Demo and Stuff

Posted on by kylar

Last night we had a big demo where we showed the alpha of our product to our sales people and SEs. It went well. Today was kind of low key, we didn’t do much, talked about the things that we’ve been doing and what we’re going to do for the next couple weeks until we do our long term planning and start breaking things out. I also think there is going to be some re-arranging of people and groups at work, but no real information or evidence yet.

I was talking and thinking about how much things have changed in the last year. Last year I worked for Juniper, lived in a different house, did different things. This year I have a new house, work in Cupertino at Packeteer, and lots of other things have changed too.

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Bloggin N Workin, And wishing, and hoping

Posted on by kylar

I don’t blog too much about work, and that’s for a good reason. Work is just something I do, not what defines me, and I’m usually pretty uninterested about it. But this weekend I got called in and had to work on Saturday, which is something that I don’t like at all. However, the position that I’m in at work is such where I’m the one who is responsible for making sure my team plays nicely with others, and as such, I take the point where someone on our team needs to be there. Fortunately it doesn’t happen often.

Also, today is another ‘first day of the rest of my life’ and I’m officially well into being 30something.

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Stress

Posted on by kylar

Lots going on this week – stress levels are high. We have a big demo today to show all the progress we’ve made in the last 2 iterations, and it could be a real big boost for us, or a real issue. Cross those fingers, and say those prayers.

Remember the last time you lost 9 minutes?

Posted on by kylar

Man, there’s been a lot of stuff that I’ve been thinking “I need to blog that”. but of course I haven’t. So let’s do a bit of everything here.

Stuff that’s been happening:
I’ve been writing a new program for a friend of mine – it’s a Point of Sale program that runs cash registers. Really expandable, easy to use. The hard parts so far have been interfacing with a scanner (to read bar codes), and the register keyboard. Each key that gets pressed fires a unique keycode, so I had to track each key, get the modifiers and keycode and map them all into a big huge action map – for example, the grunt presses the ‘Visa/MC’ key – and the keystroke is ASCII 112, with ALT+SHIFT modifiers (that’s how the system interprets it, anyways. The old program is a 15 year old DOS program that requires a hardware dongle to run! Such Antiquity!

This weekend we went up to Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton. Wow. It’s really cool, and the moving floor and 36 inch telescope are amazing. It’s even more amazing when you realize that the whole thing is over 100 years old!

Hockey last night marked only the second time that I’ve ever intentionally hit someone. We played a team called Phase Matrix, and last season they won their division and moved up into ours. This season we’ve played them 4 times and every time we play them, they start out well, then after we get a couple goals up on them they start to play dirty. Their captain is the king of the dirty players. Last time we played them he crosschecked one of our guys from behind into the boards, just crushed him right in the back. So last night I was forechecking in behind their net to get the puck and he was almost to it, so I motioned toward the puck with my stick, then threw my hip into him instead. As he was going down, he grabbed my sweater and started pushing and pulling me, and as he pulled me down I popped him a couple.. Not my finest moment, but a well deserved minor penalty, and I wasn’t going to let him keep getting away with crap.

Last friday I had a brilliant idea too.. I’m writing a Swing application, and I wrote a lot of framework to do UI stuff so that we didn’t have to do a lot of monotonous things.. so we define how screens look in XML, and the framework will do all the creation and layout behind the scenes. I also introduced the concept of a semantic action. Java’s swing framework provides you with stuff to catch mouse clicks and the like, but as a programmer and user, you don’t care that you clicked the mouse, you really care that you’re trying to perform some action, like saving your work or creating a new action, so I wrote an abstraction layer that translates system actions into semantic actions. Anyways, to get to my idea.. I’ve been struggling with getting Swing’s DND framework into our application and to play nicely. the Java Drag & Drop framework deals a lot with data transfer, serialization, the flavour and type of data, and the like. So I’ve been trying to get it to deal with our data structures, which are a generic type of data wrapper, but I realized that I don’t need to do it at all, I can just have a drop action fire a semantic action event, and that action should deal with populating data.

And last before I leave: a playlist for monday morning!
Oops I Did It Again – Britney Spears
Just A Little Bit – Gina G
Roadside Attraction – Spirit Of The West
Dizz Knee Land – Dada
Crazy Train – Ozzy Osbourne
Southside – Moby
Sober (Live) – Tool
Planes And Satellites(Live) – Sonia Dada
Barbie Girl (Techno Remix) – Aqua
Mutha Don’t want to go to School Today – Extreme
Synaesthesia (Remix) – Ministry Of Sound

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South Saskatchewan

Posted on by kylar

Conversation today at work, going something like this:

(Me not listening, watching seinfeld on my computer.. then catching the end of a statement)

“…Like when Tom becomes president.”

(I stop, take my headphones off and start to speak.)

“When *I* become president, I’m going to make this whole place a canadian province… South Saskatchewan.. Or maybe I’ll break it up into a couple of provinces. All these states, this confusion is going to be gone. 5 Provinces… the NorthWest Territories, The SouthWest Territories, The NorthEast Territories, The SouthEast Territories… and the…. Umm.. Midwest Territories.”

“So would New Jersey be in the NorthEast Territories?”

“I could consider making all of NJ it’s own province, but it would be herefor known as ‘Stinktown’.”

“Why would Canada want all that land?”

“Well, we’d technically own it, but rent it out to people.. Like the SouthWest Territories would be on a long term lease to Mexico, so they wouldn’t have the border issues anymore.. and the NorthWest Territories could be loaned out to a long-term hippie contingent for a while. Canada has a lot of land it doesn’t need already.”

“Ahh, but what about Montreal?”

“They might have to be all relocated to Stinktown Province. Except maybe the Habs, although the ‘Seacaucus Canadiens’ is catchy.”

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