Job Hunt 2008

It's been a roller-coaster ride this year. At the beginning of 2008 FonJax struggled through the usual startup hiccups culminating in a successful sale. (As in, we sold the company.) Then at the prompting of my family I took a position at a "more stable" company only to find the US office being shut-down and myself back on the job market. While I made phase 2 of the shutdown, my last day is the end of this month and it's time to start hunting around again.

I am looking for something that is either managerially challenging or technically challenging. Both would be ideal.

If you have something real that you would like to discuss, and you've taken the time to research me, please feel free to contact me. I've tried to make it very easy for prospective employers to verify my skill set. Use your favorite search engine and search on "Kim Greenlee". All technical and hockey references are me.

Silicon Valley Code Camp 2008

Thanks to everyone who donated their time, energy, creativity, and enthusiasm to this year's event. For those folks who attended my sessions and wanted the slide decks…I have uploaded files to the wiki pages attached to my sessions.

Remember that code camp is by developers for developers. So if you've never presented, start thinking about a topic. Some of us have been throwing around the idea of training sessions for presenters. When we get that going I'll make an announcement here.

Code Camps are Coming...

The 3rd annual Silicon Valley Code Camp is coming in November and the San Luis Obispo Code Camp in September. I am planning on speaking at the Silicon Valley Code Camp and seriously thinking about San Luis Obispo. At past code camps I've presented on the basics of threading...the stuff that is more at the operating system level but I think vital to deciphering threads regardless of what the stack above them is..., debugging, and architecture for startups.

I have been considering putting together a talk on the process of groking a new code base, which is something all of us will have to do many times in our career. I don't know what the process is called. Maybe there isn't a name and I should make one up! Since I know some of the .NET UG members read this blog I am wondering if you guys have an opinion on what you would like to hear about.

So of the topics you've heard in the past and topics that may interest you in the future...what do you want me to speak on? I only want to do two talks so give me your ideas.

Thanks much.

Cackl.com…The Yokes on You

A buddy of mine just created a joke site and wants to get the word out to folks and I was one of those tapped to blog about it. It's still a work in progress so post your ideas for improvement here and I'll pass them on to Mike and his team. Otherwise, enjoy and…if you're a jokester…post a few of your own.

Cackl

Out and About – July 15th, North Bay .NET User Group

I'm heading up to Sebastopol next week. The talk is titled Threading: Back to Basics and I'll be covering how threads work, .NET specific thread stuff, decomposition, and tip and tricks. You can sign up here for the North Bay .NET User Group. Make sure to sign up so they have a good head count.

Comcast? Internet? Huh?

One would think in this day and age that an Internet Service Provider would understand how the Internet works. But apparently Comcast doesn't have a clue. Not only was I NOT notified that their system would be down…they also don't seem to know how to brand their own 'under construction' page to let their users know what is going on…

After I got a hold of a tech support person, who was rude, there was no estimate as to when I would get email back. Thanks Comcast because not having access to my email is a really big deal for me. I mean it's not like I’m not trying to run a soccer team, a hockey team, play on a hockey team, run a .NET user group, or coordinate a dozen other things that I need to manage in my spare time which…wow…just happens to be at 10:30pm.

Doesn't it actually look like they lost their URL? or that there are a bunch of DNS servers offline?

Click to view image...



Update: Comcast hacked I actually suspected something like that but the Comcast rep told me the site was "down for maintenance". I hate liars. Come on folks a little honesty please.

VS2005 C++ Build Error vc80.pdb

Are you getting the errors:

Could not delete file ‘c:\myproject\obj\release\vc80.pdb
Make sure that the file is not open by another process and is not write-protected.
Could not delete file ‘c:\myproject\obj\release\vc80.idb
Make sure that the file is not open by another process and is not write-protected.

Then maybe you have the problem described here.

Another solution is to change the number of processes you allow the build process to use.

1. From the VS2005 IDE menu bar select: Tools.Options.Projects and Solutions.Build and Run.
2. On the Build and Run page set the "maximum number of parallel project builds" to 1.

Problem solved.

AVIFileOpen returns 0x8004406d…

So what does it mean? I was trying to open a .wav file to merge into my AVI stream. After a bit of running around I found that my .wav file only contained a header…no data. And this is why the AVIFileOpen was failing with the return code AVIERR_FILEREAD.

Not a very good error message because the Microsoft documentation says the error indicates, "A disk error occurred while reading the file."

Which is not the case.