Inspiring

I've been going through a rough couple of months with my work. Mainly it's been a bit boring and not too much fun. I was recently forwarded a link to The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch from Carnegie Mellon. I saw this when it was first posted sometime last year but I decided to watched it again.
Without even going into the fact that my problems are minuscule in comparison, his lecture was inspiring to me on many levels. He talks about having dreams and working hard and living right as ways to achieve your goals. He also talked about mentoring, something that I really enjoy doing but have not been able to do too much recently.
So I've decided to get out of my funk and focus on building upon my skill set, working hard to achieve my goals, and try to help others as best as I can.
I have also decided to spend the rest of the Summer teaching my son to use Alice. Alice is a tool to help students learn to program using a 3D interactive programming environment. It makes learning the basics of programming fun and interesting. Randy Pausch was one of the people who helped to put Alice together.
Thanks Randy...

You Get What You Pay For

Maybe I'm just a bit naive and maybe a bit lucky. But so far almost every tool that I've downloaded and tried from the Internet has been pretty reliable. I mean as long as it comes from a reputable site or recommended by someone who seems trustworthy or knowledgeable, they just seem to work.

So anyway, I just tried this Ant code to create a task for Doxygen. (I didn't make the call to use Doxygen, but it's pretty good, if you really care a lot about documentation). But back to the Doxygen task for Ant. I got the link from the Ant web site in the External Tools and Tasks section. So you would assume all the tools and tasks are tested and they all work (and yes, I read the disclaimer at the top, but still). I tried the Doxygen task and for some reason it just didn't work. I spent the majority of a day trying to figure it out. What it eventually turned out to be was a configuration property that was being defaulted into the config file from the Doxygen task Java code. Who would have thought that a bug that would make it not run would be in distribution binaries? For the longest time I thought it was some sort of setup issue on my end. Anyway, I also ended up fixing another error in the code that someone else found and had posted in the bugs section and put in a few custom things that I thought might be a good idea. I also posted my bug find and solution into the bug list as well.

Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate the code that Karthik A Kumar wrote. It was really well done and gets the job done in a very cool way. The Doxygen Task really helped me out a lot and saved me a lot of time. I also learned a lot about Ant Tasks and Doxygen along the way. I think it was time well spent.

But just remember, things aren't always perfect...especially when they are free.

Gamer Bus

We were invited to a birthday party for one of my son's friends. The party was at a park and they rented out a bus with video games. It was pretty cool. They had 8 XBox 360s in the bus. One side had a long leather couch and the other wall had 8 LCD panel mounted to the side. Pretty cool.
Outside the bus, they setup a Wii to keep people occupied as they waited to get into the bus.

They basically rotated the kids (and me) into the bus to play 5 minute Halo3 tournaments. I managed to not get motion sickness as I played, which was good. The kids had fun sneaking up on me and bashing me with their guns, which was not good. They didn't even want to waste bullets on me......punks.