I’ve mostly got the pieces of SQL DDL together that I need to define the tables for my sandbox project to manage file archiving. Hit this weekend after a tiring week and let myself get distracted.
I had bought an Intel NUC 6i5 to replace my ‘test target’ machine that has been randomly hanging and rebooting lately. The NUC setup and OS install went well except for the NIC driver. Wireless worked perfectly but the driver for the gigabit NIC either wouldn’t see the controller (Intel driver install packages) or saw the controller but then timed out before completing. As this was on a clean Windows install with nothing present except for the Intel driver packages I’m getting a replacement from Amazon. Should arrive today…hoping all goes smoothly as the NUCs are very nice little machines.
I let myself get distracted by some articles on Clojure and then wandered down into Scheme and Common Lisp. The various lisp dialects have always had a bit of allure to them as hugely expressive languages with very simple syntax. Nothing that I’m likely to every use professionally (though you never know) but cool toys to play with.
Clojure seems to be the closest to mainstream relevance with its JVM hosting and functional programming focus. Not sure I’ll do much more than poke at these but who knows.
Trying to get aimed back at DDL for the tables I need and then start piecing together C# code and native PInvoke stuff to get me where I need to go. Would be nice to be able to thumbnail canon raw files and PDFs (even better to get at metadata) but that will come later. Expecting that to involve serious native code execution as most of the SDKs for such things are in C or C++.
The things you run into as you’re getting serious with sandbox coding in a new language… I was setting up some pieces for the toy program I’m building (semi-smart de-dup tool with MySQL back end for archive management). After reinstalling Visual Studio 2015 to clear up an issue with creating native DLLs I’ve started framing out the pieces.
I was intending to build this as a console executable with a managed DLL for the bulk of the operational code and a native DLL for things that need interop (currently mostly VSN access for optical media and external drives). As I was laying out the projects I noticed that there was no option for static library creation in the (long) list of project types.
This surprised me a bit as I’ve found it helpful to be able to package code in static libraries while binding the resultant code as a single unit (dll or exe) for distribution. From what I’ve been able to determine with a little google searching it looks as if the managed world only supports dynamic library binding. Makes a bit of sense as the metadata issues could become complex with the same code bound into multiple assemblies.
It is funny that the common suggested solution for cases where code needed to be bound into multiple dlls or exes was to revert back to the really bad old days and just copy the source (or link to source in other projects which seems problematic in a real environment). Seems as if the managed environment assumes that non-trivial projects will consist of a relatively large number of dlls that all get copied from place to place during installs. I’ll probably poke around to see if there’s a .NET equivalent to jar/war packaging…I’d think there ought to be to simplify deployment.
Slightly frustrating moment…but working through it.
Starting to put together some sandbox code to do file de-duplication scans and some archive management. Found that the visual studio install on my main dev machine here won’t run the wizard that creates native Win32 dll projects. This works as expected on another machine so I’m running a repair to see what happens. Worst case I guess I just reinstall visual studio. Frustrating as this should be one of the simpler things that VS does.
Looking at interop (PInvoke currently) and finding that I have my very old .NET and COM Interoperability book by Nathan and a few notes in more general volumes that are much newer. Particularly disappointing as the APress book on C# 6.0 doesn’t seem to touch interop at all. Not a big deal but a bit disappointing…I’m guessing that interop has evolved somewhat since 2002…
as a place to make sandbox projects broadly available.
GIT is my preferred sandbox source code control system these days. Github provides wide visibility and the potential for collaboration should anything grow beyond the sandbox.
In the past I’ve just kept them local with no sharing. As I’m trying to make more of who I am and what I can do visible on the web, adding any interesting sandbox code I create to <a href=”https://github.com/”>Github </a> is the most effective way I have of getting this done.
So far there isn’t anything stored up there, but over the next few weeks I’m expecting to get some things rolling.
Running the tests to verify that things worked properly…so far looking good. Got a firewall exception and while I ok’d it, looks like the related test may have failed. At the moment I’m primarily interested in pretty simple stuff so this may be ok. Continue reading …and by morning the OpenSSL build is done→
Got to look into some hashing for work stuff and I really do want to get rolling on some file management tools for home (too many photos and other bits lying around and not sure which are archived) and OpenSSL meets both needs.
Going to pull it to windows and play a bit. I’ve messed with it a bit in the past, but that was aimed at implementing TLS on an HTTP connection and several years back. Handy library and worth keeping handy on the shelf.
Finally located my OpenSSL book on the shelf so that helps 🙂
Some interesting OpenSSL information at feisty duck (thought they have one feisty duck while I have nine crows 🙂 ).
I’ve linked my blogs to social media using (from JetPack I think) an automated tool that generates entries when a blog post is published. This is a bit experimental and if it doesn’t work well, I’ll disconnect again.
I’ve set things up so my personal blog tweets and posts to facebook while my career blog (here) tweets and posts to linked in.
Seems as if this should work as I really shouldn’t have anything on my career related site that isn’t appropriate to LinkedIn and anything posted to my personal blog should get sent out to my friends on facebook. I would like to find a way to control which posts get pushed, but that will have to wait for now.
I spent last weekend getting backup set up for the site after a scare that had me thinking I’d lost the blog side of the site. Backups now are looking good and appear to be running well. I still need to load XAMPP on my linux box and verify that I can restore the sites, but I’m pretty comfortable that will work.
I’m not sure what is on my agenda next in terms of technical projects but here’s a loosely form list in no particular order:
I’ve been putting off fixing the ninecrows.com landing page because things have been busy. At this point I’m trying to put content up here and keep the site interesting and thus I’m looking at fixing the landing page and pulling the whole site together.
It looks as if I can use mod-rewrite to point http://ninecrows.com/ to a static page wordpress instance that then provides hand-offs to the blog areas. At the moment I have two, one for career/technical information (here) and another for all other personal items
that has been randomly hanging and rebooting lately. The NUC setup and OS install went well except for the NIC driver. Wireless worked perfectly but the driver for the gigabit NIC either wouldn’t see the controller (Intel driver install packages) or saw the controller but then timed out before completing. As this was on a clean Windows install with nothing present except for the Intel driver 
packages I’m getting a replacement from Amazon. Should arrive today…hoping all goes smoothly as the NUCs are very nice little machines.