Alexey Solofnenko blog

Unlike our previous trip there, this Saturday we were prepared. I would say even over-prepared. Last time we were driving FWD Honda CRV and had to turn back few miles east from Bowman Lake. This time we were driving real 4x4 SUV, had GPS, during daylight, together with a friend on another real SUV, and, just in case, had a strong rope...

In the morning I found a relatively inexpensive gas station in Sacramento 73 miles from home. I always like to have an almost full tank before going into woods. Car's computer also told me that there is enough gasoline for 73 miles. That was not risky - for some reason the computer believes that the tank is 2 gallons less than it is actually and we already drove several times past "0 miles" when even analog gauge showed negative gasoline level. By the time I got to the gas station, the computer still reported about 20 miles left in the tank and we pumped only 20 gallons. I wonder what my car thinks about our usual way of driving... We met with Eugene and his son Gena and continued on the path.

Driving up on highway 80 was fun, except for few slow vehicles. I was surprised to see a Prius driving together with us. We turned on highway 20 and then took Bowman Lake Road. We stopped at Jordan Creek and jumped on the rocks. There was a lot of people swimming, but we did not take our swim suits. Regardless Katya swam in the creek far from the people.

At first Bowman Lake Road was fine, then it became a 1.5 lane paved road and then the pavement ended. It looked worse than the previous time we were there, but maybe I was driving slower on CRV. It was interesting to drive on a single lane road with a cliff on one side and a possibility that another car can be driving towards you. A recent fire was still smoking near the road. There is a shortage of water in California this year and Bowman Lake, being actually a reservoir, was about 15 meters lower than the maximum level. The weather was about 22 C and the water was not comfortable. It did not stop Katya from diving. Being a young man, Gene had to swim too. Then that my wife went swimming. After that me and Eugene had to go swimming too...

After a small picnic, we prepared to go further. However the road was fixed and the drive was uneventful. We went to Truckee. Eugene and Gene went home. We stayed, ate a pizza and decided to take Donner Pass Road back. We stopped on the vista. There was so much smoke in the air, Donner Lake was almost invisible. We looked at artificial railroad tunnel - a train track covered in concrete and noticed cars driving there. Obviously the tacks were removed there and we decided to go there too. We drove into two first tunnels, but they were narrow for just a single can to pass. The big tunnel was wider, but we decided not to go there yet. Maybe next time.

Ever wondered if your policy assemblies work?

.Net assemblies remember what versions of referenced assemblies they were built with. In general it is a good thing, but it creates its own problems when building a product that consists of many separate parts. In the interest of QA we often build mismatched package builds with some of the application products built with earlier versions of core libraries. Fortunately our build scripts (directly from VisualStudio) generate all necessary policy assemblies for previous and the current releases and installer puts them into GAC.

At first there were rumors that one of applications (developed in a different office and built on its own schedule) does not start in mismatched builds. In the beginning the warnings were dismissed because the APIs were not stable, but later it became apparent that something is wrong. And finally the problem came to me...

After enabling assembly loader log, it showed that policy assembly was recognized and the redirect actually happened, but the target assembly was not found even it was right there in the GAC. However there was a message that the platform was locked to the policy assembly platform. This particular assembly had native DLLs attached to it, so its platform was not a generic "MSIL", but "x86" and this is why it could not be found.

To test this idea I regenerated policy file with matching platform, but how to install it into GAC? Removing old policy was not possible - it was locked by installer. Fortunately Cygwin`s Midnight Commander sees real file system and ignores all Microsoft crap and I was able to remove the assembly directly from hard drive and install a new one into GAC. And it helped - the application started and worked without problems.

The policy generation (and some other "black magic" staff, including support for linked resources) is done via an include in our project files and is a part of another utility project. After that project rebuild, our automatic build picked it up and certified all dependent projects to pass unit tests. Now all our policy assembly platform match their assembly's platform and everything quiet in our kingdom.

Being a mathematician (and a little bit a physicist) I always felt something is wrong with hydrogen cars idea. Besides the promise of higher cruising range, each additional transformation reduces overall efficiency factor causing even more energy to be used per unit of work (or per mile). I would prefer that all that money would be used on development of better batteries, so cars could drive about 400 miles without recharging.

The idea of using VMWare to save energy is somewhat similar - reducing overall computer efficiency to be able to pack more services on less hardware. Lets review theoretical benefits of computer virtualization:

• automatic distribution of computer resources between VMs
• automatic starting and stopping VMs
• automatic VM relocation between computers
• services isolation

And the cost - less VM performance.

However, if you look closer at the benefits, you will notice they are similar to benefits of Java. Instead of virtualizing the whole OS, Java virtualizes just processes while generating code that executes close to native speeds (sometimes faster, sometimes slower, depending on what you are doing) and Java code has much better portability between computers with different architectures. I know it first hand - after we moved some parts of our build processes from slow Windows VMs to a single Solaris box, we saved hours!

So what is the conclusion - use Java to save energy and adding one more level of indirection is usually not the best solution.

Today I was fixing few Windows forms. There few problems that usually should be easy to fix. However in this case none of direct approaches worked. After few attempts I found that there is a logic in a form Closing event, also in OnHandleDescroyed(). As if it was not enough, there was a secret order of calls to initialize the form. After direct approach failed, I reverted all changes and started refactoring the code to simplify internal relations, move code out of the form into custom controls... At the end the all main problems were fixed and I am preaching everybody not to program like that.

Instead of camping we went today to Muir Woods. Yesterday we have friends visiting us, so we could not go camping. Maybe it is better this way - the weather was quite cold - about 4°C. Just walking in Muir Woods is not for us - instead I with kids went on Sierra Trail down to Alice Eastwood Campground. When we came there I thought that again I did not bring any fire with me. Surprisingly, there was not a fully extinguished fire place with a lot of food and boxes thrown around. The food looked like it was spread by some animals, making the date of the fire a day before! I am bewildered by the way people do not follow simple rules with fires in the forest. Last autumn, we had a similar situation in a campground on NF-11N46 at US-50 highway near Kyburz. In any case, it was beneficial for us - we just put few empty paper boxes in a fire place and watched great fire. There was a water facet few meters away, so we watered it down at the end until there were no hot spots.

In the meantime, my wife parked the car near Muir Woods entrance (it was lucky to park so close to the entrance!) and met us at the campground. Then we took Fern Creek into Muir Woods. Kids are getting better with hiking. Maxim walked all the way and even had some strength left for evening tennis.

Next time We will try Bootjack Trail. Actually each time we wanted to go there, but my GPS does not show trails, so we chose one available trail after another. Now I printed a map....

My mother called telling that my photo server is not available any more. It looks like one of versions of mythweb broke my web server. Apache stopped running with error that "setenv" is not a valid command mythweb.conf file. After removing the package, Apache is working fine. I wonder what other unused junk should I remove...

Technorati Profile

I have been playing with my new VOIP phone for some time now. I bought Linksys PAP2-NA and opened an account with a Canadian firm. Surprisingly I found out that Canadian dollar is now more expensive than American. Not much to warrant looking for another company. Of cause it did not work out of the box - I had to always use long distance numbers even for my zone and incoming calls were always busy. After contacting my provider I unchecked "Send DID Prefix" option in my DID and it worked! I still need to iron out problems with NAT before disconnecting my normal phone - incoming calls do not always connect. After that I will tell my TelCo bye-bye.

Today I visited my photos on Panoramio. Some photos became popular, some others (usually the photos that were not selected for Google Earth) stopped being popular. Surprisingly the photo I am not proud of is the most popular - a road in Long Beach. The only explanation I can think is that nobody else made a photo of this uninteresting street next to the Aquarium. As usual, location is the more important than the quality of the photo itself.

I have watched a film from "Digging for the Truth" serial about God's Gold. The film was about a possible path that the Second Temple treasures and the path ended in Saint Theodosius monastery. The film crew was denied visiting the monastery, so I decided to look at it in Google Maps. Well, it was not easy to find. The map in the film was not very detailed. Fortunately I was able to find monastery air photos and start looking for similar features on satellite's photos. Just by luck, I was able to find it: map . The images are not very detailed, but, at least, I found it and when eventually the maps are updated, we can see better what is behind the walls.