Tagged: July 2006 Blog Posts

well i just wrapped up 12 consecutive days of conference attendance.  whew, i'm spent.  and i'm taking it out on my family...shame on me...yeah, the ones i haven't seen in 12 days.  sometimes that tension just gets wound up.  and no i don't mean taking it out on them physically, so hold off on calling the authorities...just, you know, stressed out and feeling behind...and they get the brunt of your bad attitude.  i'm working on it. enough of the babble...that's not what you're here for -- you're still here right? well, i have to say, i've witnessed several different types...

i started out the day attending software tools that make life easier with jared richardson.  jared took an interesting approaching describing 'a tale of two shops' where in reality it was the same dev shop within 6 months and using two different methodologies...namely the shop got better when implementing source control management (scm) tracking, testing, etc. he had a lot of ground to cover in the short time and really only got to detail in on scm.  he concentrated on talking about subversion mainly, but did poll the audience on what is being used.  there was subversion, cvs, perforce and...

my day at no fluff just stuff continued with some ajax sessions. i say in on justin gehtland's talk on javascript programming.  justin is from relevance, the same guys bringing streamlined out to the market this past week (and as he tells me a new build on monday). justin said his favorite languages in order are: javascript, ruby, java, c#, and everything else.  yeah! c# made the list ;-).  he's a brave man with his first two being duck-type languages.  it was a good overall discussion on javascript, but nothing i didn't already know -- i think a lot of...

well, on to the next conference!  after oscon, i traveled back home, saw a movie with my wife, woke up and headed out to the no fluff just stuff conference in phoenix this weekend.  because of oscon, i missed the first day of no fluff... so the no fluff day 2 started for me by going to see a session on testing with selenium by neal ford.  selenium is a web testing framework mainly designed for user testing (i.e., user acceptance, use cases, etc.) -- *not* for unit testing.  selenium is a completely javascript application, which means it executes on...

the second day of the normal conference proceeded along the same path.  keynotes that are 20 minute vignettes again.  i'm not sure why it bugs me so much, but it does.  i think because of this i'm pre-disposed not to get much value out of them...and i didn't. the next session i went to was the history of copyright and what it means to open source by karl fogel.  karl was formerly with collabnet, and is now with google.  i have to say, karl immediately lost credibility with me on his approach.  to me he committed the cardinal sin of...

update: i just read this comment: The reliability of Google’s uptime seems to be a primary selling point. (source: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/07/27/google-challe...) well, here was my first experience: google just announced their project hosting platform code.google.com/hosting -- so i checked it out...here's my first experience: tags: oscon, google, google+code

i thought this was cool.  smarx (who got 35th/5000+ in the 2005 wsop) is participating again this year and wrote a little application to track some players. he calls into a voice service periodically and can record his chip count.  an atlas page then updates every 5 minutes with any player updates. listen to the audio sample on the voice app -- cool. tags: wsop, poker, voxeo, voicexml, atlas, asp.net

the build is stable now ;-)  this is a long day summary, but an interesting read... the official oscon general conference kicked off today.  for some reason i feel compelled to point out the odd times.  0845?  it is just odd in the 15 minute increment zone...seems to throw the rest of the day (and my personal body clock) off! oscon did a cool thing by putting up an iCal version of their calendar.  with the new features of outlook 2007, i can merge the views and drag/drop sessions i want to attend.  someone else put up http://oscal.quxx.info which...

so at oscon they are having an oscamp -- basically an event within event.  the oscamp is an 'open spaces' event -- where essentially it is an open forum... a big wall and you basically put your name and topic on the wall.  so what better to do for a group of microsofties at an open source conference?  we decided to put our name on the wall (this was about 4:30pm).  our goal (honest truth here) was to learn more about the open source community and how microsoft can do better, learn from oss, and be a...

we're still not at the official conference, but have done another build, so we've rev'd to 0.11. today is tutorials again.  i signed up for an ajax on rails one and a marketing one (how to market to people who hate marketing). much of the same -- not what i expected as far as classroom learning. :-( the ajax on rails was basically a launch party for the relevance guys and streamlined.  i'd seen it before from one of our local guys pointing it out to me.  but they finally released the gem and i was able to install it...

i'm spending this week at oscon, the open source conference sponsored by o'reilly.  it's one of *the* conferences for the open source community, bringing together developers and such from all over using various types of open source software and for others to learn from their good/bad experiences and get some general education as well. for me, as an employee of the perceived enemy, you may wonder: wtf?  well, that's a good question.  in my team's role, one of our passions is to understand any opposition and help change perception.  difficult?  sometimes.  yes there are zealots (every side has them), but...

a book for sale: "Just say NO to Microsoft: How to ditch Microsoft AND why it's not as hard as you think." -- nice. tags: oscon, oscon+2006

nice cheesy 'mailbox' on microsoft campus promoting windows live mail... tags: windows+live, live, hotmail

i'm on our campus and we've got some new cans of water in the fridge...hard to see a bit: windows vista branded cans of lemon lime...mmm vistasty tags: vista

in the recent copy of business 2.0 magazine, there was an article about new services popping up regarding 'informal debt' (or informal loans).  these are those little i-owe-you's that you and your close friends/colleagues share. you know, the ones with the guy at lunch: 'dude, i forgot my wallet, i'll get you next time' type things. well, one looks simple and is free: billmonk... the article talked about how it was inspired by a group of friends that traveled together a lot and decided they'd just start settling up on debts after the trip so they didn't have to worry...

there is an interesting discussion going on over at eric nelson's blog.  why?  simple, here's the title of the post: Time to move on from MSDE to SQL Server 2005 Express (you do want to run on Windows Vista - don't you?) eric has great points about the reasons for sql 2005 express edition (which is still free and has better features), but i have to admit, i winced at the decision myself...the comments are very interesting to read. tags: msde, sql server express, sql server 2005, sse

i'm currently at an internal company briefing conference and have been having a chance to reflect on some things. in one of our keynote sessions, we had our COO talk about a family in hawaii with a unique situation.  (i'm not sure i'll get the recalled details correct, but you'll get the point.)  the family is made up of a father who is blind, a son who is deaf, two daughters who are blind, and a mother who holds the family together.  look carefully...you'll see that there clearly is some complication for the family to even communicate with each...

korby just reminded me of a tool that is on codeplex.  well they released v1 of vscmdshell -- a simple add-in that has a dockable window of a command shell (cmd.exe or windows powershell) within your visual studio instance. i constantly find myself needing a shell while working in vs and this will work out great. hmm...now can it be modified to run by default in elevated mode for vista? tags: codeplex, vista, powertoys, vscmdshell, visual studio

my comrade woodyp led me on to the mobile client software factory.  looks pretty cool and stuffed chalk full of a bunch of patterns and goodness. if you do mobile development, this is *definitely* something to check out   tags: mobile, compact+framework

a friend of mine who's a designer/developer type of fella turned me on to some interesting links today, and i thought i'd share. first, Max Kiesler -- a 'strategic designer' -- he has a ton of posts on ajax designs, etc. -- interesting reads for web developers second, is computerlove...a fun site, but as a golf fan, here's one of the links (in case it isn't on the home page when you visit) that i thought was awesome: a phantom5 digital camera (4000 shots per second) captures tiger woods' golf swing.  very cool. and design 101 for programmers :-) tags: ajax, atlas, web2.0, tiger...

if you are jealous of the people who got the book at teched, well you can get it for free (in PDF form) now. 7 Development Projects with the 2007 Microsoft Office System and Windows SharePoint Services 2007 whew, as if our product names weren't long enough...here's the short version: 7 Dev Projects with MOSS 2007. UPDATE: Leaving a comment below asking for the book will do you no good.  I don't own the book, nor did I ever distribute it...this was a link provided at this time over 3 years ago. tags: sharepoint, moss, office

wow!  responding to market demands, microsoft has just announced virtual pc will now be free! sweet… get virtualpc for free now!

[warning: if you are reading in an aggregator, this post has some video, so visit the site if you can’t see it] well, some cool stuff hapening in the land of heat.  two really smart guys have been working on a project that one of them alluded to earlier this year. well, i’ve been invited to beta test the site/product.  this isn’t necessarily a review of the product…i’ll have to download the end result and get motivated to exercise first :-), but i thought their use of technology use is cool and they are microsoft developers who are passionate about technology. i think simon got motivate when...

the latest valleyschwag shipment came -- check out the goods! tags: valleyschwag, web2.0

eweek labs did a bake off recently and published some findings yesterday in their eWEEK Labs Bakeoff: Open Source Versus .Net Stacks article. some soundblogbytes: Even if the .Net stack had bombed convincingly in these tests, it would probably still maintain popularity in many companies. But its strong showing should give companies confidence that the .Net stack will handle most high-level enterprise needs. the one thing that i didn’t like about the article was the raw publishing of the test results…

a while back anand and i saw some stuff about meebo while at a conference.  today i just saw that Kool IM was released.  same concept really, a web-based-super-nifty-ajax-enabled messenger ‘client’ that enables access to all messenger clients. one thing that strikes me as odd is how willing we’d be to give a third party our login information…isn’t that one reason why everyone hated the passport idea? anywhoo…check it out: Kool IM tags: kool im, ajax, messenger, im

Microsoft preparing launch of iPod rival well, i can honestly say i don’t know anything about these plans…but i can say i *hope* microsoft gets it right…and by that i mean: don’t just have wmv/wma as the only supported formats: if this is the case, it will fail.  it will fail for me immediately.  mp3 is a decent format.  okay, okay, stand back drm hounds…but seriously…would you buy any music media device that doesn’t support mp3?  and video…let’s make sure it plays mpeg, avi, wmv, mov, etc. size: seriously…with the lessons learned from ipod, it should be clear that size matters ;-) — i...

today, microsoft is announcing a funding of a project to build the Open XML Translator, which is a set of tools to translate between office openxml and odf documents. msft is also announcing an interop center for office 2007, which apparently is an add-in for office 2007 where you'll get PDF XLS and ODF interop. anyhow, interesting news -- probably moreso that msft is funding this open source effort for three partners for a project hosted on sourceforge...hey, couldn't they at least have said codeplex? ;-) tags: codeplex, odf, openxml

Enron founder Ken Lay dies of heart attack honestly, i don't know how i feel about this.  luckily i wasn't affected by the enron devistation.  i don't even know anyone who was affected.  but i read the reports, saw the lives ruined, and saw the expose movies, shows.  all of which made me sick about corporate america.  after reading/seeing 'the smartest guys in the room' -- which of course is only one view -- i was so angry at what seemingly was clear corruption and fancy accounting trickery.ug.  anyway, i'm curious if those affected will feel 'justice' served?  not that anyone's...

after my third install of vista, i again faced the problem of my IE search bar not working.i installed 2 things prior to it not working: primopdf sun java runtime well, primopdf doesn't even work in vista, so i uninstalled thati then uninstalled the java runtime...lo and behold the ie search bar (and other things) worked again.  apparently there is a known issue with the sun java add-in -- beware...or disable it. tags: vista

some interesting posting going on over at john c. bland ii site. john is a great guy who is well versed in the adobe realm of things (digging flex right now) and attended our mix conference and (i think) actually walked away with an appreciation (and changed perception) of what we are doing on some of the user experience areas. his post on installing vista beta2 his post on toying with the expression tools tags: asp.net, vista, wpf, expression, acrylic, sparkle, cider, avalon