* * * * *
Lame excuses
Bunny and I were talking about the lack of posts around here, and I gave two
rather pathetic reasons for slacking off. The second reason deals with The
Corporation—I'm not sure how free I can be with work details. Smirk isn't my
boss at The Corporation (he's a fellow cow-orker) and I haven't brought the
issue up with R, who is The Ft. Lauderdale Office Manager (and the one who
hired me initially) nor with E, who I do report to but works out of the
Seattle Office.
Sure, I could mention that The Protocol Stack From Hell™ says it's thread
safe, but still requires a mutex [1] around a few calls. And I could mention
that in the source code to The Protocol Stack From Hell™ we do have access to
I found a global variable being used when creating a packet of data, thus
causing all sorts of issues with the multithreaded testing tool I'm writing.
I could also mention the fact that The Protocol Stack From Hell™ failed to
properly use C++ inheritance by declaring multiple copies of object member
variables in subclasses. And I could mention that we paid quite a lot of
money to use this wonderful Protocol Stack From Hell™.
[Related to that—I could write about the wonderful Protocol Stack From Hell™
every day, but even I got tired of my rants against control panels. The
Protocol Stack From Hell™ is way worse in that we don't have access to the
source (well, we have access to some of the source; just not the stuff that's
real puzzling) and it's only after browbeating the tech support that we learn
just how bad the stuff really is, such as obtaining a textual representation
of an error that's stored past a certain structure our code receives that's
so totally not documented. And this is a daily occurrence! Don't even get me
started on the silliness of their SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)
support!]
So yeah, I could mention all that, but I'm not sure if I can. Or should. You
know?
The first reason I'm slacking off had Bunny rolling on the floor laughing,
and yes, I could see her reasoning. It has to do with manually updating
MyFaceSpaceBook [2] everytime I posted here; it just feels like too much
work.
Okay, there's nothing compelling me to link to my post at MyFaceSpaceBook,
except that I personally view MyFaceSpaceBook as another feed (much like my
Atom feed [3] or RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication) [4]), and thus, I feel
compelled to update MyFaceSpaceBook when I update here.
Okay, I'll wait until you stop laughing.
So, given that The Protocol Stack From Hell™ was acting up yesterday, I
decided to see what it would take to automatically update MyFaceSpaceBook
when I post here.
My God MyFaceSpaceBook doesn't make it easy.
All I want to do is update my status. After several hours of reading [5],
registering as a developer (and man, I would link to that page, but now I
can't even find the page—sheesh!), manually running API (Application Program
Interface) web calls (I didn't know about openssl / s_client -connect
host:443 until tonight—wow!) to tweak settings in my account and learning
curl [6] (even though I've written code to retrieve web pages, it doesn't
support HTTPS (HyperText Transport Protocol Secure) and that's a whole mess
I'd rather skip for now), I have a proof-of-concept program that can update
my status at MyFaceSpaceBook.
The next step is to integrate the proof-of-concept into the blog engine [7]
and have it update MyFaceSpaceBook automatically.
And then, maybe, I'll start posting more often.
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_exclusion
[2]
http://www.facebook.com/
[3]
https://boston.conman.org/index.atom
[4]
https://boston.conman.org/bostondiaries.rss
[5]
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/
[6]
http://curl.haxx.se/
[7]
https://boston.conman.org/about/technical.html
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