your.flowingdata

I've been reading http://flowingdata.com/ for a while now. I was interested when the your.flowingdata tool was announced a while back but didn't bother to sign up. Decided to give it a try with the newest release. Seems like fun stuff, though I wish I had a phone w/ a real keyboard.

Anyhoo, I decided I wanted to track how many times I build my software and this is how I set it up.

First, I downloaded Twitter CLI, a command line twitter update post tool. I looked into the powershell options out there, but decided to keep it simple. I set it up in my path.

Next I opened up my trusty Visual Studio macro editor and set up a handler for OnBuildBegin like so:

    Private Sub BuildEvents_OnBuildBegin(ByVal Scope As EnvDTE.vsBuildScope, ByVal Action As EnvDTE.vsBuildAction) Handles BuildEvents.OnBuildBegin
      DTE.ExecuteCommand("Tools.Shell", "twitter.bat ""d yfd compiled " & DTE.Solution.FullName & """")
  End Sub

And viola, VS now direct messages @yfd every time I build.

Now I just need to hack bzflag...

Meet Bobbie Frank

Here's a great picture of a nice Lady, Bobbie Frank

Hopefully that's not an expiring link, if it is, I'll download it and put it here permanently. If you have any special Bobbie Frank memories, please deen us worthy to share them here.

My little artist

A sweet little pencil drawing by Eliza.

SNL horridly funny sketch

I skipped over an excellent Lawrence Welk intro, but I think this will be one of the popular Halloween costumes of this year. Sorry for the ads on the video, especially if you get one of the PG-13 ones I saw (boo to that, Hulu).

Software Support Rant

So, I had this issue with my coding tools (Visual Studio 2008) where I installed the software/drivers for a webcam, and a major chunk of development functionality stopped working. Unfortunately, the installation timing closely coincided with my installing a service pack.

Long story short, I submitted an issue with Microsoft, got some mixed quality of responses from their support staff, and finally they pointed me towards 3rd party apps interfering and I spent a long time tracking down the source. During the course of that, they asked about a few other third party apps that they've seen cause interference. Today, they closed my bug report as Will Not Fix.

To me, having a system where random third party apps might interfere with your internal communication is defective, and should be resolved. I guess its the benefit of being the big guy. You get to say that certain cases are not important enough to fix. Perhaps its just sour grapes because its my case they didn't fix. I highly doubt Logitech would care that their drivers are causing me to not be able to write software. So, I guess no webcam for me on my main computer.

If anyone's googling for Visual Studio 2008 debug hang and ends up here, try killing LVPrcSvr.exe.

For people reading my blog (hah!) who don't care about my whining, here's a picture of Ruby

From Ruby June Hannah

Ser-tah-fyed

Ruby is all ours, forever. Went to court today, the commissioner (judge) was so nice and it went excellently. New birth certificate will arrive in the mail after a while. A great day for us.

And then there were 6

6 Matelich's in my family. Ruby is home and, as expected, the kids are gaga for her. Things have been going nicely. Sleeping, eating, diapers. Its almost like we've done this before :)