Not as in “buy the company”, but in Building 35, and probably elsewhere, Microsoft has acquired Starbucks Coffee Machines for their kitchens. Long lines are now visible throughout these many kitchens as people await this Columbian nectar. I overheard two attendees talking about how the last time lines were this long was the Great Krispy Kreme Giveaway of a couple years ago.
I don’t drink coffee, so why should I care? Well, besides the potential for the lines to block bathroom doors, these machines serve cocoa. I love hot cocoa on a cold day.
But Seattle isn’t really that cold. It’s much warmer than Utah — where I migrated from — on the average winter day. But it’s the grey. Grey is conducive to psychological cold. It can be a grey day in the fall, yet 65 degrees outside, and my family will want to turn on the fireplace.
So it is with cocoa and I. On a rainy and grey day here in the Northwest, I have been known to march to the cafeteria to purchase a cup of cocoa just to feel the security of its warmth in my hands. Now, reassurance is available just down the hall.
I love this place.
Here they are. I really hate to deliver them as this. I wanted to make more of it, but this is where I’m at, and I need to move on.
There are 3 patches and a little test script I used:
I offer the normal caveat:
I bear no responsibility for the use of these patches. No warranty is expressed or implied for fitness of this software to any endeavor. These patches are released in the same vein as those by Chris Double and Edi Weitz with regards to use with Corman Lisp.
That much said, if you do have problems with these patches, drop me an e-mail (clsql@hobbit-hole.org) and I’ll do what I can. There’s little more frustrating than finding something that’s useful, only to have it not work.
So last night I was working on some patches for UFFI and CLSQL to post to the blog and mailing lists, when I decided to go to bed. I shut down the computer, noticing that there were some updates to install. I let them install before shutting down as I normally do.
This morning, I’m greeted by the error message "svchost.exe ... 0x745f2780 referenced memory at 0x00000000 ..." and another dialog shortly thereafter titled “Generic Host Process for Win32 Services” saying something about it crashing. Okay. I click past both of them and the laptop comes to a crawl and eventually locks up. Reboot. Same thing.
Thankfully some others have had this problem. These astute technologists led me to the appropriate solution.
What I had to do:
- Set the Automatic Update and Background Intelligent Transfer Service to Manual in the Services panel (found by opening Start|Run and typing “services.msc”).
- Reboot
- Rename %WinDir%\SoftwareDistribution to SDold
- Reboot
- Reset the above services to Automatic
That did the trick. It seems that the Windows Update cache (in SoftwareDistribution) became corrupt when it crashed during shutdown.
Yeah! It’s done! The functional layer for CLSQL has been ported to Corman Lisp!
Sadly, here it is a month later and I finally have the functional portion of CLSQL sufficiently done that I can write about it. I have not done a thing for the object layer for Corman Lisp, nor do I intend to in the near future. Hopefully someone else will be able to take the torch.
This project was meant to help me learn Lisp and SQL. As I’m now working for SQL Server at Microsoft, I thought it would be nice to have a Lisp binding for ODBC that worked in Corman Lisp. Unfortunately it’s taken much longer to complete than I thought, and I have other projects that I would like to get back to.
I should be posting the modified files in the near few days, probably this weekend. I will also announce it on the Corman bulletin boards when it’s posted. Maybe Kevin will want to include it in the CLSQL distribution as well.
