Still at Work

It’s almost 8pm, and i’m still at work. It also looks like I’ll be here for a bit longer. So, i’m pulling a 12hr+ shift today. Don’t worry though, I’m only getting paid for 10. Good ol’ corporate America at work. On the plus side though, I do get to come in late tomorrow. They said noon, so that means I’m getting the good side of the deal there (unless I’m really here till 10pm, by which time I’d probably have committed suicide).

Stupid things happened last week. The network security team has a habit of randomly rebooting machines remotely; to apply patches and whatnot. What sucks is that we can’t run any of our scheduled tasks unless someone is logged in. And if the machine reboots while no one is there.. you guessed it there’s no one there to log in, and hense, none of our scheduled tasks run. So, everything was running behind last week, which ran into the weekend. I’d been off since Friday, so I didn’t know that the updates on Friday had been pushed back until Saturday, but no one pushed the Saturday tasks back. So, like i stated earlier, shit broke.

So I’m running all the scripts manually now. Which takes forever, I’ve been at it for 3 hours already, and i’m not even halfway done. If I’m not at a point where I can let it run on it’s own by 8:30 – 9:00, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I kind of want to smack Brad in the head. He’s the one that came in on Saturday to check that everything ran properly. Evidently, that didn’t happen, but he said it did. That numskull..

Now i need to find something to amuse myself with for another, erm.. hour.

How hard is it, really?

When someone works somewhere, it’s usually not because they like it. They do it because otherwise they’d be living in a cardboard box, or in a van down by the river. So, that being said, it would only make sense that a company’s payroll department would be on the ball when it comes to making sure everyone gets paid what they’re supposed to.

If you’re like me, when you get your paystub in the mail, you quickly make sure that it’s the same as the last one, making sure that it’s not drastically higher or lower. You don’t sit there any calculate every last thing to make sure it adds up, that’s not your job, that shouldn’t even be a thought.

Well, maybe you should. A coworker has been getting paid COLA (Cost of Living Allowance), which is basically something to help someone pay for insurance, etc if they don’t go through the company to get it.  He just recently (in the last year) got married and even more recently had a child. He changed his insurance options (because he previously didn’t have any) to cover himself and his new family. After his changes finally went through, which took about a month and a half (absolutely rediculous if you ask me), he noticed they were still paying him the full amount of COLA. He notified his manager who notified their boss (and so on and so on) until it reached someone who looked into it a bit deeper. Turns out that the coworker had been getting paid too much COLA even before he put his changes in!!

HOW DOES THAT HAPPEN?!

So, the company was kind enough (sarcasm) to let him pay the money they had paid him back over the next six months.  We’re at work today and check our paystubs online. They paid him the full amount of COLA again. WTF. So next check they’ll be taking that back, plus the amount for what he’s got to pay back anyway.

WHY IS NO ONE GETTING FIRED OVER THIS?!

What makes things worse, our medical and dental premiums have gone up. So, he’s now barely making enough to cover just his mortgage on the first paycheck. That doesn’t include any of his other bills. For the next six months he’s going to be scraping by, and why? Because someone couldn’t pay attention to their job. Granted, I make mistakes in my programming, and yes, sometimes they’re pretty bad (causing productivity drops). But I’m always right on it, to get that shit fixed! How can a company be so lax when it comes to someone’s livelyhood?

Needless to say, we’re both hunting for new jobs again. There are a lot of things that get me frustrated, even angry, but incompetance just takes the cake. No one should be in a spot where they’re doing more harm than good, and if management can’t see that, then they need to be replaced as well.

It’s not even my issue and i’m pissed off. My hope that people aren’t as stupid as I think they are has been obliterated.

The Gatekeepers

As you all know (or i hope you do), a few friends of mine have come together to join forces in the epic battle against bad video games. We’ve formed So!Soft LLC (So-Not-Soft), an independant game studio and have been working with the XNA framework to make games. Actually, lets rephrase that. So far Zach’s been doing all the programming, I’ve been handling most of the web stuff (admining our website, setting up our twitter, and working on a side project for the Frank’s Paintball Team).

So, yeah, the website is getting really close to being done. I hope they like it. I spend quite a lot of time getting the functionality to work, and Zach put in a bunch of time on the CSS (which looks amazing imo).

I’ll let you all know when the site is finished and finalized!

Alliance Changes

I haven’t made an Eve post in a while. No worries, I’m still very loyal to CCP and their very awesome game.

My corp, Legion of Black Mesa, has — since the last time I posted — left Capital Storm and has joined up with United Freemen Alliance. Many of us have moved out to 0.0 to help with the effort to claim sov, as well as make iskies 😀  Things are going a bit slower than I had hoped. Many of our players don’t really seem to be making the move out to Geminate as quickly as I personally would like them to. On top of that, people that used to be blue to us are now red, and have been pewpewing it up in our space. This makes me uncomfortable, because i don’t like shooting at friends.

On the plus side though, we’re planning on putting a tower up soon, and hopefully we’ll be able to start doing small scale corp mining ops out there. Some of that ore is really nice.

Eve Apps


 Carnes and I have been working on some webapps to help pilots with their carebearing.

Exploration

Personally I like Carnes’ tool the best, the exploration tool. It can be found here. It’s IGB only, so you’ll have to check it out in game. Basically it helps keep track of what systems have been scanned, what was found in them, and if those things have been cleared or not. This should help people save probes, so they don’t scan out a system that someone else has already cleared out. The only downside to this is that the IGB is extremely slow. But i guess if you’re waiting three minutes for a scan, the IGB’s slowness isn’t that big of a deal.

Mining Shares

I wrote a quick mining share calculator, here. Basically you choose your region, update the prices for it (it’s a manual input right now — I use the average prices for each mineral for the day; from the market history tab). Once that’s done you can put in the mineral yields from each mineral type, choose how many shares you want, check if there’s going to be a corporate share added (for corp ops, or whatever), and click calculate. The results will be shown as an ISK amount and how many of each mineral. I’m still working on getting it to work in the IGB, but it’s a bit more complicated than I thought.

Code Monkey

So, as i sit here staring at lines of PHP, I take a glance to my left and what do I see? My boss falling asleep at the keyboard! Oh, maybe he had a late night last night? Maybe he’s just tired this morning? But this isn’t a new thing, it’s been daily for the last month or so.

So being a code monkey, like many of us out there, I take this as an opportunity to amuse myself.

OK. On to other things that don’t deal with the day job. Last month (or last year, har har) So!Soft release it’s first game (Retension) on Xbox Live Community Games. After going through Playtest and Review, the game was finally put up on the market place! Very exciting for us! We’re not sure what happened, but somewhere between Review and appearing on the Marketplace, something broke. Since we don’t deal with that part of the system, we can only assume that something in the XNA framework broke the game. We’ve been assured that the XNA team is working on the situation, but as it’s still the holiday season, i’m sure it’ll be a while. Once everyone is back to work (and snowstorms stop hitting the Seattle area), our issue will be fixed. Even though the game is broken, we’ve had some good reviews from actual users. And we’re not dead last in the rankings! Last time Zach checked, we were 77 out of 100. Not bad for a broken game if I say so myself.

Now it’s the new year, 2008 seems to have flown by. I guess that’s what they call “Life happening to you”. In February I’ll have been at this job for two years. I don’t think I’ve worked anywhere that long. This is also my first non-minimum wage job. It’s not bad here. I could definitely be in a place much worse.  The pay is decent, I’ve gotten to know a lot of people, I get along with pretty much everyone, and those I don’t get along with, I tolerate. So, like I said, things <i>could</i> be worse.

Wow, nothing breaks your concentration like when your music changes from Asian Kung-Fu Generation to Iron & Wine. I seriously think my brain skipped a cycle.

Oracle and PHP

So a few weeks ago i talked about how confusing Oracle and its’ clients can be. While i still think the lack of simple documentation, and confusing download layout are very annoying, I’ve begun to understand how things work. Well.. kind of. And by “kind of”, I totally mean, i’m still pretty lost. At least now i have a dim candle lighting the dark cavern I’m in.

I’m going to go step by step on how I got my WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) Stack to also incorporate Oracle support. I’m assuming you already have a properly working Apache Webserver running with PHP enabled.

PHP and the Oracle: A layman’s story

1) Uninstall any existing copy of the Oracle Client, unless it’s needed for other functionality. (We had an Oracle 9i Client at work, which was installed on many of the machines, but wasn’t needed in this case, and i couldn’t find any documentation online to get it to work with PHP…)

2) Install the Instant Client provided at the Oracle site. Make sure to choose the proper options, like your architecture, and whatever client you wish; i used ‘Instant Client Package – Basic’ — because it stated it had all the required files for OCI connections, which is what i was using for my Oracle<->Webserver calls.

3) Edit your PATH Environment Variable. Add the directory to where you installed your instant client to the end. For Example, I installed to C:\oracle\instant_client, so i added ‘;C:\oracle\instant_client’ — note the preceding ‘;’, this is needed if the end of your PATH already doesn’t have it. It’s the delimiter for the different directories added to your path.

You only need to add the main directory to which you installed, the php_oci extension will look for the dll’s in that main directory. Also make sure you don’t have the trailing ‘\’ at the end. Depending on your windows installation it might not like that… — Windows can be so picky when it want.. 🙁

4) Open your php.ini file and uncomment the line ‘;extension=php_oci8.dll’ — uncomment means take off the ‘;’ before the ‘extension=’.

5) Create a phpinfo file. Something simple like this will work.

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Once you’ve created the file and placed it on your webserver, browse to it. Scroll through, if it’s properly set up, you should see a category called “oci8”.  If not, make sure that anywhere where PATH is referenced, it shows your updated PATH — with your Instant Client Directory added. If it’s not there you may need to restart your Windows server. I was having issues with my PATH properly updating and was forced to do this.

Setup should be complete now.  Next is testing.

6) Try to connect to your Oracle server. I personally use the OCI. Something like this should work:

<?php
$user = "username";
$pw = "password";
$db = "(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS_LIST = (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = your.host.domain)(PORT = 1521)))(CONNECT_DATA=(SID=yourSID)))";
$conn = ocilogon($user,$pw,$db);
?>

You don’t need a TNSNAMES.ORA, but can use one (as far as i know). To use one just create the file in the root of the instant client installation.
If you don’t get a fatal error you should be good to go now. You now have the functionality to connect to Oracle databases. I’d love to hear how others have done this. Maybe there’s a better way to do it than what i did.

Some good resources for PHP and Oracle:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/oracle_php_cookbook/index.html
http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/PHP_FAQ

Christmas Eve at the Parents

Nothing says Christmas Eve like sitting in the living room opening one present under the tree, watching TV, drinking beer, and blogging. We went to Kansai to chow-down on some delicious sushi. omnomnomnom tbh. The dogs are all wound up because of all the snacks and wrapped presents (they think it’s all for them to try and eat and play with).

btw, i love the Science Channel. It’s awesome. It’s totally not annoying like what’s on all the other channels with their “Christmas Cheer shows”.

I think i’m gonna go play some Left 4 Dead with Nick.

AJAX, you’re so confusing!!

So, i’ve been building a website for this Paintball team. They seem to do pretty well in tournaments and from what I’ve been told they already have possible sponsors lining up. They want their site ready as soon as possible, but at the same time I don’t want to give them garbage. I want to be able to give them quality software. It’s hard to do sometimes when I’m not even getting paid for it. The deal is we make them a website, and we get free advertising through them, kind of like a sponsorship. But AJAX is being a pain, so it’s easier to just go play eve instead of working..

Maybe i’ll go do that now..

I got the log in system working, so i might as well take a break.. my brain hurts

What’s new in WordPress 2.7

I’m sure that a lot of people have already blogged about this, but i thought i’d put my two cents in. So far i haven’t really messed with a lot of the new features in WP 2.7, but i’m getting around to it. As of now, i’m very happy with the new design and the drag ability of all the widgets. For those of you that use WordPress, i’d say check out this vid.