Pickabar Blog

On Sunday, Ray, Sarah and I headed over to Central Park Summerstage to see the legendary Barrington Levy…this year’s edition of the annual Pickabar Trip to a Dancehall show . I have to say, I had an all around amazing day from start to finish.

We got there just a bit after 3:00, just about the time when the rain was starting. It was a nasty muggy day, like the 20 or so days before it, so were delighted once the drops finally started to fall. We’d rushed over to make sure we got in before summerstage reached capacity, but in the end the rain chased enough folks home so that that never became an issue.

Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra (or here if you don’t speak japanese) opened the show while the rain was still coming down. They played slightly enjoyable although thoroughly generic ska, but the rain and the crowd made the experience generally enjoyable. Highlights of their set included a lightning strike that appeared to hit the top of the stage, and seeing asian dudes in wet suits. Skapara (yeah, i’m hip to their nickname daddy-o) are definitely good musicians, and they put a lot of energy into their shows, but it really never veered away from generic fun ska. Maybe Ray’s jaded outlook spread to me…

…actually, now that I think of it the highlight of the show was watching members of the crowd who had probably never heard a ska band tweaking their dancehall moves and having a good time skanking it up in the rain.

About half way through their set the sun broke through the crowds, although that didn’t stop the rain or the lightning. I actually spent a great deal of the set drooling over their instruments…a gibson with some sort of tan quilted top, a strat that was beat up in all the right ways, and an electric standup bass that looked like a lot of fun. Yes Sarah, it was a pink trombone.

Pickabar friend Kahlil was the MC for the event, but he didn’t seem to hear my screaming from out in the crowd. We did talk after the show, and hopefully we’ll be getting together soon.

While I’m on a tangent, how about another? Despite the message of most of the music I used to listen to in high school, the daily newspaper, and cable news, I have to say people are generally pretty cool. A small amount of the crowd headed for the hills with each crack of thunder, and some folks seemed put off by the threat to their haircuts or outfits, but they were in the minority. Mostly the multicultural crowd danced, enjoyed being wet, and had a great time. ugh…I’m sounding like a hippy. Anyway…

By the time Skapara left the stage everyone was double ready for the star of the show. Even the weather, which cleared up just before his set started.

Barrington (don’t worry, we’re tight like that) did not disappoint treating the crowd to all of the hits you’d expect, nearly sending our little group into hysterics with “Here I Come”. There was of course the mandatory encore, but in this case the crowd really was clamoring for more. After performing a two or three song encore, the summerstage staff started to get nervous (weather? powerful neighbors?) and Mr. Levy left the stage grudgingly. The crowd sauntered off just as the rain started to pick up again, and our day was over.

Or se we thought. On the way back home we passed by the bandshell, near the spot where drum circles usually form. A crowd of folks, at least some of whom had also just left the show, were huddled under the bandshell as the rain really started to pour. We joined them, shimmying as the drummers jammed with the drops.

A few minutes later, someone decided to jump out into the rain and dance…and a few minutes after that there was a full on dance party in the rain. There was a breakdancer, an african dancer, a hippy chick, an idiot desperately looking for attention and various others who were already to wet to care.

Yes, that includes your humble host. After half an hour or so we picked up our soggy belongings and headed home.

Not feeling like cooking after dancing and dripping all day, we decided to stop by Josie’s (a local veggie eatery). We were so wet at that point that we just stood in the monsoon while restaurant goers and passersby wondered what the heck was wrong with us. Unfortunately, it stopped raining as we were walking home which also pretty much killed the fun of being dripping wet.

But it didn’t kill the fun of the day. I know I keep using that word, but I really can’t remember the last time I had so much fun in one day. Man, I’m smiling just thinking back to it!

My current favorite time killer is Guitar Shred Show – Mr. Fastfinger a flash animation that teaches the zen art of guitar shredding. Lessons on a few shred licks, including tab and a pretty accurately animated guitar samurai were the draws for me as a guitar fan, but even Sarah had a ton of fun coming up with on the fly “remixes” of the licks via keyboard buttons.

The load times aren’t so great, and the narrator’s voice is treading the fine line between eastern cool and eastern europe creepiness, but it’s a guaranteed time waster.

I may have to learn tapping…

[via MusicThing]

One of the challenges my team has faced in building a solution using InfoPath is the difficulty of testing forms which are published to a specific url. Creative use of a HOSTS file can be helpful, but sometimes it’s just not possible to support all of the features such as SSL. If the form is supposed to run from “httpS://prodserver” it may not be possible to test it in the stage environment. This has led to some embarrassing production issues for us, due to typos and the like. Add some interesting custom magic we do in our process to the mix and things can get tricky. Well, checking for typos is something that computers do very well.

So, we decided to create an automated post publish utility to verify things like the publishUrl, solutionVersion and other things that are required in our view stylesheets. The only annoying part of the process was having to manually rename the XSN file as a CAb, extract the contents to a folder, and then clean up the files. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a way, preferably managed, to automate that part of the process?

Stepping back, it’s important that you understand that an InfoPath Form template (an XSN file) is just a CAB file with a different extension. Change the file extension on any .XSN file you’ve created to .CAB and you can open it with your CAB viewer of choice (say XP’s compressed folder support). Now, back to our story…

I looked into implementing a managed wrapper for the CAB APIs myself, but it seemed like it would take longer than my budget for the feature would allow. Well, luckily enough, I stumbled onto Jim Mischel’s great article “Creating an Object-Oriented Interface to CAB Files” which includes a code sample for doing just that. I wasn’t able to get the compression portion of his code to work, but the extraction bits suited us to a tee and our used by our utility as we speak. Now testing the published XSN files is as simple as pointing a console exe at the appropriate file and letting the code do it’s magic.

Of course, I’ve yet to hear any thanks from the build manager .

Charlie Murphy had the following to say in a TV Guide interview:

Chappelle’s Show is over, man. Done…[it] was like the Tupac of TV shows. It came out, it got everybody’s attention, it was a bright shining star, but it burned out and for some strange reason, it burned out quick.

Not what any Chappelle fan was expecting to hear. In some ways though, an early end to the show might have been a good thing. The show always teetered on the edge of mediocrity with occasional blasts of total brilliance to save it. Another year, and a year where Dave’s heart wasn’t in it, might have just tarnished our collective memories of the show. Oh well…

Well, after a pretty interesting session on CLR integration in SQL Server 2005 I was desparate to actually start writing some code.
We were lucky enough to get the opportunity to visit the Experience Music Project tonight (more on that later), but as soon as I returned to my suite I sat down at the old Tablet and got cracking.

Unfortunately, it took me nearly an hour to get SQL up and running on my new Vista build. I tried running the installation a few times, but kept getting an error:

Shared Memory Provider: Connection was terminated [1236].

I stumbled onto a possible fix, but still no dice. Then I remembered that I haven’t had an opportunity to join our domain (more software problems )…I had configured the MSSQL service to run as system, so I tried switching it to run w/ a local account on a lark and things fell swiftly into place.

The next step was creating a database, a sample table, and then a VS.NET database project. Twenty minutes later I had a working user defined function to strip host names out of email addresses. Even better, the debugging worked perfectly and helped me catch a little sleepiness induced bug in my code.

Here’s my managed UDF:

     [Microsoft.SqlServer.Server.SqlFunction]     public static SqlString GetHostNameFromEmail(SqlString rawEmailAddress)     {         string rawEmailAddressAsManagedString = rawEmailAddress.ToString();                  int startIndex = rawEmailAddressAsManagedString.IndexOf('@');         int endIndex = rawEmailAddressAsManagedString.IndexOf('.', startIndex);          string result = null;                  if (startIndex > -1 && endIndex > -1)         {             result = rawEmailAddressAsManagedString.Substring(startIndex + 1, endIndex - startIndex -1);         }          return new SqlString(result);     }  

and the query I used in the test script which triggers the function when I start debugging:

 SELECT dbo.GetHostNameFromEmail(EmailAddress) FROM dbo.Customer 

   Sweet. It's going to be hard to go back to work, VS.NET 2K3 and Oracle. It won't be hard going back to my own apartment...next stop NYC!  [updated 8/5: I added the code samples.]   

I landed in the sunny Northwest (it’s recruiting week as someone said) on Sunday and within a few hours I was rocking out at a two dollar show at the local tavern. I actually went looking for frozen burritos to use in my suites microwave, but just after I found them I heard the distinct sounds of live rock’n'roll. I had to throw the burritos away. Some kid was dressed as a giant bong. I bopped around and had a great time, even if I can’t remember the band’s name. Oh yeah, Mary Baby Shakes just happened to be there…spooky!

Seems like Capitol Hill is the east village (or is that billyburg nowadays? redhook?) of Seattle. Hipsters? Ironic metal stylings, including unitard wearing drummer w/ faux porn ‘stache. Feels just like home…with less tattoos.

Every other time I’ve been out here I’ve stayed out in the ‘burbs, this time I’m lucky enough to be in walking distance from just my type of neighborhood. I guess I had a totally incorrect estimation of seattle.

Last night I made the mistake of starting to work on my lovely new Tablet, and while I managed to get dual booting (XP/Vista) working it took most of the night to get the WinFX SD humming correctly. But who needs sleep? So anyway, here’s where I am, and where I’m going tonight.

Kids, I think I’ve got the post your diary on the internet for all to see bug back…