Robin Etc

I spent 10 hours in the car today. Holy crap. Drained.

robin Robin, Work

So I spent a good 2 hours today teaching a colleague about FMS Analyst.

FMS Analyst is the program I have written for interacting with the FMS that I work with. It’s designed for data collection, but in order to facilitate it it has all sorts of bells and whistles so that the user can focus on the data and not the implementation.

Anyways, it’s still kind of complicated. I’ve written a HOWTO for a specific scenario in addition to the user’s manual, and we went over the HOWTO piece by piece until the guy understood what was going on. It took a while. Not that he’s not a bright guy; FMS Analyst is pretty complicated and he had never worked with it before. He’s read the user’s manual and the HOWTO, but reading the documentation and hands-on experience are two entirely different beasts.

So we got it mostly working, except the FMS crapped out. We were running part two of study one of the KLAS scenario, but we ended up only getting part one data, because it failed to correctly enter in the route restrictions for FUZZY. Also, I think I cleared an error message that needs to be recognized, and so missed one of the key points in the flight. I fixed that problem, anyways.

So FMS Analyst is going pretty well. :)

robin Programming, Robin, Work

I just got a new monitor. It’s a 22″ Acer LCD, 1680×1050. Awesome!

Also, this makes working from home a hell of a lot easier.

robin Programming, Robin, Work

Well, I’ve found myself enjoying one of my favorite past-times again, this time on the job. I’m writing some software for analysis of the FMS, and I need a way to automate complex sequence of batches and instructions. The answer? Write a scripting language. So I’m writing a language, but this time I get paid for it. Kickass.

robin Programming, Robin, Work

So I have two real projects at work. One of them is making a good programmer- and analyst-friendly interface. This is harder than it sounds. I have a basic API to deal with, but anything involving the flight computer is screen scraping and keyboard pressing, with delays for the keystrokes to take effect. The things they want to be able to do with it are difficult to get it to do.

The other involves isolating some functionality from a monolithic research program that my department works on. It’s a matter of ripping functionality out until I am left with the bare essentials. It’s alternatively fun and not fun.

Anyways, so I have these two projects, and I’m working basically on my own with them.

robin Programming, Robin, Work

Well, I just finished four hours of programming, working on a front-end that demonstrates the library for accessing the hardware FMS that I have written. I am giving a demo of it on Tuesday, and I really wanted to make sure it would be up to snuff. My supervisor said that the fact that I had anything at all was excellent for this early on, but I want more. I’m showing this off to my supervisor, my project team lead (my boss), and the department head (!). I want it to be slick. So, I’ve written a small document which I’m going to hand out, and I got my program where I want it to be.

The sucky part is that, when I went to record my time, it turns out that time on a Sunday goes toward the previous week. I had figured that I would have 4 less hours of work this week, but not so. Instead, I merely have 44 for last week. Blast.

robin Programming, Robin, Work

I’ve started reading Gödel, Escher, Bach again. I never managed to get more than 2/3 of the way through it before. Not that I dislike it or find it boring, other stuff has simply cropped up. I’m going to bring it with me to work, for entertainment purposes.

I left early today, after putting in only 7 hours, because I needed a break. I put in 2 more this evening, so I’m still coming out ahead. But I figure maybe if I bring GEB with me to work, I can veg out reading it when I need a break. Otherwise, there’s absolutely nothing to do. I am not willing, for example, to go on IRC or randomly browse the web on my work machine. I have, so far, been able to keep it used for exclusively work related purposes.

Anyways, I want to finish this book some time. I understand a lot of it already, and it’s a pretty awesome subject. But the rant on the incompleteness theorem must come another day.

robin Robin, Work

I had blueberry pancakes for breakfast today. The cafeteria at my employer is the bomb.

robin Rants, Work

Well, I spent all day programming. Well, I guess not technically all day. I spent my first hour on the phone with tech support concerning an automatic software security update system that fails to recognize that my version of Visual Studio (2003) isn’t affected by a particular vulnerability in VS 2005. More amusingly, the patch for the version that -is- vulnerable won’t install on my older version. Eventually it was determined that my options are either:

1) Upgrade VS to a recent, affected, version, and apply the patch it keeps trying to push on me.

2) Wait for tech support to escalate the issue to the IT illuminati to fix their update software.

I’ll probably end up waiting for IT to get their act together, because there’s really no way I can justify spending the money on the new version of VS.

Anyways, after spending an hour on the phone with support, I spent the next 8 hours programming. I got some things started, which is good. I have a stub written for a particular plugin, and I have started a separate project on which I can develop an interface to some VB code that I am also writing, which I will eventually port back into the main application.

robin Robin, Work

I have decided that, rather than the laptop bag, I am going to use my backpack for transporting around the laptop and my work documents. It makes things a fair bit easier.

robin Robin, Work