Well, it seems that mail in America towards Germany goes quite slow. For some strange reason, U3 Tibia has caught an eye now while the mail about the matter went out way way back.

I’ve run in to a bit of a problem in that stuff, being the updates. It turns out that the way that U3 works, messes up the update process. Files located in the U3P file will be largely sent to a user’s application data.

The exec folder located in the U3P file is extracted as soon as it’s being run and sent to application data of the user currently running. When the Tibia client is closed, the files stay in the application data as a cache so it doesn’t have to be extracted again if the user tries running it again.

However, as soon as someone disconnects the U3 drive, the exec folder is removed from the application data, which means the program on the U3 drive won’t be updated. Although I guess that this problem can be solved by not packaging the program in to an U3P package, but placing it in the exec folder instead and running it from there (no idea how to do that), it might add an extra strain on the U3 disk.

Well, seems there’s a fun thought there for the guys and girls at CIP.

Posted by Subaru-sama as Tibia at 10:33 PM CEST

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It’s fun, hearing the above phrase more often than once in a day. If someone asks me to bake the potatoes, I end up baking them. If they want them cooked, they should’ve asked me to cook them and not bake them. If you want me to do what you want instead of what you asked, at least ask me what the heck you want instead of being ambiguous.

If you ask me to bake the meat, fine. If you ask a second later whether I’d be so kind to bake the potatoes, but while I’m at it, make some salad too…Stop being so lengthy about it and just ask me to make dinner and make sure the damn tomatoes don’t have an expiry date of 2 weeks ago. And absolutely don’t ask me to cook if you didn’t get anything at all, because I can’t cook without ingredients either.

If someone asks me to give an estimate how long something will take to code. I assume that I have to count in FTE’s. So I throw 1 week. That some people think in their own kind of FTE (being actually 0.25 to 0.3 FTE), makes it sound a bit short indeed. If managers want to use FTE so badly, at least make sure you get the idea of how to use it.

0 FTE FTW IMHO. FIN/ACK

Posted by Taennyn as Real Life at 8:41 PM CEST

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I’m going to make a summary of my findings about AdGen.

• I think the programmers could’ve taken that extra inch to make the scrollwheel work in the diagram mode.
• I think that the algorithm should consider the chance that someone turns entities in a group the wrong way around.
• I think that it shouldn’t be such a bother making a standalone action block (and actually finding it back).
• If you’re going to allow a user to choose for themselves what part of the solution they’re going to view in the diagram, at least make sure that the treeview doesn’t like like a Picasso as well.
• If an actionblock name is being changed, why the hell does it remember the original name? It might cause trouble if actually naming a different action block that way and it can’t be used because somewhere there’s still an actionblock that doesn’t exist anymore, that does have the name.
• If you allow website code to be generated in the first place, at least make sure that the developer can make it look better than some weird ripoff of some backwards Publisher site. (Putting text is a hassle, which is just not right. Never mind actually designing stuff!)
• Don’t allow new tabs to be opened constantly. Just like with Wikipedia, people end up WILF-ing like crazy.

Sorry, but GEN is absolutely way too abstract and too wild-ass-guess WILF threat that I don’t see myself seriously coding that way.

Posted by Taennyn as Real Life at 10:00 PM CEST

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Scaring people by doing things that are straight out-of-character is keyword today it seems. I’m a downright bizarre person who is honest to the bone when it comes to an opinion. Politically correct statements are something that falls completely out of it.

And when the moment comes that things actually matter, the impact is so great when I make the politically correct statement that people wonder who the hell I am and where I left Taennyn.

I’m talking about my opinion about AdGen, where I can say that I hate the package as a whole. But when I was asked what my thought is about AdGen as a development tool an a professional level, I can only say that although I do see potential in the package (even though it needs fixing on quite a few features that aren’t alright), it’s not for me considering the fact that the development style is completely different from what I’m used to.

And we’re back to where I’m still doing my damndest best to understand this silly package. But at least I have found one thing that is still the same: Compiling. I keep getting asked why I am loafing around again and can only use the number 1 excuse for legitimately loafing off.

And that about sums today up. I’m still not comfortable with the system, the scrollwheel bug bums me out badly and it’s annoying me that it takes a different approach to get a hold of orphaned dialog boxes. And that’s just the package, not the coding itself yet.

Posted by Taennyn as Real Life at 10:00 PM CEST

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The longer I go about the GEN training, the more I’m starting to doubt the people who built AdGen. I’m seriously bothered by the inconsistency when developing.

The copy functionality (as well as the XCopy functionality) has a complete mind of its own. Considering the intent that things should be reused wherever possible by means of copying (although I see more use in a DbC approach), this is troublesome.

I really wonder that if the intent of AdGen is to make it easy to generate pieces of junk code, why make some of the most basal things like an entity group so flaky?

I’m glad that I’m halfway with this training. I’m getting the hang of this torture device programming tool, but I don’t like the system. Unless it gets a major overhaul to be more handle friendly (I find MSDOS editor or nano quite easy to work in. Perhaps even VIM), it’s really an acquired taste.

Posted by Taennyn as Real Life at 8:04 PM CEST

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Well, it seems that even with pure logic on your side, knowledge of several different programming languages and loads of coffee, I just can’t keep my calm with this stuff.

Let me be honest, I love autosave functions. It saves my work so that if the program crashes (which is very likely with AdGen), I don’t lose an hour of work. But for pete sake, why can’t it do it silently? It shouldn’t be too hard to keep a seperate autosave that is made towards last code generation/packaging so it doesn’t have to ask. It is absolutely annoying that I’m developing something and I keep getting some window in front of me every 10 minutes whether I want to save. What else did I turn the option on for?!?

I’m getting all the more annoyed about how some of the common things are shoved far away instead of right with the rest of the similar stuff. Action for a menu item, action for a button, action for a window. Seriously, is that too much to ask for?

And even more important…what happened with consistency? One moment I can make a server, the next I can’t. Dialog windows disappear at the blink of an eye or not appearing at all.

Having spent 6 hours on it once again, I can honestly say that I’m trying to finish the training, but this is absolutely going to be a one-time thing for these guys. GEN is definitely NOT my cup of tea (not coffee either).

Posted by Taennyn as Real Life at 10:41 PM CEST

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AdGen training, day 1. I must say that after I looked at the first information made it seem like it was going to be yet another RDB programming tool and wouldn’t be hard to understand. Unfortunately, it has turned out differently.

From what I’ve understood from the training itself so far, it is quite a troublesome tool. Apart from that I think it’s a horrible idea to put username and password for a database straight in to the environment variables of windows and that the memory leaks have caused me to lose an hour of developing, I really can’t get my head around the tool.

Mind you, the logic of the code itself is fair enough. However, the way you have to walk to get to the desired end station is completely bogus. Something as basic as a label on the main window is a struggle, never mind raw pieces of code. Its interface seems to have a mind of its own, allowing or denying access to some parts of the model based on some weird quirks.

I have spent 6 hours trying to figure out how this piece of junk works and am honestly wondering who in their right mind wants to work with this stuff. (don’t you dare say "Well, you of course!". I even find JBuilder 3 more interesting to code in)

Posted by Taennyn as Real Life at 10:00 PM CEST

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And I would walk 6.21371192 miles and I would walk 6.21371192 more. To be the man who walked 12.42742384 miles to drop the food right on the floor.

I might not be the best musician, but the Duinenmars was fun. Thankfully the weather prediction changed from snow and hail (prediction 2 days ago) to clouded, but dry weather. So instead of 15 kilometers, we walked 10 to spare my hun’s knees and not tempt fate. But at least I got a shiny medal this year. (I didn’t walk for the medal last year)

Gideon and the chi’s had fun too, even though we wouldn’t even let them harass the Labrador. Oh well.

Posted by Taennyn as Real Life at 10:31 PM CEST

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Alright, when I pull an April fools joke, it’s often around midnight so that people don’t have their guards up yet. If I phone you that your site got hacked at 00:12, that’d be my worst joke yet. If the site starts showing purple with green text…that’d be me wanting to annoy your eyes as soon as you wake up and check your site. In short, I had a lot of fun.

And although people tried to punk me as well (double reservation for conference room, downing a database), none of it has caught me off-guard.

Apart from the railway not riding because of cables being broken, adding 30 minutes to my travel time and making me miss the debate with Wilders.

Now, the “movie” (PowerPoint Presentation with wrong filetype is more the term) has gotten a debate. I wanted to see the debate because I feel a bit sadistic and the people there will throw around trash over nothing. Nothing whatsoever. Perhaps I’m down to earth on things, but people there should smell the coffee and wake the hell up and do serious stuff instead of whining over a half baked presentation. But it’s fun anyway.

Posted by Taennyn as Real Life at 12:19 AM CEST

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