In case you’re like me and do all of your Google searches from the Chrome address/search bar, you may not have noticed that Google has put together a petition to protest SOPA and PIPA that you should sign.
The English Wikipedia has also been blacked out and has more information about them.
Earlier today I noticed that youtube was mysteriously no longer available to me. The first thing I checked was whether I could ping it…unknown host. I brought up nslookup and tried there and the primary server for Google DNS wasn’t responding to my query.
Now, in Windows and Mac, you can specify a secondary (or more on Mac) set of DNS servers…yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen them used. In this particular case, via the nslookup command I tried the secondary server and it worked…so what is the purpose of the secondary server if it isn’t used when the primary doesn’t respond?
I’m half-venting here…but I am curious if anyone knows why it isn’t used.
Sometime around New Year’s my grandma suffered a severe brain hemorrhage. No one is sure when it happened, she was found late Jan. 1st, but it had been a couple days before then since anyone had seen her….sadly I was going to visit her on the 29th or 30th but didn’t due to me being sick and not wanting to infect her.
Regardless, this unfortunately added to previous brain-damage from several previous strokes which triggered dementia. Leaving her in a coma, on a ventilator, and requiring a feeding tube.
But that isn’t exactly what this post is about…
You see, almost 10 years ago my grandpa had his leg amputated but never recovered from it. He went through a couple different nursing homes and many trips to the hospital. But was never there mentally. I think seeing this, caused my grandma to prepare instructions in her power of attorney papers should she become incapacitated.
Those instructions, commonly called a living will or advance health care directives, made the difficult choices ahead easier for our family. She did not want to have a feeding tube or be on a ventilator…nor did she wish to have heroics performed on her that would merely “prolong death.”
While these directions will not alleviate your family of all of the anguish of the decision, it will remove some of it and provide some comfort should you die while they follow your wishes.
Of course, all of this is with a sample size of 1 family so do what you feel is right for your family.
That said, I have some opinions on it….I think it is important to have the instructions in writing and have the instructions prepared with a knowledgeable lawyer. I believe my grandma’s was done at the same time that she revised her will, so the lawyer knew the types of questions to ask to cover many of the bases and not be vague.
In the case of instructions to your family for such severe cases, being vague would probably be worse than not having directions; the point of the directions is to make it easier for your family to follow your wishes and the side-effect is that it removes guilt…but if the directions are vague you are asking them to figure out your meaning and you could leave some lingering doubt that they did was what you wanted.
My grandma passed away on the 8th, a week after she was found on the floor….I am confident that we did what she wanted.
As some of you may know (or figured out by my last post) I work for a company that sells software, specifically developer components. Part of my job is keeping up with what people may be saying about our products. For this, I’ve created several Google Alerts to watch for our products.
Saturday I received an alert, where someone had posted DDR on a warez site. I was bored at the time so I decided to see how they got around our licensing…one of the first releases of DDR that I found on a warez site had a laughably stupid way of doing it.
Unfortunately, I was disappointed…the warez copy merely distributed the serial number and other pertinent details for licensing. But, I did get to revoke a real license for the first time.
I was hoping to post about this last week, but a regression was found in the designer when working with charts and master reports so the release has been delayed.
This release will include several new features and a high anticipated designer performance boost.
There are, of course, also a large number of bug fixes included in the new release.
The regression in the designer has been fixed, and I’m just waiting on QA to verify the fix. Due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, it probably won’t be published until next week.
Long, long ago I started work on an iOS game I called Windy Garden. The purpose of the app was to familiarize myself with Objective-C and Cocos2D. For one reason or another I got away from working on it, and it sat languishing on my MacBook Pro.
Earlier this year I decided to get back into it. Partly because I had a new MacBook Air to work on and partly because I’d been itching to write code again. Due to the age of the old code, it was nearly impossible to just work with it as Cocos2D had gone through some significant changes as well as the changes to iOS and Xcode.
The rewrite was quick to do, and I got much more done than before. Its still not done, there are a few things I want to implement yet however I could release what I have now if I wanted to (and if I signed up for the developer program again).
What’s new this time is that I’ve introduced audio! I created my own tone sound effects for the seed “explosions” and found some royalty-free music by Kevin MacLeod to use in the background.
I hope I’ll finish it soon, it’d be nice to finally get it pushed out; even if I’m the only person that plays it. Only two major items remain to implement and that is high scores and achievements.
Its that time again, I let my blog languish for months on end and return with a post that promises I’ll be more active.
That sounds all great in theory, but I know I’ll wind up in the same rut I’ve been in for months now…stuff I want to talk about but can’t or just can’t find the words for. Some of that is because I’ve been meaning to post work related things and just haven’t finished them so I feel guilty if I post about other things.
I am going to try to change this.
I’m not going to let that guilt stop me from posting. I’m also going to try to post more frequently, at least once a week. Who knows maybe I can even swing this into writing more articles or video scripts for work (okay, so the scripts are already in progress).
I won’t cheat and call this my post for the week….I hope; that would be a short lived revival if I did.
Earlier today I pushed out the next maintenance release for Data Dynamics Reports, v1.6.2084.14. This new release adds almost a dozen new features and many bug fixes.
This release has been the culmination of several months of work and collaboration between the development team in the PowerTools division of GrapeCity and the Global Services division. Thanks to the work of the people on both teams this release fixes many issues with the web viewer and improves the expected behavior of it as well.
Included in this release is a change in our caching behavior.
When we first created DDR we thought we would be doing our users a favor by caching reports in the web viewer so that multiple requests for the same report would be faster and we were in a position to do the right thing. Fast forward 3 years, several forum posts, and many users later and it seems like the “right thing” is not always the right thing to do.
When developers and users are expecting the caching things are fine; however this isn’t always the case. Some developers were expecting that when they tell the viewer to load a report (via the ReportName property or the SetReport method) that we would re-load the data associated with it as well. End users were expecting that when they click the “View Report” button that we would re-run the report.
Both are reasonable assumptions that conflict with the idea of caching, we could add overloads that would do this for the developer; however users wouldn’t have a good way of accomplishing this. And what then would happen for users who are looking at a cached version and a different user wanted the report refreshed? All of these questions lead to one conclusion; that removing caching would lead to behavior that all users can expect.
So, in this release we have removed caching; that is good news for anyone that was frustrated by the behavior in the past. If you were affected by it, I recommend trying out the web viewer control again.
In the next release we will be providing a new feature that allows the developer to save a report that has been run to a file (or other stream) and load it back at a later time into a viewer control.
I’ve been busy, so it took me a few days to write up the last post while I continued my adventures in India. My days have been filled with meetings and my nights with exploring various places in Delhi, primarily to eat dinner.
Speaking of food….wow, I love the food over here, provided it’s not too spicy of course. J Of all my meals here, there was only one dish I didn’t really care for. Unfortunately, except for a couple items I have no idea what it was I was eating most of the time. A few items I did note: Butter Naan, a type of flat bread is awesome and went well with everything I ate. Chicken Malai Tikka, pieces of chicken are cooked with very mild seasoning that imparted great flavor. Butter Chicken, pieces of chicken served in a rich gravy that goes great with the Butter Nan. There were a few other dishes like the Butter Chicken that I liked but I never caught the names of them, they were slightly spicier than the Butter Chicken as well.
Probably the hardest part about eating the food here for me is that it’s almost all eaten with your hands, which doesn’t combine very well with my almost OCD-like tendencies to keep my hands clean. Despite that, I enjoyed all of the meals even if I did destroy a few napkins in the process.
My first full day here I was exhausted, though I made it through the whole day there were certainly times where I didn’t think that I would. Lunch was a simple affair, Papa John’s pizza to ease me into the cuisine. For dinner we went to Pind Balluchi in the local mall. Being Valentine’s day, the regular menu was replaced with a special one advertising the day with several special drinks, such as the “Hold Me” mock tail. I forget the name of the drink I had but it was also Valentine’s day themed and contained a mixture of fruit juices mixed with soda.
Shortly after I returned to the room that night I fell asleep and just happened to wake up in time to realize I forgot to reset my alarm for the earlier start.
Tuesday was filled with several more meetings and the night was spent at an open-air marketplace. I picked up a couple Pashmina scarves for a total of Rs 1,000 (~$25), thanks to some haggling from some of my coworkers. Unfortunately, it was starting to get dark by the time I got there so I only took one picture, of some statues that sat over the entrance to the market. After the market we went to eat at a restaurant in a large market place the British had built into a series of sweeping arcs.
Wednesday wrapped up my meetings and I went to dinner with several of the folks from the office at a rather nice hotel restaurant. I took a break from the Indian fare and had an old-fashioned steak, with mashed potatoes, and grilled vegetables.
Overall, I have to say that I really liked the food in India. Thought I don’t think I’d be even close to being able to handle the full level of spices used in most of the food.
The flight into New Delhi was rather uneventful, though to be honest if it was I probably wouldn’t remember it anyway; I was far too tired and only managed about 30 minutes of sleep on the plane. Going from Dubai to Delhi was jarring, flying out again the striking thing about the city lights were the uniform and organized arrangement of them. Two and a half hours later I could begin to see the lights of Delhi and after coming from Dubai it was a confusing mess, and that impression didn’t change after I landed.
The chaos started before I left the plane, on a typical US flight everyone just kind of waits for their turn to get into the aisle and exit the plane. Not so on the Delhi flight, before we finished taxiing to the gate people were starting to get up and grab their bags so they could wait for the doors to open. And if you don’t fight your way into an aisle, you’ll be waiting for the rest of the folks to deplane before exiting yourself. So I did what none of you would probably think I’d ever do….I forced myself into the line.
After exiting the aircraft the chaos continued, I followed the huge crowd through the airport and wound up at the arrivals counter where I needed to present my previously filled out passenger arrival form. Passengers queued up at each of the 40+ or so desks to enter the country and it was interesting to see that if someone was just slightly out of line, other people would take that as an opportunity to start a new line, bypassing the folks behind them.
After going through the line my next task was to collect my checked bag, after taking nearly an hour to go through immigration, I still had to wait another 30-45 minutes for my bag to show up on the belt. Once that was done, all that remained was to exchange some currency and to find my driver to take me to the hotel.
Despite it being about 4:30am, there was an incredible number of drivers waiting to pick up people from the airport. It took me several minutes, but I finally found the driver bearing the GrapeCity sign and was on my last leg of my journey to getting some sleep! Of course, first I had to get there. This was no small feat; traffic was light however that didn’t stop me from seeing the insanity of driving in Delhi! People, bikes, auto rickshaws, cars, trucks, and buses were all present on the highway from the airport to the hotel…despite driving on what was obviously a one-way road there were several vehicles driving towards us!
I think I was lucky that I was so tired because it didn’t really faze me too much, only after a day of rest did it hit me how crazy that trip was. After arriving at the hotel it was finally time to get some sleep! At this point, except for the 30 minutes of sleep I got on the last flight, I had been awake since 8am EST Saturday and I was finally getting to sleep at 7pm EST on Sunday…unfortunately, the driver was going to be at the hotel to pick me up in only 4 and a half hours.
