At work I am one of the ~4 code reviewers on the team.  In this position, I come across code that makes me scratch my head from time to time.  For one reason or another a developer chooses interesting logic (I've done it plenty of times too, I still do; nobody's perfect.)

Today, I came across this in a custom UserControl:

public override Visible {
   get { return base.Visible; }
   set { base.Visible = value; }
}

This is such an illustration of a fundamental lack of understanding that it's almost elegant.  In this case, it was probably due to a very tight schedule and happened to get overlooked.

If you can't spot the WTF, and you're a developer, you should get yourself one of those "Learn to Program in 21 Days" books.  You'll also want to consider crying yourself to sleep.

If you use remote desktop / terminal services, you're hopefully aware that you can share your clipboard between the local and remote hosts. Sometimes, however, it will just stop working (yay!)  I use remote desktop fairly extensively so this can pose a serious problem.  I've found that if you kill the rdpclip.exe process and rerun it (Start->Run->rdpclip.exe should do it) it will start working again.

I've had lots of success with that trick and not many people know about it;  I guess there aren't too many heavy remote desktop users out there.

On a related note, my machine completely lost all clipboard functionality today.  It was awesomely frustrating.  I especially like when I was able to cut and copy but still not paste.  That was soooo awesome.

Surprisingly, I am using XP and not Vista, so it's a bit mysterious.  It actually took a reboot to fix it.  WTF?

(as for the title of the post, please see http://icanhascheezburger.com/)

I've been working with Windows Workflow Foundation recently and came across a weird exception that was reported by one of my colleagues.  It turns out that if create a Delay Activity with a timeout value that exceeds 2^32-2 milliseconds, you will generate an exception.  This ends up being about 46 days (49.7 exactly, I believe.)

When the issue was reported, I couldn't reproduce it with my test harness.  So I set out to search the Internet for more information.  Unfortunately, it seems that Windows Workflow Foundation is not widely used (yet?) making the task a bit more difficult.  With a few choice Google queries, I was eventually able to come across the issue as reported to Microsoft here.

There's apparently a bug in the Thread Timer that results in this limitation.  The exception is:

System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Time-out interval must be less than 2^32-2.

Once I confirmed that this was actually an issue, I set out to, again, search the internet for a fix.  I came across a few articles that mention that the issue was repaired in the .Net 3.5 Fx, but I couldn't tell a client, who's in production, to update their entire framework.

I decided to setup a sandbox and try to reproduce the issue in my local environment and was still unable.  The good news is that I was running 3.0, so something in my environment had fixed the issue.  After an hour or so, I realized that I was assuming the the issue was reported from an environment with the latest service packs (silly me.)  Once I removed that assumuption, along with 3.0 SP1 from my environment, I could reproduce the issue.

Once I was able to reproduce the issue, then reinstall SP1 to see the issue was fixed, I could confidently report that this issue was fixed in .Net 3.0 SP1 and the client needn't upgrade to 3.5; they just needed to install the service pack.

I decided to write this up in case anyone else came across the issue.  When you're dealing with an expensive, deployed product, you have to be able to justify any changes to the software stack.  And, since Microsoft does have any change log or fix history for their service pack (beyond a simple "hey we fixed some issues with Workflow), I thought it'd be helpful to someone else in a locked down environment to have third-party confirmation that SP1 is all that's needed.

Also, I find it interesting that Microsoft's Workflow team didn't set any delay activities with large timeouts prior to releasing the framework.  Never assume anything..

I consider myself a reasonable person.  I have, through my travels, learned many lessons about the wondrous variety that is humankind.  These lessons have shown that it's best to set one's expectations extremely low and hope that one may be surprised more often than disappointed.

That being said, there seems to be a growing trend of incompetence sweeping through society.  It's becoming commonplace for products, services, and anything else you can think of, to operate substantially under what a sane person would consider adequate.

For instance, my wife and myself recently decided to switch from Comcast to DirecTV for our TV service.  We had the DVR service from Comcast then, due to highly unsatisfactory performance, we decide to give satellite a try.

Things went well for about a month, then, suddenly and randomly, shows that were set to record would no longer record.  They would appear to record, but that was just to toy with us.  There'd be a "hey I'm recording now, guy" icon in the guide and a happy little orange light on the outside.  But, alas, nothing.  Fooled!  In general, the whole DVR is a piece of crap; the interface and general usage is horrendous.  It's impressive how poorly it does the one, and only, thing that it's supposed to do.

There's more to that story, and perhaps I'll share it in another post.  It basically involves the DTV tech support telling us we can't turn our TV on while something is recording.  I'm guessing the invisible television gnomes anger the DVR.

So, there we have two cases where the sole reason for something being in place was to serve a particular purpose and it couldn't even do that.  First, the DVR itself, then the crap-sucking tech support.

Another example of the growing inadequacy keeps popping up that the local fast food chains.  Somehow it's become impossible for the employees of these fine establishments to read a screen and put stuff in a bag.  I mean, come on, that's all you have to do!  You look at a list, pick up a clearly labeled foodstuff, and stick it in a bag. I guess I ultimately shouldn't expect much from people making minimum wage who are being crap danced^* on by some guy/girl manager who think they play an important role in society.

I think it's fair, however, to expect more out of my fellow programmers.  I expect that if you are a web developer that you should understand the lifecycle of an HTTP request.  That seems like a minimum.  But, alas, everyday, I am surprised by the lack of fundamental knowledge in so-called web developers.  And that, unfortunately, is just the tip of the iceberg.  I'm sure there will be more posts on this subject as well.

I could go on, and I'm sure I will, because this is really ridiculous.  We, as a society, need to hold ourselves to a higher standards.  We should always strive to be better and fight complacency.

I'll leave you with this: the more you think you know, the less you actually do.  People who are convinced they know everything, never learn anything.  A penny saved is a penny earned.  Blood is thicker than water.  Don't judge a book by its cover.  Never place valuables inside livestock.  Avoid eating those little packets that come in shoe boxes that say "do not eat."  Never make eye contact with a baboon.  And, finally, what ever you put in, always consider that a doctor may have to take out.. because of the vacuum that's created when you put it in.. and he'll laugh and tell all of the nurses what you've done and you'll cry a little but then you'll think to yourself, "it was worth it" after you apologize to everyone at your kid's first birthday.

*Yes, I believe I invented the phrase "crap danced" or at least its use in that manner.

Ahh.. the bane of my existence, DasBlog.  The theme that I am using right now was completely broken in IE7. There was a simple CSS tweak to make it actually render correctly.  So, anyone using Project84Grass, here ya go:

#container{
    height:auto;
    min-height:100%;
    /* Details Elided */
}

There ya have it.. change the height to auto on the container div..

A subset of the ColdFusion tags that I once offered are now available, again, for download.  I brought over only the most popular tags since it was time consuming enough.

If you experience any issues with the site, please contact me.

I hope to get back to actually posting some content at some point.  Now that I actually have a working blog, I should be able to do that.

By the way, I have to say that DasBlog, the engine that I'm using, sucks in some major ways.  It has some niceties, but I had to download the source and make lots of mods just to be able to support my pseudo-static product pages.

Essentially, there are a lot of hard-coded paths that assume that you'll never place anything outside of the root.  That's great until you actually want to put a page outside of the root and you, *gasp*, want it to look like the rest of the site.

I was going to take a look at SubText, but I had already invested too much time in DasBlog.  That, and SubText didn't seem much better with anything non-blog.

Anyway, after some decent modifications to the horrendous source code, I was actually able to easily extend it to do what I need.  Now, I just need to come up with a look-and-feel that does suck a fatty.

I'm still working on getting my old content back online.  I expect to have all of my ColdFusion tools accessible by the end of the week.

Well, my old webhost tried to screw me over, so I was forced to move to a cheaper, better host.  It will take me a few days to get my old content back online.  I hope to lose this crappy theme as well.. :)