February 2003 - Posts

• Bin Drinkin

  Roy's post on RSS got me thinkin'. Well not thinkin, more got me in the mood to post something.  I don't think RSS is the wave of the future, I don't think bloggers should be considered in the same realm as professional journalism (no matter how unprofessional other paper journalist may be).  I've had a "blog" since freakin' 1996.  Long enough that I remember adding tables and background images to it because I thought they were cool.  I don't think my opinion matters at all, and I don't bitch everytime an article gets posted about online coverage of an event and the "blog community" doesn't get included in the "media" that covered it.  I take weblogs as they are:  A technology to easyily get people talking.  It's like XML Web Services.  It is no different than what I did in 1995 to make sure I could detect client side when an update was available to my machine.  But a "little" more standard than my custom format was. Weblogs and RSS are a good two to three years from being usefull.  Daypop is coming close to making them usefull, showing what people are caring about.  But as the google and blogger.com fiasco has show, they really only show what the "weblog community" cares about, and frankly speaking they are a small, small minority of the people of the world. Step 1:  Free bandwidth.  Bandwidth is the roads of the internet.  They should be like the roads I drive on.  I don't care if my taxes pay for them, I just want to know that if I have something popular to spit out that I won't be stuck with a freakin' $1000 bill from people wanting to check it out.  How the hell is that free speech?  Not everyone has Havard to pay for their weblog traffic... I'm drunk again. Posted Feb 28 2003, 09:34 PM by Phil Scott with 1 comment(s)

• A Little Video Fun for a Friday Afternoon

  http://www.wkrn.com/Global/Video/WorldNowASX.asp?ClipID=121299&LiveURI=&ShowCC=0&TargetAdsTag=News&CurrentPosition=0 Iced over bridge in Nashville.  Hilarity insues.  [via Fark of course] Question:  What stops a car. Answer:  Not brakes.  It's friction.  Living in Kentucky, 4WD pretty much means four wheels in a ditch.  Our last snow ice storm I saw only one wreck (out of 10+) that was not caused by an SUV.  Granted, not too many cars out that day either.  I've got nothing against SUVs or their owners, but it does seem quite a few of them skipped physics class for the F = Ma day of class.  Great for getting out of nasty spots, but a lot of drivers down here think for some reason think that they have magical breaks or something.  Seeing that land rover sliding across the bridge reminded me of that. Oh,  and that poor BMW in that video.  I hate to be a yuppie, but that's the car I almost bought.  But the one with AWD :)  RWD = the devil in ice.  Oh, and check out the Volvo.  Pretty good recovery I think...Well, compared to his cohorts... Posted Feb 28 2003, 11:28 AM by Phil Scott with no comments

• Uh, will you hold my wallet for me while I take the test please? There is a thousand dollars in there or maybe there isn't.

  Still trying to take the flippin' 70-300 exam.  Same problem as yesterday.  In the mean time, I'll be productive.  You see, normally I'd just go to espn.com and read some articles.  But I can't make it to espn.com without having to see a big freakin' picture about U of L falling apart at the end of the season.  Hopefully Rick gets the boat righted before the NCAA (if we make it of course).  So today I'll try to make some sense out of the ghetto CSV file that I have our course schedule data was set in.  I have no idea how to prepare for the 70-100/70-300 exam.  They are basically you know it or you don't exams.  You have to know some different technologies and database design, but besides that they are mostly just architecture type problems.  Reading Comprehension 101 is what I call it.  If you are looking to study for this, Tim has some exam links for it up on his site.  You might also want to check out what he has to say about the case study style of testing too. These are all tips I've developed on my own, and they do work.  I've been told that you no longer get paper, just their crappy wipe off sheets.  What a load of bull, but I guess that will keep asshats from writing the exam questions down on a piece of paper and stuffing it in their pockets or something. Links from Microsoft: Case Study test demo FAQ on Case Study Questions Posted Feb 28 2003, 11:17 AM by Phil Scott with no comments

• Get him a bodybag ... yeahhhhhh

  Not sure how many sports fans are out there, but if you haven't stumbled upon ESPN Motion yet (or are scared to install it), I'd give it a shot.  Basically it is a background app that downloads videos in the background.  I usually hit ESPN.com three or four times a day (once in the morning, once when Page2 is out, and once at night) and when I do they have a video (usually NBA tonight or perhaps top 10 plays of the day) ready to view.  No streaming, not waiting, and pretty good quality too.  Very smooth.  No idea how it works on Macs or Linux, but it works great for me.  Also cool is the new ESPN Intelligence page. ESPN is throwing up ads after the video plays on the ESPN Motion, but it's either one of their cool "Without Sports" ads, or even better the super cool "23 vs 39" ad (Eric Neel's article on how they made it here).  All they need to do is throw a SportCenter commercial or two on there and I'm set. While I'm at it, even if you are the type of person who only watches sports during the final four and the super bowl, you should check out Bill Simmon's articles.  Good times.  Definitely check out the "Holy Trilogy of the Katate Kid" article. My day has been wasted waiting for Prometric, a part of The Thomson Corporation, to get their freakin' application actually working (hey Prometric, you need computer training?  Contact me!).  Oh well, perhaps I'll feel better and maybe this is for the better.  Probably not in my best interest to take a three hour exam hopped up on cold medicine. Posted Feb 27 2003, 04:55 PM by Phil Scott with no comments

• Out of order? Even in the future, nothing works!

  Tried to register for the 70-300 (Analyzing Requirements and Defining Microsoft .NET Solution Architectures) exam today.  I called up Prometric and the lady on the line said that things were running terribly slow on their system.  On Tuesday when I called last the other lady on the phone told me that the system was responding slow ever since they upgraded to the new system.  Now, if I get in the testing center today I'll be treated with a poorly designed app written in what looks like VB3 (could also be VB4.  The bold text on the buttons is what gives it away) and uses 12pt arial font that is just plain difficult to read.  I was taking a practice test for the XML Web Service from MeasureUp that in addition to being a kinda clunky interface, also runs pretty slow. If I was in the position of evaluating people that are looking to prove their proficiencies in cutting edge technologies, I would feel silly with these interfaces.  I'm just kinda bored sitting here waiting for Prometrics servers to reboot I guess... Posted Feb 27 2003, 03:14 PM by Phil Scott with no comments

• Justin Gehtland

  Justin Gehtland's blog has moved with his switch to BlogX.  Justin is one of the authors of one of my all time favorite VB6 books "Effective Visual Basic : How to Improve Your VB/COM+ Applications."  Part of the "just buy all of Ted Pattison's COM books" recommendation I always am always willing to hand out to the VB6 students trying to wrap their heads around COM.  If I ever get a chance to write a book, I hope it is as informative, interesting and easy to read as that book.  Sure book's like Tim Ewald's Transactional COM+ book are full of good info, but that thing was a beast to read and I like to think I'm an above average developer.  Posted Feb 26 2003, 03:22 PM by Phil Scott with 2 comment(s)

• Descriptions and Bandwidth

  Scott was talking about descriptions, and RSS and the such.  One of the more interesting post abous this (well, same topic but October) is from Joel: Does anyone care about the RSS feed? About 12% of the IP addresses that came to Joel on Software yesterday came to get rss.xml. That's more than I would have thought, but it was a slow news day. I would expect when I actually post a long new article, I would get the same number of RSS clients but way more normal web browser hits. I was also surprised to see that Ranchero NetNewsWire, created by former UserLand employee Brent Simmons, is more than twice as popular as his ex-boss's product Radio (377 subscribers for NNW, 163 for Radio.) Most of the RSS subscribers are whacking me every hour, which is actually costing me cash money in excess bandwidth charges. How can I set it up so they only visit once a day? Is this an RSS option? I rarely post more than once or twice a day. Maybe I should change the RSS feed to just include headlines with links. Scott, thanks for the bandwidth and thanks for the server space.  I think I'll start making a habit of posting descriptions to help you out on the RSS.  Not everything I have to say is important, and I certainly wouldn't want to suck up bandwidth with a 10pg diatrite on why I think sports commercials are the premier form of art in the 21st centery (or even worse, VB.NET code).  If I can't throw together some description in under 500 characters on why someone might want to read my posts, well tough for me.  On a related note, everytime someone says "Semantic Web" I want to set myself on fire.  Posted Feb 25 2003, 09:46 PM by Phil Scott with 1 comment(s)

• Life is like a mop.

  Had a pretty rough day with the whole car fiasco, but I came home and installed Diskeeper.  Man, they should package Defrag software with those Pure Mood CDs from Target.  Most relaxing thing I've seen this year  28% fragmentation to 0%.  I forgot how much more info they showed in Diskeeper than the Win2k version.  I still can't get over they have a button with a caption of "Set it and Forget It" on the main form.  I'm talking to myself again. Posted Feb 25 2003, 08:57 PM by Phil Scott with no comments

• Popping Zits

  Executive sent me a NFR copy of Diskeeper to play around with hoping that I will pimp their product like I am right now.  I'll probably going to just throw it on the machine I use in class for demo purposes.  It has scheduling, networking and all that built in that normal defrag doesn't.  But where is the fun in that?  Clicking on analyze and seeing a whole mess of red, and then watching little ol' defrag move everything around is one of the most rewarding experiences there is (besides watching DOS Defrag work of course).  Now, some would say that never having to run defrag is rewarding, but these are the same tortured souls who probably keep their house clean at all time and never know the joy of spending a satuday and sunday getting things looking good.  The Diskeeper site actually says "Set it, and forget it."  Posted Feb 25 2003, 05:43 PM by Phil Scott with no comments

• Now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb

  Good Times: Decided to go ahead and try the Developing Windows Apps in .NET exam.  A two and a half hour exam, I finished with two hours left.  After the XML Web Service exam, this one was a joke.  The only reason I even went through my questions again was to make sure I didn't goof up due to the crappy mouse and keyboard in the center.  One thing I didn't feel comfortable with was the CAS stuff.  Something I definitely need to go over again.  I probably scored 95% or better I hope.  Two exams, two days, two passes.  Tomorrow I'm sitting a Time Management class so I might not continue my streak of sitting exams.  But on Thursday I'll look to pass my 70-300 exam to get my MCSD for Microsoft .NET.  Bad Times: On the way to work I ran over this metal thing.  It looked like an after-market exhaust system some kid in a Civic tried to attach to his Civic via spit and string.  The car in front of me swerved out of the way and I was presented with this shinny object that looked like Bender's head.  Luckily I had the presence of mind to realize that I had a semi to my right and a mini-van to my left, so I just took it across the chin and hoped for the best.  Well, the best was a hole the size of my first on the oil pan.  Plus damage to a couple of the shields and the subframe of the car.  I guess if you are going to mess up your car, you might as well do something where no one gets hurt but you still get the whole VW auto crew admiring the damage.  BTW, if you are shopping for a new car, Bachman VW in Louisville has perhaps the nicest and sincere people I've ever met.  My insurance person said this might be listed as a collision, so I might have to drop $500 on for the deductable.  A collision is what would have happened if I tried to avoid it.  I'm hoping they'll see it as an act of god.  This is actually my first ticket or claim I've EVER filed, so I have no idea what will happen here.  I could get a rental car, but I'd rather get my GF to pick me up than drive a freakin' Dodge Stratus. Posted Feb 25 2003, 04:43 PM by Phil Scott with no comments