Gloriously Impatient

Good news, good news... Most all the decorating is done!

Yes, in the last three weeks, we've gutted the bathroom, laid new floors, painted lots and lots of gloss onto surfaces, repainted the kitchen, sanded and re-varnished hard wood floors and generally made the house a better place to be.

The reason being, we're moving back to the old house at Brinsley, we're not sure on the old rental market or valuations so that's all going on, but our old tenant is leaving so we're having a new hearing system put in up there and going into that.

The major difference will of course be the lack of storage, the Brinsley house has not got a Utility room, nor a cloak room, nor a loft space, nor an 18 foot out building... So where will we be putting our crap?.... Who knows.

The Virgin Connection is being switched over on the 16th November, so that gives you a heads up when I'll do full dark before hand.

The one worry we have at present is, I headed up to the Brinsley house to give the tenant her finalising letter and get a schedule for her moving, so I could get the plumbers in on the case with the heating, and instead of the tenant another girl hung herself out the window... "What you want?"...

"I want to come in"

"No F**king likely perv"

"No, you miss understand, I'm the landlord, the owner, I have an appointment to measure up for my new heating system, where's XXX"....

"Oh I live here now"....

Oh no you don't lassie, and so she's been oiked out, turned out the tenant could not fully afford it after her last relationship broke down and she got this girl in from her work to share the bills... This girl is the dirtiest schmuck I've ever seen... Uses feminine hygiene products thrown in corners of her bedroom, the carpet stank, she had dirty clothes and rubbish everywhere....

And when I mentioned this needed cleaning up she said "You starting?"... To whit I could only look at the used tampon and say "No, but it looks like you have".

Dirty, disgusting pig... 

The ex-tenant has to therefore pay to clean that carpet professionally, and clean the whole house...

The other thing I noted was that nearly every light bulb in the place was popped... These were new light fittings put in before they took possession, they're less than 11 months old, how did they pop them?.. And how, if "they've been gone ages" did they see, because the landing and stairs run down the middle of the house and are very dark....

Anyway, the lots of decorating will continue I think Friday is a key day, with the estate agents coming.. Then Sunday we have the bathroom ceiling being plastered, so when he's done I'll paint the bathroom wall and lay a new bit of lino... and finally when that ceiling is dry I can paint it.... I don't envisage many WarThunder or Code hours to myself in that time.

However, what I do have in the works is my own personal, and hopefully comprehensive, series (4 parts) covering my fascination with the BF109 fighter, I'm posting this 4 part history from my own sources soon, and also developing a series of "In Game" videos for the type.

I already have one large (45 minute) video ready for upload, but that was from pre-v1.43, so I'm trying to get sometime flying the type post patch.  And when I say "Flying", we're talking exclusively Simulator Battle level detail.

My Week Off & Software Dependencies

I've just had a week off, well when I say off I mean I didn't have to get up and go into the office, instead the house needed tending to... Lots of tending to...

I've laid a new floor, had a wall demolished, removed tonnes (literally) of old fencing, painted life preservers (for by the canal side), cut down (clipped not chopped) tree's to size, visited our second house to check on the tenants, and I've done multiple runs to the tip to get rid of tonnes of this junk.

All in all, I'm exhausted and thankful to be back in the office... So what has software been doing without me?

Well, it seems a quite able chap has been busy looking through the code, and has left a bunch of very good insights into fixes for the code, almost like a peer review, something this project sorely needed.

I've duly sent a rebuild and am now awaiting feedback, but whilst that all goes on I decided to look at some of the support tools I use, to see about sending them to various people in the building.

The first problem was this is that I didn't write half of these tools, they were written pretty much as a stop gap measure, and here they are nearing nine years old and still in use in their flaky, temporary, incarnations.

They rely on libraries people don't have, they use modules which are part of the source - meaning to use it you must have the whole source checked out - and they look terrible.

This reliance on other libraries is something I need to tackle, on some systems - like Linux - you can get away with assuming the user is able to go get the libraries your software needs (if you tell the user which are missing that is) but on windows its unforgivable to leave a piece of software to crash through some mysterious missing library problem.

And this is exactly what we get with these tools at the moment, I know why they're crashing, I know others know why they're crashing, and if other more dense users read the error message they'd know why its crashing and be able to ask for a solution.  But instead I'm met with the continual report that the program is broke, and then a wall of silence as to what's wrong with it.

So, developers out there the world over, if your software needs a library, and that library is only on your machine, let everyone know, make your software check for the presence of it, don't just let it run off the end of its runtime and crash!

Energy Certificate Farce

Right, at the moment the wife and I have the house on the market.  As part of putting it on the market we have to get an Energy Efficiency Certificate.  So we paid up our doe and sat back waiting for the visit... No visit.

We chased this up, and finally got an appointment, only for it to get cancelled... So we called again, and then they started chasing us around asking for dates and times we could not make... Times when the average person is at work.

Today, in about an hour is the next appointment, but the guy turned up an hour early... He's sat outside right now... The reason for this... we have a house viewing in about 5 minutes time...

Not only is this an utter farse, but a pointless waste of his time, I've had to turn him away, because a house viewer is more important than some stupid certificate... And the guy is early, he called yesterday saying "I'm in the same postcode area, can I come by"... and it was just... "Erm, no we're both at work"...

The mind boggles, this must be the most inefficient exercise ever, all for an energy EFFICIENCY certificate.