Tired of the soul-sucking grey background in the VS2012 "Dark" theme? I've created an alternative which changes most of the gray to black.

If you're trying to get more than two operating systems (or more partitions, like a shared data drive) on your Bootcamp'd Mac, have a look at my writeup here.

November - 1 week in the UK
January - 2 weeks in the UK, 3 days in Germany
February - 6 days in Breckenridge and Vail (Skiing and snowboarding - this one was actually fun despite the spectacular cartwheel I pulled 200 feet from the lift on my last run [edit: broke a rib during said cartwheel])
March - two weeks in the UK, three days in Germany.

The frequent flyer miles are nice, but I'm starting to feel like a part-time father and husband.

In other news:

While I still feel that MonoGame is a great platform, I've found it too limiting for some of the display wall work I'm doing at the university. The initial effort seems to have missed the idea that one might require multiple open game windows within a single process. Some things that are static should be [ThreadStatic], which is a big problem. The fact that the last three pulls have resulted in broken builds - that is, *compilation* errors(!) - is also causing me to lose faith in the project. (In their defense, I'm pulling from a dev branch, not production). And, since the team is aiming for the ability to generate GL and DirectX shaders from a single source without using CG, a lot of the "newer" features like hull and compute shaders aren't available without some serious hacking. I've found that trying to correct these things in my own branch removes a lot of the benefit of using MonoGame.

So, I've started working directly with OpenTK. Despite being a bit dated - there are a few OpenGL 4+ functions that aren't included in the wrapper - it's a very solid platform (and is used by MonoGame and other projects as the underlying graphics API on OSX, Linux, and some embedded systems). I've managed to get my entity/component/system engine running on OpenTK after a few days effort, which is pretty quick considering that I had very little direct GL experience beforehand.

Semi-major complaint: OSX Mountain Lion apparently still only supports OpenGL 2.1. Some 3.3 features are available, but I'm unable to compile any GLSL shaders with a #version higher than 120. "The world's most advanced operating system" - and, the more I use it, the more I have to agree (despite being a die-hard Microsoft fan for many years now) - is using a GL version that is really, really ancient. So much for cross-platform compute shaders until I figure out a hack.

What. The. Hell.

[Edit: I've had some success with compiling the shaders under Windows 7 with OpenTK on the same machine, retrieving the binary from GL, saving it, then loading said binary under OSX. This seems pretty fragile, and probably has no hope of working when moving between machines with different graphics chipsets, but has solved the problem for dev purposes since this app is running in a controlled environment and doesn't have to work on anything outside of my test environment]

And, just for cuteness, here's a pic of me and Walt:

















Dave

Last Friday, I went to my doctor with some weird issues:

• Increasingly-frequent lower-leg cramps
• Thirsty ALL the time. (Yes, really. I was getting up at 4AM to drink two bottles of water or more.)
• Frequent urination
• Blurred vision

I thought that maybe my eyeglass prescription had changed, I needed to eat some bananas and I was dehydrated, but since all of this started at the same time it seemed wise to get checked out.

I stopped to see Dr. Doug on my way to work on Friday, thinking I'd have a quick chat, maybe get a prescription, then head to the office. Instead, after talking for five minutes, he said, "That's diabetes."

A urine test revealed that there was more sugar in my urine than, well, urine.

The doc sent me to the ER. They used one of those blood sugar testers that we've all seen to get a more accurate glucose reading. The monitor started emitting smoke and screaming (ala R2-D2) and reported a friendly "Out of range" error.

Uh, oh.

More blood taken and sent to the lab. 30 minutes later the results came back: 741 dg/ml.

That's high. Like, really, really, high. One of the nurses said, "I'm not sure how you're even walking and talking right now."

So, I got to spend the night in the hospital getting insulin shots every four hours, until they got the glucose back down to a sane(r) 150 dg/ml. Still a little high, but not much more than you'd see in a non-diabetic that was eating a lot of sugar. (Such as green beans, bread, pasta.)

Now I take an insulin shot every night before bed, and some medication in the morning before breakfast. I have to check my blood sugar levels several times a day. There's a chance I'll be able to go off of the insulin eventually if I eat right and keep things under control.

After a week of living with this, I've found that diet drinks and sugar-free stuff are actually pretty good after having been off of real sugar for a week. (Before, diet stuff or anything with artificial sweetener had a weird after taste.)

The biggest problem is finding things for lunch that I can eat. Fast food is completely out. Most real restaurants don't have anything I can eat. Fortunately I love steak and sushi, but a lot of restaurants use marinade that is high in sugar and/or carbs, and it's pretty expensive.

So, this sucks.

I'm pretty attached to my vision and legs. I'd like to live past 50 and see my kids grow up.

And, apparently I'm now far-sighted. I drove to work this morning without my glasses because they made everything blurry.

Weird.

If you don't know me, I should put this in context. I'm 36 years old, 5'8" tall, and weigh about 155 lbs. I've always eaten whatever I wanted and never really had a problem with weight. I lead a reasonably active life style. Whenever I'm in a walking city (London, Cambridge, Munich) for more than a few days, I lose a few pounds just from walking, and have to wear a belt when I get back home. In short, I'm not what people typically think of when they hear "diabetic."

And, although this has been an unpleasant curve ball, I'm really glad that it was diagnosed. I could have wound up dead or in a coma. There are a lot more things I want to do with my life; I'm glad I'll get the chance.

 

 

 

 

Just a random snippet that I've found useful. Not complex, but I've seen a few questions floating about, so here it is (attachment).

Generic hierarchy C# example source

Sitefinity is having issues hosting files with a .cs extension, so I've renamed it to .txt.

 

 

I'm back on the road for work this week. I left DFW Saturday afternoon, made it to Cambridge Sunday morning and checked into the apartment, caught 15E-1 hours of sleep, and got to work.

I'll be here for the remainder of the week, then off to the Munich office for the first part of next week.

England is actually pretty nice. (I'd say "the UK" but, not having seen Scottland or any part of Ireland other than the Dublin airport, it seems a bit presumptious.) The weather kind of sucks, but you can get some really great Indian and Chinese food here.

Yesterday, I rode the public bus for the first time in ~7 trips. It's so easy to walk everywhere here that, even if something is 1.5 miles / 20 minutes away, it's almost a crime to pay for a bus.  The office is nice, the team is great - made up of 1 American, 1 Bulgarian, 1 French(an?), one Italian, and three Brits. Hooray, international cooperation.

The kids are doing great. Wyatt started speech therapy last week and seems to really like his therapist. Walt smiles a lot and is starting to eat semi-solid food. Wyatt is getting a little more interested in his little brother as time goes on. Maybe one day they'll keep each other entertained, preferably without the use of explosives.

I'm making more thesis progress, but I still have a ways to go. Last week, I got tapped to build a volume renderer for visualizing jet engine airflow data on our Big Display Wall at SMU.

Too. Much. Fun.

It turns out that no one is really sure why jet turbines are loud. The combustion and fan make a lot of noise, but not enough to be heard on the ground when the plane is in flight. The group I'm working with is analyzing waves generated by the collision of fast-moving air exiting the turbine with slower-moving air that surrounds the plane, and the pressure (ie, sound) waves that result, to see if they live long enough to account for the noise. Of course, analyzing terrabytes of physical simulation data is exceedingly difficult - determining if a girl is hot by reading Matrix kanji is probably easier - so they'd like to be able to tweak the simulation and see the effects real-time.

New words I've learned: vorticity and dilatation. (I'm reasonably certain the "dilatation" is NOT supposed to be "dilation," as the math geeks I'm working with insist on it.)

Given my experience implementing FDTD on hetereogenous devices distributed between network nodes, and between compute devices (GPU, CPU, Cell, etc.) I seem to be semi-uniquely qualified to handle this. I'm using C# with MonoGame for the visualization and data processing work, combined with some OpenCL for the heavy lifting. This is almost as cool as my Asteroids game (test app! Not trying to infringe on Atari or whoever made the orignal) which now runs on Win7, OSX, iOS and Linux, from a single code base.

Gotta love Mono.

Can't wait to get home to my family. Travel was a lot more fun when I was single.

The enhanced functionality that VS2012 offers - integrated PIX and enhanced GPU capabilities are at the top of my list - barely makes it worthwhile to suffer the abominable color schemes - both of them, but the one thing I really can't stand is THAT THE MENUS YELL AT YOU.

APPARENTLY, THE ENTIRE VS 2012 UI DESIGN TEAM FORGOT THAT USING ALL CAPS IMPLIES RAISED VOICES, ANGER OR A GENERAL LACK OF ETIQUETTE. IT'S FREAKING ANNOYING.

Luckily, I found this post which describes how to disable the uppercase menu style with a registry tweak.

Here's the result:

 

 

For your convenience, here's a PowerShell script that sets everything.

VS2012FixCapitalMenus

Last Tuesday, Audrey and I welcomed our newest addition to the family. Walter Alan, 7lbs 4oz.

Completely. Uneventful. Delivery.

After the delivery debacle with Wyatt three years ago, I think we were both expecting something to go wrong. Wyatt had GBS, pneumonia, meconium aspiration, and a host of other problems, mostly due to a poorly-informed choice of "health care" providers on our part.

People: hospitals, and all the qualified, highly trained personnel and beeping machines they contain, are there for a reason. Go there. The "birth experience" may be important to expectant mothers, but I can't believe that any intellegent person would put their own comfort and anxiety ahead of having the best possible chance of delivering a healthy child. When something goes wrong in a home birth, you're pretty much screwed. The child can die, the mother can die, and all of that can happen so fast it defies reason.

Simple example: midwives check the baby's heartbeat every few minutes using a stethoscope or, if you're lucky, a more sensitive instrument. I've yet to speak to a person who said that their midwife used an always-on, strapped-to-the-mom heart monitor.

Without constant heart rate monitoring, Wyatt would be dead.

If we had continued past the 30 hour mark at home (the midwife told us 24 was stopping point when it was time to go to a hospital, then changed her stance/ignored her own rules when we hit that point), Wyatt would be dead, and probably Audrey along with him.

If Wyatt had been born anywhere that wasn't a five minute(!) walk for the specialist that got him breathing again, he would be dead.

If we hadn't had access to Careflight, which got him to the NICU across town in a very short time, he would most likely be dead.

As it is, Wyatt has some developmental delays, permanent brain damage (we have pictures - lots of, as in six MRIs over the past three years), and a few other small issues but, somehow, despite our recklessness in choosing and trusting what turned out to be an incompetent midwife, he's doing pretty well. We can work around the difficulties he's having.

It could have been so much worse.

So, when Walt arrived without much ceremony - I think something from Death Cab was playing when he finally appeared - I spent about a day just waiting for the other shoe to drop. And, it hasn't. He's 10 days old today, and doing perfectly well.

We've had something like 15 ultrasounds over the past nine months. Our OB was amazing, and made a point of getting to know us, our history and situation, and tailoring her approach/treatment for us based on that. We never felt rushed, ignored or discounted.

We spent more time with our OB in the first visit then we did with the midwife in the entire 9 months before the delivery.

I'll finish this up later, but the moral of the story is: don't keep trying to live in the 12th century, especially where the health of your child is concerned. It might work out, but when it doesn't, it really doesn't. There's not much room between "healthy baby" and funeral planning.

Why risk it?

I finally found time to shove the web server and NAS into the server/AV closet at the new house. I managed to commandeer a small (2.5'x2.5'x8') closet in the middle of the house for the server rack. After spending days running CAT5, speaker wire, HDMI and coax, everything appears to be working pretty well. I installed a small vent over the door to open up some air flow between the closet and the hallway which is (so far) keeping the closet at around 78-80F. I'd rather keep it closer to the ambient temp in the house (~73F) but it's not bad for $12.00 worth of parts from Home Depot. Yay, convection.

Despite some upload speed issues with Verizon FiOS (their agents tell me that they are not responsible for upload speeds, and can't tell me why I'm paying for 35Mbps up/down if that's the case), everything appears to be working well.

For some reason, my Sitefintiy data config file (which contains connection strings, etc.) went missing during the move. I checked in the boxes that are still in the other house with no success.

I managed to recreate the admittedly-short config file by hand and, voila, everything appears to be working correctly.

Wyatt is really enjoying the new back yard (the house is on a solid acre) which will hopefully come in handy as he gets used to sharing us with his soon-to-arrive little brother.

After a month or so with my 15" Macbook Pro, I have to agree with my friend Allen in that it's about the best Windows machine I've ever used.

(OSX is also growing on me, but that's another story.)

The only real issue I've had running Win7 on this machine is heat. Under light load, I've seen the CPU top 82C (179 Fahrenheit according to google. C*9/5+32 agrees, as well).

I think this is mostly due to the Mac's lack of support, under Bootcamp, for switchable graphics. OSX will switch between the discrete AMD GPU and the integrated Intel part on demand, resulting in dramatically increased battery life and heat management. The Apple-provided drivers for Windows don't take advantage of this, despite the fact that the hardware is perfectly capable and every other high-end laptop on the market performs this same switching under Windows.

I can't help with the GPU switching, but there is help for the heat issue.

Lubbo's Fan Control application (free, open source) is a Windows utility that gives you full control over the system fans. By cranking all of the fans in my MBP to 6000 RPM, I've seen CPU temps drop by 20C under heavy load.

It's really loud, but with enough background noise - coworkers on the phone, Pandora, etc. - it's not that noticable. The utility also lets you set temp ranges and min/max fan speeds, so you don't have to keep everything running at max speed all of the time.