Andrew Huey | pointlessly blogging since 2001
I went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art today for, I think, the first time. I don’t get into Philly nearly as often as I go into New York, largely because it’s a lot harder to do by public transportation.
The Impressionism exhibit that they’re running now is really nice. I’d like to go back and see it again, on a weekday maybe, when it’s less crowded.
Philadelphia Museum of Art pic.twitter.com/H252HKKlTZ
— Andrew Huey (@andyhuey) August 16, 2015
My VS 2013 update did finish installing, eventually, and now VS seems to be working fine. No clue what went wrong there. (Or maybe that’s just how long this update takes to install? No, that can’t be right…)
And I just bought Start10 from Stardock ($4 to upgrade from Start8) and installed it. The Windows 10 start menu isn’t horrible, but Start10 is better. The install was quick and easy.
Meanwhile, I decided to try playing solitaire. Well, that was a bad idea. When I started up “Microsoft Solitaire Collection” it gave me an error code while trying to sign in, and an URL to the FAQ. The URL wasn’t clickable and couldn’t be copied to the clipboard, so I had to type it in manually. Then, the URL turned out to be a redirect to a Facebook page, which is kind of weird, but ok, I guess. The FAQ says that the error code I got likely indicates that XBox Live is down. Checking on that, I see that it is, and least partially.
So here’s my full list of WTFs involved in trying to play Solitaire on Windows 10:
Well, it’s possible to play solitaire, even without XBox Live. but I didn’t really want to play solitaire anyway, I just wanted to see what it looked like. So, mission accomplished, I guess, and I got some entertainment value out of the error message, so there’s that.
After upgrading my laptop to Windows 10, I thought about maybe taking a shot at installing Visual Studio 2015. I may do that eventually, but I don’t have any reason to do it right away. But last night, I decided to at least apply the latest update to VS 2013, which is update 5. I’ve had some bad luck with Visual Studio updates in the past (going back to VS 2005 and 2008), but recent updates have been pretty smooth. Well, I don’t know what went wrong with this one, but I started installing it last night, and it’s still going this morning. It seemed to hang at about the halfway point. Rather than cancel it, I decided to just let it keep running overnight.
When I woke up this morning, it had made a lot of progress. Right now, it’s at the step that says “Configuring your system. This might take a while.” So it’s pretty close to the end, I think. I guess I’ll let it keep going while I’m at work, then see if it’s done when I get home. So this could well be a full 24-hour update install. I understand that updating a complex product like Visual Studio isn’t easy, but really, there has to be a better way to do it.
I upgraded my ThinkPad to Windows 10 yesterday. It was a pretty uneventful upgrade. All of my software seems to work, including some stuff that I thought might be dicey, like Norton, VirtualBox, and OpenVPN. (Well, technically, I installed an upgrade to VirtualBox right after the Windows 10 upgrade, so I’m sure that fixed up the network stuff and whatnot.)
The new start menu is OK, I guess, but I’m not super excited about it. I was using Start8 with Windows 8, and I’ll probably install Start10 at some point.
I haven’t had a reason to play around at the command-line much yet, but I’m happy to see that they’ve made some (much overdue) improvements to it.
The ThinkPad upgrade was smooth enough that I now feel like it would be relatively safe to try the upgrade on my main desktop PC. I may do that next weekend, if I’ve got nothing else to do.
Today is my Dad’s birthday, and also our friend Gloria’s birthday — her 80th. She had a little party yesterday, and I got a good photo of the two of us. She was a good friend to my parents, and she’s been a good friend to me since they passed away.
I don’t often post pictures of myself on the blog, but this one is okay.
I haven’t upgraded either of my Windows 8.1 machines to Windows 10 yet. Neither machine has popped up a notification saying that it’s ready yet. Per Microsoft’s FAQ, “Your notification to upgrade could come as soon as a few days or weeks.” I know I can just download an ISO, and I might do that if I get too bored this weekend. But I’m not in a hurry. I’m probably going to use Start10 rather than the fancy new start menu anyway, so Windows 10 will look much like Windows 8 (with Start8) and Windows 7 for me.
I’m thinking about watching a few Scott Hanselman videos today to learn a bit more about Windows 10. And I should probably run backups on both machines too.
I’m doing some work on credit card processing right now. This is all related to my company’s upgrade from Dynamics AX 2012 RTM to 2012 R3. There were major changes to the credit card processing code in R2, and we’ve customized the code from RTM quite a bit, so there’s a lot to do. I’d like to write more about it, but it probably wouldn’t be of any general interest, plus I don’t want to get into any company-specific stuff.
But one very minor thing came up yesterday that was a little bit interesting. I noticed a support ticket from a user who was entering a new card, and wanted to enter an expiration date that wasn’t shown in the drop-down. (It was too far in the future.) This didn’t have anything to do with the upgrade, per se, but it made me curious enough to look at the code in RTM and in R3, to see what was being done. I was curious if maybe we had something in there like this example from The Daily WTF, or something where the upper-limit on the year was hard-coded to a specific year.
Well, it’s not quite that bad, but it is a bit questionable. In RTM, there’s a drop-down that is populated with years from (current year) to (current year + 7). In R3, it’s pretty similar, except that, when editing the expiration date after initial entry, you can go to current year + 8. (That’s probably an off-by-one error, rather than an intentional extension of the range.)
This all made me wonder what a reasonable upper-bound for expiration year would be, which lead me to this Stack Overflow question, which seems to indicate that there’s no agreed-upon maximum, but that it’s probably safe to go with 15-20 years. So Dynamics AX could stand to be be a bit more flexible on that range.
The other thing that bothers me about the way AX handles expiration dates is that (in 2012 RTM) they’re stored in the database as “MMYY”, which makes it difficult to sort and filter out expired cards. I was hoping that would be corrected in R3, but they’ve only changed it to “MM/YYYY” (without any leading zeroes on the month), which has the advantage of being more easily-readable by a human, and also of storing the full 4-digit year, but the disadvantage of being even more difficult to sort on, since the year sometimes starts in the 3rd position and sometimes in the 4th.
And let me end this blog post with a link to my very favorite publicly-documented method in AX, related to credit card processing: CreditCardWizard.codeCoverageFudge. I’m not entirely sure why this method exists in the released product, but I’m guessing it was added to fudge the code coverage numbers in some unit testing metrics. Maybe a certain percentage of code coverage had to be achieved, but there was no easy way to write meaningful tests for the remaining uncovered code, so they just wrote a method that does nothing, and a unit test for it?
Here are some photos from my trip to the Delaware Water Gap yesterday.
(I think I have figured out how to embed a whole Flickr album in a post without too much grief, so I may do this more often now.)
With my inexplicable renewed interest in anime and manga, I’ve been doing some digging on the internet, and finding that some of the most popular web sites, periodicals, and anime/manga companies from back when I was really into this stuff have disappeared. I’d already heard about most of this, in passing, but hadn’t ever sat down and realized how much had changed over the last 5 or so years.
Tokyopop (mostly) shut down in 2011, and has been going through a bunch of drama since then.
ADV shut down in 2009, apparently, but might be coming back?
One of my old favorite web sites for anime reviews, AnimeOnDVD.com, was sold off in 2008, but the founder went to the new company. Then, the founder left that company in 2011, and started a new site. (And the new site looks pretty good!)
AnimeNewsNetwork.com is still around and mostly unchanged, though. (Obviously they had a redesign at some point, but not a drastic and/or horrible one.)
Newtype USA went away in 2008, to be replaced by something else that didn’t last long. Now, it appears that Otaku USA is the only US-based anime magazine left standing. (Which, I guess, isn’t surprising, since the magazine industry as a whole isn’t exactly thriving.)
Crunchyroll seems to be doing well, and has developed into a pretty impressive “Netflix for anime” site. I’m tempted to sign up for it, but there’s plenty of anime on the real Netflix that I haven’t watched yet.
I’m currently working my way through Big O season two, by the way, having watched the first season last year. I acquired the DVD set for this via eBay, and it may not be quite, shall we say, kosher. But it doesn’t appear that anyone is currently selling an official US version of Big O, so eBay was the best I could do.
The Amiga 30th Anniversary Event at the Computer History
Museum in Mountain View this weekend looks like it should be really fun. Too bad I’m in NJ and not CA.
I get nostalgic about the Amiga once in a while. I keep thinking I should try the emulator from Amiga Forever, but I never get around to it. (There’s enough current technology that I don’t have time for; not much point in messing around with a 30-year-old dead OS. Heck, I’ve done almost nothing with the Windows 10 preview that’s installed on my laptop, and working with that would actually be useful.)
The Amiga 500 was my third computer. (The first was a TRS-80, and the second was a Commodore 64.) I bought it when I was in college. It was the first computer I owned that had a real OS, and multi-tasking, and all that good stuff. I could actually use it for some of my programming assignments! (Prior to that, they were all done on the school mainframe, or on shared Unix machines.) I remember that picking up a copy of the Lattice C compiler was a big deal for me. It wasn’t hugely expensive, but it was a significant purchase for a college student.
I wonder if I have printouts of any of my old programs around here somewhere. If so, it’s probably best to leave them buried. I’m sure the memories are better than the actual code!