Cricalix.Net

My camera is back in my possession, and the shutter button appears to work properly again. So, onwards and upwards to see if the crash issue has been fixed, or whether I’m going to be talking to a certain manager at a certain store.

Someone built a (model) car with a Mindstorm’s NXT, and it can parallel park without human assistance. Very very cool.

Some days, programming can be quite fun. Boss dropped a hot rock on the lap of myself and the other developer, saying that a customer (to be?) who had a bit of paper for us wouldn’t give us the paper until a certain feature offered by sales was done. Our task (and we didn’t get cool theme music or ’should you choose to accept it’) was to create this feature by the end of the week. By the end of the day would be even better.

Round 1 - see if any of our current stuff will do this feature without heavy bending. Nope.

Round 2 - come up with an idea, bounce it off of my fellow developer. Why not prototype it?

Round 3 - write prototype program in about 30 minutes. Test it lightly, declare proof-of-concept functional.

Round 4 - integrate round 3 into the existing code and test it some more. 30 minutes later, declare code functional as version 0.01.

Round 5 - package up the new code and store it somewhere safe should we have to do this again.

Total time from concept to functional, actually semi-robust code? 1 hour.

I like perl. I also like Net::Server.

Yesterday was an interesting day - a sewage pipe that runs through the office wall apparently got stressed with the amount of rain we’ve had recently, and sprung a rather good leak.  One moment it was a nice dry office that didn’t smell too bad, and the next minute the sales guys were moving desks and the room was ponging a bit.  Based on the smell, it was more stagnant water with decaying leaves etc, not toilet sewage.  Net result was that we had to evacuate the room for the rest of the day, and it was up to the technical department to try and provide voice and data services to alternate rooms so the business could at least limp along for the rest of the day.

I spent probably 3 hours going up and down stairs, trying to get our voice and data patched into other cabinets.  Not once did I get dial tone or an Ethernet link signal on any of the cables I moved around.  Problem 1: We don’t have a tone tracer/generator, so I couldn’t determine ports using that.  Problem 2: The patch panel in our office has 16 ports.  The patch panel upstairs in the comms room has 12.  This automatically invalidates 4 of the ports in our office.  Problem 3: No documentation on how everything goes together.  I was reverse engineering the colour codes used by the folks that laid in the service originally to determine what cables did what.

In the end, I never did get it to work, though I did discover along the way that we don’t have dial tone on the dedicated analogue line for ADSL, so we’re going to have to check that patching run again to make sure no one has pulled the wires out of the punch-down blocks (they weren’t in properly in the first place!).

I’ve been pondering whether SOAP actually has any use for any personal projects I’m thinking of, or for my $dayjob code. Today, I decided to play with PHP5’s SOAP implementation, just to see how weird the SOAPy life is. I read the php.net documentation on SOAP, and to say it’s lacking is like saying the sun is hot. As a reference document on how to call a particular function, it’s fine. Beyond that, it’s not that useful.

So, onwards to Google. ‘php5 soap’, ‘php5 soap server’ and a few other queries got me some documents, but most of them were discussing nuSOAP (despite the php5 keyword). A bit of bouncing around, and I found the Zend devzone article on creating a SOAP service and client using WSDL files, complete with examples. All well and good, and the examples worked. However, they only chucked around strings, and I wanted to chuck around associative arrays. More digging ensued. At this point, I still haven’t read the documentation on how WSDL files are constructed - I’m doing pure seat-of-the-pants learning.

Found good example WSDL file via mpwgateway.net that gave me some clues on how to do complex data types in the WSDL file, and things started to make a bit more sense. Added some class work on the server side code, and I can now chuck objects around, and do fun things with them on the client side. No class methods yet, but I just need a data mover anyway, so the objects on the server side don’t need (yet) to have methods (and methods wouldn’t travel via the SOAP call anyway).

My kitchen, not me.

It now has to dry, and I need to decide on tiles vs upstand vs backsplash (or a combination of the above). The plasterer also fixed the spot at the top of my stairs. There’s also a video available - you’ll probably need VLC to play it, as it’s a 3GP file (special mobile phone format apparently).

Oh, work has a Christmas tree - well, the building does (danger Will Robinson, mobile phone camera picture).

The 4th plasterer (to date) has shown up, looked at the kitchen job, and said he’ll be back on Tuesday morning to do it.  Told him there are other bits and pieces to be done if the job is done properly, so hopefully that’ll entice him to come and do a good job.