Rant
A few days ago, I blogged a response to Rob Conery’s question entitled, Why MVC Turbine? Since then, Rob has been so kind to send me an email saying Thanks for the blog post, but…Dude, I still don’t get it. Help me reach the ‘aha!’ moment. As I told Rob, after I re-reading the blog post and the tone it had, I whole heartedly agree with him: The post did not answer his question. So Rob… My apologies, mea culpa, lo siento. I really appreciate your feedback and your assistance with developing a valid message for MVC Turbine...
I've been looking into getting a laptop skin for my Macbook Pro for some time now. I've been searching on Google trying to find something I like and have tossed the idea of creating my own with the lozanotek logo (I still might do this one!). The one to me that seemed the coolest (and the one that people might know more) is an art piece called The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai. Here's what the art work looks like: While returning a movie over at InMotion at Seatac, I bumped into the Gelaskins version...
twitter is a funny thing. Not only is it a web application but also a way interacting with people both on/off-line. The thing that I find most interesting about it is how people tend to user it as a verb (have you twittered?) and a noun (my tweeps)...like another thing that's just part of their things to do. Another interesting thing is how people here in Des Moines have managed to organize a monthly physical meeting where other fellow DSM tweeps can meet. Definitely something I really need to check out next month. Not sure how many of you...
This is just too funny: We all know we've been there!
I'm a huge fan of RSS because it enables me to be lazy. How does it do that? Well, the simple fact that I don't have to go to your site to pull content is a HUGE time saver for me. It's nice that we have a mechanism (RSS) that allows you easily pull the content that you care about. I've been using FeedDemon for about +1 year now and I'm pretty happy with it. I actually bought the product back then, but now you can get it for free. The nice thing about FeedDemon is that it's just...
Last Thursday, I purchased a Samsung i760 Windows Mobile phone under my VZW contract. I had previously tried other phones like the MotoQ but did not like the battery life it had. I also looked into getting a BlackBerry, but unfortunately our company is moving toward Windows Mobile devices to make the integration between our laptops and our Exchange Server easier. Another nice thing about having such phone is that I can write software for it using the .NET Compact Framework. Here's what I've discovered/really like after a week of having this phone: ...
I caught up with my comics and I just had to share this one:
Joel Spolsky posted today his second part of the talk the gave to the Yale Computer Science Department on Nov. 28th.
In this part he talks about perils of internal software development at non-software shops. Here's a glimpse,
... New York was the first place I got to see what most computer programmers do for a living. It’s this scary thing called “in house software.” It’s terrifying. You never want to do in house software.
You’re a programmer for a big corporation that makes, oh, I don’t know, aluminum cans, and there’s nothing quite available off the shelf which does the exact...
I was looking through XKCD.com today and ran into this beauty: It's funny to me 'cause NP-Complete problems was one of subjects that I most enjoyed out of my Theory of Computation class at Iowa State...and the Knapsack problem kicked my ass trying to understand it. Yes, I'm both sick and sad at the same time... ;-) For those of you (math/cs) geeks out there, check out these other famous NP-Complete problems: Knapsack Problem Subset Sum Independent Set Graph...
I about spilled my drink when I read this, it's freaking hilarious!! (I got this from Ryan Olshan):
I was looking at my blog posts numbers and I must say, they're pretty sad. In the past three months, I've had 15 posts...For those of you that are regular readers, thanks for sticking around. Honestly, I've been pretty busy with my workout routine and with my new job, that I've had little time to do interesting blog posts. Don't worry, I have some really good posts that I need to finish up and publish. Another reason, which is a little less obvious, is that twitter is taking up most of my "random" blog posts. If you follow my tweets,...
Well, unfortunately, I couldn't make my standby flight to Tulsa this evening, so I'm stuck in Des Moines for the evening. Not a bad thing being stuck at home, though. I'm confirmed for a flight at 6:30 AM tomorrow to Dallas/Tulsa. From the looks of it, I will be arriving at 12:30 PM..30 minutes before my talk so I'm not sure how that's going to work. I contacted David Walker already and gave him a heads up to see if could switch my time with somebody else. Hopefully things can work out for both parties. Oh, the joys of traveling...
For the past couple of weeks, I've been looking for the "right" laptop to use for home/work/dev/play. I started to look at the Dell XPS M1330, their new slim 13.3" laptops, and was not too satisfied with their hardware/price ratio ... good hardware but too high of a price. So then I started looking at refurbished Dells and quickly came to the same conclusion. I was looking for the following things on a laptop: Fast CPU - I want to do software virtualization (aka, VPCs). Lots of RAM - (same reasons as above) Descent size HD - (same reasons...
No, no! We're not expecting another child! I just got a couple more golf clubs for my collection! ;-) Here is the detail of the clubs: Nike Sasquatch 460 Description: The SasQuatch (SQ) 460 Driver. The SQ 460 features a distinctive yellow sole design and club head design with what company officials call the "ideal ratio" between the width of the club face and the depth of the club head. All I can say is that is club rocks! I was lucky to buy it WAY cheaper than it says for retail and it was worth every...
Alright, here's one way off left field...I guess that's how you start thinking once the architecture-side dominates your life. ;-) My 15th-month old loves Sesame Street. One of the segments of the show is called Elmo's World. Here's a description of the show from Wikipedia: Elmo, a small red monster who speaks in third person and is perpetually 2 1/2 to 3 years old. The show also features Mr. Noodle, a human mime character, and Elmo's pet goldfish, Dorothy. The segment was first introduced the beginning of its 30th season on November 16, 1998. The segment takes place in...
No, I did not decide to un-install IE7 and re-install IE4 ... although, it would be cool to reminisce the old days ... but while re-installed Visual Studio 6.0 (yeah, we still have VB6 applications), I encountered this screen: (Yeah, I know it's fuzzy) Oh, let the good times roll... Alright, I confess!! I'm doing some Visual J++ on the side!! I CAN'T KICK THE HABIT!! ;-)
I'm not sure if all my three readers have had the chance to check out LinkedIn for all your business networking needs. Recently, I added a few people I've met at the MVP Summit and TechEd to my "contacts" list on my LinkedIn profile. Is it just me, but is this website sometimes used the same way as a MySpace profile? Granted, the only thing is missing is all the pr0n bots and teens pretending to be "older" than 14. Don't get me wrong, I'm not judging the website...I mean, I use it and see it as a great asset. ...
So, I arrived to the Des Moines airport early to get through the lines quicker. I hate waiting through lines, so I viewed this as a good thing. While listening to my audio book, I received a phone call from Delta airlines...yeah, not a good thing. The conversation went a little like this: Delta: Mr. Lozano, this is Delta airlines contacting you with information regarding the changes done to your intinerary. Me: I'm currently at the airport, I don't see any changes to my parting flight to Atlanta. Delta: The change is actually to your connecting...
The blog has been kinda quiet lately ... to my three readers, I apologize. I've been out of town having some well needed r&r, without the laptop. Yeah, it was a bit hard at first (since I'm addicted to email) but I was able to make it through it. My wife asked me, Are you sure you can make it a week without email? ... from the looks of it, I did a pretty good job. Right now I'm on my way down to TechEd '07 in Ornaldo. I will a TechEd posting blog with the information I acquire...
I've been reading the blog entitled, Coding the Architecture, for quite sometime now and I really enjoy the its content (you should definitely check it out). Recently there are two entries dealing with responsibility and authority (from an SA's point of view) which hit close to home. Unfortunately for me, I have responsibility without authority ... which as some of us know, that's not a good combination. How can you be responsible for something you have no saying (authority) over what happens to it? Do any of you out there suffer from the same fate?
Man, Jeff is going all overboard with the planning for the Party with Palermo series (dude, you should quit your job and become a professional party planner!). As you can see, he even has a badge for the party!
If you have the time, check out the party's website and RSVP so we know who's all coming! I hope to see a lot of fellow MVPs there! I know it's going to be a blast!
Yesterday Nick sent me a link to these videos on YouTube that have the old "Hi, I'm a Mac. Hi, I'm a PC." gestalt to them. If you have the time, check them out they're pretty hilarious. RubyOnRails vs PHP - Migrations RubyOnRials vs PHP - Organization RubyOnRails vs Java
Yes, we can! (Thanks, Bob!) ... this is a typical answer from project teams that get too involved with the how of their project. To me, as a member of many good & bad projects, I care more about these questions: For who are we building it? Why are we building it? Are we fullfilling the needs of the customer? Who's going to maintain it? As a developer/designer/architect/team member, we should be caring more about the needs & requirements of the customer than the way we use tools (Agile, .NET/Java, etc.) to try to solve the problem. The moment we lose...
First, I would to apologize to my three blog readers for the lack of blog posting I've done the past couple of weeks. Why have I been missing in action (MIA)? Well, I've been too busy helping management pay for the blank checks they signed earlier this year. Huh? Ok, I'm totally lost, you say? Well, a while back our management started to sell the idea for the project of the year to our business partners. After the initial sale pitches, we were asked to come up with a time line that would guesstimate how long the project would take...
I just bumped into these pictures on Flickr of the MVP Summit. Looks like Jeffrey Palermo and Noah Coad had a ton of them to put on this Flickr group! If we want to see the blast we all had, go check them out!
While downloading a Novell client for one of our servers (don't ask), I bumped into this "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC..." like commercial campaing from Novell. What's their product? Linux. I must say that their spoof of these commercials are pretty hilarious. If you have the time you should check them out.
<sarcasm> Another lesser known of the *DD approaches for design and development. Essentially, the design of your application is driven by the ineptitude of the people developing it (aka, your employees). It's a sad realization when you (as the employer) realize that you could've gotten the same product if you would have applied the Infinite Monkey Theorem with a time constraint. </sarcasm>
Nick already posted about Google's April Fool's joke. However, while looking around and clicking on the URLs, I found they have a couple more out there.
So, as some of you have noticed, I haven't blogged in about 10 days...and that's a little unsual for me. After getting back from the MVP Summit, I tons of work that had piled up during my absense plus the work that I need to get done that week. Needless to say, I was pretty swamped. To make matters worse, an enhancement that I had deployed prior to leaving for the summit had stopped working and no one could figure out why. So, alas I spend the first half of Monday trying to dig through all the failed steps to...
I've decided to give Soapbox on MSN a try to host some of the videos of Dominic. Check out the first video of many to come on my soapbox: Video: Dominic First Snow Experience The video was taken using our Sony DCR-HC48 MiniDV Camcorder and re-rendered from AVI to MPG-2 using Vegas Movie Studio+DVD. Reason for the re-rendering? Well, the AVI file as 587 MB and Soapbox has a limit of 100MB for uploads, so the file format had to change to accomodate this requirement.
I saw this video last week and it gave me chills...
All I have to say is that I love the time we live in... and better yet, it gets more interested and connected by the second.
So, I decided to install the Spanish language pack for Vista to see the OS from a different point of view. All I have to say is that definitely different. The thing that first took me by surprized is the Recycle Bin (ó en Español Papelera de reciclaje): Also, check out the Windows Start Menu: Notice in the start menu how some programs are configured for internationalization while others are not.Yeah, I know, I'm too much of a geek... ;-)
I really like Vista, but I have to admit that this new Mac commercial is pretty funny. Those of you that have experienced the User Account Control (UAC) feature of Vista will appreciate it. Don't get me wrong, the UAC is a great way to protect your PC and the apps you build, but when you're doing development on Vista, it gets a little annoying.
Looks like MS has declared war on Apple by confirming that they're working on a Zune phone. As I previously mentioned, I now own a Zune and I'm pretty happy with it. Scott Watermasysk has a pretty funny idea about a commercial for the Zune Phone if they release before the iPhone (yes, it's always a race). If you have the time, check it out. Now, if MS would only release an API for the Zune...now, that would be sweet!
Have you ever wondered what happends to the sporting event (Super Bowl, NBA Finals, World Series, etc.) merchandise of the "non-winning" (loser sounds so harsh!) team? Well, my brother Jon pointed out this article in the NY Times regarding the fate of these collector items. After reading the article, I don't know what to think...it was this paragraph shocked me the most: By order of the National Football League, those items are never to appear on television or on eBay. They are never even to be seen on American soil. ... This way, the N.F.L. can help one of its charities...
That's right, I've traded my 30GB Video iPod for a 30GB Zune. Why? Well, since I'm running Vista Ultimate with Media Center (I'm working on a blog post) the Zune made it easier for me to sync up my recorded shows.
To convert from Media Center format to WMV (MPG, MP4, etc), I'm using Roxio's MyTv ToGo. When I had Media Center 2005, this product worked great with my iPod. However, after upgrading to Vista, the software was unable to transcode the recordings to MP4. I don't know, I guess it's just cool to see my Futurama, Family Guy, The Simpsons, The...
When system design is based on the can we get it done in the given time factor. Common conversations start out like
If we only had a week to design the system, how would I...
Nick posted a really good read that covers some of the same topics. I particular like point that Getting Real makes on building half a product, not a half-ass product.
You are Spider-Man Spider-Man 95% Superman 90% Iron Man 70% Robin 65% The Flash 65% Supergirl 60% Batman 50% Catwoman 50% Wonder Woman 40% Green Lantern 40% Hulk 15% You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have greatpower and responsibility. You are Dr. Doom ...
As you can see, Dominic has decided to take after his father:
Next step: Learn C# & ASP.NET!
A couple of days ago, I finally installed Vista Ultimate on my laptop! What can I say? ... it's not too bad. After getting pretty tired of all the security prompts, I disabled the User Account Control (UAC). From there, it was off to get my Windows Experience Index! Needless to say, the laptop didn't do too well. This is due to the fact that my graphics card is the standard Intel embedded chipset. Hopefully tomorrow, I will have a chance to install Vista Business on my work laptop so I can see how well it performs. For now,...
Not sure how many of you guys have experienced FxCop Rule# CA1002 : Do Not Expose Generic Lists through out your coding ventures. I'm not sure what to think of it... In one hand, I see the flexiblity of returning the IList<T> type since there could be x-number of things that could implemented. Thus not tying me up with a specific implementation such as List<T> or Collection<T>. On the other, Collection<T> does allow you to override functionality and also implements IList<T>. The rule does mention that List<T> (IList<T>) is designed for performance and Collection<T> is designed for inheritance... What are your thoughts on...
<sarcasm:MyReality> This is the lesser known of the *DD approaches for design and development. Essentially, all logic lives within your stored procedures (sprocs) within your database. And by "all logic", I mean, ALL LOGIC. That's right, ALL validation, business rules, persistence, workflow, etc. resides within sprocs that interact against your database. What makes it challenging is when you try to implement some object oriented techniques with a strictly procedural language. That's what I call, "exercising your tech-muscle." </sarcasm:MyReality>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee What's your take on it?
I'm sure that I'm going to get a lot of crap from this, but here it goes... <RANT> While talking with a potential candidate today about what .NET language we were using on building our business layer & common library with, I mentioned that we will use C# for the common library and VB.NET for the business layer. He asked, "Why? You're current staff is mostly VB developers, wouldn't you just use VB.NET for all?". That's when I re-iterated that we're planning on using VB.NET for some of our business layer development. Since there's a small team (2 people) right now that...
So yestereday I'm reading my daily RSS feeds when I encounter Ted Neward's post on a comment that Scott Hanselman made during the p&p Summit in Redmond. After reading this post, I shot Nick a message asking him to read it and see what his toughts were on this...you can find his response here. I couldn't agree more with Scott, Ted and Nick. Here's why ... In my old Java dev days, we utilized a lot of open source technologies (Http Commons, log4j, Bouncy Castle, etc.) to help speed up our writing of code (just as Scott did with log4net). The company I...
Ok, so you know it's kinda scary when you get and leave a conference when it's dark (7 AM - 8 PM). But overall, Tulsa TechFest was a huge success. My ASP.NET presentation was well received (I would like to apologize for taking too long on the earlier topics and cutting ExpressionBuilders). I was glad that people found the information useful and relavent. After attending several of the other presentations, I was ready to hangout and have some relaxation. The fun part of the evening was hanging out with Tim, Shaun and the rest of the gang and just kick...
That's right, Tim and I had a lot of fun today getting down here to Tulsa. We left Des Moines with no problem and had a pretty easy time finding our terminal in Dallas...only to find out that our flight was cancelled. After talking with the guy behind the ticket counter, he told us that the next available for me flight was at 7:25 PM and that for Tim it was 10:25 PM. Yeah, that news did not settled too well with either of us. Once the time approached for us to board, Tim was lucky enough to get into...
At my new job, we're in the process of moving some legacy applications to .NET. With this conversion/re-write, comes a layer designed and re-usable components (both in classes and productivity enhancements to VS2005) that developers can benefit from. Today, some one sent out this link to the entire IS department expressing their enthusiam for the dawn of .NET. Things like that (to me at least) make it worth while to come to work every morning.
So, after posting about v2.0 of my blogiversary, I wanted to check out my stats on Google. When, I looked at the amount of dots on it, I was pretty impressed about the location of the 10 heavy hitters. City Country # Visits London United Kingdom 20 Bangalore India 17 Bellevue, Washington United States 14 Des Moines, Iowa United States 12 Warszawa Poland 11 Hyderabad India 11 Singapore Singapore 11 Madrid Spain 9 Bombay India 9 Buenos Aires Argentina 8 I was surprised to...
That's right! It's been two years since I messed up my first blog setup! And from the stats from FeedBurner, looks like I grew from a year of 1 (me) in 2004 to 50 (hey, bots count!!). During this time, you've stuck me my rants, some-what-useful posts and most of all, my poor writing skills (I'm a web developer, not a writer!). In all, I would like to thank you my three readers (including myself) and 47 bots for sticking around and listening. I promise that this next blogging year will be even better!
While looking through my RSS feeds through RSS Bandit, I bumped into this post by Roy Osherove. I couldn't believe it, so I had to try it! I know, I have a sick sense of humor. ;-)
I was curious the other day and decided to see how many other "Dominic Lozano"s are out there. So, I Googled for it. To my surprise, my five month-old son is the first Dominic in the list! When I asked him what he thought of it, all he could say was: "goo". ;-)
My good friend Tim Gifford has a pretty nice write up on object-orientation and the always popular, "static vs. instance" methods. Here's something I would like to comment/add-upon to his post: Tim mentions, Because when you're agile, you must be able to make changes quickly without affecting the system. In order to do that, you need to reduce (or eliminate) duplicate code and minimize coupling. I will have to say that this statement holds true for more than just agile developers. If you're doing any type of component based development or have incorporated some higher-level abstractions into your code,...
That's right! My new Dell battery has arrived! A week ago, I blogged about finding out that I needed a new battery due to Dell's battery recall. Man, that was fast!! It only took a week to get the goodness... This is a pretty picture:
Not sure about you, but this sounds like a great opportuntiy if you can do it. Come on, there's nothing wrong with this offer:
Get paid by NYC “market“ salary (from .NET Rocks Show 192)
Live in NYC for a year in a free apartment
Work at a big financial instutitution
Get flight pass to return home
Like I said, where can you go wrong? If you're a contractor and can take a “year off” from the Midwest, check this out!
For the past two years, I've had the pleasure of being involved in the world of consulting. Being a consultant has allowed me to learn about how businesses utilize technology to make their processes more streamlined and automated. In particular, I've been able to develop my "business analyst" skills by being more involved in the overall process rather than just the coding piece. During the past year, I was heavily involved in the design and implementation of an enterprise-wide solution for one our clients. (NOTE: I've stressed the words enterprise-wide solution because these words tend to have different meanings to different...
By now, you've all heard about the battery recall Dell is doing for all laptops sold from October 2004-2005 (approx.). Well, my Dell Inspiron 6000 was bought in early 2005 so it could contain one of these faulty batteries. After login into Dell's Support site and providing my battery ID, I hit the jackpot...if you can call it that. I get a new a battery in about 20 days! For the mean time, I'm running my laptop without it just in the case that something goes wrong (I've had this laptop for over a year now and nothing has happened. ...
Finally, something I've wanted for a long time from MS...a blog post writer thingy. However, I like other people wanted this functionality added to OneNote since you can consider (at least I do), your blog as an online version of your OneNote thoughts. Scott Hanselman has a great post on his thoughts on Live Writer; in particular on how it behaves/interacts with dasBlog. I do agree with him that this writer seems/feels very familiar as BlogJet (an editor that I decided to purchase). Some of the layout of the editor has a certain feel to OneNote (like the right panel...
Months, that is! It’s hard to believe that Dominic is now four months old…where has the time gone? Has the lack of sleep skewed my reception of time and space? Maybe I’m just going insane…oh well, such is life.
The one thing about him turning 4 months is that he now sleeps through the night. YES!! OURN PRAYERS HAVE FINALLY BEEN ANSWERED. The funny thing about it is that we still get up and check on him…I guess, it’s our turn to get used to start sleeping through the night.
Life hacks are becoming pretty typical these days. I decided to jump on the bandwagon by becoming more organized with my thoughts (Yes, those of you that know me, know there are other things I should be focusing on, but that’s besides the point). To achieve my quest, I’ve requested the help of the Moleskine notebook to collect simple thoughts (wait, aren’t all of my thoughts simple?) and the Miquelrius notebook to collect the full detail of the thought. Since I don’t carry my Miquelrius notebook with me all the time (it’s a little big to fit in the pocket), I use...
Tonight we had our first Post-It discussing meeting. Here’s the jist of it from our member’s email
We're trying something a little different for this month's meeting. At the beginning of the meeting, you will be given a post-it note and asked to write down 3 topics that you're currently interested in and would like to discusss.
We'll collect the post-it notes and form discussion groups based on their content. Anybody interested in the related content is encouraged to discuss/learn/share within the group. Also, each discussion group will have a recorder that will write the ideas discussed within the group. These ideas will...
Roy Osherove posted some great info on how you can tweak your current IE and FireFox installation to make them “faster.” I will have to say that after trying these teaks I’m quite impressed. Specially with the FireFox one.
Please note that this will make your browsers un-compatible with standards.
Check it out!
I’ve been running Vista Beta 2 as my main OS for about a week now and things are going pretty smoothly. The first thing you need to do to make things easier for you is to turn-off the User Account Control (UAC) to prevent Windows from asking for permission to execute simple operations such as a file copy. Trust me, it gets pretty annoying…Why did I turn it off? Well, since my laptop is a development machine, I don’t want to keep clicking the “Allow” button whenever I make an intended change.
Currently, I’m running SQL Server 2005 Dev Edition, IIS7, VS...
That’s right, another year, another birthday. What have I learned in my 25 years? Well, not much, actually. Just do what you really want to do and make sure you surround yourself with people that support that cause.
It’s as simple as that…
Our flight didn’t leave until 5 PM, so I attended all morning sessions and the first session after lunch. The two sessions that stood out the most was Clemens’ REST, POX & RSS with Indigo talk and Juval’s Advanced Serialization in .NET 2.0.
All I will have to say is that TechEd was a lot of fun for me. It’s not everyday that I have an entire week when I can “geek out” and just code, go to talks about code and have some alcohol put into the mix.
The only bad part about the TechEd experience was our flight back. We...
Ok, yes, I know that my last post was for Day 1. Well, a lot of stuff has happened since then and I haven’t had time to blog. Why? I’ve been playing around with all the cool stuff that’s around.
For the main sessions of the day, I attended Ron Jacob’s talk on SOA Patterns and Anti-Patterns. Pretty good stuff. Ron did an excellent job of getting the people in the talk involved by asking for input and keeping a conversation with the crowd. After, that I headed out the MS influential party.
The event was held at Ned Devine’s at the Faneuil...
We landed in Boston around noon after a nice 2 hour flight from Chicago. The bad part about of this trip is that we left Des Moines at 7 AM…yeah, not fun. Once I got the convention center, I had the pleasure of meeting Carl Franklin. I must say it was pretty awesome! I’m a huge fan of .NET Rocks! so it was nice to meet the man in person. After that, I was off to an MVP event at the Westin Copley Plaza where I got to hang out with Kent Tegels and the various MVP leads. The coolest part about the event...
A couple of days ago, I got to play with BizTalk 2006 and Windows Workflow for the first time. I know of the capabilities and features, but I was amazed on how quickly one can generate results from them.
For BizTalk, I had to create a POC that would convert a delimited flat-file to a COBOL copybook format. Sounds pretty straight forward, doesn't it? Well, it was! After playing around with the Flat-File Schema Wizard and creating a simple orchestration that executed a transformation from Schema A to Schema B, I was done in about an hour (that is, after...
I'm going. Are you? If you are, drop me a line in the comments and we can hang out/talk/get drink sometime during the conference.
While working with VS2005 the other day, I started to notice that things were running a little bit slow. All I had in my solution was 8 projects (4 code projects and 4 unit tests projects. 2 of these projects have 200+ classes), and needless to say, the VB.NET background compiler was going a little bit nuts...
I decided to kill devenv.exe to restore "peace" to my PC. Here's what the graph of memory usage looks like when you kill an application that takes 842 MB of RAM.
Can't wait for Vista to get your hands on their fonts, well now you can download the new Consolas font and use it in VS2005. I've been using this font for about 2+ weeks (previously I had Lucida Console) under VS2005/Windows and man, it's sweet! The only requirement is that you have ClearType enabled. If you don't, or would like to tune your current settings, use the ClearType Tune PowerToy.
Sorry Jeff, I just had to share this wit you.
Decided to pick up this book by Joe Duffy.
I'm a follower of Joe's blog and love the information he shares on the inner workings of the CLR. I think the thing that "sealed the deal" was the table of IL instructions as an appendix in the back of the book.
&nbps;
Yes, I'm a sick individual. ;-)
Eric Gunnerson posted earlier this week a simple C# Trivia quiz. This quiz contained questions such as "How many loop constructs does C# have?" and "What was the name of .NET before it became .NET?". Well, today he posted the answers to these questions. Pretty interesting trivia information. If you have the time, check it out.
Jeff Atwood has posted information on a hibernate hotfix for your PC. If you have 1+ GB of memory and using hibernate, check it out.
Scott Hanselman has posted this great link to Stop your presentation before it kills again!. This link contains a great test that you can use to check if your PowerPoint is ready to kill…Looking at the list, I know that all of my previous presentations have certainly created a body count.
Looks like I have work to do …
I’ve been pondering the ideas presented in this post for quite some time now. It’s also nice to see MS had a similar post awhile back. It has always been my belief that a consultant should always look out for the best interest of the client not themselves. What are your thoughts on this?
Ryan sent me this funny video link showing you how MS would design the iPod package. I about died laughing when I saw the "This is an empty box" red circle sticker appear on the box! The “We should clarify 5GB“ section was pretty good too.
Check it out!
Just received this old driking prayer from Ryan on response for a small change of plans for his bachelor party this Saturday:
Our lager,Which art in barrels,Hallowed be thy drink,Thy will be drunk,At home as I am in the tavern.Give us this day our foamy head,And forgive us our spillages,As we forgive those who spill against us,and lead us not to incarceration,But deliver us from hangovers,For thine is the beer,The bitter and the lager,Forever and ever,
Barmen.
For those of you that missed the Super Bowl commercials, you can go check them out on Google Video.
To stream them all at once, click here.
Current at work, I’m doing some training on .NET (mostly ASP.NET, Enterprise Services, COM Interop and Security). For my three readers out there, have any tips/experiences/stories related to training you would like to share with me? The more I know what’s “best” or what “works”, it will help me relay information back to my students/listeners.
I received this funny link by way of Levi.
Waterfall 2006!
After years of being disparaged by some in the software development community, the waterfall process is back with a vengeance. You've always known a good waterfall-based process is the right way to develop software projects. Come to the Waterfall 2006 conference and see how a sequential development process can benefit your next project. Learn how slow, deliberate handoffs (with signatures!) between groups can slow the rate of change on any project so that development teams have more time to spend on anticipating user needs through big, upfront design.
<sarcasm><![CDATA[
This is awesome! I...
First of all, I hate the layout of Mexican (es-Mx) keyboards!! All keyboards here are qwerty but some of the main (en-US) keys are moved! For example, the @ key requires the use of the right-Alt and the left-Shift. Yeah, messed up...oh well, the key just reflects the widely used characters for the language.
Just wanted to say that I will have pictures posted of my trip on my flickr site for you guys to view. Hope you all had a great week.
<selfPromotion><![CDATA[Levi informed that my Extending ASP.NET 2.0 article has been selected for the favorite ASP.NET article of the month survey at CodeProject.
If you have read my article and enjoyed it, go vote for it.]]></selfPromotion>
Wow!! First, thanks for all of those that showed up for the presentation! I think that was one of our biggest crowds! Second, I would like to apologize for these two things:
My lack of preparation (granted, I received the slides the day before).
The prize give away procedure (yes, I know things could have gone A LOT smoother).
In all, I think the presentation was a success! Fred did an EXCELLENT job even with his VSTS issues! Thanks Fred for stepping up and presenting to the group!
Also, if you would like to present at a user group, let me know and we can set...
Today was a big day for my wife and I as we got to see our new son.
I can't wait to show him the fine art of programming! ;-)
… download. While writing this post, I was downloading the J2EE (is it JEE yet?) 1.4 SDK. The installation file is about 116MB. I had a startled look on my face when I saw the IE download window display 80% 30 sec. remaining. It turns out that Sun has some pretty fast connections serving their download servers (728 kb/sec!).
Now if I could only get the same speed for my MSDN subscription downloads…
A couple of days ago, I blogged the Agile Dilbert cartoon. Also, I asked a good friend of mine, Tim Gifford, about his input. He responded earlier today with his views on how management views software projects.
All I have to say is “Amen, Tim!” Is it just me or is “Project Management” the new buzz word in IT? What do you guys think?
For one our clients at work, we’re implementing a base architecture built on v2.0 of the .NET Framework. In doing so, we’re using the RC1 release of VSTS. Granted this software is still in RC mode, so it’s bound to have some bugs in it. The best part these bugs, is that they decide to show up when you’re trying to get stuff done.
Here’s a few screen shots I took today that made me chuckle:
Is VSTS RC1 rivalling SQL Server on memory consumption?
Yes! Only 741 tests to get working and we’re done!
This is great! Tim what do you think of this?
Ok, to me Scheme is fun. Why? Because could you can do things like this quite easily…
[From my CS342 Spring Semester 2003 Second Midterm]
Consider the following BNF-specification:
<boolean-expression> ::= true | false
| not <boolean-expression>
| and <boolean-expression> <boolean-expression>
...
It has been two years since I’ve done any Scheme. For those of you that are not familar with Scheme, you can read more about it here. A great feature of the language is that procedures (functions/methods) are first-class. This means that procedures can be created dynamically, stored in data structures, returned from other procedures. If you’re C# inclined, you can do the same thing using anonymous delegates.
Any who, here’s some good ol’ Scheme code for the always popular fibonacci function and factorial (recursive of course!):
(define fib
(lambda (f)
(if (eq? f 0) 1
...
Another great Dilbert treasure,
For you MS heads out there, check out this list of codenames for Microsoft products. Oh, how I recall playing with Snowball and Janus.
Just working late on a project. Here's the total thus far:
Total Lines: 23, 133
Total Lines of Code: 16, 901
Almost there!
This is hilarious! I about died laughing with the picture used for the “Meanwhile…in Redmon…” square! I also like the “bunnies are fluffy… ” square.
All I can think of was F*cking Windows 98! Get Bill Gates in here! You promised Windows 98 would be better!
Yet another week that has gone by with me not bloggin. Man, I miss being back at the main office! On the upside, I’m doing a lot of research with Enterprise Services (ES) for one of main customers. They are currently moving their application from being mainframe based to a .NET n-tier framework. So, I’m kept pretty busy most of the day reading articles and writing proof-of-concepts. The kicker about this part of the architecture is not just the get us something to make it all work, but it is also position us so when something new comes out (Indigo/WCF) we...
Well, I've been out of the bloggin scene for the past week due for many reasons. The most important one is that I've been down at a customer site and it's hard to blog when they monitor your internet access. I make a note to blog about my finding and run-arounds with technology when I get home, but I always forgot or get sidetracked.
On 7/30, I installed Vista as my base OS. Why did I do that? Well, the VPC ran like sh*t! It was soo slow that was a complete waste of time to do anything on it. Vista...
We had a meeting with a customer today to discuss some design and implementation of a WinForms architecture. The funny part about this meeting was that every other word that came out of the attendees’ mouth was either enterprise, architecture, object oriented, methodologies, common controls, design patterns, etc.
I am not sure about you out there, but in the last year (or two), the words enterprise, architecture, services have become an integral part of meeting fluff. I remember that not too long ago, the words XML, n-tier, distributed applications, XSLT, web services were the big hype. Why do we have to come up with...
I've been playing with MSN's virtual earth (VE) for the past day and I'm still deciding on a verdict. Sure it's cool to see the aerial pictures and road maps within the same AJAX enabled application, but what makes it different from Google Maps (GM) or Google Earth (GE)?
The driving directions feature takes you out to MSN Maps in a different window to show you the route. GM shows you the route in the same screen. Don't get me wrong, I know the project/product still is in beta (it says so right next to its name), so there's room...
Well, after several weeks of waiting my new custom fit irons have finally arrived! They are the Cleveland TA6s!
The sad part about all of this is that I won’t have time to hit the range this week!! Oh well, on the upside, I have the irons in my bag!
…I came into this world. Another year, another birthday.
The architect allows things to happen.He shapes events as they come.He steps out of the waysand let the design speak for itself.This is deep. ;-) Check it out!
I was looking through my feed subscriptions during lunch today and I've completely forgotten about this little guy. If you find it funny (or even a little amuzing), you're truly a geek.
I was poking around Technorati's beta site and encountered this error:
One word, "cool".
I wanted to check the resource utilization for a client's SQL Server while I ran a clean up process for the tables. Man, I'm glad the machine had 2GB of RAM!
I am Mario.
I like to jump around, and would lead a fairly serene and aimless existence if it weren't for my friends always getting into trouble. I love to help out, even when it puts me at risk. I seem to make friends with people who just can't stay out of trouble. What Video Game Character Are You?
I never knew the day will come when Darth Vader will be defeated by a set of Hollywood executives...
If you don't believe me, check it out! I got the link from Scoble's blog.
One of the guys I work with pointed me to this site. They have a product call Chuckit! that allows you to throw tennis balls for long distances so you can play catch with your dog. The funny part of this product is the disclaimer at the bottom that reads:
WARNING! Read instructions before use. High-speed flying balls can cause injury. Do not use product to aim or throw directly at people or animals. Not for indoor use. Use only standard tennis balls or Canine Hardware balls manufactured for use with this product. Be alert, ball may travel in unanticipated...
I was showing Nick how simple it was to implement a JavaScript function that checks to see if the value keyed into a textbox is a number (without a regex). If it's not, then the key will not be entered as a valid value. I told him that for now, I'm restricting the values to numbers (0, 1, 2, 3..) and to - (dash), . (period) and ( ) (left and right parenthesis) to allow for formatting. He looks at me and says, "But that doesn't stop the user from entering boobies into the text box!!"
... ... ...
...Puzzled for a minute, I was...
I reformatted my laptop last night cause it was getting a little slow. After re-installing Windows XP, the laptop is now cooking with speed. Unfortunately, Dell did not include a driver CD with the laptop so I had to download all of the drivers individually...stupid Dell.
Today Nick and I had the pleasure of having lunch with Tim, of Gifford Consulting fame. The lunch was packed with .NET and talks about world domination... <sinester_laugh>HAHAHAHAHAHA</sinester_laugh>
It's always fun talking to Timmy.
Well, I just ran a report on the total lines of code, thus far, for the Sprint Experience project. The numbers turned out as follows:
Lines
Code
Comments
Mixed
Blank
18,532
13,799
1,395
235
3,573
Oh yeah, changes are still on the way!! So these numbers will increase as the pay decreases.
... Freaking CRA-ZY!!
I've been missing from the bloggin' scene all of this week cause I've been swamped at work trying to crank out this bad boy. Hopefully, next week I can work my regular 50 hrs.
Does anybody know of any big .NET (C# ONLY) projects going on in Des Moines? ... Any one? ... yeah, I thought so...
Or is it deleteability? Yesterday while meeting with one of our customers, the word deletability|deleteablity came up in regards to having editable fields in a web form. As soon as I heard the word, I started to think...is that English? Or is it just another crazy English contraction to add to the lexicon? Is it a numeric metric for data?
I tried to look up both of the words in dictionary.com and, as suspected, they don't exist! It's amazing what one can come up with in the spur of the moment.
Anyway, at the end of the meeting...
Nick posted his Linguistic Profile quiz results from a quiz he found online. I having nothing else to do, decided to take it. My results are not that bad...granted, I've only been speaking English for the past 13 years.Your Linguistic Profile:
75% General American English
10% Upper Midwestern
5% Dixie
5% Midwestern
5% Yankee What Kind of American English Do You Speak?
Is it just me or don't you hate the fact that when you are working on a project in VB.NET, that from time to time you get a race condition from a manual build? (The message in the Task list that says "Unable to write file ... to ..."). The reason I think this happens is cause of the fact that VB.NET compiles the code for you in the background and that at times it keeps holding onto the assembly when you force a manual rebuild. How do you fix this? Kill the IDE...yeah, it sucks!
Have...
Thanks to Ryan's little find, this is what I look like as a South Park character.
Yep, even as a cartoon I'm still geeky.
I know a couple days have passed since Wednesday's IADNUG meeting, but I've been quite busy at work so my bloging time has been somewhat limited.
First, I will like to extend out my thank you to Mike Benkovich for coming down to speak at our user group. For those of you that don't know Mike, he's our Developer Community Champion which in Microsoft's terms, he's the guy that does the MSDN presentation for our region. Thanks Mike for taking the time to come down and speak to our group about data warehousing and their uses!
Also, Jeff Brand, our Community's only...
I just need to vent a little bit...For the project I'm currently working on, one of the developers was told to 'clean up' some of the fields that are no longer in use for the windows client. Well, since the ASP.NET client and windows client touch the same data...hmmm, I wonder, will that affect the ASP.NET application? Anyone, anyone? For the past hour and half I've been doing impact analysis on our application finding every dropped field and make sure that they are correct mapped back to our business objects.
Some of you might say, that's easy just go...
It's scary how some of us geeks tend to think on the same wave length...
<rant>
Earlier today, Nick and I were talking about AJAX and how it's now supported by most browsers. In particular, how Google Maps have managed to use this browser feature to make their application run smoothly. Some of you out there might be saying, "Yeah, google maps, it's soo cool! Look how it uses AJAX!"...well, what about OWA or even so Web MSN Messenger? I'm not sure how many of you know this, but all of these async http request functionally was added to IE with the...