So, I pay all my utilities via credit card, and I receive emails when the bill is due and amount. Last month, the water department notified me that my bill was $240 and change. Considering my normal bill is $39 my attention was captured.

Here's the interesting thing - about 4 months ago, the water department started rolling out smart meters that they could query and collect usage information. Think now - water department, smart meters, automatic billing.... most of the people I've met from the county departments leave me less than inspired. This month, my water usage has been at a square wave. Normally 400 gallons a month, it's been spiking at various times and days to over a thousand gallons per day. I've already pointed out that their data is corrupt, but all I get is a tired voice on the line.

I may have found a new career, no, sorry misspoke, consulting opportunity.

7 weeks to go and I have SERIOUS short timer disease. I know it will pass, but at the moment...

Very heavy weather the last few days in the southeastern US... tornadoes up where one set of grandkids live, tornadoes a bit north of me, but....

530am - thunderstorm moving through the area, nice breeze blowing through the office, I just need to sedate the geriatric golden that I know has less than 6 months to live Hips are failing.

So, I'm extremely annoyed at MS these days. Every dang OS update I get some new advertising, etc. Anyway, so I decided to give Copilot (preview) a swing. Now, call me paranoid - I actually believe that corporations collecting data on us is completely out of control - with that said, I cannot run Copilot queries unless I'm logged into my MS account. There can only be one reason for that...

So I need VS2015. I have a project using it on a secure server, and I need to replicate the dev environment. I do my search, I login, I get to the "Your Downloads and Product Keys". It shows me this:

"Visual Studio Community 2015 Not available 6/27/2016"

If it's not available, why prick tease me? And this is the company assuring me that all of the updates they push out are for security. Right.... then I get an ad "inclusion is innovation." Well that's useful - not.

Wow, so, I despise edge. Trying to download opera - the file gets dumped to "operasetup.exe isn't commonly downloaded..." and edge renames it to something bogus. I have to rename it to a .exe to get it to install. What drivel.

I started my software development career using FORTRAN, taught myself C, suffered through Pascal and despise Visual Basic. I'm an EE that just learned how to do this. Back in the beginning, there were no IDEs just text editors, so I naturally developed the habit of putting one function in one file. As I moved on to C++, I continued this style with my class development - one class per file. I suppose I picked up this style from the people I worked with, early source control systems I used (CMS/MMS anyone?) and what not.

Now I admit I am no C++ guru. I have seen people on stack overflow answer a C++ question with so much mind numbing detail that my eyes glaze. I view some or most of the esoteric aspects of c++ (like operator overloading) as dubious at best. Sounds good initially but later on in maintenance, ugh.

So, coding style question - do you embed classes within classes? I suppose if the object is never used outside of it's main file, it sort of makes sense. But it makes it a $itch to track things down. Then, other modules that include the header file for the parent start referencing the embedded classes, and it becomes spaghetti code. I know it's valid C++, but....

Thoughts? I'm probably just being a curmudgeon. Currently doing battle with lifting a VC6 project to VS2022. To say it's "interesting" is putting it lightly but that's for another post.

So, these days I have a few medical issues I'm working on... I try to login to my doctor's portal, and it's unable to handle Opera. Oh really? 40 years after all this got started, and you won't handle opera? Get it to come up in Edge - finally - and the f'ing icon is using my login information. I think not.

Off to vpn for me.

You're not paranoid if they really are listening and harvesting your data. I'm sure FISA will keep me safe.

Has it EVER fixed anything?

Every time I've been prompted due to some network issue to run windows network diagnostics, it has NEVER, EVER found a problem or fixed anything. This morning, it just errored out with some random code.

I guess I am getting cranky in my old age, but I have laid down the law in my house. The next animal will be mine. I've always wanted My elaphanting dog. Now while I whine and grumble keep in mind the context - I have raised 11 children, 3 grandchildren, a few rentals, and some boomerangs - somehow they always manage to leave their pets with me. As I type this, the only dog that actually belongs to me is whoop whooping at the door (and it's a nice day). I have a cat in the house - not donated. I have a rodent dog - donated. I have a golden retriever - donated.

Am I enabling behavior?

ps That was a rhetorical question.

I use multiple hardware systems with multiple VMs on them. It would be extremely useful to me for a tool that would allow me to login across all machines and share cut/paste information. Now, here's the caveat - I am not creating or logging in to a Microsoft account to allow me to do this. The MS ecosystem is such a disaster at this point, I don't want to bother. I'll throw apple under the same bus.

I'll keep searching. I don't know, maybe there is a website out there that does something like this?

I'll preface this question with the joke appended at the bottom... Maybe I'm just mentally challenged at the moment, but is it just me that has a heck of a time finding the Microsoft Developer forums? Maybe Microsoft deleted them, I don't know. I thought I saved a bookmark some time back... but that was in chrome...

Years ago we had usenet and people could ask organized questions - like here on CP. Then Microsoft absorbed that into their own forums and morphed that into a discussion format, and it just kept going down hill from there. I just spent an hour poking around the ms website, searching, and I know it has to be out there, but I'm beginning to have my doubts.

I'm looking for the forums that don't filter or think for me. I'm looking for a list of topics on Visual Studio, etc.

-------------------------------------




Joke:
A helicopter was flying around above Seattle when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft's electronic navigation and communications equipment.

Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter's position and course to fly to the airport.

The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, drew a handwritten sign, and held it in the helicopter's window. The pilot's sign said "WHERE AM I?" in large letters.

People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign and held it in a building window.

Their sign read: "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER."

The pilot smiled, waved, looked at her map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely.

After they were on the ground, one of the passengers asked the pilot how the "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER" sign helped determine their position.

The pilot responded "I knew that had to be the Microsoft building because, the response they gave me was technically correct, but completely useless."

No not honey the code witch - honey as in referring to MS....

So, it's Sunday 0 dark early - I don't sleep much these days, but I have started the habit on Sunday morning to check all my VMs and other systems for updates. I'm doing this deliberately to avoid getting randomly nuked...

Every VM and system times out trying to get updates.

Trying to live in the MS ecosystem is like living on the Serengeti - you never know when you are going to get eaten.


-------------------------------------------------------------

Meanwhile, on the update page, I read this: "Windows Update is committed to help reduce carbon emissions." Clicking on the Learn More button, I get this drivel: "Windows Update is now carbon aware" - that's the title of the article. If you read down, MS has decided it's a good idea to turn off all of these devices, etc, yada yada. Great, now I need to go in and change all of my settings so that Windows 11 does NOT turn off all of my usb devices talking to hardware.

I really think there is a "Drop Managers on Their Head" department somewhere in Microsoft. I have got to get back to Unix development.

Interesting thoughts on a Friday morning....

I spend most of my time at home these days coding in a converted dining room. It's just off the kitchen at the front of the house, has two large 6 foot windows facing the front yard (THAT OPEN - think fresh air), and full of furniture. 20 years ago, I got a deal on a large solid oak lawyer style desk plus a credenza (new would have been $4k+, I got it for $800). At the time, I had a 6' folding plastic table and an itty bitty metal workstation for the monitor.

Setting aside the fact that I'm dancing with retirement, I'm in the planning stages of turning it into a real work area. Suitable for s/w and engineering development with the necessary desk space to spread out various pieces of hardware, sufficient network connectivity and power. Lawyer desk is going... As a side part - since I'm dancing with retirement, I want to be able to use it as a hobby space. For a home office, probably the most expensive issue is power (means running a couple of dedicated circuits from the breaker box). Anyway...

I dusted off this old article from Joel on Software written in 2003 - Bionic Office – Joel on Software[^] and I'm using it as a general guide as to what I want.

I'm working with 120 square feet. It's a 10x12 dining room. So you know, when I bought this house, I had seven children, so a formal dining room was out of the question. Even so, when I go into customer locations, I am APPALLED at cubicle sizes and overall conditions. Maybe 8x8, and the only way they get away with it is modular furniture. The s/w area I go to on occasion is actually better - we need more room to spread equipment, but the entire design is "office" and not workspace. It doesn't help that the building manager who did the redesign was a cheap bas$$$$$. 15 years after this, a memo just came out asking if anyone wanted new chairs.

Is it any wonder why people don't want to go back to the "office"?

My plan is at least 2 walls with large floating work surfaces, outlets flush with the surface as well as a strip outlet under each surface. Wall mount locations for monitors to keep the work surface clear, under surface drawers and a couple of rolling file folder cases for the paperwork I cannot seem to get rid of and a place to put one printer.

Did I miss anything? What one thing would you change in your home office, assuming you have one?

elephanting rolling turds down the street.... so laptop had to update to the latest Windows 10 update. Update changed the default browser. Oh, but it gets better. Going to the default apps, it says Opera is the default browser. Click on a link in email, and I get edge - ewwwww.

I don't know what POS from MS decided this, but I might trip your child or children on the playground.

-----------------------------------------

So, anyone else had this happen, and how did you fix it? As you know, I have recently entered therapy on browser tabs. So, oh wait, google reveals the truth. It turns out that Outlook now has its own default applications. Cute. Links default to edge. Tacky. One more excuse for me to change my email client. This is how I feel about crap like this:

Microsoft Users engaging with stupid MS managers | Movieclips - YouTube[^]

"medium" - they are about fully cooked but not quite there...

Curious if this just happens to me.

beware of their animals. Somehow I have become the care taker of 3 canines. Due to unforeseen circumstances the children's new lives do not permit them to take their critters. If I don't do the dad thing, I'm the most evil SOB that ever walked the planet.

This is the final batch for me. The vet bills are stupid ridiculous - take one dog in, lose $500+. Oh, I don't identify with this furbaby crap. It's a dog or a cat, we plant them in the backyard. I have a .40 and a shovel - this vet thing is sheer bs.

well not really. But I did collect and file interesting tabs into my history folders - 40+ windows, nigh north of 150 tabs.

Yeah, I need therapy.

Tabs ran across an eclectic group of topics and issues: IRS, estate, hot tub maintenance, 20+ weather tabs, 3 groups of customer issues, the list goes on.

I feel a little cleaner.

So, dusted off this not too old article - Email Clients[^]

I suppose if other people paid my bills, I would not care. So, other than Outlook, what are you using these days for email clients?

So, as a side project, I've been delving into the git source control world (triggered by Visual Studio incorporating it), and I'm smelling something nasty. As in, what's the point, other than preference?

I've insisted all of my development projects be in source control since the mid 80s. Back then, we were heavily developing on VMS, the version control system was CMS. I'm not sure back then we had the concept of branches and what not, but we could tag the code base for a specific release. I ran into one developer who kept his changes as file versions - it's a VMS thing. All it took was one purge command to lose ALL of the history.. shudder. Anyway....

So in the years to follow, I've motored through PVCS, ClearCase (shudder), VSS and SVN. After VSS burned me badly (there are many unflattering stories out there) due to a network outage, I transitioned all of my source control to svn. Supports concurrent development, tags, branches and merging and is far more robust than VSS. This would be about 15 years ago or so.

Along comes this git upstart. And all of the comparisons between it and svn generally say git is better for concurrent development, blah blah blah. Oh and it's a distributed model. And it allows for branching, etc.

Just like SVN.

Exactly what am I missing? I simply do not see anything significant git brings to the table that svn does not. I nod to preferences, but can anyone provide real world examples of how git solved a version control problem better than svn? The most common "feature" articles say about git is some mumbling about not needing a central repo which makes no sense to me.

Appreciate your thoughts.

Context:

I've been busy trying to get a very stable and old solution to build in VS2008. It's a mess of code and 40+ projects accumulated over the years - mostly MFC stuff - this means stdafx.h. Over the years, multiple developers (myself included) tended to slap preprocessor definitions in stdafx.h and I suspect other places; it's always fine until someone gets hurt. In this case, sometimes my solution will build and sometimes not. I started the general trend to put the definitions in the IDE properties window. I'm thinking this was a mistake, as sometimes the definitions propagate and sometimes not.

Part of the problem of specifying directives using the IDE is that Microsoft's IDEs do rude stuff to project files. I see this all the time comparing SVN commits in an attempt to determine what has changed. The IDE has no issue with re-ordering things.

So, what is your preference or practice in managing your preprocessor directives?

I get attached my my mice and keyboards. Try to use the same setup on each system I use. The mouse specifically is a USB corded Razor; wireless just won't work for me - too much lag, and any lag irritates me. But my main beef is when mice lose their plastic slider pads. It always starts at one particular edge and snags the mousepad. A perfectly good mouse brought down by a .0001 cent part.

yes, I've tried the replacement path - it never seems to stick as well.

I'll go get some cheese with my wine. Buying a new mouse pad as well. The little things are important.