Category Archives: Salesforce

Thoughts on Life

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Life goes, I suppose.

Today, I went to Border’s to use up my gift card on books, with the intent of picking up copies of Slaughterhouse-Five, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World (the last being the most important). However, of those books the only one that was not $15 was Fahrenheit 451 (seriously, if Amazon can sell these for $8 new, why can’t you?), so I picked up a couple clearance books instead. Spent the afternoon and evening reading through them. It’s nice… I haven’t really just sat down and read books for fun in a long, long time. (Perhaps the speed at which I go through books is a contributing factor, given I finished three 200-400 page books in 6 hours. Then again, given I watch most DVDs at 1.5x with subtitles, I probably go through all media faster than most people.)

Work goes. I find it strange how I can enjoy the work I am doing so much, yet be so frustrated by work in general. Perhaps it’s because it’s always the little details that annoy me, but the general work I’m doing is interesting and awesome. So it goes.
(As an example, I had to attempt to submit a changelist seven times today before it went through, over a period of about 2.5 hours. Frustrating.)

I have been working on the redo of RPG Get!… again. It’s now on its fourth revision (second, as far as the general public is concerned), and will hopefully be ready for limited playtesting this weekend. With the rules revamp came a template revamp (although this was actually not necessary this time). Playing around in Photoshop is always fun, and I’m hoping to be able to do so for each expansion set released as I redesign the templates to fit the particular source material.

Personal life continues to be very nice. I suppose I don’t write about that enough, but I don’t really know what there is to say. Things go well and I am very happy. Whee.

I feel like I haven’t been sleeping well lately. I should attempt to rectify that now.

null

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Yesterday afternoon’s little bit of head scratching and debugging confusion comes to you courtesy of the fact that

SELECT * FROM my_table
WHERE my_id = iObject.my_id

does not do the expected thing when both my_id and iObject.my_id are null.
Because apparently null = null and null <> null both evaluate to false, because any comparison involving null evaluates to false.
(Edit: As pointed out to me by many people, it should actually evaluate to null, but regardless, the effect is the same… the select statement does not get the rows you expect.)

I guess it makes sense when you think about it (a lack of a value is not equal to the lack of a value, because there is no value, as opposed to C where null is just a pointer to 0x0 so a value comparison makes sense), but it’s still a surprising issue when you first come across it. Working around it involves the non-intuitive

SELECT * FROM my_table
WHERE (my_id IS NULL AND iObject.my_id IS NULL) OR my_id = iObject.my_id

It looks like MySql also provides the null-comparing operator <=> which will return equality even if both items are null. But it doesn’t look like Oracle does.

Blah.

On an unrelated note, I’ve redone the design of photos. Check it out if you haven’t yet, and let me know if things are broken or don’t work for you. :)

Food

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Life has been eventful lately. I’ve been neglecting posting photos, but that’s more because I’ve packed away my old laptop and do not currently have access to Photoshop. Galleries of photos will be forthcoming once I am in Pittsburgh and situated and have a new computer (because resizing hundreds of photos is no fun without batch processing).

Friday was a trip to Mountain View for dinner at New Mongolian BBQ, followed by a trip to Dan’s for games.
Saturday was spent wandering… we headed to Stanford to take photos on campus. Afterward was an impromptu pool party at Katrina’s apartment.
Sunday was spent in San Francisco packing and walking places with Ian (Costco pizza and gelato for lunch!) before Tres Agaves dinner with Mark and Ian.
Monday had a random “we converted to Dell boxes and Linux yay” party at work on the beautiful 42nd floor. They raffled away Dell Minis. I didn’t win one, but I will probably end up getting something similar anyway.
Today was awesome dinner at EAT which featured an amazing salmon and shrimp dish, followed by the most amazing nectarines and plums I’d ever had anywhere (never mind the other parts of the dish that were just as amazing). Afterward there was hot tubbing at Bayside. I will miss having a hot tub.

Good food is one of those things that I should indulge in more often. It’s really enjoyable and going with the right people makes it an awesome experience too.




Tomorrow is my last day in San Francisco. Scary.

Success…?

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There is nothing quite like the feeling you get when a big change you made gets deployed to customers and you try it and it works. That feeling is magnified 10000x when you have been stressing all day over it because it is a major bug that was introduced the day before and you have a hard deadline the next day for fixing it.

That said, I’d rather not have the magnification and not have to stress.

(In case you couldn’t tell… the release Friday night went very badly for us.)

Here’s hoping tomorrow doesn’t hold any more surprises for us so I don’t spend all day at work again.

This has really been the worst week ever. :\

Karaoke

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Today we went to YamaSho and sang karaoke. They are a really nice place and the song selection is excellent. They also deliver excellent Japanese food right to your room, which is awesome.

It was a good break from what is turning out to be a horrible week at work. The issues have been piling up and this morning (after a bad dream and walking to work in tons of rain and wind that soaked everything I was wearing), I was basically getting constant emails and bugs for 4 hours. Context switching between 6 issues every 5 minutes is… not pleasant.
This week will just get worse from here, as Friday is a major release and both my manager and our QAs’ manager are out. This… will not end well.

But blah. This weekend, unless horrible things happen and I am forced to work, I am spending doing random things completely unrelated to coding or bug fixing or troubleshooting.

Edit: Shower, and now feeling better. As long as I don’t get shittons of emails and bugs again tomorrow, I think I can tackle the stuff I got these past few days and be ok. Hope.

Also just realized that the release means I have to be working this weekend. Meh. Oh well. I can at least do things unrelated to bug fixing or troubleshooting. :P