October 31, 2004
Off to SLC in the morning
Tomorrow morning I'll be off from SNA to SLC as I escort my dad to the Salt Lake City VA :sigh: Thankfully the OC registrar of voters has a early voting booth at John Wayne airport so I'll be able to vote for an elector. Yay? But will it make up for the horror of traveling to SLC? The Cold? The VA? The stress of watching my dad go thru the motions as he tries to get on the "official VA" heart transplant list?
probably not.
October 27, 2004
gmail?
Elias was kind enough to send me a gmail invite - so I set up "jason.dearte@gmail.com". I was never "excited" about gmail like the rest of the masses were - I allready have a mail server and a decent spam filter. But I must say that I like gmail's conversation filtering. Simple and Elegant.
Hmm, I wonder how long before the spyders find it here & IF their junk mail can get past google's spam filters? I'll check on it in a week or so. Who knows, maybe I'll discover a new form of penicillin? ;-)
October 26, 2004
Debugging an Unhanded Exception Filter
The crash capturing api is very usefull as a foundation for you're own crash reporting system
WINBASEAPI LPTOP_LEVEL_EXCEPTION_FILTER WINAPI SetUnhandledExceptionFilter(LPTOP_LEVEL_EXCEPTION_FILTER lpTopLevelExceptionFilter );.
It allows you to define a callback function to be used as a filter when NO OTHER code or debugger is present to catch the exception.
However that introduces a slight problem - debugging the filter function.
If you're in a debugger, it never gets called
If you're not in a debugger, no amount of assert()'s nor _asm {int 3} lines in the filter function will do any good. It's probably a good thing that it doesn't work anyways - horrible recursion could result.
So how do you debug the undebuggable?
Well, I pop up a message box from the UnhandeledExceptionFilter in debug builds and tell my debugger to attach to the process, set a breakpoint on the line after the MessageBox - and debug away!
October 21, 2004
[div] instead of [p]
I figured out the problem with the extra vertical space when viewing this page with a FireFox web browser - the paragraph tag <p> was adding the space! so, rather than dig thru the CSS docs to figure out if/how to set the paragraph spacing - I just replaced the appropriate tags with <div> tags.
October 19, 2004
FireFox and this site
One of these days I have got to track down why this pages top half loads so differently in FireFox. Notice that the horizontal spacing is near itentical, but the vertical spacing is just wrong (i.e. overly padded). Did I mess up the stylesheet? Maybe after I get out of crunch mode, I'll have some time to figure it out.
How it looks in Internet Explorer 6 (as I intended it to look - nice and tight)...
How this page looks in FireFox (much to my displeasure)...
Wow, I didn't even notice that the script on fire fox was also broken. Damn.
October 17, 2004
The pool is BLUE
Ever since Labor day our pool service has dropped the ball, & let it turn green. We've left messages & received no callbacks. To make matters more frustrating - on Thursday vector control left a little note on our door wanting to check our pool for mosquitoes. Ugh.
Well, after 2 days, a large quantity of chemicals, and bi hourly sweeping/filter backflushes later - the pool is blue once again.
I dare vector control to visit.
October 11, 2004
GameSpy, 5 Years, Today?
That's right - today is Year 5 of employment here at GameSpy. Or at least the business entity that DBA's as "GameSpy Industries". Originally (back in 1999) it was "Critical Mass", but then Mark Surfas (founder and then owner) sold the name to some Canadian company. Then in last March we merged with IGN & became IGN/GameSpy. Then a few months later they truncated GameSpy & we were left with "IGN" . But I'm still at the same Irvine company with the same great people & we still call the Irvine office "GameSpy".
What a ride it's been. I wonder if I'll get something cheesy? a watch? desk set? clock? pen set? light-saber? amazon.com gift certificate? or maybe, just *maybe I'll finally get a t-shirt for a project that I worked on??? Naaa.. I've got a better chance of convincing HR to allow me to cash out 100 of my ~200 unused vacation hours.
*It's a long running "joke" that while I have worked on a number of client software projects at GameSpy, I have never recieved a "project t-shirt". In an industry that is based on a twisted economy of product branded t-shirts, one could argue that I have been severly undercompensated in this regard. ;-)
October 09, 2004
Make sure the DVD Recorder works next time
 |
Earlier today Bren & I went down and got a new 3d/4d ultra sound. Unfortunately the DVD recorder they had didn't make a proper DVD & is completely unreadable in all my DVD players and PC DVD drives :( I could kick myself for telling them not to bother with the VHS. |
October 07, 2004
CAPICOM has Been Located!
So out of the blue, the MS download center's "ten latest downloads" included a link for "Platform SDK Redistributable: CAPICOM" posted Oct 7, 2004 1pm
Would you believe that the download link actually works?
Wow - 3 days ago nothing - now there is something. I guess they're not all slackers at MS. ;-)
October 04, 2004
CAPICOM & accurate MSDN entries... Where are you?
Maybe this is just a 0.0001% thing, but it always seems to happen to me.
Over the weekend I was investigating the whole authenticode thing, I just needed a simple method for testing signed exe's under win9x thru XP. Looking at MSDN, it directs me to WinVerifyTrust in WINTRUST.DLL. Unfortunately msdn also reports that it's available only under WinNT/2k/XP.
Thus my search began - and was quickly answered by CAPICOM.DLL, a redistributable that's available for Win9x thru XP! It's a com library that exposes a large number of interfaces for managing authenticode signatures. The most important of which is the ability to check the signature of a signed file!
Unfortunately ALL the links on msdn to get the redistributable are dead. In a few places it's mentioned that it was moved to the platform sdk - but that's only a half truth: the platform sdk includes source samples and not the redistrib!
When I went to the QA lab to start digging thru the msdn archives, I got a random thought "what if msdn is a lying bitch? It's not like it's never been inaccurate".
So I turned on the oldest Win9x box I could find - win98.
I did a search for WINTRUST.DLL
I found it in the windows directory
and I sent it to my main workstation
Would you believe that it not only has "WinVerifyTrust" it also has "WinVerifyTrustEx".
This leads me to a single, unwaivering conclusion: MSDN's level of accuracy is similar in spirit to that of the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. Which in my technical world that requires highly accurate API documentation - does indeed make it a lying bitch.
On the bright side, there are a few MS KB tech support entries that reference wintrust.dll, it seems to get installed by IE4.x and later on Win95
Oh well. Why is it that in moments like these, the phrase "Thank you Microsoft, May I have another?" comes to mind?
Simpsons Hit and Run
After playing the first few levels of The Simpson's Hit and Run, my vivid imagination has lead me to the conclusion that the design mission statement was "GTA3 Meets Rugrats - all the driving mayhem, without the guns, in the child friendly world of Springfield".
It's a fun game, tons of character audio clips, great for fans. However the most annoying parts are the video tearing (which most people wouldn't notice unless you've worked with a lot of games or are familiar with video coding) & the craptastic camera control that tends to get "stuck" behind things.
Overall, it's a great "pick up" single player game - well worth the $20USD
October 01, 2004
SLC VA in One Month
According to both the LB & SLC VA's Dad is supposed to be in SLC for a 4 day "diagnostic" on November 1, 2004. I'm glad that's straightened out. Now I just need to find a decent hotel with internet access within walking distance of SLC VA.