June 2004 - Posts
Wow! There were over 25 people at tonight's Portland Nerd Dinner - and the MSDN team wasn't the main event. Word is getting out that the in place to see and be seen is with the PND crowd.
I was so excited by the size of the group I forgot to use the HSoP Method of Photography. I hope the master will forgive me.
After everyone ate, Chris Sells got up and started giving away some "new" clothes. Well - "new" as in "never been worn" - but not "new" as in "made within the past 5 years." :o) He had a Windows 98 Beta Tester polo shirt (a collector's item for sure). (But nobody wanted it... I wonder why?) A couple of "COM is Love" t-shirts (I scored one of those puppies). A couple of "DevelopMentor original" t-shirts from 1932. A few XML DevCon (AKA "SellsCon") t-shirts (those were from last year). A nice fleece pull-over. And the big winner of the night was Stuart who shamelessly out-nerded Rich for the Columbia Sportswear C++ .NET waterproof jacket -- it was really sharp and it was new.
Oh, and a number of people -- the first 10 or so who arrived -- walked home with a brand new copy of "Writing Secure Code, Second Edition," by Michael Howard.
On the food side, I stuck with a "safe" sandwich from Subway. Rory went with his usual Indian cuisine -- and paid the price. Mmmm. Good crummy mall food court food. Nothing like it in the world. :o)
I really like WebHost4Life as my hoster. Good price, lots of features. But sometimes the SMTP e-mail doesn't want to cooperate. As a result, during those times, if someone posts a comment to one of my blog entries, I don't see it. The e-mail doesn't get sent to my account.
One nice thing about DasBlog is that it creates a single file that contains all the comments ever written on my blog. It's an XML file. Hey, I've been working with the XML server control lately, using XSLT and such (dressed up the home page at http://SnowstormLife.com with it) -- what a great, quick, easy way to create a comment view for myself! I'll just throw the XML through an XSLT file and get some nicely formatted output.
Oh, if it had only been that easy. For some reason the XSLT thought that none of the document was inside an element. I did a match on the root node, and everything in the document would splat out on the page. Even without doing a "value-of" command. Grrr. I tried a bunch of different stuff, but without luck.
The XML server control and associated XSLT syntax isn't very well documented in the MSDN documentation. Piss poor, to be honest.
Anyway, after the Nerd Dinner I kept trying different things. Last resort was to strip off the <? XML.... ?> decoration from the first line of the file and the XMLNS: definition from out of the root element. Hey! That looks different! It found one of the child elements!!
So I wrote a little method that will remove those things from the XML file before applying the XSLT. And now it works. And I'll see your comments, even if my SMTP service isn't working. The finished product is at http://snowstormlife.com/BlizCommentView.aspx.
Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 is available today to MSDN subscribers. The Visual Studio 2005 Express beta products are available for free public download as well. See http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/get/default.aspx for more information.
[Update: I read the fine print on the web site: "...which will be available for subscriber download within just a few days." Argh. What a tease.]
I'm reading the book "Object Thinking" by David West. So far he's led me through a philosophical history lesson, talking about (and quoting) Plato, Ed Yourdon, Christopher Anderson, Dijkstra, Greeks, Romans, structured programming, etc. This definitely isn't a "fill the book with program listings" type of book. It's making me think. Here's one of the lessons so far:
"If you think about design using an implementation language - as programmers and especially extreme programmers are wont to do - your designing will be enhanced or severely restricted by that language."
David challenges people to look at creating software not as a science with formal, ridged processes, but as an art with lots of creativity. He proposes that extreme programming and agile development techniques aren't only for small teams and non-critical software. He says that critics tend to put these concepts into a corner because it's harder to think creatively. That it's harder to teach someone to be an artist than it is to follow rote process and procedures. As a result the formal computer science programs self-validate themselves in their formal thinking and trivialize non-conforming thinkers.
Hm. More on this later...
I had to get a new camera today. My old one gave up the ghost. It was a good camera, but recently it had started scrambling the image as it wrote it to the card. I lost a few TechEd pictures because of that, lost most of the pictures I took at the Portland nerd Laser Tag a couple of weeks ago, and when my son took it to school for last-day pictures, most of those were scrambled as well. It might have been the CF card that went bad, but I didn't want to pay a bunch of money on a new card only to find out the camera itself wasn't working properly. (Plus I just wanted a new camera. (There, I said it.))
I didn't go with the ultra-cool Casio like Paul has. It's a nice little camera and is very easy to carry around, but I needed something a bit less expensive. I ended up buying a Kodak CX7330. It will take up to 3 frames per second, it has a lens cover that automatically opens and closes when the camera is turned on / off, (I really like that!), and it's smaller and lighter than my old camera. Plus it uses an SD card, and I already had a 256MB one of those available.
I created a second user control for aggregating my blog. With it I can specify the number of entries I want to display on the page that contains it. I can change the number on the fly (just have to FTP the default.aspx file to my site) and it's in effect immediately. I don't have to recompile.
I tried using an XSL transform to pull off N number entries from the RSS feed. But I banged my head against that wall all evening with nothing to show for it except a headache. I completely punted and threw the XML into a string and did some simple string parsing on it. It got the job done and my headache went away.
I still haven't gotten around to determining why my default RSS feed won't load in an XmlDocument. That's something for Friday evening or Saturday.
Well, enough for now. (Except I need to post a reminder to myself about the PADNUG meeting coming up on Thursday night.)
Hey, don't forget! The Portland .NET User Group meeting is tonight (Thursday, June 24).
See you there!
( And here's a quick reminder that the next Portland Nerd Dinner is right around the corner -- 6/29/04. )
I read in the Seattle Times online today that Microsoft is going to increase the amount of free e-mail storage for Hotmail accounts from 2 MB to 250 MB. That's cool. I have to check my Hotmail account on a daily basis just to clean out all the junk mail that it receives. If I didn't it would go over the current limit and I wouldn't be able to receive any important e-mails (like those from you).
Good move, Microsoft.
[Disclaimer]
Hey, you may already know the e-mail I received today is totally bogus (see below).
But think about someone like my uncle: just got a computer a few months ago (Christmas) and is now hooked on eBay. He hasn't been around the internet block yet, so if he saw something like this he might fall for it.
<this is the e-mail>
Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted by
(VXF3R2___Account@ebay.com) on Saturday, June 19, 2004 at 06:55:39
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
: :Dear Member
We Here at Ebay, are sorry to inform you that we are having problem's with the billing information on your account.
We would appreciate it if you would goto our website and fill out the proper information that we need to keep you as an Ebay member.
Please Update your account information by visiting our updates web site below.
Steve Johnson.
Billing Updates Center
Acoount Updates Team.
http://www.<BlizRemovedTheDomainName>.com/ebayupdattes/ebayupdate1.htm
AZ1U9H.
We do hope to continue doing business with you.
AZ1U9H
<this is the e-mail>
I removed the domain name because I don't want those suckers to get any traffic - at least not from my site.
I can't believe I didn't call you on Father's Day. It was just another day, and there would be plenty more.
Having kids has really helped me understand what you must have thought and felt while I was growing up. And how challenging it is to be a parent. John and I turned out OK.
And now you're gone and I can't tell you ever again Goodbye or that I love you.
Rest well.
Everywhere I turn I see commercials and advertisements for "Atkins Friendly" or "Fewer Carbs" or "Carb Friendly".
Now they have come out with OneADay "CarbSmart" vitamins! Vitamins? Good God! When will this carb infatuation end?!?!
sitting by water
a splash to the right of me
where did my friend go?
I've been on the road the past two Thursday evenings (flying back from Seattle last week, at the Boise .NET User Group meeting this week).
As a result I've missed the .NET Rocks! live show for two weeks in a row. From James Newkirk's blog I see that John Alexander and Barry Gervin were on last week, talking about Test-Driven Development and Unit Testing.
I'll have to go download it & listen this evening.
(Next time you see John you'll have to ask him how he came by his SPOT watch.)
Flying back from Boise this morning. The weather across the Northwest has taken a turn for the warmer. Highs in the mid-to-upper 80s through the weekend. But right now my feet are about to turn into ice cubes.
Flying out to Boise yesterday morning I browsed through the Horizon Air in-flight magazine. It had an editorial about how they're trying to keep the interior of their planes cool while on the ground. The Q200s -- like the one I'm on now -- don't have equipment necessary to condition the air while the plane is grounded. I can attest to that based on Wednesday afternoon's flight back from Seattle to Portland. Hot as an oven inside while we were waiting for takeoff.
To combat this, a new Horizon Air policy must have been issued yesterday requiring all Q200s to store up cold air while they can, so it will last through the heat of the day.
So the cabin temperature this morning is set to "freezer" as we fly through 25,000 feet. I hope everyone who flies this afternoon appreciates the cooler air and thinks about the sacrifice paid by everyone this morning.
Note: Aside from the frozen feet this morning, I love Horizon Air. I'm kinda tall (6' 2") and I really appreciate the extra inches of leg space they have on all their planes. (I used to fly on United's shuttle planes -- they're designed for metro-sized people like Paul and Rory.) Horizon also serves Starbucks coffee on morning flights and complementary beer and wine on their afternoon / evening flights. Mm.
I'll see you at the Boise .NET User Group on Thursday night. Darrel Carver is going to give a presentation on "Patterns and Artifacts and Iterations (Oh My!)." The presentation will cover how Micron's Facilities IS Team (FSIT) is implementing design patterns and short, fixed-length iterations to implement long-range technology planning, and formalize the design and code review process.
Should be really good stuff!
See you there!
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