Author: Andrew Huey

more on BlackBerry syncing

After some finagling today, I figured out that I could keep using Missing Sync for my calendars if I just created a single dummy calendar on my Mac in iCal. It syncs my “real” calendars as read-only now, but I’m OK with that.

I’m still not sure what I’m going to do for my next phone, but if I was interested in Android, I’d be looking at the Droid Pro or maybe the Samsung Continuum.

syncing BlackBerry and Mac

I’ve been using Missing Sync with my BlackBerry Storm, just to sync my contacts and calendar from my Mac. I’ve had problems with it, on and off, but it’s mostly worked OK. Since I’ve switched to the new MobileMe Calendar though, the calendar sync doesn’t work anymore. Mark/Space has a KB entry acknowledging this, but there’s no indication that they’re planning to fix the problem.

I’m eligible for a “new every two” discount from Verizon soon, and I’m wondering if I should stick with BlackBerry. If Verizon really does get the iPhone, that would really simplify the sync situation for me. On the other hand, if I switch to an Android device, that’ll make it more complicated. I’ve been playing around with options for syncing iCal and Address Book on the Mac with Google contacts and calendars. It turns out to be really easy to sync the address book with Google — the option is right there in the preference screen. There’s no such option in iCal, but it seems like I ought to be able to subscribe to a MobileMe calendar in Google calendar, though I apparently would have to make the calendar public to do that.

I’m wondering if Spanning Sync would be worth looking into. It’s kind of expensive for what it does though. And I occasionally think I should switch over to using the calendar that comes with my Backpack account. I could use that as the source, and subscribe to it in iCal and Google.

Meanwhile, I’ve ordered my usual Moleskine calendar for 2011.

Doctor Strange

I just finished reading Doctor Strange: The Oath, by Brian K. Vaughn and Marcos Martin. I stopped buying comics about a year ago, but I still have a big pile of unread books. This mini-series was published back in 2006, so that’s how far behind I am. This is a good standalone story. It’s respectful to the characters involved, which I appreciate. The art is quite good too — a little reminiscent of Ditko, and maybe even a bit of Kirby in places. Nice and clean, and not flashy, except when it needs to be.

There’s an article on CBR where Vaughn discusses his approach to Strange and his goals for the series. If you think you might be interested in picking this up as a trade, go read it. It’ll give you a good idea of whether or not this series would be your cup of tea.

weird Blogger stuff

I just updated tags on a bunch of old posts. I do that once in a while, since Blogger makes it easy to do. If I realize that all the posts mentioning “Windows” should be tagged “Windows”, it’s easy to do a search, select all, then apply the tag.

The weird side-effect of that is that if you look at this feed, a bunch of old posts are bubbling to the top now. That’s OK though. I don’t think anybody looks at that feed.

found it

Following up on my post from a couple of days back, I found my invalid nulls today. There were null values where there shouldn’t have been on 20 records in a table of 100,000+. I fixed them. Tomorrow, I hope to zero in on whatever program bug is causing them to get in there in the first place.
A couple of quick observations:
First, SQL Profiler is my friend. There wasn’t really any way I could trace what the VB6 program was doing, and it wasn’t putting out enough error info for me to figure it out, but by following a SQL trace, I eventually isolated the problem records.
Second, I discovered Query ExPlus today, which turns out to be a pretty good tool if you need quick access to a SQL query tool on a machine where you can’t actually install the full SQL Management Studio.

how not to do error-handling

Currently working on a bug in an old VB6 system. The only thing we see in the logs is “Invalid use of Null”, which I know if the standard VB6 error you get when you try to access a value without checking to see if it’s null first. Since the system itself hasn’t changed in years, I know that, somewhere, in some table, there’s a null value where there shouldn’t be a null value. But, because the system doesn’t pass through the line # of the error, I can’t see which field it might be looking at. And, because it doesn’t pinpoint which record had the error, I can’t really tell which record it was processing when the error occurred. So, it could be any of about 100 different fields on any of about 100,000 different records. I’ve made an educated guess that it’s probably one of only a few different fields, and I think I’ve narrowed down the possible problem records too, but still, could I please ask anyone out there who may be writing non-trivial systems that may be in use long after they’ve left their company: If you’re going to “handle” exceptions, please do more than just eat them and report the error message! Please, for the love of god, at least report the line #. And, if you’re processing a large data set, give some indication of which record you were processing. Thank you.

Mom’s Birthday


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Originally uploaded by andyhuey

Today would have been my Mom’s birthday. So here’s a nice picture of her and a baby. I have to admit I’m not sure whose baby it is.

I see my talking Pee-Wee Herman doll in the background, so this would have been from Christmas 1987, plus or minus a year.