Vernon Scannell (1922-2007)

Born John Vernon Bain in 1922.

Weekly Standard

Fugitive Feline

The Thomas Saga Continues

After a few hot humid days dominated by thunderstorms relief finally arrived today (Saturday) in the form of cool, dry weather. Even the mosquitoes found it too cool, which made for pleasant lounging "out back" at Heritage Pointe. Heritage Pointe is shaped like an "L" and the back corner of the "L" has a stairwell. At the bottom of the stairwell lies the laundry room, the building superintendent's apartment, and a back door that gives access to a small grassy area with a patio and a few lawn chairs. No apartments face this area, and the thick woods are only about 20 feet away, giving the area a feeling of privacy and quiet. The mosquitoes are bad, though, but a citron candle helps somewhat. I also wear long pants and dark long-sleeved shirts so I've been spared so far. This little corner of the world has become Thomas' territory. His dutiful "masters" (Beth and Myself) bring him food and water every day, along with the occasional grooming brush.

During the storms there was some serious thunder, lightning, heavy rainfall (2 to 3 inches), wind, and falling tree limbs, and this lasted for two days. On top of all that, Friday was the 4th of July and the rain let up just around sunset, which allowed the fireworks to begin. At around 9:00 I went out back to feed Thomas. He trotted out of the woods as if nothing was wrong, and with distant explosions and whizzers going off all around, he calmly ate his food, drank his water, and cleaned himself. I tried to carry him inside but he went nuts at the door, so I just dropped him and let him go. As the great British Poet Sting once wrote, "If you love someone, set them free." That was Friday night.

As I mentioned at the top of this post, Saturday was dry and cool; absolutely perfect weather. For me, that meant sleeping all day and getting up in the evening. It was very comfortable out back, but today's Thomas Feeding took a few dramatic turns.

I set up a bowl of cat food and some water near my chair and Thomas emerged from the woods and came right up to me and started to feed. I then noticed a scruffy-looking orange cat tailing Thomas. He parked himself just outside the edge of the woods and watched us. I took some food and walked over, but he dashed. I left the food for him and went back to my chair and waited. After less than a minute, there was Orange, chowing down. But wait! What's this? A Red Fox comes along, trotting on the mowed lawn right at the edge of the woods. Orange dashes back into the woods, the Fox sniffs around where Orange was just eating, and then continues to trot along less than 20 feet away from where I was sitting. Thomas was a few feet from my chair; he flattened down, remained absolutely motionless, and stared at the Fox. I realized that Thomas has a good coat for camouflage, especially at night. He seems to know how to keep the white part of his fur hidden.

The Fox glanced over at me and ignored me. I don't know if he saw Thomas or not, as he gave no indication. He circled around us and walked right into the middle of the lawn about 40 feet from us, sniffed around, and then continued along the edge of the woods and disappeared behind the maintenance barn.

I fear that Thomas might meet his demise by the jaws of this Fox someday or perhaps by some of the other larger predators which must surely roam those woods. The Margaret Lewis Norrie State Park and the Norrie Point DEC Education Center comprise a large area located right next to the Hudson River Estuarine area, an area rich in creatures lower on the food chain than foxes, coyotes, wild dogs, and even wolves.

Cat lovers may hate me for saying this, but I would rather Thomas live the life he prefers and face a possible early demise than have him cooped up in a tiny apartment. At any rate, if he survives until the first frost, I will think about snagging him and taking him back to his cell block for the winter. I draw the line on Winter; wether Thomas likes it or not he is coming inside.

Regardless of my plans or of Thomas' desire for freedom, there does exist the possibility that the management of Heritage Pointe will demand something be done about a stray cat on their property, especially one owned by a tenant who signed a lease and, by doing so so, explicitly agreed to abide by the rules of the facility, one of which is Pets are not permitted to run loose.

I fear that more drama, feline, vulpine, and human, is in the future

Film: The Fastest Guitar Alive

The Fastest Guitar Alive will be of interest to aficionados of 60’s pop culture. If you are not sure you belong to this group, the following is a quick, reliable test. If you are amused by the fact that the minor character “1st Expressman” is played by Sam the Sham, then this film might be a pleasant diversion for 87 minutes of your life. Might be; you can take that as a lukewarm recommendation. It’s lighthearted fare with some competent Roy Orbison songs, none of them masterpieces but none of them bad. The title does not imply that Roy plays like Joe Satriani; the acoustic guitar he carries throughout the film has been modified so that if you play a certain chord a retractable six-shooter emerges from the guitar's body (fastest guitar, fastest gun... get it?).

The film has the look and feel of any episode of the 1960’s TV show Bonanza. They could have used the same sets, costumes, incidental music, and saturated-color film stock. Watching this film any Baby Boomer who spent their formative years bathed in low-level radiation will feel the same involuntary responses.

If you don’t know or care who Roy Orbison is, then read no further. Otherwise, note that the late Mr. Orbison and his songwriting partner, Bill Dees (who passed away in 2012), penned seven original songs for this 1967 film (also available on an LP released along with the film). The song titles are Pistolero, Good Time Party, River, Whirlwind, Medicine Man, Rollin’ On, and the eponymous title song. The musical scenes have little to do with the film's story line, but who cares. Roy always sports a different brand-new cowboy outfit and his luxuriant (and tall!) head of hair is always perfect.

The film’s saving grace is that it does not take itself seriously. It is self-aware. There is a Freudian joke about the obvious phallic symbolism of a guitar that is also a gun, and there are other surprisingly witty moments. The dialog and acting is hilariously awful, but that’s beside the point. If you can get past the casual racism (we’ve got Funny Indians!) you might enjoy things like the following snippet of dialogue from the Chestnut sisters:

“When a woman wants something from a man, she makes love to him. When a man wants something from a man, he goes to war for it.”

“Gee, sis, I wish I could think of things to say like that.”

I had this film running in the background as I worked on my laptop, so those 87 minutes where not a total waste.

Roger Ebert Was Great

Just ran across this line from the late Roger Ebert's review of Donnie Darko:

The movie is grounded solidly in a leafy suburban setting...

Yes.

Exactly

Using Visual Studio 2010 and the C Programming Language (Forget It!)

Using Visual Studio 2010 and the C Programming Language

Writing C programs and building them with MAKE was fun back in the days of DOS 3.3 and Borland's Turbo C. Although I would have liked to have found an employer who would pay me to write C programs all day, it was not to be. I started out in a small I.T. department where there were support-related tasks, hardware and software installation and maintenance, user administration and training, and every other task my bosses wanted done. This was fine, as it gave me a broad range of experience. This was in the days of the 8088, 286, and 386. Lotus 123, Word Perfect, and a company called Ashton-Tate. I was more than happy to take on any task they asked me to do, even if it was spending an hour with a person who had spent her entire career using a typewriter and now had to understand how to save a "file" in a "directory". One of my biggest regrets was the way I taught these concepts. Terrible teacher. I should never have used the word "directory" in the first place; it sounds too much like a phone book. I could see the look of confusion on the person's face when I tried to describe how to save files on a disk and store them in different directories (this was before Microsoft had the good sense to start calling them "folders", but that was only after Windows came out and you had the luxury of showing little pictures of file folders on the screen). Instead, I should have used simpler terms. They already knew how to give a document a name (only 8 characters, remember?) and I should have just said "from now on just type another name in front of it and use the back slash to separate them. Backslash? What's a "backslash". "Oh, it's this key over here, see, it kind of leans backwards... err.. to the left, whatever."

Sometimes the manager would ask me to solve a problem that required custom programming. That gave me the chance to write some Lotus macros and dBASE III programs. Programming! Yay! But there was not enough time in the day to develop a database system in C, so I had to use RAD ("rapid application development") tools and say goodbye to C. I did find a C database library called CodeBase that was very well regarded in magazines like PC Magazine and Doctor Dobbs Journal, but I did not have enough confidence in my C programming skills to be certain that the purchase of this library was going to pay off for my employer. In addition, I am not a confident, persuasive person to begin with, so I just never got around to having that meeting with my boss where I try to talk her into spending $500 (in 1988) on software. I just said, forget it, I'll learn dBASE III+, which I found to be as much fun as C. Other locations within the company were using FoxBase, with which I was not familiar. When the disaster known as dBASE IV came out (oh agony), I tried what was then called FoxPro and found I could live with it.

Now fast-forward to today. I'm retired, so now it's all for fun. So nice setting up Ubuntu Server with no GUI, just a command prompt. The vi editor is built to be loved. Using make and the GNU C libraries is an absolute joy.

But I'm pathologically restless, and after a few week of this GNU pleasure I decided (subconciously seeking pain?), to see what it was like writing command-line C programs on Windows 7

On Windows, MAKE is called NMAKE. The compiler is called CL.EXE and the linker is called LINK.EXE. The first thing I tried was opening a command window and typing NMAKE and got 'NMAKE' is not recognized as an internal or external command. On my computer, there are two versions of NMAKE:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\bin\nmake.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\bin\amd64\nmake.exe

You have to add one of these directories to your PATH, which then allows you to simply type NMAKE on the command line. Which directory you choose depends on your target architecture, 32-bit Windows or 64-bit Windows.

Command Prompt

Windows 7 has a main menu item called Command Prompt. When you open a command window you get a session; when you close the window the session ends.

The default command window's environment variables can be viewed by entering the SET command. You can create your own environment variables. For example, entering SET ZPATH=C:\ creates an environment variable named ZPATH with a value of C:\. You can then type SET and see your environment variable listed along with all the others. Why have environment variables? Environment variables can be read by command line programs; they are a way for you to communicate some information to a program.

If you close your command window, open it again, and type SET, you will see that ZPATH is gone. Environment variables you create on the command line during a session exist only for the life of the session; when you end the session any environment variables you created during that session vanish.

Permanent Environment Variables

You can create environment variables that persist from session to session.

If you right-click on Computer on the Start Menu and choose Properties from the pop-up menu, you get a dialog box. Click on Advanced system settings and then Environment Variables. This gives you a dialog box that lets you set permanent environment variables, which persist even if you restart the computer.

Session Environment Variables

There is another approach you can take. You can create all of your environment variables in a batch file and run that batch file every time you open a command window. The environment variables created this way still disappear when you close the command window, but you don't care, because they will be created by the batch file every time you open the command window. You can also create your own shortcuts to the command line and customize each one with different environment variables. To see how this is done, go to the Start menu and select Microsoft Visual Studio and Visual Studio Tools. You will see three menu options that open special Visual Studio command windows:

• Visual Studio Command Prompt
• Visual Studio x64 Cross Tools Command Prompt
• Visual Studio x64 Win64 Command Prompt

The difference between these special Visual Studio command prompts and the regular command prompt is the addition of the environment variables INCLUDE, LIB, and LIBPATH and the path to NMAKE.

You can then use a text editor to create the makefile and the source code and build the executable in the command window.

Using the Visual Studio IDE

Another approach is to do all of your work in Visual Studio. I used Visual Studio for about two years developing C# applications for my last employer and really enjoyed it a lot. The debugging power of Visual Studio is impressive.

Unfortunately, I failed to configure Visual Studio to be the simple C development environment (with debugger, of course!) that was satisfactory to me.

You are supposed to be able to use the Empty Project and Makefile Project templates, and I did spend some time trying to get them to work, but I found the process convoluted and confusing. I couldn't get the debugger to work (which is my main reason for using the IDE in the first place) and gave up in frustration. No matter what configuration options I tried (and I tried many of them) the IDE still presented my C projects with a C++ project "look and feel", even when I was able to turn off all the C++ stuff (there are compiler options to ignore C++ and just use C) it still displayed remnants of C++. As this was several months ago, I don't remember all the details, but my mind is made up: I gave up on using Visual Studio for C.