The Green Drinks Greensboro chapter has its second meeting this evening at Natty Greens Brew Pub in downtown Greensboro.  With 88 members on the current email list and 30 people attending the first meeting, I would venture to say it's off to a successful start.  I look forward to seeing you there!

From Greendrinks.org:

"We're off to a great start.  Over 30 people showed up at the very first event!  The next date is....

When:   July 16th, 5:30pm                                        
Where:  Natty Greene's Brewing Company, 2nd Floor
Why:     See below...

What is Green Drinks Greensboro? It's a social hour.  It's a networking event.  It's unwinding with friends.  It's a time and place where it's okay to be green and to find out what others in your city are doing to be green, work green, play green, or live green.  And it happens all over the country and the world in over 300 cities.  Proving that it's never too late to join the green movement, Green Drinks Greensboro will be meeting every third Wednesday of the month on the 2nd floor of Natty Greene's Brewing Company (345 S. Elm St.) starting from 5:30 until 7:30(ish).

Green Drinks Greensboro invites all those who care about the environment, teach about and learn about the environment, work in an environment-related field, have interest in the environment, environmental products, sustainable building, environmental protection, eating local, ecological design, alternative energy…you get the idea.  There will be no agenda and there are no dues. From time-to-time we will allow a few minutes for short presentations. To get on our e-mail list, simply send an email to greendrinksgso@gmail.com and we will keep you posted on our events.  See you there!"

Good Job Plurk!  I won't be doing that again.

This is what happens when you use their built-in 'feature' to add people you already know from another service, such as Gmail. 

Have we not heard of using ssl or form submission without using querystring values?  It's really not that difficult guys...

privacyLink.Text = String.Format("<a href=\"{0}\"{2}>{1}</a>", hrefLink, LinkBuilder.ExtractTextFromLink(links[0]));

This caused me a bit of grief this evening.  While I am not a fan of building strings like this, it's the way things were and I had to run with it.  In an ideal world this would be done with a text or html writer, but I'll be happy with anything short of basic string concatenation. 

While refactoring a fairly large application for a web analytics migration, I missed one small but key problem with the line of code listed above.  The error given was referencing an array index out of bounds or an undefined array index referenced.  Thus I immediately went chasing after a possible problem with the links array being empty or null.  This proved futile, and after a few minutes of tracing the flow and checking the history of changes on this file it became apparent that if there was a problem with the array reference, it had been an issue for at least six months. 

Google had a cached copy of the page, indexed before my code push, which told me it had definitely been working before I touched anything.  I decided a closer look at the String.Format() method call was necessary.  In this instance we're expecting a string formatter and an array of one or more strings as additional parameters. 

Since this uses late binding of the string parameters into the formatter, the compiler never checks that the correct number of arguments are specified.  It would have been nice if the compiler had been designed to parse the formatter and fail the compilation if one too few arguments were provided, but understandably that responsiblity falls on the developer in this case.

There were some key factors in why this bug made it into production before being caught during testing there:

• Partially centralized link building, duplicated in many different portions of the application when a single linkbuilding class would have been ideal.  In reality, halfway OOP is often much worse than none at all.
  
• Code that is not testable with out cost-prohibitive refactoring.
  
• Limited content and resources with which to test in the staging environment
  
• The error only occurs when a custom privacy policy link is used, >70% of the time the default is used.  Only 5 of well over 100,000 pages were throwing the error.
  
• Lack of automated tests on production data.  We're working to eliminate this particular hindrance, but precious time for such "extras" is always scarce.

I was eventually able to correct the error and push the code up to staging and pre-production to validate the fix.  In the end the fix made its way to production before customers became aware of the problem, but these kind of errors are preventable by working to correct the problems listed above.

See you there!

http://tinyurl.com/4l4bdr

On a somewhat limited timeframe (Saturday late morning until Sunday night), I seem to have picked the perfect destination to escape city life and enjoy some great views of Linville Gorge. 

Was a great opportunity to try out my new tent in stormy & windy weather.  It deflected both wind and rain quite effectively.

We went down the twisty 8 mile gravel road from 181 to the parking area at Table Rock, and then it was a short 1 mile hike to the summit on Saturday evening.  The fog had engulfed the entire mountain, hiding the many spendid views until it lifted mid-morning on Sunday. 

The sunrise was just incredible, one of the best I've ever seen.  The sunshine quickly pushed back the clouds from the day before, slowly giving way to some breathtaking views.

Roxy faired well, as usual, except when I had the bright idea of launching the last piece of Bridget's uneaten Cliff Bar off the side of a cliff; and then scrambling to convince her that I was not playing fetch with her.  Luckily she had more sense than her owner this time.

Timing was crucial, as we packed things into the tent just after finishing cooking dinner and nothing got wet before we were able to get all our gear stowed away in the tent or the covered vestibule.  The spot we camped at had this random level grassy patch among the rocks that seemed to have no other purpose than a nice soft place to camp on.  There were some good areas at the summit too, but it was far more rocky and uneven; though had keenly positioned bushes that would have shielded us from a significant bit of wind, had we not turned in early because of the rain. 

I was initially a little reluctant to carry my camera because of the extra weight of a SLR vs. a point & shoot, but the extra weight was neglegible on this short trek and the photos I got wouldn't have been half as good.  The tripod did, however, stay in the car, as there really wasn't a place to attach it to my pack and the extra 5-7lbs would have been annoying.  Next time I'll invest in one of those bendable gorilla arm tripod-like devices to be able to do some time-lapse and low-light shots.

Half-way down the mountain we scoped out a lower nearby peak as a possible site for future trips in the area and found it to be an excellent group camping site with plenty of locations to see around half of the Gorge.  It's not quite high enough to see Lake James as you could at the summit, but there is room to bring a few friends with you without them having to sleep on rocks.

All the steep cliffs reminded me of my last Gorge experience when my older brother fell around 60 feet from a ledge when the weight in his day-pack shifted and pulled him over the side.  We're all very lucky his fall was broken by a thick spanse of thorn bushes!  So I took a lot of extra care any time the verticals looked particularly threatening. 

Pulling out the map, I was able to verify that you can indeed see Babel Tower from Table Rock, as I had suspected.  The Babel Tower trail is a favorite of many, including myself; as it is particularly challenging with a full equipment load.  By Sunday when the clouds cleared out a bit you were able to see Sandy Flats from most any part of the Table Rock upper ridge area.

I believe Laurel Knob is the next camping spot on my list in the Gorge.

Spooky!, originally uploaded by ballance5702.

This is a time lapse shot I took of some friends around a bonfire in the backyard. I'm not quite sure who the uninvited guest in the tree is.  Invader Zim or the rabbit from Donnie Darko?