Moby-Dick, or The Book

I finished reading Moby Dick last night. I don't know how long the voyage of the Pequod was, but I'm certain it was nowhere near as long as it took me to read the book. I added it to my Goodreads account five years ago. I'm not sure if I added it because I had started reading it, or because I wanted to. Regardless, it's been a long, long time since I started that book.

Recently I became more and more adamant on completing my quest. I was three-quarters through that book and the eponymous whale hadn't even made an appearance yet! I was beginning to become more and more suspicious that the whale NEVER shows up, and that only two people ever had gotten to the end of the book where Melville writes, "Shhh! Let's have a big laugh at everyone and never let them know that Moby Dick doesn't actually appear in the book."

I think I wavered between Ahab's determination to finally confront the Leviathan and Starbuck's insistence that they just pack up and go home. On and on I read. 92% done my Kindle said. 93%... 94%, and this exhaustion came over me. A very real exhaustion. My eyes were burning, and I couldn't make any sense of what Melville was writing anymore. The words, difficult enough to understand when I was lucid, were becoming a mangled pudding in my head. I slumped off to bed, and my headrush literally brought me to my knees before I could make it there.

I had a short nap but was then awakened by Buck, our little pip of a dog. Maybe he was nervous because Jen had left and he felt alone, but maybe he was telling me I had to finish before all momentum was lost. I picked that Kindle up again, raised sail once again if you will, and plowed on just as the Pequod plows forth to its fate.

I won't tell you how it ends. Maybe the whale makes an appearance. Maybe he is never seen. Is the whale the devil? Is Ahab? Maybe Melville himself is. Was it worth it? "Hours of entertainment," I told Jen. "For free."

Creating a Local Windows Group on Install

One of the recent Installer/Wix issues that needed to be addressed in our product was to automatically create a Windows group on install. Our installer creates and starts a number of Windows services that are run as a particular user with the appropriate permissions. Currently, whomever is installing the product must create the local group, create the user account to run the services and add the user to the local group before running our installer. In order to count down on the tasks the user must do manually, we added a story to both create the local group and user on install, and I first took to doing a spike solution to create the group.

Doing a spike allowed me to isolate the action needed to just creating the group. Our installer is currently made up of several Wix libraries, approximately a dozen Wix source files, and a number of custom actions. I wasn't confident about finding just the right place to add the group before I even understood how to do it. Also, the spike allowed me to quickly run the install and uninstall without going through all the other actions our current installer does.

My hope was that I could do it fairly simply with Wix or with the Wix Utilities extension. The utilities extension does provide a group element; however, "This element is not capable of creating new groups but can be used to add new or existing users to an existing group." Luckily a Google search indicated that someone had already done the work to create the necessary custom actions to do this. Msiext (http://dblock.github.io/msiext/) contains a UserPrivileges extension along with a number of other Wix extensions which I wish I had known about before. The download includes runnable demos, but there isn't much in the way of documentation. Ergo, I'm writing this blog post rather than simply pointing you to some documentation there.

So I got the latest msiext download. I created a console app as my spike and added a Wix Setup project to the solution. To the setup project I added a reference to the WixUserPrivilegesExtension DLL in the msiext package. This gives access to the LocalGroup element:

<UserPrivileges:LocalGroup Id="DemoLocalGroup1" Name="DemoLocalGroup1"

Description="Demo local group 1 for a spike." CheckIfExists="yes"

CreateOnInstall="yes" DeleteOnUnInstall="yes">
</UserPrivileges:LocalGroup>

The explanation is pretty straight-forward. the Id is the unique element id, Name is the name of the group and description is what appears in the description when you Manage Groups in Windows. CheckIfExists will prevent it from re-creating the group if the group already exists. CreateOnInstall creates the group on install and DeleteOnUnInstall will delete the group on uninstall. These can be changed if, for example your application creates the groups itself and all you want to do is delete it on uninstall, or if you want to leave the group unchanged even if the user chooses to uninstall. Like I said, pretty straight-forward.

My entire Product.wxs looks like so:

xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Wix xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/2006/wi"
     xmlns:UserPrivileges="http://schemas.appsecinc.com/wix/UserPrivilegesExtension">

    <Product Id="*" Name="SetupProject1" Language="1033" Version="1.0.0.0" Manufacturer="PlutoTech" UpgradeCode="5eec8bc9-ee30-451b-b3c2-fd4ce78bf277">
        <Package InstallerVersion="200" Compressed="yes" InstallScope="perMachine" />
        <MajorUpgrade DowngradeErrorMessage="A newer version of [ProductName] is already installed." />

        <MediaTemplate />
        <Feature Id="ProductFeature" Title="SetupProject1" Level="1">
            <ComponentGroupRef Id="ProductComponents" />
        </Feature>
    </Product>

    <Fragment>
        <Directory Id="TARGETDIR" Name="SourceDir">

            <Directory Id="ProgramFilesFolder">

                <Directory Id="INSTALLFOLDER" Name="SetupProject1" />

            </Directory>

        </Directory>

    </Fragment>
 
    <Fragment>
        <ComponentGroup Id="ProductComponents" Directory="INSTALLFOLDER">

            <Component Id="LocalUserGroupDemo1" Guid="YOUR-GUID-HERE">

                <UserPrivileges:LocalGroup Id="DemoLocalGroup1" Name="DemoLocalGroup1"
                    Description="Demo local group 1 for a spike." CheckIfExists="yes"
                    CreateOnInstall="yes" DeleteOnUnInstall="yes">

                </UserPrivileges:LocalGroup>

                <File Id="File.MyService" KeyPath="yes" Source="$(var.AddLocalGroupSpike.TargetPath)" />

            </Component>

        </ComponentGroup>

    </Fragment>
</Wix>

Note that the INSTALLFOLDER cannot be the keypath for the component. In this case it is actually the executable, Id="File.MyService. In our actual installer, the component that creates the necessary groups is separate from any other files, but the component group it belongs to is associated with the TARGETDIR directory.

Keystone XL

I'm hoping I can weigh in on the Keystone pipeline before Obama vetoes the bi-partisan bill authorizing its construction. This is one of those political issues that I think highlight how dysfunctional our federal government has become. The stance of Congress, mostly on the right side of the aisle with a couple handsful of supporters on the left, is that the Keystone XL pipeline, an offshoot, a shortcut, if you will, of the rest of Keystone that has already been built would make it easier to get oil down from Alberta, Canada, to the refineries on the U.S. gulf coast. The majority of Democrats, following the lead of the White House, believe that more time is necessary to study the environmental and economic effects of the pipeline before authorizing its construction. Note, no one is saying it should NEVER be built, only that we need to take more time to examine the impact of building it.

First, let's get one thing right out of the way: the Republican argument that it will create 42,000 jobs. That's the figure thrown out there all the time by those on the right. It isn't a made-up one, but the report they are citing says that money spent on the the pipeline would help sustain 42,000 jobs. In the short-term it would create about 4000 construction jobs. Other jobs would be created both directly and indirectly by the construction, but not 42,000. Some of those jobs involved actually already exist, are filled, and are being paid today. So, while I'm sure that while locally it will help economies where it is being built, the construction isn't really going to have a big impact on the national job market. That was just a nice story for Republicans to throw out there when unemployment was so high.

I certainly wouldn't dispute that there are environmental issues at play with the construction of Keystone XL. However, assessments of its impact have been going on for five years now. The government itself published its "Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement" this time last year. Note the terms Final and Supplemental. It's supplemental because the government wasn't happy with the assessment created by a third-party that they allowed the owner of the pipeline to commission, which said that no significant environmental impact would occur. Guess what the government's independent assessment stated. That's right, that the pipeline and construction of the pipeline would have no significant environmental impact. Well, there was money well-spent. And how can the president insist that more study is needed when they've been holding on to the "Final" impact assessment for a year now?

In fact, Obama himself fast-tracked the construction of phase 3 of the pipeline in 2012. (The XL extension is phase 4). He made a big proclamation to the people of Oklahoma how he was going to cut through the bureaucratic red tape to get that phase built. We already have hundreds of thousands of miles of pipeline criss-crossing the U.S. It isn't the pipeline nor its construction that is really at issue in regards to the environment. It is oil sands.

Oil sand, as the name suggests, is oily (really bituminous) sand. Like its stony shale cousin, only recently has the technology made it profitable to try and extract oil from. The extraction of it is more akin to strip-mining with pits and tailings, than it is to an oil well. Also, it burns with higher carbon emissions than lighter crude oil, but much less than those given off by burning coal. Environmentalists real concern is that the pipeline will give easier access to Alberta's oil sands reserves and expand its extraction.

Two things about this: 1) Canada has been expanding the oil sands extraction regardless of access to the pipeline. That has been driven by the high price of oil and better and better technology. With the oil price plummeting, extraction may not increase, but you can bet, at some point, that oil is going to come out of that ground. 2) Currently those gulf coast refineries already refine oil from oil sands, only that oil comes from Venezuela. Venezuela is one of the largest exporters of crude oil in the world. Their government is also a repressive, socialist one that has consistently labeled capitalism and the U.S. specifically as its great enemy. The U.S. imports about 300 million barrels of crude oil annually from Venezuela. Even with today's price, that's $15 billion U.S. dollars flowing to Venezuela annually. Why would we want that money going to Venezuela instead of Canada?

Finally, as I said before, that oil is going to come out of the ground in Alberta one way or another. They are still expanding their operations up there. How does that oil get to the refinery now?, you might ask. Because it IS still going to refineries. The answer is by trucks and trains. Go ahead and Google "train derailments". Go ahead and Google "Lac-Mégantic". Tell me that moving that oil by train is somehow safer than by pipeline. I don't even need to start on truck accidents. We had one here just north of Brighton, carrying diesel rather than crude, that closed the interstate yesterday. What emits more carbon into the air, pumping oil through a pipe or moving it by truck or train?

This is federal government bullshit on both sides. Okay there's some job impact but not significant enough to say that the pipeline is definitely in the national interest. There is some environmental impact but not enough to say it isn't in the national interest. This issue is simply a political card that the two sides are wielding against each other. I, like most other Americans according to polls, believe the pipeline should be built. Yes, we have low gas prices now, but the market will adjust. When prices go back up, we'll be bemoaning the fact that Alberta is sitting on a ton of crude they can't move fast enough. However, whether it makes sense or not, let's stop with the bullshit coming out of Washington.

RIP Stuart Scott

Honestly, I never thought I'd shed a tear over the passing of Stuart Scott. I'll admit that I wasn't the biggest fan of him as a Sportscaster. Initially I thought that Boo-yah and all the other catch-phrases were sort of gimicky. I just wanted the sports scores. I didn't need SportsCenter to be entertaining. As a young white kid used to the vanilla delivery of the sports report each night and then each morning with the advent of ESPN, I found Scott's delivery to be uppity. There, I said it. Yes, UPPITY. Subtle racism that I didn't recognize at the time, but it amounted to this black man coming into a white man's world and overturning the apple cart. Thank God he did. Sportscasting has never been, and will never be, the same again.

There is one fewer innovator in the world this morning. Scott brought real soul, soul in the most African-American, hip-hop, barbershop, gospel choir sense of the word, to the mayonnaise on white bread world of Bristol, Connecticut's ESPN, and he did it unabashedly and without compromise. (Can I get an Amen?) He changed how every sportscaster would deliver the news, black or white. I'm paraphrasing, but one of the more insightful comments I read about Scott this morning was from one of his white colleagues (it escapes me just which one) saying that Scott came in and was just himself, a rather brash black man, and that gave everyone else the permission to just be themselves as well.

More recently, while I appreciated what he had contributed to his profession, I felt that he had grown a bit long in the tooth for his "cool as the other side of the pillow" persona. I remember though after his eye injury, someone taking a shot at him on social media about it and thinking, Really? Here's this big brash persona who puts himself in the public eye (still completely unabashed), is very good at what he does, and yet has plenty to criticize, and you want to take a shot at his appearance? And it was with great sorrow that I heard of his cancer diagnosis. Having lost loved ones to cancer, it isn't something I would wish on anyone.

I started following Stuart Scott on Twitter. It was then that I really began to admire him. Here was a man who was facing a devastating illness with such a quiet dignity. On Twitter he told of the doctor visits, the treatments, but never with any complaint. His concern was more for the young cancer patients he saw. He was always optimistic, always a warrior attitude toward the fight ahead. And still his timeline was mostly about sports and his children. On air, other than his increasingly thinner appearance, you'd never know anything about his fight with cancer. I was impressed to see him on air so soon after what I'm sure was some exhausting round of radiation. A professional. Cal Ripken and Lou Gehrig rolled up into one.

Today's news is further proof that cancer is a bitch. It doesn't care how optimistic you are, or how much of a fighter. I mean, those traits are certainly healthier for you in a fight with cancer than resignation. I just mean, that I've seen the most optimistic, courageous people lose to cancer. It's more proof that the fight cannot be left to those who have the disease or their immediate circles. The fight against cancer belongs to all of us. This world was a better one with Stuart Scott in it.