So Joshua takes me to the repair shop today to pickup my car after taking it having patiently taken me to about two other shops and a car rental place in the past few weeks. I'd already been told by the mechanic that the fix would cost $600 so imagine my surprise when told at the counter that I had to fork over $800. A complaint and a quick call to the mechanic dropped the price to $700.

A further slap in the face was that they didn't even fix the damn problem but an slightly related one that reduced the clunking to a bearable level since rebuilding my transmission would cost around $1500. So my car is still a freaking clunker just not as often. I hate mechanics.

Poll: Who are least trustworthy?

 

 

I'm currently using the ANTLR version that emits C# code and can't take it anymore. The main reason I picked ANTLR to do this project was all the advanced and cool features of ANTLR like near-infinite lookahead given dissambiguating rules, controlling lexer return types, etc. Unfortunately it looks like whoever wrote the C# port tried it on some "Hello World" level examples and then considered his work done without checking to see if any of the advanced features worked correctly. Of course, my freaking employment contract prevents me from simply fixing these bugs and giving them back to the original author and instead I have to work around them.

Click below for another popular reason Open Source projects don't have as many bug fixes as you'd expect.

 

 

I've been snowed under with work recently which is annoying since I've let many personal projects go to seed. The the K5 user search engine is still down, there are empty boxes for my new computer and Ikea bookcase still in the living room, I haven't started working on my Chinese visa for my trip to Hong Kong nor have I finished my GPL article.

Of course when I had a four day weekend last week I spent most of it playing Baldur's Gate II and drinking beer.

Poll: Which is the best game in Carnage4Life's software library?

 

 

If you've somehow missed it over the past couple of days most there has been a significant amount of hubub around Microsoft's palladium strategy. So far I've seen articles appear on MSNBC, the Washington Post, Clueless Cringely's column and ZDNet with each one attaching their favorite conspiracy theory to it. My thoughts on Palladium below.

Also I discuss relationship problems I'm having, Eric Raymond's weblog, the difference between good and bad programmers and have a couple of Links of the Day.

Poll: What is the most important lesson to teach your offspring?

 

 

While reading my daily weblogs I came across an article entitled Objects vs. XML via Sam Ruby. The interesting quote being

Integration with OO languages is necessary to enable XML dominance, but that's an accident of history. In the view of the XML zealot, OO will eventually fall away and only pure, clean XML will be left in it's place.

which makes me shiver even though I work for a team that ships the some of the most commonly used XML tools on the planet. If any XML people want to go down the world domination road and replace Object Oriented Programming they need to get their house in order first. More below.

Poll: Which of the 10 Corporate Deadly Sins Does Your Employer Commit?

 

 

Cringely cringe inducing most recent column on obfuscation and .NET is one of those so utterly ignorant pieces that typically spew forth from Cringely that convinces me that the article is written by a rotating gaggle of college sophomores working as interns at PBS.

Poll: What would you rank yourself out of 5 for a performance review?

 

 

I just wasted an hour trying to figure out why TomCat wasn't allowing me to connect to it on port 8080 via my domain name but would through localhost only for my machine to sieze up and when I powered off and back on, I no longer have freaking DNS.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGGGGGGHHHH.

Poll: Who is the strongest one of all?

 

 

So browsing Slashdot today, I notice an article that states that Sun Microsystems has decided that its employees don't deserve cubicles. Reading the the actual story on Yahoo is rather disturbing because it mirrors a description of the bleak existence of being a cog in a wheel working for the "feds" after the collapse of the US government in Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash.

Poll: Best Way To Spend A Summer Day?

 

 

Well, first things first. It looks like my 1^st Extreme XML column is out. Which is cool except for the fact that I think my face is too dark on my picture on the columns page. Plus they picked the pic where they made me do the goofy cross-your-hands-and-form-an-X pose.

Poll: Favorite Liquor?

 

 

A diary in which I ask 5 random questions that have occured to me over the past 24 hours. Feel free to answer any, all or none of them.