April 2007 Archives

We had a great inspection of the Deal. Compared to the inspection of my old home, it was very thorough, detailed, and informative. What a joke that dot-com was with regards to informing and alerting the owner.

I feel very aware and informed of all the maintenance and systemic problems. We may even set aside more money from our down-payment to do the work.

Because as it turns out, we need to do extend the terms of the Deal to do further inspection on the 85-year-old plumbing system.

Not to jinx anything, but we penned our half of the signatures on the contract this Friday, April 13. Yeesh.

Dang. Cpu arranged to baby-sit for a co-op member's 7-year-old. That went pretty well, except for the part where he knocked my SEGA Dreamcast onto the top of the Shuttle XPC. Guess where the SexyWesternDigitalRaptor lives? Right on top. It stopped working almost instantly, failing to find a bootable disc.

This week, I've been writing python as a base for an automated GUI testing infrastructure. Admittedly, still research and almost through that phase. I'm just turning the corner into productive.

This is because I've discovered python ctypes.

• Forced the issue of moving internal tools bugs out of project databases and into an internal tools bug database.

• Migrated bugs into bugzilla, patching importxml.pl in the process.

• Written perforce trigger in python.
  

• Update: convincing engineering to (re)implement it on precious servers much harder.

• Enable a spec depot so engineers can recover their borked build clientspecs and I can rest easy.
• Debugged some crazy low priority game bugs.
• Wikified lots of wisdom.
• Wrap Xenon SDK dll functions with ctypes.
• Read the GUITAR white papers and a similar interpretation in a how-to-auto-test book.
• Try to recruit people at GDC
• Sucker people into playing warfish.
• Used python to start a framework for automated testing.

But more than all this, is the cutting through red tape and internal resistance to good ideas. That is a very tiring battle indeed.

But days went by, Friday loomed, and I hadn't had my review yet. I became worried - was my TV a kickback in lieu of a review and raise? Was I going to get the royal shaft supreme? Even the UI Guy hadn't gotten a new display, and it is his job to ensure that every video mode is correctly supported and designed for. WTF was going on?

Well, it turns out the TV mercifully isn't my raise. I had a pretty good review, by which I mean there was praise and good criticisms. I feel good moving forward, and happy to be working there. And I still get to keep the TV where it is. Yay.