Notes From My Basement

I'll never tire of watching and being blown away by the technology available on the Microsoft Surface platform.  The application demoed is a WPF (official WPF site) application for the healthcare industry.

This is a quick 5 minute video worth every second.

Tags: wpf, frameworks, graphics, windows client

This came to me via my friend Benny, who can't wait to jump on any chance he gets to highlight everything evn remotely mentioning Apple and specially if it is "anti" Microsoft.

Battered and bruised by a long-running advertising campaign on the part of rival Apple, Inc., Microsoft Corp. is turning to sitcom star and world renowned comedian Jerry Seinfeld to help clean up the public perception of its Windows Vista operating system.

Full Article here.

Also funny is that Benny does not "own" any Apple hardware... he did buy his wife an iPod and once in a while plays with her PowerBook.  His main workstation is a Dell Inspiron 9400 (which you can say is what pays the bills)

Ironically, the computers featured in the 9-year situation comedy Seinfeld, for which the comedian payed a semi-fictional version of himself, were always Macs.

Tags: funny, opinions, happenings

Quick note to link to the training kit released with the advent of .NET 3.5 SP1.

Complete kit with presentation & events materials, hands on labs and demos on:

• ASP.NET MVC
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• ASP.NET AJAX History
• ASP.NET Routing
• ADO.NET Data Services
• ADO.NET Entity Framework
• WCF 3.5 SP1
• .NET Framework Client Profile

Tags: .net, training, asp.net, links, tools, free

One feature in Visual Studio 2008 I found myself using frequently is this:

Right Click on the project in your project explorer, and the next to last option in the context menu is...

When building systems made up of many components that need to be "shuffled" around, from and to many solutions, across different locations for different reasons, it becomes a handy tool.

Tags: visual studio, .net

This is about the only time when being a geek might work to one's advantage:

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Back on July 2nd of this year, my wife Tammy and I celebrated our 3rd wedding anniversary.  Today, one month later, I thought it would be a nice way to commemorate it once again by bringing in some alcohol talk into the mix.

Now, I don't need excuses to drink, and of course I am not saying that marriage is a reason to... I can feel myself digging a hole deeper and deeper...

The reason I mention this is because around that time, my Father and Mother in Law took a road trip down south and on their way up they stopped at the Woodford Reserve distillery, and brought us back this beautiful bottle of 90.4 proof whiskey!

w00t!

I felt the need to post this because a) I am grateful and this is one way to show it, b) I think the bottle is kick ass and c) I don't drink whiskey... (hmm, ok, I don't CHOOSE whiskey as my first option, but I drink just about anything with alcohol in it).

Since my wife and I are also expecting a new member of the family, due mid January, we couldn't possibly (yet) put this present to good use.  I will wait for her patiently, then maybe after the new munchkin is here and she regains strength she would agree to add willingness to do at least one shot with me.  Until then this puppy will age a year or so, and maybe we'll use it to celebrate our 4th wedding anniversary, or plan B could be that it mysteriously disappears and end up with a mammoth of a headache!

All joking aside, it is a beautiful gift, a great bottle, it looks great and gives me one dumb excuse to write a post about it.

Care to share?

Tags: guillermo, noteworthy

There is no other way to put this before I delve into the details: You (as a professional developer, product owner, product manager, software practitioner in any ability) owe it to yourself to read this book… that is, if you are anything like me and reading about all of these tidbits of software development history while getting a degree of insight into the process of an "organized" open source project, in any way call to you.

 

There is a little bit of everything here, presented in a narrative that is pleasant to read, and with the right amount of abstraction to keep you at the right interested at the right level without too much detail making the reading terse.  I almost [ALMOST] gave it to my wife to read, only until I was deeper into the book itself I reluctantly admitted it would have not have appeared as appealing to her as it was to me.

The [story] follows a team assembled and funded by Mitch Kapor, in its quest to create the open source product that would Chandler.  In the process, the OSAF is founded as the backbone supporting and governing the efforts.

Their trials and tribulations make up the narrative's main thread, but the vision, the lessons learned, the passion that one can feel jumping off the pages from those involved in the project and who wanted it so badly, was what made this a page turner for me.

Needless to say, the stories, the citations, the anecdotes surrounding all of those who end up intertwined in the process, as well as all of those that emerge from the story itself, and some of what otherwise would be considered useless footnotes in the history of software development, spoke to me, enticed my curiosity for wanting to know more about them and motivated more than a few searches and articles to be read parallel to and after finishing the story.

The book was published in January of 2007, and covers the project time (including vision and conception) spanning 2001 to late 2005, where the book sort of trails off and never quite has what one could call a "written form of closure". 

The author, Scott Rosenberg, sort of ends the book with a couple of chapters that are full of historical (albeit somewhat relevant) notes and an observer's retrospective analysis which are probably more subjective than actual factual conclusions.  I don't mean and certainly don't intend this to be criticism to the book itself or to the way he (and his editors) chose to conclude the book, but I would have liked a cap on the story more fitting to the initial heart beat of the book, one that would give the story it own identity, a beginning and an end.

The project itself is still alive, the product is available but beyond knowing that I would suggest that if you intend to read the book that you don't spoil the whole experience of reading the book by "catching up" on where the project is at currently.  I can share with you that the many players in the story and the project are interesting and up until the end they "all" came and went.  An interesting note worth mentioning is that a good number of the people involved in this project are the same "core" that brought us Firefox.

You can read it as a story, you can read it as a use case, you can read it as a diary of a software development project, you can read it as a text book that is 100% pragmatic, but nonetheless I recommend you read it.

You can find other reviews here, here, and here.  More opinions will for sure confuse the heck out of you, so go right ahead and read them all!

The book's main site is kept by the author at Dreaming in Code, available on Amazon or you can just let me know you want to borrow it!

Tags: books, methodology, software, management

As I announced in a previous post, I’ve been looking for a new host for this blog, driven primarily by a need to have consistent up time, but at the same time piggy back some slight performance boost as well as offload some of the worries and concerns that come from self hosting.

I looked around and considered a few providers included the one that is prominently advertised on the blogengine.net site, and the one that ultimately got the whooping $30 for 7 months worth of business, SeekDotNet.com.

I can’t say it was an easy process, believe it or not. Of course it is all said with a grain of salt. I was expecting to pay for the service, get the site IP, FTP account, etc, and be on my way in 10 minutes, tops. After a couple of hiccups and some overseas support, the site was up and now fully ready. I do have to say that having overseas support in a different time zone kindda worked to my advantage in that I got to communicate with them in what is their “core business hours” and what for me was the time of day I can actually dedicate to these fun things.

Thanks to those who emailed/left comments with suggestions and offers, but by the time the post where I mentioned my need had published, I was in the middle of my support process and was determined to get it to work.

So my next task relating this matter in an indirect way will be to install/upgrade to BlogEngine.NET 1.4! Wish me luck!

In the end, I am happy in that I get what I need and for cheap! Can’t go wrong with that deal.

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Mainly just as a quick reminder to self of the tools I've found to be worth the time to install and learn.

The Tools listed here are mainly utilitarian, and not at all focused on anything in particular. All of them, as stated in the title of the post, are free. I love free software, oddly enough given I make my living writing software.

.NET/Development

• Lurz Roeder's Reflector, I am not the first (by a loooong mile), nor the last one to list this MUST HAVE. Just go get it if you don't have it and don't ask, just use it. Period. 'nuf said.
• Krypton Toolkit. If you do any Windows Forms development in this WPF new world, you HAVE to get these Free Components, use them and love them. Great looking, practical, easy to use. Check out the tutorial screencasts on their website.
• Fiddler. Look at your stuff... look at everyone else's stuff... the stuff that is really coming down, ya' know!
  
• Sysinternals Suite. With tools like DebugView as a given, and many others that add incredible value to any developer's arsenal, this is a no brainer must have.
  

Firefox Extensions

• ScribeFire, I am writing this post using it. Nice, simple, integrated, powerful.
• foxmarks, Keeps my bookmarks synchronized between my home PC(s) and my work PC. Priceless. Literally.
• TwitterFox, The easiest and least intrusive way to keep up with an addiction. It is not the most powerful or feature rich Twitter client... by a mile... but it works!
• SiteAdvisor, Free browser extension from McAfee. I'll make this disclosure: it works for me. In an unsafe world I use common sense first and foremost, but many get past my gut feeling, data backs this service up which is better than nothing.

Editors

• NotePad2, I use the installer Brennan created that adds an "Open with.." to the right click context menu.
• LINQPad, great way to learn and teach. At this point it is not a tool of daily use, but its awesome, so I list it.
• Windows Live Writer. Hands down the best blog post editing tool. Although ScribeFire is convenient and very good, Windows Live Writer is great for offline editing and also has tons of plugins available.
  
• Cayra. Mind Mapping tool. Cool to use, ideal if you can actually make it an "everyday" thing. Handy to have right now for me though.
  

Other Tools

• Pidgin. All your IM accounts in one client. Lightweight, simple, so bells and whistles.
  
• Picasa. Simple photo organization and editing. Love the feel of it. Direct upload to Picasa's online web albums (free up to 1GB of storage), and also to photo printing services (my main reason for using it), like KodakGallery, SnapFish, WinkFlash, Shutterfly, Walgreens, Walmart and many others.
  
• 7Zip File Manager. Awesome compression, great compatibility.
  
• CCleaner. The first "C" is for CRAP. Yep, that's right, it cleans crap out of your PC.
  
• SyncToy.I tend to want to keep some folders in sync. In the end each one is its own world, but this has been the tool I've resorted in my attempts to keep them the same.
  
• FeedDemon. From NewsGator, my favorite desktop RSS reader. Although it does "synchronize" with an online OPML, it only works between a given instance of the reader (say the one you have a home) and the online version they provide. It does not keep two desktop instances and as such it has proven inadequate by itself.
  
• Virtual Clone Drive. Great ISO management tool. It works as a driver to mount .iso files as a local drive. Awesome and indispensable.
  
• AusLogics Disk Defrag. Better than the built in defrag, great performance.
  

Tags: tools, lists, free

Even before I started even thinking about actually "blogging", one of the elements that quickly came up as important to consider was hosting.  Now, I've always hosted my own, and for the most part it has faired pretty well.  I don't (and lets be honest, most likely never will) have the traffic to even put a blip on anyone's bandwidth use radar, and that was one of my initial (unproven and unjustified) concerns.

Since we are putting an addition on the house, and redoing (read ripping it all out) the 70s looking basement, my hand was forced and I had to take down all of my infrastructure, including server and incoming Internet connection. 

I will get a new, decent, nice looking, office out of all this, and it will not be cold and an eye sore like it used to be.

 

I've been managing by having to relocate the physical infrastructure required to provide me with outbound access (mainly my router, modem and a power strip) which come into my basement, almost on a day to day basis, although its been stable since Wednesday or so and over the weekend because there was nothing going on down there as far as construction goes.

This has created too much downtime for me, and although I have little to no audience, it is clear that it doesn't help.

I have been evaluating options from different hosting solutions, and thus far in 1 week of on and off (15 minutes at a time) dealing with several, I have come across 2 disappointments and no true clear winner.  Of course, a huge contributing factor is that this is merely a hobby and as such justifying too much of an expense (more than say $10 a month) is a hard thing to do.  The search continues, but regardless of my convictions I should be moving this blog to a new site within a couple of days.

In the meantime, read this as somewhat of an explanation for the lack of posts, and my sincere apologies to go with it. 

I am well aware downtime and lack of constant posts are big no-nos in the list of things not to do when one is without an audience and trying to gain the trust of anyone who would listen. 

Again I apologize and my commitment continue despite some of the minor obstacles and workable setbacks.

Tags: infrastructure, guillermo, networking