Archives
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Copyright problems?
Mike Sax posted that "The Creative Commons License may ruin your life"and linked to my previous post about wanting a different copyright notice on my blog. Frankly, I didn't see what the big deal was. Then I read his link to Dan Bricklin's post about these "warrant" issues, and Yikes!
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Need a new copyright notice
Keith Ballinger pointed out to me a couple of weeks ago that the "Copyright Keith Pleas" at the bottom of this blog basically doesn't allow anybody to do anything with my blog. Perhaps even quote it. I asked Scott - who runs dotnetweblogs - about adding a customization option for copyrights, but it apparently didn't make it into the new site he rolled out this weekend.
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User Group = Customer Support Group?
Julia talks about why she runs a .NET user group. I just couldn't resist making the connection to this past Sunday's Dilbert cartoon about corporate "Customer Support Groups". <vbg>
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Taped the MSDN ".NET Show" on Friday
Chris Kinsman and I taped an episode of the .NET Show on applications architecture with .NET. We did the show with Ed Jerzierski (of PAG) and Mike Burner (of the Platform Strategy Group), and it should be out in May. Lots of stuff to talk about: the architecture community portal I announced last week, new patterns and stuff coming from PAG, and what we learned from our first on-campus architecture event in March and how we're updating things for our next event (now called the "Guided Design .Summit: Architecture and Design for .NET").
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NEW: Community Portal for .NET Architecture and Design
The new Microsoft portal for .NET architecture and design just went live on GotDotNet. This is the community side of the MSDN Architecture site and contains patterns, VS.NET enterprise templates, technical articles, discussion groups, and third party content.
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More stats for my blog...
As I mentioned in my previous post (emphasized in the comments by Mike), RSS "views" are the vast majority of accesses. And, yes, they tend to inflate numbers dramatically. The aggregator I'm using - SharpReader by Luke Hutteman - by default refreshes every hour.
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Audience for weblogs?
Robert is waging a personal war against "traditional" industry pundits (particularly John Dvorak), postulating that they're afraid of the readership that blogs as garnering. So, just how popular are these blogs?
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Pill people posit?
OK, thanks to some noted bloggers (Tim, Don, and Robert in particular) everybody knows that Chris Sells "took the red pill" and joined Microsoft. No doubt, this has caused some people to wonder about their chances of getting hired by Microsoft.
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How could I be so dumb?
I showed a security example at VSLive this week that simply didn't work. It was pretty straightforward: I put a LinkDemand in a component assembly that looked for a key signature in the caller. It's always worked before, so I didn't think to test it ahead of time. Dumb.
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Friend or Foe?
This week was VSLive Chicago. Pretty good turnout with lots of late registrations, which is encouraging for the industry.
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"Developer Dawgs"
The "Developer Dawgs" movie:
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Certification: False Postives versus False Negatives
OK, lots of people are aware of the false positives of certification. Like Scott Hanselman, who says "I know lots of people who are certified that I woudn't hire."
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The "Golden Hammer" anti-pattern strikes again, with echoes...
Don XML - in his From The What Were They Thinking Department post - wrote about what a poor idea Fawcette's Enterprise Architect Summit was. Robert Scoble and bunch of other "MS'ers" (apparently, .NET developers) climbed on saying yeah, how can it possibly compete with the PDC, they're idiots, won't they ever learn, blah, blah, blah.
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Please save us from "professional" developers
Sometimes I feel like us "Morts" live in some kind of parallel universe.<sigh>
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Aw, it's not so bad being a Mort...
Mike Harsh mentioned the "Mort" personna that MS uses for VB.NET developers, saying that "In summary, the Load event is about convenience". Julia expressed some tongue-in-cheek alarm over being a Mort.
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Memories of developing with Office...
Chris reminisces about writing MS certification exams in his Blast from the Past post. Well, going even further back, our first contracting job at Microsoft was writing the Excel SDK. This was in 1991 and came out of our bitching about Excel-based development at the Developer Tools Forum (the pre-cursor to TechEd) held in Seattle in August of that year. In yet another demonstration of serendipity, we actually worked for Joel Spolsky. Chris has used his FogBUGZ on a couple of projects, but I haven't been in contact with Joel in years.
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Condescending? Who, me?
About my previous post on Certification Exams, Andrew Duthie commented in his blog that:
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MS Certification Exams
Scott Hanselman ranted yesterday about the people putting all their MS certification initials after their names. A comment from Mike Gunderloy threw me into the "way-back" machine...back to perhaps 5 years ago when Chris Kinsman and I were hired to do the technical review of the Windows Architecture exams that Mike and Ken Getz wrote the questions for. Boy, we sure fought a lot over those questions. Not sure why exactly: Those exams were pretty pointless anyway.
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Whither UAL?
On a recent United Airlines (UAL) flight I ended up next to one of their pilots. I've been a Premier Exec on them for a few years, have a quarter million miles and a bunch of upgrades "in the bank", and am naturally playing close attention to their bankruptcy. The ticket agents say "don't worry, we'll always be here". 20 minutes later I read that they're being delisted from the NYSE. I've got to buy tickets for Chicago, DC, NY, Milan, Michigan, Boston, NOLA, Dallas, and Barcelona. And that's just in the next 3 months. <sigh>
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St Louis .NET UG
I did a talk on remoting for the St Louis .NET User Group on Monday. It was very different than the one I did in January for the Austin .NET User Group. The Austin meeting was quite an eye-opener: A large number of the people there were from the Java .com meltdown and most of the questions were about bridging between .NET Remoting and J2EE RMI. For those who care, check out Ja.NET from Intrinsyc and JNBridge Pro from JNBridge. The wierdest thing about the Austin talk was the ride back to the airport: The cab driver was a laid-off IBM Java developer with a master's in computer science. Very scary.
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Why am I doing this?
Well, Scoble's been after me for a while to set up a blog but, frankly, I figured it was just another nutball technology that was never going to amount to anything. I mean, he's always pushing something, right?
OK, so sometimes I can be a bit thick. But three things happened to me this week that - combined - pushed me over the edge. 1) On a flight to St Louis to do an INETA presentation on remoting to the St Louis .NET User Group, I sat next to a United Airlines pilot and learned some amazing stuff (which I'll put in a subsequent post) related to their current financial problems. 2) People all around me mentioned that Don Box was driven to the airport by Jeff Richter after a King Crimson concert. 3) Daniel A. Seara (the MSDN RD for Argentina who I met at the INETA LATAM kickoff a couple of weeks ago) forwarded a truly interesting link to Scott Hansleman's Tips for a Successful MSFT Presentation. So...in reverse order to above...there's some great stuff up there, people I know are doing it, and I've got a few things I'd like to tell the world about. Besides, I mentioned to Yasser that I was thinking about it and about a half-dozen people e-mailed me about that.
