My Ham Radio Technician license class practice exam app — that horrendous bug fixed — is now available in the marketplace.
Actually, it was back in the Marketplace a few days ago, but I’m just now getting around to mentioning it. If you want to check it out, search in the Marketplace with my name “Mike Clark”, or with my Ham Radio callsign, WA7MC.
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I’ve found an interesting new author: Eric James Stone.
I was digging around in the Mormon Dialogue and Discussion Board in inestimable boredom one night this week when I happened upon mention of a Nebula-winning Mormon-themed science-fiction novellette entitled “That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made”. I thought to myself that that was certainly news, so I hopped right over and had a look at the story. Wow! Is all I can say! Well, obviously I have more to say, or else this post would end right here, but Wow! certainly applies.
If you are a science-fiction nut, like me, then you gotta read this. It won’t take long (it’s just a novelette), and it is very interesting indeed.
Eric James Stone has made an important contribution to the varied menagerie of fictional extraterrestrial life-forms (is there any other kind?) and come up with a rather unique interstellar transportation system. If he’s planning a novel using these two plot devices, sign me up, because I want to see what he does with them!
Check out his novelette here: “That Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Made”
Now I got something more to read while waiting for Jerry Pournelle to publish something new!
Another CandyRat artist, this is Ewan Dobson.
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I’m not sure what is going on with the conical hat. A commenter on YouTube says that this he resembles the fighting character Raiden in the video game Mortal Kombat. I guess.
And another great Antoine Dufour song, These Moments:
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I hate stupid bugs. I don’t mean to call all bugs stupid, just those bugs that make me feel stupid.
I actually put the first Ham Radio practice exam app into the App Hub last week after what I thought was exhaustive testing. Turned out it wasn’t exhaustive enough. The thing worked fine up until the moment you hit the Windows button on the Exam page (or got tombstoned from it). Then the jig was up and it would never work again, unless you deleted it and re-downloaded it.
After I caught this — fortunately decided to test it as an actual downloaded app after it got published — I pulled it from the Hub. Fortunately only two downloads (besides my own) had occurred, so there hadn’t been much damage to users by this time.
Turns out that in coming back from tombstoning you would hit a Navigation exception. Sometimes. But once you did the thing was broke. I thought it was some really esoteric bug, but it turned out to be a glaring omission in part of my tombstone-handling in the Exam page.
Man, I feel stupid.
That’s why I call them “stupid bugs”.
Not that it is “news” to be talked about here in this blog, but as expected more information about bin Laden and his hideout have now been released by the United States government. Interesting stuff.
One bit of self-referentiality is a video showing bin Laden watching a video of himself being reported upon in the news. I am reminded of the movie “Smoke Signals”, where the character Thomas Builds-the-Fire remarks that there is nothing more pathetic than watching Indians watching Cowboys and Indians on TV. However, I do suppose that it made operational sense to be concerned about how one’s efforts to murder as many people as possible are being reported upon in the media. You know, so as to better tune one’s efforts to maximum effect? Yeah. I guess I’d be doing the same thing if my conscience would permit me to blithely go about ordering the death of people who had never personally offended me nor offered my persona any threat.
Osama bin Laden in dignified pose
I suppose Osama thought he was at war, and since “All’s fair in love and war,” well, then murdering innocents was “fair”. But I don’t think that is what is meant by that particular phrase.
The picture at left, unattributed because the source I got it from attributed it to “Anonymous”, shows a relaxed, personable-looking and sincere man with a strong, handsome face, who, forgetting for a moment that he is an instigator of mass murder, might have been an interesting person to know. I don’t doubt that his associates thought well of him — though to this point I have never heard his personality actually described by anyone who knew him well.
I suppose that we are well and truly best off to be entirely rid of him. If he had merely been captured, then the question would still exist as to what to do with him, but the answer would have been certain. He could never be let go, of course, and ultimately if brought to trial there is no doubt as to his ultimate fate, and that would have been execution. No argument could have prevented that; even Hitler, not a mere terrorist but the head of an actual state at formal war with the United States, and adjudged guilty of ordering mass murder, would have met the same fate, as did Japan’s Tojo at the end of World War 2. So, even if he had been captured, there is no doubt at all that he would have met his end in some form of judicial-ordered death. There is no doubt whatsoever about his guilt; he freely admitted it himself, even boasted about it, in publicly-released videos. So a great deal of pointless legal gyrating was thankfully short-circuited by the soldier who put paid to this man’s life in the town of Abbottabad, in Pakistan, on May 2, 2011.
I do however feel a great deal of sympathy for those who loved him, those otherwise not guilty with him of violent murder. Speaking in particular of his wives and young children, I do not doubt that they believed, with him, that what he was doing was righteous and though hard, needed doing and was justified. I respect those beliefs even if I do not hold them (and indeed strongly reject them and their goals), and were my condolences of any value whatever I would offer them. It is in any event a sad thing when a human being with the potential to do good works leaves this life before he or she can do them; it is an even sadder thing when such a human being does evil acts instead, and must be forcefully removed from this life before he or she can do more of them.
Removing such an one from this life cannot be seen to be doing anything other than what is plainly necessary.
May the souls of those whose murders he expedited find closure upon his death; may he himself find whatever mercy God has in store for him.
It’s getting close, I can feel it!
There’s only one troublesome issue: that tombstoning has proven to be a bit of a puzzle! Whenever I am trying to return the user to the pivot they were on when they tombstoned it hasn’t been working the way I thought I coded it. But it is only tonight that I discovered that the pivot Selection_Changed event is firing before the Page_Loaded event! I hadn’t even known it was firing at all until the user made a pivot selection. Evidently, the Selection_Changed is fired because the act of painting the page trips it. At least that is what it looks like. And since the Selection_Changed event was being used by me to memorize the new user location (i.e. which pivot the user was in now), of course it took the default, and thus overrode what had been set before the tombstoning. I’ll figure a way around that shortly. That’s actually the last significant “thing” holding me back from submitting the app. So I am very sure that I will submit it to the Marketplace tomorrow.
I had a really bad time getting an important part of the navigation working with the Set Exam selection, which was originally done using a ListBox. I found that when clicking on the MainPage selection button from Score page’s Return pivot, it would definitely try to send you to the MainPage, and would even start to display it (the AppBar would pop up briefly), but you’d find yourself on the Set Exam page instead. Very odd behavior, and I bet it is a bug. But, wanting to not screw around with it any further I changed out the ListBox selection for a bunch of buttons. The odd behavior vanished with that. Once I get this app submitted, I will definitely fire the ListBox/Navigation thing over to Microsoft to see if there’s some kind of bug going on in there.
So, after this I’ll be using this completed app as the template for the other two Ham licensing exams, and so as soon as I get the question pools ironed out they will go in as well. I’m doing this at an awkward time for one of the exams, the middle one (General license class) because the current question pool expires at the end of June. I have the new question pool, but it won’t be valid until July 1. And by the time I’d be ready to submit that app it would be way close to the expiration date on the old exam. So, I may delay that one and do the third exam (for Amateur Extra class) right after this current one goes in.
I was thinking to doing some more Ham Radio-related apps, but my wife wants me to start working on a game after I get these three apps submitted, so that’s the next goal — her thought (and I concur, actually) is that games have a better income potential, especially if they are ad-supported (See Elbert Perez’s blog). I had a game in mind: a version of a VERY old arcade game favorite of mine: Lunar Lander. Not under that name of course. But I checked the Marketplace and there’s several games under that concept in there already — with much better graphics than I had planned to do. I was going to go for the original vector graphics look and feel. So, I don’t know. I’m sure I could come up with something else.
Maybe the Marketplace needs one more Sudoku app? 🙂 No? I didn’t think so.
Well, you knew it had to happen.
Some folks belong to the conspiracy of the week club, and of course to them nothing the US government does is anything BUT a lie to cover up whatever their favorite story-teller wants to feed them about the government’s true intention.
So naturally, according to the various tale-merchants, Osama bin Laden didn’t die last weekend in a US raid, he:
I made up one of those above. Guess which one!
There are so many conspiracy theories out there about a hundred different things, so many that it is impossible to keep track of them all. And most of them wildly contradict each other. And they all pretty much contradict common sense.
There are undoubtedly a few horrible truths out there that are covered up by government secrecy of one sort or another. But the death of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan is so sufficiently well-attested, that I don’t think anyone with a brain can doubt it.
“I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure” – Mark Twain
This blog is hardly in the forefront of news, so nobody reading this will be surprised, but Osama bin Laden has been killed by US forces in a ground action in Pakistan. His body has been positively identified via DNA fingerprinting.
It’s about time.
Wow.
I am not by any stretch of the imagination a Barack Obama supporter, but he was the man in the hot seat and deserves kudos for making the final GO for this mission. And rumor has it that Obama sent Trump the following message:
When I plugged my Dell Venue Pro into my PC, the Zune software picked up on it right away, and in short order let me know that there was an update to be done. But it told me that I had to update Zune first, and so away we went with this. Once it was done, Zune offered the Feb 2011 update, and so I started it.
I sometimes have the luck of not having the same problems as everyone else, so I wasn’t expecting it, but was also not surprised to find that I was going to have to deal with it anyway. So there we were. So this is what happened: it got hung up on Step 6 of 9, and eventually popped out into Zune with the error code: 801812C1.
It had a web link and I followed it. It said that there was a device driver that needed updating, and provided some ameliorative action. I followed the advice, but it didn’t work. In fact, I chased around the web looking for the best way out of this, but nothing seemed relevant. One site suggested that I plug the phone into the PC, and when it tried to pull in a device driver from the web, tell it to stop and let the update go out for it instead. This apparently was advice based on Windows 7, and I’m on Vista. I tried to do it anyway, and it didn’t work.
But this gave me an idea. Obviously there was some device driver already on my system, else Zune wouldn’t be able to talk to the phone, and it was doing so just fine. So I chased down my Control Panel and then the Device Manager. I found the WP7 driver in the listing for Portable Devices and I uninstalled it. I also had it deleted when the management console asked if I wanted to do that. I know this took immediate effect because suddenly Zune couldn’t talk to the phone.
Next step was to unplug the phone, and plug it back in. Of course the Plug n Play kicked in, and it went out to dig out the driver from the web. I let it do so, and eventually the driver was reinstalled, and Zune could talk to the phone again. Great. Now, having made certain that the driver was the very latest by uninstalling and reinstalling from fresh, I restarted the update process again.
This time the update went much better. It breezed by step 6, and I thought it would cruise all the way through to the last step, number 9, but this time it held up on step 8. Unwilling to screw things up by quitting too early (I think I had read that the update should only take 30 minutes or so), I let it sit for a good two hours. Finally, I gave up and clicked on the Cancel button. Thinking that the update had failed and wondering what would happen if I made another try, I hesitantly unplugged the phone and plugged it back in. Eventually Zune recognized it again, and I was expecting to be offered the Feb 2011 update again, but Lo! and Behold! it was offering me the Mar 2011! Huh. Wadda ya know?
I fired up the Mar 2011 update and the process greased right through to the end, successfully. Yay!
Well, I don’t know if everyone who has had my problem will find their results the same as mine, but it might be at least one more pathway to a successful update.
Yesterday, I got my new device via Fedex, thanks to the kindness and diligence of Chris Koenig, MS Developer Evangelist!
I’ve been trying to get the attention of someone in the Mothership to beg and plead for a gratis WP7 device if one could be made available, since my finance department has thus far utterly denied the possibility of obtaining one through any commercial means. I’ve contacted (or made blind stabs at contacting) various folks I’ve run into or heard from at Microsoft to this purpose, only to find success eluding me. I had given up for a couple of months but resumed my importuning back last month. Here the tide turned. I found Chris and his email and shot off a desperate plea, including the magic mantra: “Help me, Obi-Chris Koenigy, you’re my only hope!” Of course I hoped my geek-cred would be proven by this invocation, but feared it wouldn’t be enough. Almost immediately I got an out-of-office notification that he’d be gone for a week. Oh, well. So much for that attempt, I thought. He’ll never see my email amongst a week’s worth of backlog. Then I was pleasantly surprised to get a response right away, and he said he would do what he could to help.
Well, this went variously trying different avenues until Chris wrote me and said that he was coming back from MIX2011 with four devices, and oh, by the way, would I still like one? Of course, I responded :Yes!
Yesterday, that device arrived: a Dell Venue Pro. It is gorgeous!
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