doppelganger. There must be more. More! MOAR I SEZ! …ahem… Sorry, I devolved for a second there.

After a recent gaming session in EYE: Divine Cybermancy with friends, I decided I needed to setup another dedicated server for the game. It's pretty awesome and it's a Source engine game. Since Source engine games can be run using the same dedicated server application I realized that I could get it running using a Linux server. Since the Source engine is made by Valve and published to the Steam platform, I decided that my Source engine dedicated server would be named Golem. Sadly, I have not spent the time getting it running yet and really need to experiment with the Source dedicated server before I jump into running it on Linux.

My real next task is to setup two VMs for experimentation. One will be a Linux playground and the other a Windows playground. With so many distros of Linux, I'm not sure which flavor I'll use, but I'm thinking just a standard one, like Debian. Windows I have fewer choices, but it tends to be more of a hog and so I'm not sure which version I'll install. Anyway, once those are installed I'll make snapshot backups of each and then I can experiment on the system and mess it up as much as I like. And if I can't fix them, I can just restore from the snapshots.

Besides the Source dedicated server, I've thought about playing with include a private Internet radio server, DNS server, file server, web server, and a SQL server. I'm also hoping that I can buy some large capacity HDDs within the next year to put into Doppelganger and expand the storage to ridiculous sizes. If you have any ideas of what I should experiment with let me know in the comments and I'll see what I can manage.

Until next time:
Work hard. Play harder.

quirks

/TECH
As most design and development is apt to have, SharePoint 2010 and its associated software has quirks. These quirks can be documented or undocumented, but they eventually come up as someone out there is trying to use SharePoint in some specific way. I use Infopath and SharePoint Designer a lot as I design and develop custom forms. One of those quirks has become apparent to me as I was struggling for several hours one day to get a workflow functioning correctly. This workflow was trying to compare a username to a person field returning the login name as a string. SharePoint 2010 is new to me and the string builder features are much improved over 2007. One of those features however broke a workflow. It turns out that the new string builder treats the '\' just like most programming languages: it's an escape character. Thus when I had it trying to concatenate a '\' in a string, the lookup following it kept failing as it was no longer being a lookup but a string literal. Again, as with programming using 2 '\' actually inserts the character into the string.

/EXISTENCE
Speaking of escapes, currently I've gone through another bout of gaming remorse, this time from Diablo 3. I spent an unhealthy amount of time on the game over the last weekend, thus not getting useful things done, like working on my projects this blog is supposedly helping me follow through with, finishing my re-organization project, getting a haircut, doing laundry, or going grocery shopping. Was it worth it? The frustration and self-defeating said "No, and you're a loser for wasting all that time".

But I know I'm not a loser. It takes me a little bit of time to get over the initial depression that sets in, but then it turns into a priority defining moment for me. It was because of those thoughts and the realization that I can actually do something about those problems that in the time between writing the previous paragraph and this one, I went and got my hair cut and grocery shopping. It's amazing at how much better I felt after something as simple as getting my hair cut.

The same thing goes for work. Last week by Friday I was burned out. I was just wasting the University's money by sitting there while I did nothing but stare blankly at my screen. So I left early. Today I went to work and before I knew it, it was time to leave. In fact I stayed a little longer today because I needed to finish something before I left. Perhaps there's hope for me yet on accomplishing 40 hours per week.

Until next time:
Work hard. Play harder.

back to work

/TECH
Doppelgänger still doesn't have a power supply, but I've been waiting until I got back to work before I began spending money on the project. The PSU is just the beginning for the system. For the time being, I'm going to use my old AMD Athlon 64 x2 hardware. I've only got 2GB of DDR RAM for it currently, but I hope to replace all the core hardware before the end of the year. The hardware I'm looking at putting into the case is an AMD A-series CPU+GPU, an accompanying FM1 motherboard, and at least 16GB of DDR3 RAM. I'd prefer 32GB, but we'll see what I can afford throughout the year.

On that note, as of yesterday I'm once again employed and continuing work for Whitworth University. It's a great place. Of course I have some complaints about the work and the area, but those issues are far less significant than being able to say, "I'm employed, eating well, enjoying my evenings in the house I live in, and sleeping comfortably." But this is tech talk, so let me elaborate on the issues I'm currently dealing with at work.

As a brief intro, I work with Microsoft SharePoint creating custom forms with InfoPath. Our current project is migrating from SP 2007 to SP 2010, which is one of the issues I'll discuss. The other issue is providing support for existing forms with both InfoPath 2007 and 2010 installed on my workstation.

If you've ever had to upgrade even a personal computer, you know that migrating data from the old version to the new version doesn't always go smoothly. I love advertising that states it's simple and seamless. Bollocks. It's only simple if all the conditions are right and when is a server ever perfectly stable and up to date with the latest hotfixes? I've been developing custom forms for our SP2007 environment for the past two years and although I don't have to re-learn everything, I have to become acquainted with the quirks of each environment and the quirks that come with the conversion process. On top of this only some of our forms are actually being converted to 2010; some are remaining in the 2007 format but being published to the 2010 environment.

One of the InfoPath 2010 quirks is that you cannot specify a rule in a form that only stops the remaining rules from running. Every rule must have at least one action and stopping the remaining rules doesn't count. To mitigate this you simply have the rule edit a dummy field with nothing. Problem fixed, right? Well, the conversion quirk that comes with this is that when InfoPath 2010 imports the 2007 form it takes a look at the rules and any of those "stop" rules are removed. No warning. No making the rule invalid. Just remove the rule without notification. Microsoft, that was a stupid idea. This breaks a lot of the functionality in the forms I develop. I rely on that rule to stop the other rules from running and causing errors. And I don't even have to be converting. Even if I'm just publishing a 2007 form to the 2010 environment as is those "stop" rules disappear.

But we're going about this smart and we haven't pushed the 2010 environment into production yet. This means that we're running both 2007 and 2010 environments. As a result I have both 2007 and 2010 versions of InfoPath and SharePoint Designer on my workstation. However, because a key change to the contact selectors happened with InfoPath 2010 the two versions of InfoPath are incompatible. So when 2010 is the primary application I have to be cautious about editing 2007 forms with IP2007. The reason is that if there's a contact selector in the 2007 form I can't edit the control at all. So when I have to do maintenance on a 2007 form I have to repair the 2007 installation which takes time and requires the computer to be restarted. Then the next time I open 2010 it updates the computer again breaking contact selectors in 2007. It's a constant battle.

/EXISTENCE
Of course I talk about all this and remember that I have plenty of distractions awaiting me at home. These come in the form of a large Steam game library, a PS3, and my newest addiction: Minecraft. I'm a bit late to the Minecraft scene but Oh! how grateful I was late to the party. The game is so ridiculously addicting I'm sure I would have done much worse in classes had I purchased it earlier. In the course of 5 days I've probably sunk 50+ hours into it. I'm really happy I bought it during my vacation so that I could spend that initial period with it. And then there's my backlog of games I have yet to complete or even start! Hell, I even went as far as using a website to help me track that backlog, speaking of which I need to update.

Until next time:
Work hard. Play harder.