I certainly don't want this to turn into a video blog of fish, but I got some more video of the fish in our stream, and it's so unbelievable to me as someone new to this area that I simply must post it.  I've also done some tweaks to my custom Silverlight player as well as used some different encoding techniques (I haven't decided whether I like them yet).

Again, enjoy me sounding like an idiot.

[UPDATE:] The way I have embedded the player this time seems to prevent it from showing in most RSS aggregators. click through to my blog to see the video.

So, the salmon are running in our stream.  They're really big.  I caught this video today of a smaller female (I think).  Hopefully I'll get some bigger ones on video soon.  This is also an experiment with Silverlight.

Oh, by the way.  I'm like giddy with the thought of salmon in my stream, so I sound like an idiot.

Today is our 8 year anniversary.  Eight years seems like a really long time!  This past year has been a crazy year for us.  We've moved across the country, away from all our friends and family.  And, through it all, Becky's put up with all my crazy shenanigans.

Thanks, Becky.

For some reason, when I'm typing (and especially when I'm coding) I often conciously attempt to capitalize numbers under certain conditions.  For some reason, my brain thinks that there's a difference.  For instance, if I was typing HttpV4Implementation, I would probably end up with HttpV$Implementation because if there had been a letter there instead of a number, I would have capitalized it.  Does anyone else have this problem?  It's really frustrating because I often retype it several times making the same mistake each time before finally realizing what the problem is.

I think this may be caused by my handwriting style, which seems to be typical of engineers, where all letters are in captial form, but differ in size to indicate capitalization.  I've seen this referred to as "smallcaps".  Oddly enough, I didn't pick this up in college as an engineer.  I decided to start writing that way in junior high after noticing how cool my granddad's handwriting was.

This year, we gave the gift that keeps on giving... the stomach flu. But, before I get to that, let me back up a bit...

If you recall, we got our power restored after over a week of outage with just a little more than 12 hours to prepare for our holiday travels.  However, we managed to get everything together and arrive at the airport the suggested 2 hours before the flight.  Out trip went through Phoenix instead of Denver, so I figured we'd be in the clear weather-wise since nothing ever happens in Phoenix.

Wouldn't you know it, we got to the airport to discover our flight had been delayed due to fog in Phoenix.  After a bout with a touchy airline representative (which I may eventually devote an entire entry to), we decided to go ahead to Phoenix since everything was delayed coming and going in hopes that our connecting flight would be delayed as well.

4.5 hours after our flight was to leave originally, we boarded the plane with still a slight chance of catching our connection.  After we landed in Phoenix, we discovered we'd missed the connection by a mere 19 minutes.  With no flights available to El Paso until Christmas, we really had only one acceptable option... rent a car and drive.  So, at about 9pm, we hopped in a car and drove the 6.5 hours from Phoenix to El Paso to Becky's parents house.  All in all, I felt a great sense of accomplishment in having executed such an old-school road trip with a 1-year-old.

Christmas with the Pattersons was great.  I got something I have wanted most of my life... a radio-controlled helicopter.  Thanks everyone.  The only issue was that things in our room were much colder than we were used to, which resulted in Jenna waking up every 30 minutes after midnight due to being cold, and she got all sniffly and such.

We went to Cattleman's (a world-famous steakhouse) for dinner Christmas eve, and I had a huge t-bone.  It was delicious.  Becky had been feeling ill earlier in the day, but we attributed it to lack of sleep.  After dinner, she took a turn for the worse.  I started feeling bad, but attributed it to eating too much.  Becky went to the doctor while I put Jenna to sleep.  By the time Becky got back, I was full on sick, but it was too late to see the doctor.  It was probably the worst night of my life.  Becky's dad helped us tremendously by tending to Jenna, who had also caught the bug.

The next morning, after an unpleasant episode in which I thought I was literally dying, I went to the doctor too.  We were scheduled to fly to Austin and drive to Belton this day, and were contemplating delaying the trip.  We ultimately decided that the pros of keeping our original schedule outweighed the benefits of staying longer.  So, somehow, we got on a plane to Austin and then drove the hour from Austin to Belton.  Unfortunately, the wake of our illness still spread to virtually all of Becky's family.  Some of them got sick on their flights home.

In order to avoid getting sick when we arrived in Belton, my parents just waved to us as we went to the apartment behind the house where they work.  They had gone to alot of trouble to quarantine us away, which was great because we had alot of room for Jenna and we had complete control over the temperature.  For the next few days, we followed a protocol of constant hand washing and such to prevent the spread of the plague.  We even avoided seeing my brother's family completely to avoid any complications for their new son who was less than a few weeks old.  This seemed to be working until my Dad got sick, followed by my mother that night.  My aunt also got sick on her flight home.  We ended up canceling several rendezvous we had planned with friends in the area.  In the end, we finally had a very short visit with my brother's family on his back porch.

Even though we had to be up at the crack of dawn on the 1st to get to the airport, we thankfully had an uneventful and undelayed flight home, and we just sat on our couch in disbelief of the events that had transpired during the previous few weeks.  Now, we just have to shift Jenna 2 hours back to Pacific time.

So, to everyone we had hoped to visit while we were in Texas, we're sorry things had to go down like that.

So, we still don't have power, but things are looking up.  Let me give you the rough timetable so far.

• Thursday, Dec 14th ~8pm: Wind starts picking up. Lights begin to dip occasionally.
• ~10:30: Power goes out.  Ticked because I was in the middle of a Halo match.
• ~11:30: By this time, the wind is really blowing.  The sound of branches breaking off can be heard occasionally throughout the surrounding woods.
• Friday, Dec 15th ~12:30am: The wind is blowing like crazy.  The gusts are bending the trees to an alarming degree.  We decide we should move downstairs in case one decides to fall.  This wakes Jenna up and she decides we are playing some kind of game.  She spends the next several hours honking our noses.
• ~2:00am:  I am VERY concerned about falling trees.  With each gust, the sounds of breaking trees can be heard.
• ~4:00am:  Jenna is finally asleep.  The wind seems to have subsided.  We go back upstairs to be comfortable.
• ~morning: Damage is surveryed.  Nothing major.  Check around the neighborhood.  Nothing terrible.  Patiently wait for power to be restored.
• ~noon: It's getting cold.  I look for some firewood.  All I find is soaked through.
• ~3pm: still no warmth.  We decide to bail.  We call the Flints and head to Bellingham.
• ~7pm: We arrive in Bellingham, warm up, and stay the night.
• Saturday, Dec 16th: Head back to our house to check on the cats.  The daylight reveals the devestation of the infrastructure.  Trees are down everywhere.  Powerlines are a tangled mess.  The power's going to take a while.  We make sure the cats are OK, and head back to Bellingham.
• Sunday, Dec 17th: Attend Jeff's church and locate a generator that meets our criteria.  Big enough to run the furnace, small enough to fit in the trunk.  Head back to the house and fire it up.  Becky took Jenna to a friend's house while the house warmed up.
• 8pm: the house reaches 60 degrees, our criteria for staying the night, so Becky brings Jenna back and we put her to bed.
• 10pm: the house reaches normal temperature.
• Monday, Dec 18th 12:30am: The furnace stops working and the house begins cooling fast (the structure itself has not yet heated up to normal)
• 1:00am: We head to Becky's friends house and spend the rest of the night.
• Daytime: Jenna and Becky hang out at her friends house, and I go into work to see about arranging furnace repairs and do other errands in addition to keeping work from falling too far behind.
• Evening: return to Becky's friends house, and have a nice evening playing with Jenna and xbox. Becky and friend go check on cats, which are freaking out, but otherwise doing fine.
• Tuesday, Dec 19th: Some work.  The furnace guys show up and confirm my diagnosis of a faulty flame sensor.  Furnace working again.
• Evening: Head to another one of Becky's friends for some nice dinner.
• 8:00pm: I get a call from my realtor, who just got power and offers his huge generator.
• ~9:30pm: Big generator hooked up and running.  Now we can run some lights and other stuff. Additionally, it runs all night on a tank of gas, rather than having to fill every 5 hours.  Also discover cable service is out.  No xbox.
• Wednesday, Dec 20th morning: wake up from a very pleasant and successful night. Fill tank on the generator and go out to get more gas.  Then head into work.
• 1pm: Becky and Jenna join me at work for some lunch.

In somewhat unrelated news, I saw what I believe to be a couple of river otters swimming in the creek yesterday evening.  The reason I think they were otters was they looked like otters, and the tracks I found in the snow look like otter tracks. I'll have to keep my eyes open for them and maybe get some pictures.

I've gotten lots of inquiries lately where, for now, the answer is simply, "we're alive".  If you weren't aware, the Seattle area was pounded last Thursday by an incredibly fierce windstorm.  Over two thirds of the houses in the area lost power, which equates to over a million customers (houses/businesses). We live in one of the areas hardest hit by the storm.

Luckily, we, our cats, our home, our cars, and everything else all escaped unharmed.  However, we have been without electricity since Thursday night.  We decided the best course of action with a one-year-old was to get the heck out of there.  We stayed with the Flints Friday and Saturday night.  After a brief period of warmth on Sunday brought by a generator, we are now staying at a friends house in nearby Kirkland who regained power on Sunday.

I'll update more when I have more time.  For now, I'm working on getting the furnace fixed.  Either running it continuously for about 8 hours damaged part of the ignition system, or running it from a generator screwed something up.

Hopefully, everything will be cleared up in time for us to make a Saturday flight to Texas for the holidays, but they're saying it may be Friday or Saturday before our power gets turned back on.

It hasn't snowed any more. In fact, yesterday was a clear, beautiful day.  You can check out the photos I uploaded yesterday for all the snowy goodness, as well as some overdue photos since Halloween.  But, the temperature hasn't gone up, so all the snow is still here.  I even went outside, got some snow, and made some snow ice cream, which I haven't had in ages. (It doesn't snow enough in Central Texas to get clean snow)

My smart card reader is broken, so I don't have remote access, which makes it hard to work from home.  I decided to go into work today to try to get another one.  It's supposed to snow more tonight, so I wanted to be ready, and not feel like I need to go in.  The way into work was interesting.  There were still lots of cars in ditches or stuck going up hills, etc.  But, I can't find a card reader, so I'll probably head home soon.  I don't want to risk getting stuck on the way home.  So, I'm going to queue up some work for the rest of the day and head out.

It snowed yesterday morning, and evening, resulting in quite the winter wonderland.  We didn't get as much as Jeff did up in Bellingham, but any snow to us is alot.

Also, last night while we were feeding Jenna, we heard what sounded like firecrackers going off.  Seconds later, the whole house shook with a huge thud.  It took me a few seconds to realize what had happened.  Several large branches had broken off one of the trees on the northeast side of the house, and one of them had hit the roof on the way down.  I believe the only damage was to the gutters, but I'll have to see.  There is still a large piece of the branch on the roof.

The branches don't look very big when they are way up in the tree, but when they get to the ground, they are small trees themselves by our Central Texas standards.

Well, almost.  By the time you read this I probably will be.  The truck arrived on schedule this morning, but the moving company forgot to send out the loaders (which was odd because the packers were here yesterday).  That was fine because the driver had a chance to go around and tag all the furniture.

Anyway, things are eerie around here.  Nothing but lots of little pieces of garbage everywhere.

I'll get some pics up on Flickr later.  I'm working with relatively limited internet access through my phone.

I've got a hotel room lined up for us tonight, then it's off to the airport late in the morning!  Crazy

The packers came early this morning and packed all our stuff.  I was completely amazed at how many boxes it took to pack up the kitchen.  It pretty much took 1 person dedicated to the kitchen, while 3 others did the rest of the house.  From what they said, it's typical.  The kitchen has to be packed with more padding, so it takes up more room and takes longer.

Anyway, the loaders come tomorrow and load up everything.  That will be even crazier.  The house will pretty much be empty.  Then, we fly out on Thursday about noonish.

I simply don't have room to take my camera on the plane, so it's packed.  I'll try to snap some pictures with one of the lesser cameras though.

I'm getting ready to shut down my PC for the last time here in Austin.  The packers are coming tomorrow morning.  I hope they're not really mad at how unprepared we are.  Anyway, things are getting pretty stressful here at the end.  There's still so much to do and only a couple of days left to do it.  We said goodbye to my brother and his wife this evening, which was pretty sad.  I've never lived more than about an hour from my family my whole life.  Things will be very different with them being that far away.

We did finally find out where we will be living for the next couple of months while we look for a permanent place. Here's a bird's eye view.

We've got a ton of possible houses to look at when we get there.

I was watching Jenna this afternoon, and she was crawling around and generally having fun.  She crawled over to a little book (Goodnight Gorilla, to be exact), openned it up, and began making noises.  This was nothing new.  She does this often, and we think she is pretending to read it.  What I was most amazed by was that she began making sounds like E-I-E-I.  This of course is familiar.  So, I grabbed her Old MacDonald book, which was nearby, and began reading it.  Lo and behold, Everytime I read, "Old MacDonald had a farm...", she would respond with E-I-E-I-E-I.  I was completely amazed.

I took me a while to realize that I ought to be videoing it.  By the time I started rolling, she was less interested, but I did get it a few times. If I get a chance this evening, I'll get it encoded and get a clip up here.

Well, today I am officially unemployed.  I just made my last commute home from Freescale Semiconductor.  I'll really miss my old team and the fun times we've had.

Now that I'm unemployed, Becky and I are free to follow our dream of moving to Washington state in hopes of finding the elusive sasquatch or "wood ape".  That's right, I'm not going to work for Microsoft after all.

My plan is to drive through the forest roads at high speed, hoping to catch the beast unawares and hit it with my huge, 80's style station wagon.  Thinking it dead, I'll strap it to the roof and drive home, only to have it wake up and scare us.  In my panic, I'll brake abruptly, sending the hairy bigfoot flying through the air.

After some misadventures, my family and I will grow to love the gentle giant, and seek to return him to his home, lest he be poached by his arch-nemesis, Jacques LaFleur.  In doing so, we'll realize that if we lived more like these gentle sasquatches, in harmony with nature, that we'd all be better off.

Things have been uber-crazy around here the last month or so. The quality and quantity of my posts had been seriously lacking, and there have been tons of things to post about.  Jenna's crawling everywhere, standing up and walking while holding stuff, and starring in a broadway musical (OK 2 out of 3 isn't bad).

Anyway, I've neglected my readers, and I apologize for that. Hopefully that will change soon. I thought I would come up for air for a moment to announce that I have accepted a position at Microsoft.  Becky, Jenna and I will be relocating to Redmond, WA (near Seattle) sometime in August (wow, that's soon isn't it).

I will really miss my current team, our local friends, and church; but Becky and I are super-excited about this new opportunity.  I'll post some more details when I get a chance (and after I learn for sure what I'm allowed to talk about), but for now I can tell you I'll be working on the Common Language Runtime team.

My XBox360... is dead.  It started locking up in the last few days, and now is completely dead.  I spent some time on the phone with support to no avail.  They are sending me a coffin to put it in so they can try to resurrect it.  I suppose it's fairly good timing.  I had planned to get alot of work done around the house this holiday weekend, and I'm sure the 360 would have been a distraction.

I thought some others might find this useful.

I have been baffled for a few days why certain actions in an experimental Rails app would work fine in dev mode, and then give me mysterious HTTP 500 errors when deployed.  The Rails logs would tell me everything was just fine and there was no problem. But, there they were in Fiddler... status 500.  I haven't figured out how to get ahold of the Apache logs from my host yet, so they couldn't help me.

I finally set up Apache with FastCGI myself so I could attempt to duplicate the problem.  It was immediately apparent.  The Apache log was complaining about invalid headers in the FastCGI communication.  I was using "puts" to write out to the console when running in dev mode in order to quickly debug what was going on.  This works fine when using the Webrick standalone server, but FastCGI on Apache evidently uses stdout to do the communication between it and the fastcgi processes, and writing to stdout screws up that communication and Apache reports HTTP 500, even though Rails thinks everything's A-OK.

The lovely thing about Ruby is that I was able to fix it by redefining puts to do nothing.  Ideally, you ought to use the logging mechanisms, and I will.  But that made a great short-term fix.

I've updated my blog's tagline (at least temporarily) to celebrate.  Halo 3 was just officially announced.  Hop over to bungie.net and check out the trailer, or download it from the XBox Live marketplace.

I simply can't wait.  I'm going to pour all my energy into building a time machine so I can travel ahead to 2007.

I figured out how to draw historical track log data from my tracking app onto the Virtual Earth control.  It's a pretty early implementation, but it works really well.  I'm generating transparent PNG images on the fly and using them as the content of a well-placed pushpin. Here's a screenshot:

Don't be confused.  If you've played with the VE API, you may think I'm creating a pushpin for each datapoint.  I'm not. I'm creating one image and overlaying it on the map.

Once you figure out how to take the latitude/longitude to pixel translation to the server-side, it's fairly straightforward.  The hardest part about it is geting transparent PNG images to render properly in IE.  Hilariously, my workaround currently breaks the functionality in anything other than IE.  Just stupid.

Anyway, now I have to resolve a few little issues as well as "tile" my overlays much like the virtual earth image tiles.  That should fix some of my performance problems.

[UPDATE] OOPS! Something I changed last night broke the tracker position.  Not sure where the problem is, but rest assured that I AM at work today, and not still at home.

I've been loving my new phone.  In an effort to fully exploit and justify my unlimited data plan, I've been dreaming up applications for it.  My latest one is something I've always wanted to do.

I hooked up a bluetooth GPS and capture my position.  Every 10 seconds or so, I send the logged data to a server.  I then have a spiffy Rails app set up to display my current location on a Virtual Earth map.  The page uses AJAX to poll the server every 10 seconds or so to update my position on the map.

I've got lots of ideas for how to mine and visualize the data, as well as provide nifty tools for my friends and family to track my location, as well as hooking the data up to my Flickr uploader (rewritten now in just about 20 lines of Ruby code) to automatically geo-tag my photos when I upload them.  I've got lots of cool things I plan to do with it while we're on vacation this summer.

I'll have live demos for the public available soon.  Some of my friends have been playing with it already as I debug it. For everyone else, here's a shot:

If you're a friend of mine and want to play with the live version, lemme know and I'll shoot you the temporary link.  Most of the time, it's pretty boring because I'm at work, but hold on to you hat when I start going somewhere.

I was on the way back to work from lunch, and I saw a truck with a trailer full of large boxes.  I could not tell what the contents were, but on each box was the company's slogan in big letters....

If anyone deserves it, you do

I think that is a hilarious slogan.  What's in those boxes?  Every possibility made me chuckle.  Rat poison, suppositories, hand grenades, spoiled food, etc.  Is it a sarcastic, humorous slogan, or are they simply playing to people's vanity?

After some Googling, I determined it was furniture from Berkline furniture, which was kind of disappointing.

For those itching for pictures, but not patient enough to wait for me to upload mine, they can check out my dad's blog.

We're doing OK.  We're pretty tired.  We plan on taking advantage of the nursery tonight so we can be rested for when we go home and don't have a fully-staffed nursery.

This morning, at 7:37am CST, Jenna Evelyn Miller was born, one day early, by c-section. She had turned since our last ultrasound earlier in the week and was breach (breech? beached?).

Everything is fine and Becky and Jenna are both resting.

Evidently, this is the time of year when all the cool software developers have their babies.

Pictures are coming, I'm blogging from the delivery room

[UPDATE: 11:30am]  I forgot to include the stats.  7 lbs 15 oz, 20 inches.  Will get pictures up this afternoon.  Lots to do!

Another geeky post.

We built our own query system several years ago.  It used the concept of "query by example" with templates that were interpreted into SQL.  You could generate the equivalent of an "IN" clause by assigning something that implemented System.Collections.ICollection to a template property.  Recently, with the introduction of generics and the generic collections, we decided to relax that contract to IEnumerable since that's really the least common denominator of all collections.  This produced some hilarious results.  As you can imagine, anywhere where we were using strings to specify template values, they were being interpreted as collections of characters.  This manifested itself mostly by having queries return nothing, since our system properly handled Chars and treated them as strings.

But, this reminded me of a similar incident a few years ago that involved a framework that rendered objects as comma-separated values. So, instead of:

Mark, Miller

You'd get:

M, a, r, k, M, i, l, l, e, r

I thought since I had been bitten twice, I would write it down.  I usually don't forget stuff I take the time to write down.

So, the moral of the story: Remember that even though System.String implements System.Collections.IEnumerable (and now System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<System.Char>), you usually don't want to treat it as a collection.  You may need to special-case it.

Anyone else think of another type like this?

I ran into a nasty performance problem recently.  It involved some AJAXy type dynamic requests.  The problem was that two requests always seemed to be occuring serially rather than taking advantage of the wonders of a multithreaded server and running in parallel.  After much spelunking and debugging, it suddenly occurred to me that the handlers were marked with IRequiresSessionsState to pull a trivial piece of information out of the session.

You may not be aware, but accessing the session usually results in an exclusive lock.  Normally, this isn't a problem since users very seldomly open multiple windows or send simulataneous requests, and sessions usually represent unique users.  But fire off two simultaneous requests, and they will be processed serially.

But, if you mark your page as being "ReadOnly" (or disabled) via the EnableSessionState attribute of the @Page directive (or IReadOnlySessionState for IHttpHandlers), you'll help yourself out.  ReadOnly will get a reader lock on the state, allowing multiple readers access, while disabled (via "false") will not lock at all.  In addition, if you're running your session state out-of-process, disabled will keep you from incuring a hit from the db or other store access.

Just an interesting bit of information that thought would be useful.

Here's the logic response to Peter's experimenting:

[UPDATE] Since I've gotten some favorable response to this post, both in the comments and in email, I thought I would give some special, behind-the-scenes information

When I saw Peter's pictures, I immediately thought of the series (1,2) of photoshop trickery I did a while back. Look familiar?

Now, if you'll notice, in Peter's original, he is looking straight at the camera.  So, I had to fix the eyes and distort the nose so he's looking over at Jenkies, who is also obviously added to the scene.

What a geeky post title.  Well, I guess it's a geeky post.

Based on the number of people actually in the bathroom at work when I'm in there, I would think that two people entering/exiting the bathroom at the same time would be a rare event.  Yet, I've come to expect the door to magically open in front of me as my hand nears the handle, or swing violently at my face as I exit.

I always find it amazing the number of things in real life that have dualities in software.  In software, we'd solve the problem of collisions in the doorway by taking a lock on it (although locking on a public object is not always a good idea).  This becomes a problem in the real world because of visibility.  The bathroom door has no window (which is probably good), so you can't see when someone is right on the other side.  You seldom have a collision when the door has a window because you can see who else is going to try to use the door before you can get there.  There are tons of "shared resources" in the world where we've created synchronization mechanisms of various authority.  I think we could learn a thing or two by observing them.

For instance, when roads intersect, we have several different ways of dealing with collisions (we sometimes call them that in the software world as well.):

• Raw intersection - No traffic signs or anything. Typically found on dirt roads where traffic is scarce and the probability of collision is low.
• Yield - One street is a lower priority and "yields" the intersection to the other road.
• Stop signs - you see where I'm going
• Flashing Lights
• Traffic Lights
• Traffic circle - This one always amuses me.  It is actually a very efficient means of managing an intersection IF the drivers are familiar with navigating it.  If they are not, hilarity ensues.
• Overpass

And there are tons of "in-between" flavors.  Hopefully you see what I'm getting at.  The granularity of synchronization in software can be just as complex.  Simple locks, Mutexes, Reader/Writer locks, etc.

Where am I going with this? I don't know.  I just thought it was interesting how many real-world examples of synchronization there are, and how we avoid them in different scenarios, sometimes delegating that responsibility, sometimes taking a more strict position. Prioritizing etc.

That is all.

• A generic method with the following characteristics:
  • More than one type parameter.
  • A return type composed of one or more of the method's type parameters other than the first one.

Some C# example signatures (Not useful or practical, just simple examples that show the problem):

static IEnumerable<TValues> FindDictionaryValues<TKey, TValue>(IDictionary<TKey, TValue> dictionary)

static TValue FindAValueInADictionary<TKey, TValue>(IDictionary<TKey, TValue> dictionary)

Doesn't that sounds like an awesome band name?  Someone here just said that and I had to write it down.  This seemed like as good a place as any.

Most of my day today was tracking down a problem with our app when we obfuscated it.  We were getting a System.EntryPointNotFoundException in the obfuscated version, while the normal one worked fine. The stack trace contained the following on the top of the stack trace:

at System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable`1.GetEnumerator() +0

No concrete class, and an assembly code offset of 0. Weird, eh? After tweaking with lots of settings and digging through the IL of several iterations of differing obfuscation techniques, I finally determined the problem.

I had three overloads of a method that each took a different parametrization of IEnumerable<T>.  For the sake of example, we'll say IEnumerable<A>, IEnumerable<B>, and IEnumerable<C>.  In the obfuscation process, calls to any of the three were being changed to the IEnumerable<A> overload.  Sure enough, PEVerify was giving errors about the wrong type being on the stack. (I was going to show the IL before and after, but I just realized that I deleted the non-working one after fixing it. I'll post it if I can find it again)  It seems that Dotfuscator was not distinguishing properly between overloads if they only differ by parameterization types. I have not verified it, but this may have been aggravated by iterator methods.

We're working up some sample code to send to Preemptive so they can address the problem, but debugging it was frustrating enough to post a synopsis of the account for Google to find.

We're migrating an app to 2.0, and I've come across a rather bizarre behavior.  Basically, after running for a while, the app will begin taking up 100% of one CPU.  Perf counters would indicate that the process is in GC (% Time in GC is very high).

Now, some background.  This is an ASP.net app. We've got very aggresive caching such that the static memory footprint is about 600MB. When things first get going, everyting behaves wonderfully.  Then, at some point, the GC gets hungry or something and starts chewing up cycles.  The heaps never go down.  No allocations are being made.  Nothing tangible seems to be going on.

When requests comes in, they are handled normally, and the GC seems to "get out of the way".  (DB wait time is accompanied by 0% CPU) But after the request is completed, it's back up to 100%.

This app worked fine under 1.1.  And I guess there's an argument that says it still does.  It just doesn't play nice with anything else on the system.  I'm just kind of writing this to get this problem out there in case anyone else is seeing it and is searching for a solution.  I'll probably also ping a few folks at MS to see what they have to say.

[UPDATE] Check out this update.

Wow, I can't believe it's been 5 days and I haven't made an entry about the 4th of July fun.  We spent the weekend in Belton with my family.  On Sunday, we hooked up with Heath and Courtney Robinson and their two sons, Gage and Soren. It was quite fun to catch up with them and see how big their kids are getting. We took them to the mall and into the arcade that I think used to be Eckerds.  Watching them play ski-ball and air hockey,  with Soren barely able to see over the edge of the table was a blast. Here's the photo set of our meeting.

On Monday, the 4th, it was time for the annual Miller 4th of July Olympics!  Usually, my mom comes up with a bunch of crazy games, and we play them and declare winners and such.  This year, Andrew wanted to be in charge of the games.  He did a pretty good job.  We started with the bean bag toss, where you try to knock wooden blocks with animal pictures on them off a saw horse from across the yard. Then, we set up the casting competition, where we used a standard fishing pole equipped with a foam ball and tried to cast it into a pool.  This was quite challenging.  I got some pretty good shots of the moment when the ball hit the water.  After that, we attempted to drop quarters into various sizes containers which were submerged in water.  We all seemed to have drastically different theories about what would work, and oddly enough, most of them worked pretty well.  Most involved harnessing the rotational inertia of the quarter to prevent it from fluttering as it sank. Then, it was on to one hole of tennis ball golf, where you had to navigate a course with a tennis ball and 9 iron, which was also quite entertaining.  That was all for the outdoor games.  Next, we stacked Jenga blocks end to end to see who could get the highest.  For some reason, the girls were much better at that game.  After that there was a heated game of what we call "ball game", which is simply throwing ping pong balls in a trash can, in order to break a 3-way tie for second.  Once 4 place was settled, it ended in a sudden death round of "ball game" for second place.  The prizes were "winners choice" between:

• Some foam balls
• A pocket knife
• A vanilla scented candle
• A small stuffed monkey
• A velcro paddle and ball set

It was great fun. Check out the whole set for the games of the 3rd Julympiad.

Andrew made his patented secret recipe trail mix, which is alot like a bowl of candy.  His wife Sara made a delicious cake.  And we had lots of other goodies.  We didn't get to shoot any fireworks this year, which was unfortunate, but that just means we'll have to make up for it next year.  I hope everyone else had as much fun as we did.

My boss and I spent Wednesday and Thursday in Phoenix, Arizona on a business trip.  We were evangelizing some internal tools we've created over the last several years.  We left early Wednesday morning on Southwest Airlines and had a stop in El Paso, where I changed seats into the best coach seat I've ever sat in.  It was just behind the emergency exit row, and the seats were arranged such that there was no seat in front of me.

Let me just say something about Phoenix.  It is HOT!  We came up with a slogan for Phoenix:

Hell is cold in Phoenix

Anyway, the trip went well.  And our tools were well received.  For the first time, I made sure that my GPS was turned on as much as possible to enable me to geo-code my photos.  I used the WWMX Location Stamper from Microsoft Research to put the GPS track data into the photos.  I was hoping to integrate them into Google Earth, but they are no longer taking orders for the plus version which allows GPS track data to be integrated.

Also, in a bizarre coincidence, my friend Jeff Flint, who lives in the Seattle area, was in Phoenix on a sort of baseball tour.  So, Wednesday night, I ditched my boss and headed to the ballpark.  I was worried about the sun and the heat, but on the way there, I noticed that the smoke from the fires in California was making it much less intense.  Then, when I got there, an even better surprise.  The roof was closed and the park was air-conditioned, making it very pleasant.  Jeff and I watched the game, chatted, and generally caught up, which was great.  He managed to catch two balls during batting practice.

Back last year, I outlined a problem I had with calling Response.End from a thread other than the thread that handled the request.  It stemmed from a progress mechanism we had implemented that had the ability to cancel long-running tasks when the user hit stop or closed the browser.  As it turns out, that wasn't the whole story.

We recently added a few reports where, the majority of the time, gathering the data takes over a couple of minutes.  While doing memory and performance optimizations, we noticed our worker process was recycling with the following message in the System event log:

Googling for this error doesn't do you much good since it could be caused by a variety of reasons.  Most of the advice I came across wasn't well thought out and made quite a few bad assumptions.  So we added some more debug logging and determined that this was happening when our canceling mechanism kicked in when a user decided they didn't really want to wait 5 minutes for the report.  I was greatly puzzled by this since this feature had been tested thoroughly and had been running in production for some time.  Looking back through the server logs, it was evident that it had been happening all along, just not very often. We had just gotten the performance on the vast majority of pages to be very good and it wasn't an issue.  The problem only came to the surface when we added the report that always takes a while.

Here's the problem.  If the handling thread is aborted, it causes a condition that IIS considers to be bad and that forces the worker process to recycle. (presumably, there is some communication that doesn't occur) This doesn't happen when Response.End() is called because it passes a special exception as the exception state to Thread.Abort.  The HttpApplication catches ThreadAbortException and checks the ExceptionState.  If it is an HttpApplication.CancelModuleException, it knows there was either a timeout, or Response.End() was called, and it cancels the Thread.Abort by calling ResetAbort which allows the thread to continue running at that point.  I thought that was pretty slick.

When I was aborting the handling thread, I was on a different thread, so I had to call Thread.Abort manually, so CancelModuleException was not being used, so the thread was ending completely and causing the recycle.  Since HttpApplication.CancelModuleException is internal (and rightly so) I could not simply use that mechanism.

The good news is that the Unload event always happens (for all practical purposes), even when the thread is being aborted.  So I added my own PageIsCancelling property to our base class Page and check it, along with the current ThreadState in Unload, and cancel any pending abort if the page is canceling.  So, the abort is contained within the callstack of the page, and the thread stays alive and all is well.  No more crazy recycling.

As an aside, it seems this is aggravated by multiple processors, which might explain how it passed testing on the dev's machine.  Although I don't have any proof of this.

With Becky's family in town this weekend, I took her brother Ben to play some frisbee golf.  We met up with Dave at the Wells Branch course near our house.  The weather was really nice despite a nagging wind which made it a bit tough.  As usual, there were some great moments and some mishaps.  I brought the camera along and captured some choice moments like this one of Dave leaping across the stream after retrieving a stray disc.  The pictures turned out really well.  Check out my photoset!

Well, it looks like the Lady Bears are gonna win it all.  That's really exciting.  They really deserve it.  I played in the basketball band at almost every home game while I was at Baylor.  Just heard the 'bones playing Emperial March.  Cool to see the band still doing some of the things that Dave, Jeff, and I started while we were there.

[Update] It's now official

[Update] changed 'game' to 'band'. He he

So, my recent drink of choice is also Robert Scoble's.  I found it to be one of a very small number of diet drinks that I can stand.  Among them are Diet Dr. Pepper and Diet Dr. B (a knock-off).  I find Diet Mug Root Beer to taste almost exactly the same as the regular version.

Robert, just don't leave it in the freezer and forget about it.  I wanted a cold one and the cans we're cold yet, so I thought a little freezer time would speed things up.  So, I forgot about it.  It was a mess.  It was pretty cool though.

This is what happens if you break your XBox communicator and still want to play.  Dave broke the plastic part that rests on your ears, so he's using a headband to hold it onto his head.  He said he was really hot after playing a while. Hilarious. 

Becky and I spent this weekend in Victoria Texas.  Why you ask?  Becky was playing in the Victoria Symphony!  I was really impressed with the fine arts culture of the small town.  Becky did a great job, and got to play one of the most famous 2nd horn excerpts (Beethoven's 3rd Symphony).  I got a "comp" ticket, and was basically the closest person to the stage.  I had stayed up all night Friday playing Halo 2, so I was overly tired at the concert.  I was enjoying the music quite a bit, but fighting hard to keep my eyes open.  It was very strange.  It was like my brain wanted to shut down all unecessary cycles except for listening.  I never fell asleep, but I did listen to much of the second half with my eyes closed, employing the standard techniques to not look as though I was sleeping of course.  Becky did great.  Perhaps she'll get the permanent gig!

After the concert, we went to the Sonic.  They had a credit/debit card machine built into the menu, which also conveyed useful information like "your order is being prepared" and "your order is being delivered".  It was really useful.  No fumbling coins in the food exchange.  It was sweet.  I hadn't seen those before anywhere, and I didn't expect to find it in a small texas town.  Bravo.

For the last 2 months, I've been having a blast playing Halo 2 with my buddies online. (except Jeff, who for some reason refuses to get on despite having all the necessary ingredients) It has worked reasonably well, with the exception of some weird incompatibilities with certain people.  If they were the party leaders, I'd get the famous "We are experiencing network issues." message.  Bungie says that this is almost always caused by NAT incompatibilities.  This didn't get in the way too much because we could usually juggle around the party leader until everyone could join.

At first, I attributed this to my out-of-the-norm network configuration.  I have VoIP, so I have several routers.  When I first started playing, I had the VoIP box as the outer-most router, followed by the venerable WRT54G.  So I was doing a double NAT.  The last several weeks, I've been trying to reduce my incompatibilities.  First, I managed to set up the VoIP router inside the firewall (I have AT&T CallVantage).  This involved....absolutely nothing.  It simply worked.  I did set up QoS on the Linksys to ensure the phone would always have enough bandwidth.  This fixed some of my incompatibilities, but other issues began to crop up, like being unable to hear everyone in the game lobby sometimes.

I had been running the wifibox firmware on the Linksys, and decided to upgrade it to a more recent, official firmware. So I upgraded to the Live-certified firmware version.  This didn't help.  Then, after changing nothing, I began having problems joining people that I had never had trouble with before.  Last night, after putting the XBox in the DMZ and still having problems, I got fed up and systematically hunted down the issue.  It was definitely something with the router, which didn't make sense since it was XBox Live certified, and I was having trouble with other people who had the same router and they didn't have problems.  It just didn't add up.

So, I broke down and got a new router, and it fixed everything.  I played until 2:00 this morning without a single problem.  VoIP still works. Wireless works.  All the PCs work.  All without any additional port forwarding, DMZ settings, or other configuration besides the QoS.  It just works now.  And do you want to know the most bizarre part?  I got the exact same model of router.

My conclusion is that the wifi-box firmware screwed it up somehow.  It's the only variable left in the equation.  I'm curious if anyone else who is running 3rd party firmware has had problems like that. Perhaps I'll link to someone that I know does, and see if that generates any discussion from his previous post.

Since my last rant about vending machine prices, they've raised the price to 70 cents for 12 oz. cans here at work.  Ridiculous.  I only wish I knew who "they" was so I could complain.

Whew, what an ordeal.  I finally got my Adobe Photoshop CS in the other day, and last night, I created a "Droplet" for batch converting all my raw files from my Canon Digital Rebel. Droplets are a really sweet feature that lets you create a little executable from recorded actions for batch operations.  So, I burned through about 2000 images, creating big jpgs suitable for uploading to my newly upgraded Flickr account.  It was getting pretty late, so I fired up an uploader an set it to upload my 1GB limit (roughly 900 pictures).

This morning, I checked my account, only to find that none of the metadata had been uploaded.  All my images appeared to have been taken on Feb 11, 2005...uh oh.  So, I set out to find out what happened.  Turns out, Photoshop saves the metadata in it's XMP format within the file. XMP is simply an rdf encoding of the data in an XML payload within the file.  It's actually pretty cool, but Flickr doesn't read this data yet.  So I set out to "fix" my pictures, since I can't upload anymore until next month and I have lots more to upload.

After looking at lots of libraries and Adobe's XMP SDK, I decided it would be easy enough to pull the data out myself.  So, I built a little app using my FlickrApi library I just created that would blast through my uploaded pictures, find the corresponding image on my local pc, pull the xmp data out of the file, and set the "date taken" on the Flickr site.  That way, I can at least organize them more easily.

It worked perfectly.  It blasted through about 900MB in less than a minute.  Look for the pictures as I tag them, annotate them, and change them from private to public.  I'll have to see if there's a way to have Photoshop preserve that data next time because I'd really like to have the rest of the metadata available.  I'll probably make my XMP parser available as well if anyone's interested.  As far as I know, there is not another managed implementation available.

This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time.  Try my flickr name (marklio).  It lets you drill through my contacts and see their information.  Keeping clicking and you'll see all kinds of cool things.  It really helped me see Flickr as a web service rather than just a photo sharing site.  It gave me alot of ideas.  Things like using tag matching to automatically creating blog entry backgrounds that are relevant to the content.  I'm going to be playing with that.

Their API is really nice and well-documented.  Some people made a .NET wrapper for the API, but it's not up-to-date and I wasn't really impressed with the design.  I'll probably roll my own and just implement the things I need as I go.

After some banging of my head on a wall, I found what I believe to be a bug in Oracle's .NET data provider (or ODP).  Or, at the very least, it is some non-intuitive behavior.  We have a byte-based enum that is stored in the db for a reporting tool.  As we all know, bytes are unsigned, but somehow a bunch of my values were negative in the database.  Closer inspection indicated that my values had been treated as if byte was signed.  After a thorough review of my code, I fired up Reflector to dig through the ODP code.  After a little while, It became clear ODP was treating my byte as if it were signed.  Although the actual problem is in unmanaged world, here's a troubling method that's called during the binding process:

internal unsafe void SetPrmValCtx(byte b, int index)
{
*(((sbyte*) (this.m_pOpoPrmValCtx.pBltVal + index))) = b;
}

It was easy enough to work around, since our API is several layers removed from ODP itself.  But annoying nonetheless, especially since using an sbyte (signed byte) as a parameter value will throw an exception.  Just thought Google might be able to help someone else out in the future using this information.  in the meantime, I'll make sure Oracle knows about this little annoyance.

I just got finished debugging a crazy problem with some C# code.  This particular code is part of an application that deals with file spooling, and it deals with alot of ambiguous file locking issues by always locking greedily.  Any spooling task that is unable to gain an exclusive lock on a file simply assumes another thread must be working on the file and it leaves it alone.

The developer used a pattern that handles System.IO.IOException and assumes that any IOException must be because of a concurrency issue.  The problem with this is that there are lots of calls that can cause file IO that you may be unaware of.  In this case, there was an assembly binding issue caused by some plugin-style dynamic loading that was throwing System.IO.FileLoadException (Which actually seems to be out of place as a subclass of IOException since it is specific to assembly loading and not IO in general).  The pattern in the code was assuming that, in general, any IOException was not an exceptional event and signified another condition. So, the task never did any work and never reported the exceptional condition.

Eric Gunnerson wrote a nice overview piece on exceptions in C# on msdn.  Some of his guidelines are

Catch the most specific exception

If your code needs to recover from some exceptions, make sure to catch only those exceptions. If you catch more general ones, it's more likely you'll mistakenly swallow exceptions you don't want to swallow.

Only swallow if you're sure

This is really a corollary of the previous guideline. When you swallow an exception, your saying that you understand all cases where this exception could arise, and that the recovery code you're writing handles all of those cases.

Use lock or using if applicable

If you can use the lock or using statements, use them. They make the code more readable and make it more likely you'll do the right thing.

Wrap exceptions if applicable

If you can add additional information to an exception, by all means do so. If I pass a parameter on to another function, it might be useful for me to add additional information about the parameter.

The first two here are obviously directly applicable to the scenario, and would have at least raised some flags if I had first checked all the IOExceptions to see what they encompass.  The solution for me was to take a look at the pattern and reduce the scope of the IOException catches to only those statements that I expected might throw the exception for locking.

[UPDATE] I wanted to note that the exception handling pattern worked great until it was extended by me to a more complicated scenario involving dynamic assembly loading.

We spent the day in Belton today with my folks and my brother.  We had a good time winding up the holiday festivities.  Mom made her patented roast, which she will tell you is nothing special, but it's really yummy.

Dave got an XBox communicator, and when Becky and I got back from Belton, I had about 5 hilarious XBox Live voice messages from him. We played several games of Halo 2 “Big Team Battle”.  I think you probably have to experience it to truly understand how fun it is, but it's an 8-on-8 team battle playing different kinds of capture-the-flag-esque games in huge environments with all kinds of flying, rolling, and hovering vehicles; lots of guns and grenades; and in-game voice hilarity.  The funnest moment for me was jumping in a Warthog (a humvee-type vehicle), waiting for Dave and another guy to jump in the passenger and gunner seats, and then taking off across the battlefield at full speed to pick up the bomb and singing pirate chanties along the way.  It was great.

OK, I was not prepared for the onslaught of hilarity that ensued in the comments of my last post.  Somehow I think it's not over yet.  It's good to know that even though there are alot of us Mark Millers, that most of us seem to have a good sense of humor.

I about fell out of my chair at the thought of someone stirring a butter knife around in the trash to make it a more damaging weapon.  I think I'll have to use that in a movie.

I'm glad I got dasBlog fixed in time to blog about Google Desktop.  Trust me, if you ever have looked for something on your hard drive or in your email, you want it.  It is freaking awesome!  I saw a video demo of the new MSN search which is identical in purpose, but it appears they've been beaten to the punch.

Scott Hanselman has some good observations on how it works.