There is so much stuff out there that I have no idea exists. Anyone
else know that there’s a program that come with Windows called
“IEXPRESS.EXE” that basically makes installers? Anyone know you could
use this thing to convert a .BAT or .VBS to an
.EXE?
I
love my two cats, but the little Siamese-tabby mix Jack is pretty
aggressive and he’s been chasing my other cat Xev around a lot,
particularly in the last, oh, month or so.
Yeah, you’d never guess that from the picture, right?
Okay, so a couple of weeks back, it’s business as usual - Xev is yowling
because Jack is riding her back around the house. (Yes, he’s fixed.
They both are. He’s just being an asshole.) They make a mad dash out
from behind the couch and…
SLAM!
I turn to see that one of the stands with one of my Bose Acoustimass
16
cubes has been knocked over and the two cubes that make up the speaker
have come apart from each other at the part where they swivel.
Looking at the mechanism that was exposed, it looks like the thing
literally just snaps together. Unfortunately, the way it snaps together
is so tight and fits together in just such a way that there’s really no
way you can just snap it back together. I can see that the assembly of
the two cubes actually happens pretty early in the manufacturing process
because it looks like the two cubes would need to be snapped together
before the speaker bits got inserted. The speakers proper still work,
the cubes just aren’t attached anymore.
I tried everything short of actually disassembling the damn thing, but
it was no use. I ended up taking it to a repair shop who specializes in
this sort of thing and it turns out the speakers aren’t field
serviceable. Of course they’re not. Instead, they have to order me a
replacement, and that’s going to cost me - wait for it - $151.
That’s one-hundred-and-fifty-one American dollars. That’s in addition
to the $25 I already paid them to look at the thing for me (some of
that is credited toward the total cost of the speaker, bringing it
down to $151).
I started working on converting
CR_Documentor
over to use XSLT for its documentation transformations this morning and
soon realized that it may not be that easy. The goal was to be able to
just take the XSLT from the various documentation generation engines
(NDoc, Sandcastle) and as fixes or changes happened, “plug in” the new
XSLT and have the preview ready to go.
Not so much.
I tried a simple test using the NDoc XSLT and it turns out that I have a
few stumbling blocks.
The input XML is complex. The format NDoc expects the XML to be
in prior to executing the transformation is pretty complex. That’s
not really a problem in a post-build timeframe where you’re not
looking for real-time changes, but just creating the correct XML
hierarchy is a pretty big task, let alone then getting it through
the transform engine.
Everything is relational. There are a lot of things in the NDoc
XSLT that assume, for example, that you’ve got everything you need
to document all in one file, so there are relational things going
on. For example, when you generate the documentation for a method,
any cross-reference links you have are also generated… which runs
through connecting actual URLs to HTML files and setting up links
and everything. To avoid setting up bad links, the XML that’s
generated gets heavily pre-processed. Again, not something that can
readily happen real-time.
Much is assumed to be in the filesystem. Temporary files, the
XSLT, images, script… there’s a lot that the XSLT assumes is in
specific spots in the filesystem, which means that I couldn’t use
the stylesheets as-is anyway; I’d have to heavily massage it to get
it where I want it to be.
Unfortunately, a lot of this sort of means using XSLT directly is a
non-starter. Even if I could get past the fact that I’d be doing almost
as much work creating the input XML as I’m doing right now to generate
the whole preview, the requirement for all the relational things and the
fact there’s so much in the filesystem anyway means I’m probably better
off just hard-coding the transformation the way I’ve been doing, as lame
as that is.
I won’t lie; it doesn’t increase my desire to work on the project. I
like it, and I really wish I could just release it to the community
open-source style, but since I can’t, I’m sort of stuck. Motivationally
challenged, shall we say.
Well, I guess my next step is to look for opportunities to refactor it
and make the code at least a little easier to maintain and update.
Maybe that will make it easier to implement new rendering views.
Going through the process of being
acquiredtwice
in the last few months, I’m getting pretty used to how the information
dissemination process works. In a nutshell, there really isn’t any.
From one point of view, I get it - there’s a lot to coordinate, and
legal requirements dictate that certain things can’t be shared until
certain times and so on. I get it. I get it so much I’m really tired
of people reminding me about it because they think I don’t get it. I
promise. I get it.
The other side - the side I seem to always be on is “The Dark Side.”
Not like the Dark Side of the
Force, more
like “people who are in the dark about any details about what’s going
on.” This is actually the majority of the people most of the time, and
regardless of how “transparent” communications are supposed to be,
management (the people who “know stuff”) generally seems to believe that
“more communication is better,” even if there isn’t actually anything to
communicate.
If you haven’t been through this process, I thought I’d help you out by
throwing together a little Q&A simulator so you know what this is like.
First, imagine you’ve been notified of a very important all-hands
meeting. It’s mandatory. You must attend. Your very life depends on
it.
You get to the meeting, and the Person In Charge says, basically, “Hey,
folks, we’ve been acquired. We figured this was the best move for the
company. Any questions?”
Now’s the time you get to ask all the questions you might have. Try
them out in my handy simulator:
Ask your question about the acquisition of the company:
Answer:
…and there you have it.
Now go to three or four of these in close succession - one for the whole
company, one for your division, one for your group within the
division… you get the idea. Congratulations! You’ve been through the
acquisition experience.