A quick update on Mei. Doctors have found she has some brain hemorrhage. Also, her kidneys are not doing so good. So, the doctors are having a meeting to decide how to proceed (whether to infiltrate her kidneys or not, etc).

Since we will allbe at the hospital all day and tomorrow, feel free to call us. My dad's cell phone is +011 (502) 5814-4878. My cell is +011 (502) 5215-8722. I have Miami number, 1-305-455-9823 that forwards to my cell.

Just got a phone call. Mei stopped breathing this morning. They got her going again, but she's having some liquid in her lungs and problems with her kidneys. Doctors are looking at putting a shunt in or something. I'm heading down now.

Update: She stopped breathing this morning.

That is, all of got through the night. Very strange coming back, seeing all Mei's stuff, lying down, and she's not there. Plus the neighbours baby was crying this morning, so for a split second I thought perhaps Mei was back here. At any rate, Gaby and I feel a lot more...composed. Mei is doing fine according to the nurses. Gaby and the grandmothers are going there this morning.

A little bit of information on what Mei has:
http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov/ddiseases/pubs/hirschsprungs_ez/

A lot of people have said “Buying blood, WTF?”... Well, I guess that's how they do it down here. As far as I can tell, each hospital keeps a bit of blood themselves, but rely on a bloodbank for {many|some|most} requests. However, the idea of pre-stocking is a completely foreign concept here. I think I wrote before on this blog, but we went to a store once, asked for soap. We were told there was no soap. “Well, shouldn't you buy more, since you already sold out and it's only the middle of the month?” “No, we only sell soap for the first half of the month.” Another time, shopping for an out-of-stock item, I was told ?(quite angrily) “We stock enough of the product, the problem is that people just buy it so fast.” I guess the same applies to blood?

Things are complicated by the fact that the donation requirements are absurd to say the least. Obviously you want healthy blood being donated, but they will deny someone from donating for any reason, such as having taken aspirin a day before. My wife's doctor was denied because... he's a doctor. Went I want to donate yesterday, the nurse said I couldn't because I was “scared”.

Then, throw in a good dose of inefficiency (really, I almost flipped on the receptionist when she said “receiving blood??” and seemed puzzled at how to handle our order), and there you go. When I was paying, the lady insisted on a national tax ID number and wouldn't let me say “no, I don't need a government-authorized invoice, just let me have the blood so I could go“. Fortunately the doctor was with me (I don't think I'd have been the best driver), so he gave his... crazy.

The whole blood issue is small however compared to the doctor who handled Mei. This should have been caught quickly, before it became a major issue, if he wasn't negligent. Probably doesn't help much to think about it, but it just infuriates me to know that this was so easily avoidable, and *should* have been avoided.

The kidney expert said that they needed to change Mei's blood to help fix her kidney, so they performed a blood transfusion on her. They also lowered her sedatives so she is slightly awake, but without any pain. Gaby's (my wife) is going to go there all day tomorrow and I'll show up later on at night (since Mei only wakes up at night anyways). I guess this is progress?

Just a short update, Mei's white blood cell count is now up to 2700, from 1300. It should be around 10,000. But at least this is good sign that she's making some leeway against the infection. At least, I'm guessing that's what it means.

Her kidney is still having some trouble. While she did pass a bit of urine, her kidney isn't at normal levels at all. A specialist is coming in this night to check it out.

Thanks to those who have emailed and left comments. Your prayers and messages are deeply appreciated.

Updates, click here.

I haven't written here for a long time, so I don't know how many subscribers there are... but anyways. Something personal. For those who want to skip the article, I just beg a second of your thoughts to Natasha Mei Giagnocavo, who's in intensive care. A prayer, short meditiation, positive thought, any little bit helps. 

Four days ago, my first daughter, Mei, was finally born. Perfect quick labor (< 2hrs, out of the hospital in 19 total), everything checked out just fine, we were home the next day.


That's me in scrubs with Mei, minutes after she was born

Having a baby is the the most awesome, most amazing experience I've ever had. She's pretty cute, and when your baby opens her eyes and just stares at you... it's something profound. But enough: People who haven't had children won't understand, and those who have, already do.

Anyways, two days later we were a bit worried as she hadn't had a BM at our house. So we called the pediatrician, and he assured us that she had had a BM at the hospital, and that everything was normal and fine.

Sunday night:
She cried a lot at night, making us think perhaps she was colic. Sunday night, same thing, she started crying a lot, mainly little cries as she exhaled. She started having green vomit come out, and her stomach was hard as rock. We called the pediatrician again, and he told us to give her a sedative. Not believing the quack, I called my mother, who is a registered nurse (RN). My parents drove down immediately, and when my mom saw Mei, she knew we had to leave for the hospital immediately.

Mei was coming up this green stuff, but barely crying. The whole evening, she had her eyes (dark dark blue) wide open, just staring at us, crying a bit. I had no clue what pain she was in, how bad things where.

At the ER, we got a tube down her nose to start bringing up all this green stuff. They tried to get an IV in, but weren't able because her veins were so small. All the time she just stared, calmed down when I spoke her name, looked so precious.

For those few who actually subscribe to my RSS feed, sorry... I'll be posting info about spammer companies I find in Guatemala so I can refer their clients to the pages. 99% of Spanish spam I receive is from companies who have been fooled by spammers. Usually I receive a good response after talking to the client directly, so we'll see. This could get interesting, in which case I'll make a separate /GuatemalaSpam/ directory and get it off the blog.


Offending Spammer:
Direct Publimedia
3 Ave. 8-37, zona 9 Guatemala
Telephone: (502) 2361-7900, (502) 2377-1272, Fax: (502) 2339-1779
ventas@directpublimedia.com

Confirmed spamming client of Direct Publimedia:
 -SuCarrito (SuCarrito.com)
   Av. Las Américas 18-25 Zona 14, Guatemala
   Telephone (502)2385-2261 (502)2459-1434 (502)24591410 
   soporte@sucarrito.com

Offending Spammer:
Estrategia Digital (Publinet):
Avenida Las Américas 18-81 zona 14
Edificio Columbus Center Oficina 2 
Guatemala, Centroamérica
Teléfono: (502) 23633084

Here is the list of confirmed clients that spam with Estrategia Digital (Publinet):
 - Nina Caps (2436-0261, ventas@ninacaps.com, 10a calle 27-67 Finca El Naranjo Zona 4 de Mixo)
 - Carolina Y H (they are a big Pharmacy and Hardware store... (don't ask about that combination)) 2368-3990, ventas@carolinayh.com
 - MoviExpress, a pirated software vendor (5692-7916)

Here is the list of unconfirmed clients that spam with Estrategia Digital (Publinet). I have not collected an email from them, but have good reason that they have sent out spam or soon will, as they are dealing with Estrategia Digital.
 - Inter Mall (1a. av. 15-54 zona 10, 2470-2964)
 - Unnamed perfume store “La Perfumeria” (calling them gets nervous people saying “umm... perfume... yea, hey, call this number and talk to this guy...“) 5615-2155, 2238-6467. 

Install took about 15 minutes. I installed the database server + workstation components. No reporting, analysis yet. Maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me, but it seems that it will install multiple components simultaneously if dependencies are satisfied. That's neat. Anyways, the setup is a very slick setup, and I didn't get any annoying errors about having to reboot (which always seems the case with SQL 2000). No errors reported.

After you are done, it tells you to run SQLSAC: Surface Area Configuration. Wow, this is very cool. Right in your face: Do you want local only connections, or remote connections via TCP/IP or named pipes or both? For the many people that have a single-server setup (i.e., tons of web sites), this should be a nice and easy way to lock yourself down.

The old “client network setup” and server setup is replaced by an MMC-based configuration manager. Quickly view your setup. Nice.

The old help system has been replaced by the new kind (Help 2?). In the earlier versions of Yukon, this meant it sucked, as the help was very messed up. But now, like Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2, the help flies and works just great.

I tried adding an operator and adding an alert. While the alert shows it's been triggered a few times, the operator is never contacted (email). I set up “Database Mail”, but that didn't seem to help either. The help files had some really lame advice. Like “to set up notification, click notify” kind of stuff. Spent probably 10 minutes trying to get some notification going, to no avail. :@. Anyone know how to do this?

One that that is great about the Studio is that things actually work. In the earlier versions, nothing was implemented. I've successfully attached my SQL 2000 databases. This is a huge thing, as now I know I can just upgrade my servers and go full 2005! Bye bye SQL 2000. It's been great.

I really, really, like the SQL Server Management Studio. No more having to go to Query Analyzer separately. Now I can do everything right there. Very, very, nice.

The only ugly thing is that the grid UI they have looks really old and ugly. It still reminds me of SQL 2000's Query Analyzer or something. It's also terribly slow. The rest of the UI seems fast, but those damn grids are just screwed up. I can actually see the lag. I hope they get replaced.

Database diagrams are back (like they should be!). This is great. However, after importing my SQL 2000 database, I couldn't view my existing diagrams, and trying to create one results in:

Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio
----------------------------------------
Failed to retrieve data for this request. (Microsoft.SqlServer.SmoEnum)
----------------------------------------
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
An exception occurred while executing a Transact-SQL statement or batch. (Microsoft.SqlServer.ConnectionInfo)

Cannot execute as the database principal because the principal "dbo" does not exist, this type of principal cannot be impersonated, or you do not have permission. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 15517)

However, it did work fine on a new database. The diagrams are way uglier than before, but whatever. At least they are there. Having them makes up for the table editor sucking. Seriously, the table editor is as bad as Visio's table editor. This means you must click a field, and then go down to the bottom and use this little property editor to set basic parameters. I just don't get it...

Support in Visual Studio looks like exactly what I'd expect from a development standpoint. It appears that you get the entire tree of SQL Management Studio from the database on down. Cool.

Well, anyways, that's my first quick look. I'll be using SQL 2005 as my primary database from now on, so I'm sure I'll come up with a lot more feedback.

I got my Windows 2003 machine installed without a problem (well, except for the bloody floppy disk drive being needed). After installing SP1 and Office 2003, I decided to go put on what I had been waiting for since Saturday: Whidbey Beta 2.

Install went smooth and fast. I think it was under 30 minutes (not inc. MSDN). I install almost everything except J# (haha), Crystal Reports (yuck), and Dotfuscator (I have way better!).

I reboot, install MSDN, run Visual Studio.

---------------------------
Package Load Failure
---------------------------
Package 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.TestCaseManagement.QualityToolsPackage, Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.TestCaseManagement, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a' has failed to load properly ( GUID = {A9405AE6-9AC6-4F0E-A03F-7AFE45F6FCB7} ).

Damn, there goes all the testing features. While all the pretty icons are in, none of them work.

*Update! A friend who works on Team System says that not installing the Team Foundation Client will cause problems with Beta 2. I'm also told that I don't need to wait to install TFS first. So, I'll go install it. Thanks, I hope that works!

Next, open up a project, try the properties. Everything works smoothly. The properties window even closes correctly. This was a major pain point before.

Performance testing. Oh, wait, that doesn't work:
---------------------------
Microsoft Visual Studio
---------------------------
Could not load type 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.Performance.PerfWorkItem' from assembly 'PerfPkg, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a'.
---------------------------
OK  
---------------------------

OK, well, I don't use those features everyday. I'm sure someone will find a fix shortly. I haven't even looked yet.
*Update: Supposedly related to not having the TF Client installed.

I got a crash while saving my settings (I can't resist going through all the nifty options). But I tried again and it worked.

Graphically, the whole program looks quite polished. Except for the test on the splash screen not being antialiased, and a few icons here and there (solution icon in the solution explorer), it looks very refreshing. The docking tabs (is that what they are?) for the toolbox, solution explorer, etc, are redesigned. A tad space wasting, but attractive. Dragging a toolbox around has a nicer targeting system. There have been a lot of great colourizing enhancements. (Yes, and my suggestion of maroon-coloured strings is now a default! Yea!)

Seems quite fast. Compiling my only real Whidbey app (~25K lines of C#) works great. UI does not lock up while compiling. Compiling web projects does not take forever (before, it'd hang for about 10 seconds).

ASP.NET... ok, here's the big one... *IT IS NOT FIXED*. Yep. Everyone (like me) who was hoping that the ASP.NET team would stop tripping before Beta 2... welcome to reality. You're gonna develop your web apps like ASP Classic, and you're gonna like it, dammit.

Basically, it boils down to that every bloody class is its own freaking assembly. What a pain in the ass. I mean, seriously. They do ASP.NET 1.0, and blow everyone away. Then they think that even though people like me have been saying it should be this way for years, they feel it is too early to introduce real app development to web apps. If you want to share code, you have to put it in the “App_Code“ directory. I guess this helps people who are used to <!-- #include “inc/functions.asp“ -->.

Another thing, ASP.NET isn't listed in the new project dialog. Somehow the ASP.NET team things that they aren't projects. I'd *love* to find out why this is, besides “idiots who could barely figure out PHP couldn't figure out ASP.NET need help“. Why I have to have this “file based“ “web project“ thing just keeps annoying me.

But, despite my complaining, I will, like an abused girlfriend, keep coming back for more from ASP.NET 2. The other features (i.e., great designer, awesome C# code editor, freaking fantastic framework) outweigh the huge annoyance that ASP.NET projects have become. I swear, if it wasn't for ASP.NET's new features (like Master Pages), I would not, repeat, would NOT, develop new web apps with VS 2005. But, they know this. They know their feature set is so sexy, I'm gonna happily get smacked around. They know I'm addicted and will play whatever little game they want to play to keep using. They want to treat me like dirt^H^H^H^HMort, fine. Whidbey is such a huge jump ahead that I'll just have to move on. Really. I will. Eventually. BTW, I'm not just complaining for no reason. Even on the relatively small projects (say, 18 project solution, ~100K lines) that I've done, I can't imagine ever, ever, using this new project model.

Of course, maybe I'm just missing something, and it actually is fixed. If I missed it, then I guess I deserve it. But I'm pretty sure they aren't hiding much.

Moving on...

I am also going to install Team Foundation Server and the Team Client. In the TFS setup, it says to install the client after the server (*Update: which might be incorrect). And the server needs SQL Server 2005, so I'm waiting for that to finish downloading. Finally.... real source control, defect tracking. Wow. I'm also looking forward to playing with the revised (hopefully revised) data tools. The ones in Beta 1... were next to unusable. I understand they've been fixed and features left in (like diagrams).

I heard there was community integration, and sure enough, there's a Community menu item. However, clicking anything there ends up with a:
---------------------------
Microsoft Visual Studio
---------------------------
The operation could not be completed. The RPC server is unavailable.
---------------------------
OK  
---------------------------

Maybe the install is messed up. Or maybe it's a crappy error message for “Couldn't contact Microsoft's community servers.” No idea.

In C++, I've had more success with the “go to reference” feature than before. This is a non-Microsoft C project. I'm using VS as the editor only. The experience seems to be improved over Beta 1. Cool.

MSDN works! It's fast too! Quite fast actually. And so does the search (well, haven't tried in detail, but before it was pretty crappy).

Upgrading. On my 25K line project, I had 34 errors and 10 warnings. The majority of them were from ASP.NET's changes (the ones that improved it from Beta 1). Not bad!

Well, that is my first quick glance. I'll have some real time during the next while to really get involved.

As of right now, I have 760GB in my computer, temporarily. My Western Digital 120GB IDE drive had an error a month ago, so I got some Seagate 7200.7s and put them on an Adaptec SATA RAID card (RAID 1). After I remove my old drive, and discounting the mirrored drive, I have almost half of a terabyte of storage on my local computer (and it's mostly full already).

What's interesting is that almost ten years ago, I was making the similar claim about having 500MB -- half a gigabyte! Most other people I knew either didn't have a computer, or had much less than 500MB. Heh, and today, I've got 1.5GB of RAM alone :P.

Oh, one little rant. Windows setup sucks. Horribly. If you've had to install Windows onto a “3rd party mass storage device” (well, duh, Microsoft doens't make hard disks), you know what I'm talking about. It actually requires you to have a floppy disk drive. A floppy! Who the hell has one of those? Oh, you can do the $OEM$ thing, if you can figure it out. Microsoft doesn't have any guide on adding your drivers to the Windows boot CD. Nope. I mean, would it have been that difficult to have it also be able to load from a CD-ROM? I've got 2 spare CD burners here. Not a single FDD! I had to get someone to bring one down, and then waste probably an hour trying to get it to work, find an actual diskette that worked, etc... Sigh.

Well, at least I hear Longhorn will have an amazing setup system...

I just read that Adobe is going to buy Macromedia. Ever since I touched that atrocity named “Flash”, I've been hoping that this would happen. I'm sure anyone who's ever dealt with Macromedia's “Freehand” will also let out a big sigh of relief. I won't say it's a brilliant move, because I don't know of a single good Macromedia product. Only that entrenched Flash thing...

Although, it's actually doubtful that Adobe will fix Macromedia's products, because their users would get all confused. In the past, when I've had to work in such environments that required dealing with “designers”, I've found that Mac users are only surpassed in cluelessness by Freehand users. That's saying a lot, since I've had a Mac designer tell me that Windows can't “draw a smooth line”.

As far as Flash... Adobe has a Flash product. “InMotion”. And for actually doing animation, it rocks Flash. But Adobe is not really that great at doing motion products. Their still-image stuff is the best, but Premiere, After Effects... blah. If you want to see what some REAL compositing/editing software is like, try out: www.discreet.com.

Now, if discreet (Autodesk) could just manage to get Adobe, we'd be living in a nice world. This is in spite of Microsoft selling off Softimage to *horror* Avid. Microsoft should have worked on a fork of Softimage, scaled down to home users. Movie Maker|DS anybody?

Wow. It's up. Downloading @ 50KB/sec right now. If you don't know what it is, I'll give you a hint. It starts in Visual, ends in Studio. Beta 2.

On Monday I'm getting (2) 200GB SATA-II drives to use with my Adaptec RAID card. I'm going to run RAID 1 (mirror) just in case my daily backups + 2nd day archive backups + weekly DVD backups fail. Am I paranoid?

At any rate, that means installing Windows on the new system. And along with that, Visual Studio Beta 2, on a nice, clean, machine. Perfect timing.

I just used the coolest feature in a while: VS2005's Call Browser.

I'm currently working on some firmware for IP phones and adapters. The chip is the Intel 8051, as used by Centrality Communications in the PA168. It's actually quite fun, programming for an 8-bit system. Apart from writing in C (instead of such high-level things like C#), writing for embedded systems like this adds its own interesting things, like having to decide where a variable will be stored (I think there is 3 different storage locations a variable can have with the 8051). Oh yea, and having to keep things really small, and really fast.

At any rate, I am not that familiar with the entire design of the system, and I just want to focus on adding features to the IAX2 implementation (cause SIP sucks!). A large part of my work is to figure out how things work. Having the Goto Definition (F12) is great for finding specific symbols, but doesn't help with the flow. Up until now, I've been Finding in Files for a specific method, then chasing things down by recursively Finding in Files until I figured out how things are called. This happens a lot, since these devices support 5 protocols and use #ifdefs and generic calls to interface with the different protocols. Add to that 8MB of source, and it's no small task.

This morning, I remembered I had seen a “Call Browser” window in Visual Studio 2005 a while ago. Edit: Apparently this isn't a new feature and has been around since VC6 (at least). Well, it's new to ME, and it's still very cool.

Here's an example. Let's say I want to add attended transfer (where you have a call, press transfer, dial a number, talk to the new call, then hangup to connect the two). I'm looking in the source I'm familar with (the IAX protocol area), and see iax2_hangup(). That's a packet-level call, so when someone physically hangs up, that, somehow, gets called. Where? Well... right click the function, Call Browser -> Show Calls To:


Click... click... click... bingo. Now I've got a complete grasp on the call flow that would send a IAX_COMMAND_HANGUP. My old way (which makes me feel stupid now) of browsing source doesn't even come close. A lot of programming these days is managing complexity. It's all about making the best use of our limited brainspace (some more limited than others). 17 lines/1 small diagram. That's all it takes for me to see this complete flow. How much mental capacity does that require versus browsing multiple locations in 4 different source code files?

Well, I didn't get reawarded this year, so today's my last day as an MVP. I didn't get reawarded this year because, lets see.... I didn't do anything to deserve the MVP award. I wholly agree with their decision, and I'm quite sure another way more qualified person is now in the program. I'm just really busy with this thing called “real life”. Growing up, I wasn't sure it existed :). Anyways, with a baby and some serious work issues coming up ahead, I doubt I'll be able to do much for the community for the next while anyways.

Anyways, it was a great ride, lots of fun. Thanks!