Alec Whittington

As many of you already know, I recently left my job at CrystalTech Web Hosting. It was on good terms and I am still friends with everyone there. One of the downsides was the fact I was about ready to make the jump to a dedicated server to house a side project I am working on. I admit, I was leery of search for a Windows Dedicated host, but I eventually found one that seemed like they knew what they were doing.

Let me introduce you to Server Intellect, a company that is consitently in the top 10 Windows Dedicated hosters on HostingReview.com. I ended up getting this server for a very reasonable price (I think at least). If you are looking for a server, I would highly recommend them. This is not a knock on my former employer, it just boiled down to what I would get for the money.  

While reading blogs recently, I came across several blog posts about the new Microsoft Sidewinder mouse. Most of the posts were positive overall and it just so happened that I needed a new mouse. My trusted Logitech MX1000 had finally decided that the years of gaming abuse were too much for it to handle, it stopped holding a charge. I decided to roll the dice and give the Sidewinder a try, even though I was leaning towards a new Logitech MX Revolution.

Well I have to say, it is awkward at best. While it performed flawlessly for the 2 hours I used it, I just could not adapt to it. My hands are on the medium side and I found that I was having to maneuver my hand in ways that one should not have to in order to click a button or scroll a wheel. This thing was designed for people with Shrek hands, no joke. One of the nice things about the MX 1000 and Revolution is their shape. The sloping backside makes for very natural positioning of your hand and you do not feel like you are reaching to click anything. While I enjoyed the weighting the Sidewinder provided, it still could not compare to the weight of my trust MX.

I ended up returning it to Best Buy within less than 24 hours of the purchase. I do have to say that Best Buy took it back without a complaint and issued me a very no hassle refund on it. In the end I ended up getting the MX Revolution and am enjoying it. Is it the same as my old pal, the MX 1000? Nope, but it will make a good replacement. I really wish Logitech would bring back the MX 1000 in the original form, not the Keyboard / Mouse bluetooth combo version they offer now. Seriously, how many people use BlueTooth on the Desktop PC? 

Rob Conery made a very interesting post on Ruby on Rails today. I stand with everything he is saying, especially about how he could not imagine treating his users in the way the Rails team does. This is a very important part of the whole post, if you are going to release something to the public, you need to be willing to support it and the situations that may arise from the use by others. I volunteer as a Project Lead for DotNetNuke and there is one thing I have found out, you don't know shit about your users until they use your product and find bugs you thought were never possible. I understand that it is hard sometimes to maintain your composure when someone you do not know starts verbally abusing you in a public forum. They don't know your dedication to the project, they don't know you, what gives them the right to treat you this way? Well guess what bud, you put yourself into that position. Sometimes you are gonna have people say things that you don't wanna hear, it will make you mad. The only person to be mad at this is yourself. You put yourself in the public eye.

So head on over to Rob's place and check out the post. While you are there, check out his other posts too. He has a very unique writing style that I think displays who he is very well. Rob is an all around good guy and someone I admire deeply. I just want to know, where do you get your energy Rob?


 

There is nothing worse than making stupid mistake because you are tired or for whatever reason. Yesterday I made one hell of a stupid mistake. I work for a little company called SMBLive, the company is based in Virginia but I work remotely from Arizona. It is an ideal arrangement, much better than my previous arrangement that caused me to drive 84 miles daily. The project I am currently working on is based on one of our current product platforms and I am trying to set-up a local development environment.

The product is a MS SharePoint based product and as such I need to set-up a virtual machine that has SharePoint installed along with MS SQL and VS 2005. Seems fairly simple, right? Don't let it fool you, it's not that straight forward. So yesterday after being woke up at 5:17 to put out a fire, I spent the rest of my 17 hour day setting up the VM. I prefer to use VMWare over Virtual PC as I find it to be lighter on the resources as well as being very intuitive. So I spend a few hours getting the OS configured with AD, DNS, IIS, .NET 2.0 and 3.0, and then all those Updates. Finally I can move on to the rest, so I install MS SQL DE and SP2. Simple install, so I move onto VS 2005. Another simple install. I move on to installing the dreaded SP1 for VS 2005 (you know, the one that takes FOREVER) and I notice is says it is for the "Premier Partner Edition". Oh damn, I should have installed VS before SQL. Ok fix all of that and decide it is 10PM, I need to get some sleep. I am beat and can finish it in the morning.

Well right before I go to bed, I decided I wanted to defrag my VM drive on my host machine. I keep all of my VM's in one location for organization purposes and the drive is a SATA II drive so it is faster than my boot drive. Moving on, I noticed that there were quite a few VM's in there that I did not use or did not need so I decided to clean them out. Well silly me, I forgot that the one I just created was in an old folder because it was replacing one. I did not realize my stupid mistake until this morning. Looks like I will be setting it up, AGAIN. I hate stupid mistakes.

 The CodeMash conference has opened up registration. The conference is January 9 - 11, 2008 in Sandusky, Ohio.

You can register here.