Jeff Makes Software
The software musings of Jeff Putz
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J Allard is my hero
I'm still a month behind on reading Wired, but there's a great article about Xbox 360 and J Allard. Seriously, this guy is my hero.
Why? Because he's a badass that says what he thinks. I respect that. I respect that even more that he's able to do it in a huge corporate structure like Microsoft. (And by extension, I respect his superiors more that they'll put up with, and listen to, his foul-mouthed e-mail.) I get the strong sense that his personality is a lot like mine... strong opinions, not content with mediocrity, not concerned about others' perception of him, 30-something, and perhaps walks the line between confidence and arrogance. That's me.
I tried to work that way once in a corporate environment, while at Penton Media. That didn't work out because it was a horrible yet classic example of a good old boys club, with a bunch of fat old white men that figured the status quo would continue to work. They didn't want to listen to some 28-year-old kid at the time tell them what the Internet really meant.
What did I have to say? While it wasn't my idea, one of "our" people suggested building a Web-based CRM product for internal use and to sell to our customers. I mean, we were a B2B media company, why not? I pushed the concept around in the business units I worked in. They said it would never work and no one would buy into it (this opinion was largely based on their lack of sales of Web-based ads). Morons. Salesforce.com got there and made people rich. Those assholes all got canned, Penton was delisted from the NYSE, and that was the end of that. I left for other things before it went down.
I wouldn't say I'm bitter as much as I hate that I worked in an environment where new ideas were never given a chance for discussion. You'd think they'd stand up and listen to the "kid" that sold a domain name for $100k, but they were so stuck in the print world that they didn't understand the company's evolving role for our customers. The key to success is a combination of identifying customer needs and innovating.
But who knows, if it were a different company, maybe I would've had the kind of success Allard has had. I really admire the guy because, if you believe everything that has been written about him, he's never backed down from the winner-take-all attitude for risky business. Who in their right mind would create a business plan to take on Sony and Nintendo? And walk into a room with Gates and Ballmer to sell it? He's even smart enough to see the potential for other Xbox uses, even if he sees the thing as mainly a game machine. Frankly his vision makes a hell of a lot more sense than the whole Media Center approach. If he has Gates' ear, hopefully he's listening.
So I raise my glass to J Allard... someone who really gets it.
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Stuck on v2 ConfigurationSection class
This will teach me to write a ton of code on the first beta...
Back in "the day" of beta 1 of .NET v2, I could:
XmlNode myNode = ConfigurationSection.GetRawXml().SelectSingleNode("myNode");
Well, that GetRawXml() method has since gone away. How do I do the same thing? Brain hurts getting my head around the changes.
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Inexpensive SSL, great support
If you need an inexpensive SSL, try Instant SSL. I've been using them for a few years. When my latest renewal wasn't working, I e-mailed support, got a response in five minutes, on a Friday night (which would be overnight for them... I think they're in the UK). Turns out they updated their root certificate and I didn't install that on my server.
It seems so rare these days to get that kind of service.
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Microsoft's recruiting practices
Interesting article on News.com today about Microsoft's recruiting practices. I wholly agree with some of the assertions made about the company, and it's probably the reason I've never bothered applying with Microsoft.
The whole "brain teaser" thing in particular is annoying. Yeah, ask me about the obvious stuff that shows I know what I'm doing, but don't play games with me. I'm a grown up. In fact, I would go as far as to say that even a less knowledgeable person with the right personality beats the heck out of a PhD with the personality of a complete jackass. I just hired a guy for my current project who has only nine months of working in .NET in earnest, but it was the little things, some technical, some not, that sold me.
A company selling itself really is important. This ain't 2001 anymore. The good people shouldn't be expected to feel lucky to have a job. I need to know up front why I should work somewhere, because life is too short to be wasting time in a place where I can't thrive and be happy. Frequently it's the intangibles that are more important than the money. Although money is still good. The more the better.
I'm sure that the article doesn't represent the way things go everywhere in Microsoft, but still, I've heard enough stories like those to know I'm not sure I'd want to go there. And that's coming from someone that loves the company's products.
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CliqiueSite® NewsBlog v1.0.0 posted
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Annoyed with Enterprise Manager
I'm really annoyed with Enterprise Manager. When I try to access a database properties dialog, it gives me the world-famous "Microsoft Management Console has encountered a problem and needs to close" error. None of the solutions I've encountered fix it. It seems to have developed since installing the SQL Express Manager, but I'm not positive of that.
Has anyone else encountered this?
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Quicktime and HD: I have seen the future
Apple put out a preview version of Quicktime 7 for Windows. The excitement here is of course that it includes the H.264 codec for HD video.
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Easy, hackable blog/news roll app for ASP.NET v2
I wanted to bang out a little application that did simple news rotation, kind of a blog roll of sorts. I have a need for this, but everything currently "out there" is overly complex for what I needed to do. So I decided I'd build something that met my needs and give it away.
So I created CliqueSite® NewsBlog. It's built more in the ASP.NET v2 paradigm with the classes in /App_code and such, and is meant to be easy to change and maintain. It does RSS feeds, categorization, comments, etc. Really simple, really easy to change, really easy to use.
So where can you get it? I'll let you know soon!
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Jessica on TWiT
You former TechTV fans should check out the current This Week in Tech podcast for Jessica Corbin.
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ASP.NET v2: Smart between the ears
I was setting up a handler to parse a particular URL (kinda like this), when I was pleased to see that the link to a style sheet between the head tags of the master page was smart enough to alter it to the correct path. How cool is that?
Of course, I don't know if it's proper to use the link tag anymore. Is it? I thought you were supposed to use CSS imports instead these days.