Since I began riding motorcycles I haven’t really thought much about the noise levels accumulated inside the helmet. I guess I’ve always thought that if everyone else can do it I can too. But then one day I realized that the small amount of tinnitus that I already have was being more and more easily provoked by the noise in my helmet. That’s when I started riding with ear plugs and the more I asked around among other bikers it turns out that quite a few of them also wear varying types of ear protection.

Given that my ear canals are on the small side I’ve had troubles finding protection that won’t make my ear canals hurt like h**l after a while (especially inside a helmet). After some research I found a company (EARfoon – Swedish site) which will make molded forms of your ear and produce custom made ear plugs which they then fit with filters specifically made for bikers. About three weeks ago I had my molds made and now they’ve arrived at the shop. Going to pick them up at 11 – happiness! =)

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Oh my, this is some good stuff I’ve gotten my hands on! They fit like a glove on the first try and no more turbulence induced noise in my ears. I’m still able to hear people talk with the plugs in (although at a slightly lower volume) and the engine is still slightly hearable. Sure, you can feel that you’ve got something in your ears, but it’s not nearly as painful as regular plugs. Plus that these plugs won’t move around in your ears (and thus causing noise/acoustic pressure) as the helmet moves on your head (due to road conditions and so forth). Given the fact that these will allow me to keep my hearing even though I’m riding bikes this might be the best investment in the motorcycle equipment department for a long time to come!

If you care for your hearing even the slightest bit – get a set of these!

So, it’s been a while since I mangled out some information using this here fine blog. There are perfectly valid reasons for it being so, like me getting a motorcycle drivers license. And getting a motorcycle as well. =)

These things make you value the time when the sun shines a wee bit more than you might usually do. I got my license the 1st of July and I got the bike the 6th of July and since then I’ve driven a bit more than 5000 km. It’ll still be some time before I hit the 5000 miles line, but until then I can always think about being the man that falls down at your door.

The bike I’ve got is a black 2010 Yamaha XJ6, the naked version with ABS (ABS was an absolute requirement when looking for a bike).

During these 5000 km I’ve already managed to get a screw in the rear tire. There seems to be something with me, vehicles and getting wheels punctured by screws within the first 30 days of ownership. For those of you not in the know, the exact same thing happened with my car less than a month after I had bought it. The funny thing is that I had a conversation with my dad before getting the car about how usual (or unusual) it is to have a tire punctured. He told me that he’s had two punctures in his life and that this was nothing to worry about. So, by his count I should be done with repairing tires by now. =)

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I had the opportunity to assist one of my co-workers today in troubleshooting a web service + Silverlight client I had built for a customer a while back. The combination of the two enables users to upload large files to a server over intermittent internet connections. My co-worker mentioned that she got an error message in a message box from the Silverlight client stating that something was wrong with the parameters sent to it.

In the end it turns out that the parameter for the maximum file size allowed to upload had been set to 3 GB. The specification I received when building this stated that the maximum file size that the system should be able to handle would not exceed 1 GB. So I figured a regular int would suffice for managing the maximum file size restriction.

So what this malconfiguration gave was that the Silverlight client tried to stuff the value of 3GB into an int – this is a no go. My co-worker is not to blame for this, she just got this particular setup handed to her from someone else.

What you specify is what you get.

The past couple of months I’ve had reason (more than usual) to sit back and think about all the different frameworks and patterns available out there. One specific example of this is the following:

Imagine that you would want to build a web service whose role it is to impersonate a SharePoint list. This list is then supposed to be consumed by an Outlook clients calendar tool. The data you want to fill this calendar with is stored in a database containing approximately two tables. The reason I got in touch with this was that I was asked to solve some problems regarding the switch from regular time to daylight savings time and calendar items tagged as all day events. Upon hearing about this existing system I thought something along the lines of “How hard could this be? It’s just a bunch of tables and a web service contract to fulfill.”. Well, as it turns out – the joke’s on me.

I’m not kidding when I say that the code base in the repository for this project consists of ~200 files! Factories, Repositories, Providers, Containers and god knows what! When you open a project and within the time frame of about five minutes can’t figure out where approximately to begin solving a specific problem there has to be a problem with how the code is organized. And I don’t see myself as an under qualified developer. What I ended up doing was setting a breakpoint in Global.asax at the start of a request and then step my way from there. And the funny thing is that all the database access code was hand written. NHibernate (or any other OR-mapper for that matter) hadn’t crossed the mind of the previous developer (or at least wasn’t implemented).

Grossly over engineered. That’s what comes to mind when I look back at this.

A couple of days ago I was recommended the following article: Joel On Software – Why I hate frameworks. Read it! It’s quite a funny read and I can definitely relate to this problem. I also think that this specific issue should be more widely discussed. Somehow it seems that the software development world has moved away from solving real problems to solving problems related to the problem solving. Not quite sure how that adds immediate value for the customer. Also not quite sure how it relates to working agile. If we extrapolate the current situation just a liiittle bit more we’d end up with architects and developers adding a bunch of frameworks to their project and organizing them according to some new patterns (which are bound to appear) they’ll expect the code to write itself!

And I haven’t even mentioned the frameworks managing the other frameworks.

Today I realized that something from my past as a systems administrator has passed on. The NewSID tool has been retired by it’s founder himself, Mark Russinovich.

As it turns out it’s impact was pretty nominal, and might even be detrimental in some cases where software has been installed before the SID is changed. This is a scenario I have experienced myself actually. My intention was to prepare a fully installed BizTalk server which I could clone whenever I needed a new instance of it.

As it turns out the Enterprise Single Sign-On data becomes unavailable after the SID is changed. I’m guessing that the SID is somehow used to encrypt the data, and therefore the decryption fails with the new SID.

To read the specifics about why the tool has been retired head over to Marks own blog where he goes through all the gory details.

The other day I enabled Time Machine backups on my Mac and after a few exclusions (e.g. my virtual machines) I had a backup of about 40 GB to do.

Today after a day in the office I noticed that the next backup would take 600 MB. This made me wonder what actually was backed up and why that much data had changed.

After some google searches I found the tool timedog on google code. By using this tool as described on their web you can find out exactly which files were backed up in the last backup and how much space they take up. Using this knowledge I could tune my Time Machine exclusions further.

Small addition though: if your Time Machine is on the network you will first have to have it mounted so that it appears as Time Machine Backup under the Devices node in a Finder windows. This is easiest done by right clicking the Time Machine icon in your menu bar and then selecting Enter Time Machine. This will mount your backup as a device and take you into your Time Machine. When exiting your Time Machine your backup will still be mounted and thus be accessible for use with the timedog tool.

Enjoy.

Tonight from 8 pm to 9 pm (local Swedish time) will be the time for my first appearance on radio. Not just the web-radio version, but actual frequency modulated energy transmitted to peoples radios via.. air. The show in question is a local Swedish show appearing once a week on friday nights playing electronic music (sometimes referred to as synth). I’ll be playing music together with two friends: mDr and Diverge. So, if you’re a resident in Stockholm or the areas around it tune your radio to 95,3 MHz or point your media player to the digital web-version of the show (which will be working when we go on the air).

I’ve collected a few tracks which I think will be good energizers for a friday night, kind of as a preparation for the upcoming dance floors for the night. We’ll see how I manage to dish those tracks out for you. =)

Yes!

Since my switch from PC to Mac I’ve had to find a new instant messaging program which preferably has support for multiple protocols. The application of choice here seems to be Adium, which I’ve been using since I got my Mac. The main drawback compared compared to Miranda (which I’ve been using on my various PCs) is that it lacks support for IRC.

Until today, that is. Today I found out that the current beta of Adium has support for IRC, and it also supports SSL connections to the server you use (provided that the server supports it too, of course). Being the old school user of IRC that I am I immediately noticed that the layout of group chat windows in Adium didn’t quite fit my mental image of what IRC chat windows should look like. This is where Adiums styles come to the rescue!

The internets provided me with this excellent style: irc 2.0. It also has inverse color schemes for those of you who don’t like the black background.

My life as a happy Mac-user continues.

What else is better to do than to act on your wishes and make something of them? As a reaction to my previous post today I got in the car and drove around a bit. I ended up at Kungsängens Brygga where I got out in the freezing weather (-16 degrees Celsius) and took a few pictures.

A little while later I figured I’d take a few pictures of the car I’m currently driving (a loaner while my own is in the shop). A thumbnail and a link to the gallery if you click the thumbnail:

Enjoying a soft saturday. Woke up and thought it was sunday and that I had overslept (I need to get up on sunday morning to work a bit), but relaxed again and grabbed my laptop and started catching up on the blogs / feeds I subscribe to. Looking out the window I feel a need to get in the car and go out and take some pictures. Could be that going through the ‘Photography’ category in my feed reader has inspired me. Thinking about trying out the famous ‘one picture a day’ project, but I’m wondering how I’ll have the energy and will to take my camera with me each and every day since I’m already bringing my laptop with me everywhere I go. Need to work these things out first.