Defenestration Station

"If you don't understand [something] that doesn't mean you should reject it. You don't understand electricity, probably. First of all, no one even knows what electricity is...Do you know how it works? I don't know how it works, but I do know this: you can cook a man's dinner with it, and you can also cook the man."

- Bob Proctor

"It appears that some individuals (of, as the writer believes, the highest ranks of life) have laid a wager with a mischievous and foolhardy companion, that he durst not take upon himself the task of visiting many of the villages near London in three different disguises — a ghost, a bear, and a devil; and moreover, that he will not enter a gentleman's gardens for the purpose of alarming the inmates of the house. The wager has, however, been accepted, and the unmanly villain has succeeded in depriving seven ladies of their senses, two of whom are not likely to recover, but to become burdens to their families.

At one house the man rang the bell, and on the servant coming to open door, this worse than brute stood in no less dreadful figure than a spectre clad most perfectly. The consequence was that the poor girl immediately swooned, and has never from that moment been in her senses.

The affair has now been going on for some time, and, strange to say, the papers are still silent on the subject. The writer has reason to believe that they have the whole history at their finger-ends but, through interested motives, are induced to remain silent."

- a resident of Peckham

Created by Jeff Atwood

Check out this link:

http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html

This is cool.

My buddy AJ recently had the honor of throwing out the first pitch at a Twins home game!

From AJ: "It was as close to awesome as you can get! If you notice the goofy smile on my face while on the mound, that was completely unavoidable. I was smiling uncontrollably. ;) Anyway, when it came time to do the pitch, I took my time and did the full windup. Everything was feeling good... until I let go of the ball! It sailed about ten feet over home plate. Not even the Twin mascot, TC Bear, could catch it. The ball banged off the back wall and I felt a bit silly. I never was a very good pitcher. I kept thinking about the quote from the movie "Bull Durham"... "HIT THE BULL!" But despite that minor hickup, it was still a terrific experience. I passed right by Harmon Killewbrew and Tony Oliva in the tunnel out to the field. Also, Gardy walked right by us on his way to the dugout - he said hello to the girls. Good times."

We call MSBuild from NAnt to build our software, and it has worked really well up to now, but we came across an issue with building our new mobile software. This is a Windows Mobile 2003 device app, and the output of the release is a CAB file that you can deploy on the mobile devices.

The problem comes from the fact that MSBuild does not support building deployment projects, including mobile CAB files. When I tried to build the CAB project using MSBuild, the NAnt log showed this message:

warning MSB4078: The project file "MyCAB.vddproj" is not supported by MSBuild and cannot be built.

The workaround I found was to use devenv from the command line.

"c:\program files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\devenv" C:\dev\MyMobileApp.sln /build release /safemode

Use the /build switch instead of the /deploy, since the /deploy switch will try to launch the software in the emulator or on a activesynch'd device.

I used the /safemode flag because it ostensibly loads a minimal set of drivers for stability. It is probably not necessary, though.

To get this working in NAnt, I added some code to a custom NAnt task that was already running for this project like this (inside XML tags):


exec
program="c:\program files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\devenv"
commandline="${vss.bin.dir}\Application\${application.name}.sln /Build Release /SafeMode"


****
I hope this post helps someone; this is probably pretty basic stuff, but I would've saved a couple of hours if I could've found this info in once place when I came across the problem.

UPDATE
I ran across some additional problems -- the CABs being created by devenv did not include all the assemblies that were referenced; the issue was that our automated build process was incrementing the version number on each build, and in order for the CAB to build correctly you need to manually "refresh dependencies" on the CAB project.

The final resolution was to download the Windows Mobile 2003 SDK and run "CabWiz" from the command line. I used the "inf" file that was generated by Visual Studio 2005 (make sure to convert it from Unicode to Ansi text first) and everything worked like a charm.

As many of you know, Liz went back in for a second surgery on March 25 -- her shunt had a bad or clogged valve and fluid was going around it instead of through it. The good news is, it looks like everything is fine now -- it took a few months of her sleeping semi-upright for everything to heal up, but she is now looking good and has a good report from the doctor.

She's working on sleeping through the night, but still not that great at it -- we are doing sleep training, which is not fun but is necessary.

In any case, it's been a while since I posted, so here are some new pictures of the kids:





Here is Liz eating squash. She's gotten a lot better at it -- but it's still a messy proposition.












Creighton likes to lay down on the carpet with Liz -- she loves it too. Basically, she loves any attention she gets from him. She has started grabbing at his head and clothes when he is near enough, and they both get a big kick out of it.










Finally, Liz is able to sit up by herself for brief periods -- she is a little slumpy, but once again is making progress.