Category: Jessica’s Tech Blog

Yesterday we (the tech team) stayed at the hotel and tested all the remainder of the computers. Of course, this required moving all of them from D. & M.’s room to the Bruncas room (what kind of name is that for a room anyway?) which was a lot of heavy lifting even with the baggage carts to move them. In the end we got them all tested and the room cleaned back up, but not until an hour after “lights out” time.

But in all that testing, we were having fun. All the really broken equipment got named with funny names in sharpies so we wouldn’t accidentally mix up one of the items from the “irrecoverable damage pile” with the “good pile”. And then we were dragging around all the broken monitors by their “tail”–“walking the dog”–we explained to Ceasar, the staff-person from the hotel setting up for breakfast, in Spanglish that the monitor was a dog and then he was laughing with us.

The tech team is a little “different” than the other groups. We don’t tend to follow along with the other groups as closely–we have a little more freedom, being a small group–like we went out for lunch yesterday again (the other groups had only PB&J for lunch), and to the market a couple times during ministry time and me and Leslie went for a swim till we got kicked out of the pool because it was raining too hard–but when we’re there finishing and then cleaning up till 11:30 after having been up at 6:30 in the morning, you don’t feel an unfairness about it–we just get our free time distributed differently and are doing work a lot of people don’t want to be doing.

Yesterday we had our first real rainstorm that was more than a drizzle. We also had power-outtages in the Market when we were there, and the rest of the day in that building when we went back for dinner. Not that I was entierly sorry when that meant we got switched from eating at the downstairs restaurant to the upstairs one that has more menu choices (ie. fish or vegetarian instead of just chicken or beef) and required eating in shifts so we ate later and it was pretty much just the tech team hanging out because naturally, D. the trip coordinator made us the last group–she knows computer people are by nature night owls and woudln’t mind having the last dinner compared to say, the construction team that is famished.

So, even at the meals we were having time to get to know the other geeks better–and not only are they computer geeks–but computer geeks who are Christians and computer geeks who go on missions trips. Way cool. And I still think its weird (but cool) that half of the tech team is from San Diego so their comparisons of San Jose Costa Rica to TJ and Fudruckers and other such local San Diegian things are understood.

Even though we are doing a lot of work, I really feel like I’m on vacation on this trip, and feel thankful for that.

Yesterday we went out to Project Abraham on the other side of town and installed a lab of 8 computers, plus one computer for the secretary of the church. It was a pretty impressive church because they have been very resourceful–almost everything they’ve built is with donated materials–like they found someone who was throwing away wood from shipping crates, and they got laborers (labor is much cheaper than materials in costa rica) to pull the nails and carpet and whatnot off the wood to build the framing for the building, and the glass is all donated. And they aren’t out there building on credit, they only build when the money and materials come in and they have a long term plan to build in phases.

We had a few broken machines, so for the 9 computers to install, we brought along 15 so we’d have some extra to raid for parts if needed. We had to break out a hard drive and network card from one of them, and a couple of the monitors were damaged in shipping (though if you saw the way things were shipped, you’d actually be surprised how few were damaged!

Out of reflexive typing habit you make a typo like this:

So I did a little scouring with some success (I think()

…and don’t think anything strange of it until after you’ve sent the email…

Today we [and by we I mean “I” on behalf of my team] had a fun foray into signed vs. unsigned types and type conversions. Certainly makes one long for languages like C# where they have *unsigned* types and don’t make you worry about the nonsense of whether all your numbers are signed or not and how to convert a pair of bytes into a short and why you can’t or signed types containing unsigned data together and expect them to create the right bit pattern…

So my dry erase board is all covered in scribbles like 0xB2 = -78 (really should be 178) = 0xffffffb2 not 0x000000b2… but 0xffffffb2 & 0x000000ff = 0x000000b2. Well, that’s me linearizing what is on the dry erase board…which also have pictures of bytes and bit patterns within byes and casts and arrows and…

Pretty ugly huh? Man, and here I thought (once upon a time) that once we got past learning assembly language in school I’d probably never have to worry about such a low level programming, as to whether our numbers are twos complement and what the actual bit pattern is for various signed data types…at least I haven’t had to do any floating point number storage…cuz that’d have been really ugly. Hahaha…

[edit] So much for no floating point to worry about…I discovered the next day I needed to use “Float.floatToIntBits(latitude)”

Although brilliant, they’re also a pain. I mean, think about it: in the old days, your comm ports were fixed. But now you can dynamically add and remove usb comm ports on the fly. And apparently Sun’s Comm port library can’t really handle USB comm ports well. Its not so cool to get 3mb of logging in less than thirty seconds; one of the files we got sent back had over 5gb of logging. Root cause? If you physically disconnect the USB comm port while the port is “open” in the software, the dll that interfaces with the comm port prints out in a repeated loop some error message… Well, guess R.’s going to get to have some large amounts of fun fixing that one, since I’ve been “de-allocated” from the project 😉

Our last day in Spain was a smashing success. We finally got done the one thing I came here to do…just when it seemed like it wasn’t going to happen’

Everything finally fell together today as best it could. And we even manged to do a few things we weren’t expecting to–like talk with the radio to a tank that was out of sight…I’m not even sure how far
out of sight it got!

I’m ready to come home and have tome Turkey (they don’t have Turkey here anywhere!). Its been a long week and tomorrow is going to be a long day.

Today was actually kind of fun and productive. Actually made good use of my sitting around time too. Wrote some documentation…and got to play with the tank–or at least climb inside it and take a look around. Not every day you can say you climbed around in a tank in a military base in Spain.

you get a call on your cell phone earlier than you normally come into work with urgent questions that just couldn’t wait another 15 minutes till you get into the office…

Doing integration testing can always be quite entertaining. Today I found a bug that is completely consistently easily reproducible–if you do some combination of things on about the order of complexity as most video game cheat codes–Send a reset. send four ammo level sets as one message. Then send three more ammo sets individually. then reset. notice reset was ignored, incorrectly. reset again. suddenly it works. As it turns out ammo level set wasn’t setting the toggle bit… so if you had seven ammo messages going across, the first two resets had identical toggle bits and thus were being filtered as duplicates.

So the company picnic was today…it was pretty cool. I met some families of some people that I hadn’t had the opportunity at the past picnics to meet the families of, which was neat. Definitely gives you a better idea who people are as a whole and not just within the confines of the context of work.

Played a little volleyball…got a little sunburned, so I went to find someone with sunscreen to borrow. After walking around a while I saw this lady with a couple little kids, who I asked if I could borrow some sunscreen from. And while I was putting it on, back comes the dad–and much to my surprise, it turns out to be someone I knew–a really upbeat friendly fellow who I run into at the picnic table at lunch sometimes. He had thought that somehow I’d seen him over there earlier or something and had come over to talk. But no…it was just luck (if you could call it that). He’s such an upbeat guy, and his wife and kids were soooo sweet, so it was great to meet them.

And then there was massive Uno playing too. Apparently that’s THE game to play lately everywhere I go…which is fine by me, I like the game. In fact, I have an Uno deck. D., whom I know from the softball team at work, was totally prepared, had a card table, folding chairs, Uno, and a friend she sings gospel choir with (who knew she sings in a church choir? Isn’t that cool the things you learn at company picnics). D. had some cool “club rules” to play–where you can play a draw two on a draw two instead of drawing and it passes it to the next person who either has to put down a draw two or they have to draw four and so on…so they are cumulative till someone doesn’t have one to play and has to draw…leading to amusing results like having to draw 10 cards…and we were playing “infinite draw” (no passing after two cards that are the wrong color) so the games lasted foooorever. We only played three rounds and D. won every round. J. (friend who works in another division) and C. (who I also know from the softball team) joined us for a round or two also. More fun with five than with three!