The Daily Parker

I posted too soon about the new Webcam. It worked great until I logged off and back on again. Then it stopped working. The problem appears to be with the drivers on the host computer.

I'll write more later. I've given up an hour of my life because of this stupid thing. I sincerely hope I'll have the cam working in the next few minutes.

Update, 17:26 UTC: It wasn't the camera. It was (a) a Belkin USB extension cord or (b) Windows 2000 Server. One of the two did not play well with the Webcam. I can't believe how long this simple thing has taken me.

Update, 17:44 UTC: OK. Got the camera working (temporarily) on an old Windows XP box. Also got the Lab Cam (below) running, but I haven't given it a home on the Website yet. That will have to come later. Right now, I have a server to build for a client.

And, apparently, a parking ticket. Dang.

The Lab Cam (live image, updated every 5 minutes):

After much searching, and more than one total Webcam collapse, I've finally found the perfect Webcam. It has numerous features, like its own stand, that will make the Inner Drive Technology Webcam even more fun and enjoyable.

The old cam will go into the Inner Drive Technology Comprehensive Testing Facility tomorrow or Monday. The image will look nothing like this one, which I include for Anne's benefit:

More when I get back from my client visit.

No real entry today and no entry at all yesterday because I was helping my mom move. However, all of the pieces of the Inner Drive Technology Comprehensive Testing Facility are in, so we should complete construction tomorrow morning or, possibly, on Saturday. Photos will follow.

The Inner Drive Technology Testing Lab at IDT World Headquarters is nearly complete. Today we have a fully-functional, multi-computer testing lab. We'll be moving some computers around probably next week, and we expect to add a chair or two. We may also put some maps up on the wall, because we love maps.

Here's the nascent facility:

The saga of the Webcam continues. At least it's back on its perch.

Here's what I found when I got to my office a few minutes ago:

And here is what the Inner Drive Webcam saw as it teetered, tottered, and tumbled to the floor of the office. At 5:53pm Central time, all was fine:

Then, suddenly, the mounting began to give way. The first shock came at 5:54; the second, at 5:57:

The mounting held for a while; here are shots at 6:15 and 6:30:

The end, when it came at 6:33, came swiftly. A jolt at 6:31, another at 6:32, then at 6:33, blackness:

Until, bleary eyed and stunned, it woke to a changed world at 7:30 the next morning. The final shot is 9:00am, about the time I discovered the horror of the fallen Webcam:

But, gentle readers, the Webcam is back up. At this writing, here is the image, in all its properly-mounted glory:

(Your guess is as good as mine what it sees tomorrow morning.)

Sigh.

Astute readers will gather from the preceding post that I am out of the office for a couple of days. And pessimists will agree that, if something were going to go wrong in the office, it would go wrong the day I left. Pessimists: rejoice! The Inner Drive Webcam has decided to add a new page to its history:

Now, as nearly as I can figure it, you're looking there at the back end of the computer that hosts the camera (highlighted below), upside-down. I'll have to review the archives on Saturday to figure out exactly when this happened. And I'll have to review the method I'm using to secure it to the window.

For a couple of years, Inner Drive has had a webcam pointing out the window. We've moved twice since the webcam first went online. From time to time, we've adjusted the webcam slightly. And, every so often, the webcam adjusts itself.

For example, the first cam image is from when we left the office last night, and the second from when I woke up this morning:

(The images are displayed at half-size, but you can view them at full-size by saving them from your browser. You'll notice that they have timestamps, which are in Universal time.)

The poor webcam was lying on the floor of the office covered by the box upon which it had previously sat. See how it sits precariously in this photo? Imagine it now in a heap under the chair by the window.

So, since we had to move it anyway, we decided to rotate it south 90 degrees, to this angle:

For those interested in history, here is what the image looked like yesterday during the day, and at 6, 12, and 18 months ago, respectively:

And finally, here is what the Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters looked like in October 2004 and October 2003:

(Yes, the image on the right is of my living room.)

Note: I didn't realize when I started this post that today is the second anniversary of the Webcam. As a special bonus, here is the very first Inner Drive Cam picture ever, from 17 December 2003 at 1:28 pm CST (19:28 UTC):

I've finally added an explanation of Evolutionary Delivery to my corporate site. I wrote this as part of a proposal to a client in September, and for reasons that passeth understanding, I neglected to publish it online.

By the way, I write software for a living, so if you're reading this and realize you need a small, agile development team for a .NET project, send us a message.

A code smell happens when a piece of software code looks like there might be something wrong with it, but you can't quite tell what. You use the smell to figure out where the bad code is hiding. Martin Fowler has devotes an entire chapter of Refactoring to code smells.

Here is an example, from a class that returns configuration information:

public string Read() { ... }

public double ReadD() { ... }

public int ReadN() { ... }

public string ReadString() { ... }

What's wrong with this code? Several things:

1. It does the same thing four times.
2. Having two similar methods that appear to return exactly the same data raises a red flag, because you don't know from looking at them why they differ but you feel like they differ for a reason.
3. Despite the code's appearance, it actually offers no guarantee that the data requested will be of the correct type, only that the data will have a particular type.
4. if some random piece of code requires a data type it doesn't support, you'll have to add yet another method to the class, or change the returned data to suit what you need, neither of which makes a lot of sense.

This code came from an ancient, functional-procedural outlook in which the type of data returned actually matters. Object-oriented design cares more about what the data represents. In other words, this code is like multiple different filler tubes on your car, one for each grade of gasoline.

There's more. A little farther on, we find these methods:

public int ReadArray(string, ref String[]) { ... }

public int ReadArray(string, ref int[]) { ... }

public int ReadIntArray(string, ref ArrayList) { ... }
	

In all, there are 14 "Readtype" methods on this class, some that return the data sought, others that return a status indication and pass the data back through a by ref parameter.

And, of course, since this is in a fundamental class, none of these methods has fewer than 5 references to it in the application, and some (like ReadN) have 34, making refactoring unusually difficult. I'll post again when I figure out how I'm going to do that.

Addendum to my previous reading list.

I'm now reading Microsoft's Framework Design Guidelines, written by the guys who wrote the .NET Framework.

Add this to my list of recommended books.