April 2004 - Posts
If you're in the Portland, Oregon, area tomorrow (Thursday) evening, join me at the PADNUG meeting (http://www.padnug.org). If you're not, then go to a user group meeting where you are. If there's no user group meeting tomorrow night, create one. Just call up, e-mail, IM a couple of your buds and have a user group meeting.
Thursday night. It's national attend a user group meeting night.
Hug a nerd.
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
9:52 AM
Don't you just love it when you hear some news that just makes you feel good all over. That happened to me yesterday.
Yep.
Monday, April 26, 2004
9:08 AM
It started with such humble beginnings. [http://neopoleon.com/blog/posts/145.aspx]
And now there's no way on earth anyone can put that genie back into the bottle! (and who would want to?)
Yep. One year ago today, the world was introduced to Rory.
Happy Bloggaversary, Rory!
Monday, April 26, 2004
8:35 AM
Paul Murphy is doing some work BACK EAST this week [http://paul.bz/blog/posts/486.aspx]. On the plane ride over he took a look at dasBlog [http://www.dasblog.net/documentation/]. It's only a matter of time before you'll see a post from him on "why I switched to dasBlog."
I wonder if FlexWiki [http://www.flexwiki.com/default.aspx/FlexWiki.FlexWiki] will be next?
Sunday, April 25, 2004
8:52 PM
I bought a Sunfish sailboat a couple of years ago when I lived just minutes from Lake Washington. Living that close to the water, it was very easy for me to get home from work and be on the water in less than an hour. It made for some fun evenings in the Northwest where it can stay light until 9:30pm during the summer.
When I moved to the Portland area last year I took the boat out on the Columbia River a couple of times. That was quite an adventure. The Columbia is fairly quick, and there has to be a steady breeze else you'll end up way downriver with no way to get back. I only took the boat out twice the whole year.
Rather than try to rationalize hanging onto the boat any longer, I decided to put it up for sale on EBay. My wife is a big EBay shopper, and I figured it was time to get some money flowing into the checking account from that site.
What a great idea. (And my wife will claim that it was her idea until hell freezes over. (Uh, maybe she's right.))
I took a few photos on a sunny day and uploaded them - even supersized them. I wrote a glowing description of the boat, trailer, and dolly.
I signed up for a 7-day auction. The bidding was sparse at first, and I didn't think I'd come anywhere near the reserve I'd set. My wife told me not to worry, that the seasoned EBay'ers would end the auction in a flurry of activity.
She was right. The last 5 minutes of the auction was - well - a blizzard of activity. The boat sold for a bunch more than the reserve, but still a very good bargain for the winner when compared to a new set of items.
The person is coming by tomorrow to pick up the boat and drop off the $.
What fun! And I will finally have some room in my garage.
I saw that Channel9 has a cool Site Map feature. It allows you to see all the topics in the Wiki.
That's pretty cool.
I just finished coding up a Site Map feature for the Northwest Evening Blend Wiki. It automatically updates itself every time you click on the Site Map link from the Wiki homepage, so you'll always see the all the latest topics. I haven't put in a lot of error handling yet, so it might blow up on you and bring my server to its knees. (But hopefully it won't.)
It was a fun little exercise, and I used NUnit to help me unit test the core functionality.
Ward has some cool features on his wiki (such as a spell check feature) that I'll implement sometime.
(And no, Northwest Evening Blend isn't an alcoholic beverage. It's a place where developers from the Northwest can congregate.)
Some of the wacky MSDN folks want to see what all the hoopla is about with these Portland Nerd Dinners. They're going to drive all the way down from Redmond to join us at the May 18 Portland Nerd Dinner. (I wonder if they're going to drive a 1965 VW Microbus with the Mamas and the Pappas blaring on the radio...)
So be sure to wear your fancy pocket protectors and put a fresh piece of tape on the nose of your glasses. :o)
Be there and be square.
[Edit: Um. “...on the nose of your glasses”? Since when did glasses get noses?]
If you have the Visual Studio 2005 community technical preview, then this is the place for you: http://usingvisualstudio.net/flexwiki/
ARC300 - Metropolis: Envisioning the Service-Oriented Enterprise
ARC302 - Metropolis: Building Applications in the Service-Oriented Enterprise
ARC303 - Metropolis: Using Information in the Service-Oriented Enterprise
Pat Helland is going to deliver these talks. I heard Pat give a presentation earlier this year and it was wonderful. He really brings together how things were done in the past - manufacturing of goods - and relates it to how information systems have been developed over time. We're still in the early stages of making application development and systems integration an efficient process.
One point he made in that talk was that XML is equivalent to CARDBOARD. XML is important between services. It's not as important inside services.
Interesting thought.
See you in those sessions.
For a list of all the breakout sessions, see http://www.msteched.com/content/breakouts.aspx.
The next MSDN event in Portland is this Thursday, 4/22. Paul's going to present 2 sessions on security: “Writing Secure Code - Threat Defence” and “Implementing Application Security by Using the .NET Framework.“
It should be top notch material, as always.
Follow this link to register.
[Major edit: Wow. While I was in my hyper-geekified stupor late last night I somehow originally scheduled the next PND on the same night as the next Portland eXtreme Programming user group meeting. What a dunce I am... and I've exposed myself to the world, and I can hear the nerd dinner police coming to haul me away. (Many thanks to Wayne Allen for showing me the err of my ways. Wayne will be the speaker at the May 11 XPDX meeting. So see you there, people.)]
I feel as though I should have entitled this, "Thank you Sir, may I have another?"
Wednesday night's Portland Nerd Dinner was absolutely rocking fantastic (aside from the crappy food that left me feeling, well, crappy (wait - is that too much information because I *am* speaking literally)). But that's all part of the fun of a PND. ;)
Let's do it again!
I only gave a couple of day's warning for this last one -- sorry about that to everyone who wanted to attend but didn't get the word about it in time.
SO, since I've recovered from my intestinal fun and now the evening is just a pleasant memory of simulating conversation, here we go:
What: Portland Nerd Dinner
When: Tuesday, May 18, starting at 6:30 or so
Where: Washington Square Mall food court
Why: Because life is too short to eat crappy food alone
Be there and be square.
Spread the word.
The anticipation is going to kill me!
I'm headed back to Boise on Thursday (as in 6 hours from now -- have to love those super-early flights!) to join in the fun at the Boise NETDUG meeting (http://www.netdug.com).
It's been a few months since I've been out to the Treasure Valley and I'm looking forward to catching up with the folks there.
Perhaps we'll have a Boise Nerd Dinner following the user group meeting.
[Update: my notes from the NETDUG meeting can be found at http://www.snowstormlife.com/wiki/default.aspx/MyWiki.NetDug04152004]
Some of my thoughts about leaping are over here on Northwest Evening Blend.
All this inspired by the stimulating conversation at the past couple of Portland Nerd Dinners.
See also...
[Edit: by popular demand, here's my entire post from the Wiki:]
How do you know when you’ve leapt? Do you know you’re about to make a leap? Do you plan for it? Hey everyone, I’m about to make a leap here! I’m about to take us to the next level!
Or do you one day stop and look back at what you’ve been doing and suddenly realize – Hey! We have made a leap!
Is it more an “accidental” process than an intentional process? A side effect?
Does the next leap involve abstracting away the details even more?
Objects and frameworks...
Think about an object.
I think of a coke can. The physical thing. I don’t think of something in abstract terms, such as methods and attributes. I don’t think about class diagrams, inheritance hierarchies, modeling diagrams.
I always think of a coke can.
Big step forward. I don't have to think about the details.
Patterns...
Where to patterns come into play in all this? Big step forward. Was it a leap? Should it have been a leap, but ended up a hop instead? They’re certainly not a misstep. Who is to judge?
Is a leap a single revolutionary event or can it be a series of smaller steps that “suddenly” become large enough and revolutionary enough to be called a leap.
Wizards...
Are wizards small hops forward that when combined turn into a leap? Do they stand on their own enough to be considered a leap?
Computer, I want to create a report. At a high level (without having to consider the gory details of writing a report) I can launch a report wizard and within a few steps I have a report template and a custom report. Done.
Another wizard can take me through the process of defining a business process and workflow, and even generate the governing system that will implement it. I still have to have canned routines to plug in (objects? smart agents? Adapters?).
But I don’t have to get into the world of writing all that plumbing code / multi-threading code / translation code. Done.
And so on.
So if you combine all these wizards do we have a leap? Definitely it’s a hop. Productivity is improved. As a developer I don’t have to write things that have been written before.
Custom controls...
VB was a leap wasn't it? What about a good old VBX control? A charting control, datagrid control, a “you name it” control? As simple and unassuming as they were back in the VB3 days, they were big steps along the road to an order of magnitude leap in productivity and programming.
Starter kits...
And then if you combine this with things like starter kits you end up with some pretty powerful tools. An e-commerce site it a box. A community site in a box. Skin it a bit differently. Add some custom flavor here and there. Voila! Big productivity gains.
The destination or the journey?
Each one of these may not have been a leap in itself, but what about in combination? Perhaps we’re leaping right now and won’t realize it until after we’ve landed.
Good turnout tonight, both in numbers and in geekage.
It was loads of fun, once again.
I'll have a write-up in a matter of hours (which in reality could turn into days, but days are a matter of hours, just a few more).
In the meantime, Rich has posted some comments and a picture on Northwest Evening Blend and in his blog.
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