Archives
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A Little Video Fun for a Friday Afternoon
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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." -
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. -
Just because I'm on vaction, don't mean I'm out to lunch.
I'm not teaching this week so I thought I'd take some exams. First on the list: Developing XML Web Services and Server Components. Holy jeez that was a beast. All kinds of questions on remoting and a bunch that are along the lines of: You build version 1.0.0.0 of your component against version 1.2.0.0 of some .dll. Later on, someone puts that .dll in the GAC. Then, someone create a version 1.1.0.0 version and creates a publisher policy in the GAC. Then you rebuild your app. What happens?
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humph
People sitting behind the play-by-play guys during the half-time show that are on their cell phones waving and grinning like an idiot need to be immediately removed by the arena security. I feel very strongly about this.
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Download!
Something came up at work where one of our larger partners would like to get our schedule database in some sort of XML so they can put our schedule on their site. Great! Piece of cake to do, plus more sales for us. Well, now they want all the schedule data from all the centers, world-wide I assume. Now, our corporate HQ hold the data and there is no direct way to get at it. So what I have is a little command prompt app that simply hits their public website and strips off the classes and dates for our schedule. Best I can do. Requests for an XML Web Service or even a CSV file have gone unanswered, so this is what I was left with doing.
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MCAD / MCSD
I've been fooling around preparing for the XML Web Service exam. This exam is by far the more difficult of any of the other exam, mostly because it covers stuff I simply have no reason to work with on a day to day basis. Giant chunks of remoting seem to be in this exam. I mean, I know how to work with remoting and I understand it, but I really don't see where your average developer looking to get their MCAD (Microsoft Certified Application Developer) really should be an expert at writing remoting components. It just isn't something used in most applications by people I think this cert is targeting.
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Extended Markup Language (XML) Web service
I'm taking a practice exam for the XML Web Service exam, and they pose questions like this: "You create an Extended Markup Language (XML) Web service..."
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Catch ex as exception when IL = WTF
Roy's post about the when statement in VB got me thinking about how that would be implemented in IL. I'm not an IL expert by any means, but that doesn't look regulation to me. I can follow it, but it looks like spaghetti code to me. I'd stick with an if statement or something.
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qqqqqqqqqqqq
The man, the legend ScottGu has posted some info about some pretty snazzy ASP.NET utilities, including QQQ I played with the other day. I didn't have ACT installed on the machine, so I wrote a ghetto console stress test to try it out on some dummy ASP.NET. Today I'm going to try it on the latest build of our new site and see what happens.
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By Popular Demand
Download TopMenu.ascx. The zip file contains an example on how I broke apart the DHTML menu from BrainJar.com into an ascx, css and js file to make the thing a little more reusable in my app. I didn't include the .vb file for TopMenu.ascx because there is no server side code on this guy quite yet. But it works fine for normal navigational purposes. I have it setup so the menu drops down automatically when you hover over some text, the demo on BrainJar you have to click to expand the menu. I think mine works a bit better for my site's purposes.
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Bork Bork Bork
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ASP to ASP.NET Migration Handbook
Its official, my book copies came in today's mail. Wow, it is pretty cool seeing your name on the cover of a technical book. Someone actually allowed me to share my thoughts and actually published them...now that is scary!
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"Super Saver"
I finally picked up the Developing Microsoft ASP.NET Server Controls and Components book from Amazon.com. I opted for the Super Saver because I really didn't need it quite yet. Well, I kinda hit a snag in a project and I was hoping a quick skim of that book might get me back on track (I need to create a simple server control...I think). Well, it shipped out from Amazon's warehouse in Lexington early yesterday morning. Great I thought, it will be here Wednesday (Lexington is an hour drive from Louisville). Nope, it went right to Cincinatti (two hours from Louisville, about an hour and half from Lexington). So it will probably make it to Louisville sometime tomorrow, if they decide the book doesn't need to tour Virginia too. Followed by HOPEFULLY a delivery in time for the weekend.
For the record, I could have jogged to and from the warehouse much quicker than the postal service. That's what I get for being cheap I guess. -
Index Tuning Wizard
I've been finding out that a lot of VB people out there are getting stuck with the role of the DBA. They can create the tables, data integrity stuff, stored procedures and all that just fine. They might even pick up some security and backup knowledge. But something that many just don't have the time to learn proper is indexes and the index architecture. Some really cool stuff in there, but many people are too busy creating apps to worry about creating an index that might perform a little better than what we have out there already.
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MCAD / MCSD
Not sure if anyone is looking to get their MCAD / MCSD for Microsoft .NET out there, but a couple of links that I've found treemendously helpful are Tim's Exam Links. What he's basically done is taken Microsoft's list of skills you need to pass the exam, and provides links to MSDN or other websites where you can pick up the skill. So say you haven't done much in the ways of "Provide multicultural test data to components, pages, and applications," there are three links to get you up to speed on that topic. I like resources like this because I never really prepare for exams, I just kinda take them. That willy nilly stuff was fine fof VB6 because, well, I did all that stuff all the time. Now with .NET, there is just SOOO much that I just don't touch on a day to day basis (like multicultural stuff), things like this are a god send if I want to confidently pass an exam.
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Konfabulator
All this hype about Konfabulator is kinda making me jealous. That was my idea! I never did much with it, but my idea was to basically do what they did, but instead host ASP.NET and serve up "applications" that way in an applications. I'm sure if I was wiser about Smart Clients, I could figure a way to do some cool stuff like that....
Edit: More Links
- Reference for Creating Objects
- Gallery of Stuff people have done so far (link is misspelled in their menu).
- Article in MacWorld.
- Wired News Article <- best info IMHO.
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MCSD
Not sure how many people here are MCSDs, but if you are, starting March 1, 2003 you qualify for a free exam voucher for exam 70-300 (Analyzing Requirements and Defining Microsoft .NET Solution Architectures) which should help you obtain the new MCSD for Microsoft .NET. See the secure MCP site for details.
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Me Too
Not to be another "me too" on Ingo's redesign, but what's up with this ;)
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Macromedia DevNet
Macromedia DevNet [via CNet]. Who are these people using freakin' Dreamweaver and Flash that need to drop $1,500 on DevNet. It's upgrades and their resource kits. And upgrade costs what, $200 bucks for each piece of software? So you are paying $1000+ for info most people have available for free on the web? Hmmmm. I have no problem with the subscription system (god bless MSDN Subscriptions), but it's kinda like paying $900 bucks a year for Sports Illustrated and access to CNNSI. You could easily buy the magazine at the store and hit up another website for the info.
I feel I'm missing something here. $1,500 seems a bit high for what you are getting. Oh, BTW, Tim's blog got me interested in Flash Remoting until I saw the price tag. Which took a couple of days to find out, because Macromedia's "Dynamic content" was down yesterday. Not a good sign when evaluating their dynamic content type applications... -
Because Every OS Sucks
I'm feeling kinda left out by the OS thingy, but for the record I'm Debian Linux. I figured out my OS way back before finding out you are DR-DOS was cool.
http://homepage.mac.com/deadtroll2/.Movies/ossucksref.mov -
The Java Problem
In case you haven't seen it yet, an internal memo about "The Java Problem." Not going to get in a language war, but it is still interesting to read, and hope that .NET doesn't end with issues like the size of the JRE and the "Extensions do not support modularity" type stuff. I'm a little worried myself between whether I should be creating Windows app at all with version 1.1 of the framework...Ever. Or is it 1.0? That might just be my ignorance on how a system that has version 1.1 installed, and not 1.0 which my application is running with. According to Sean and Scott I better deploy the framework, but having a link for people with version 1.1 installed to download version 1.0 seems just down right shady to me. Time to read some more...
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Things are Gonna Change...I can Feel It
Just got an e-mail back from Danny from Daypop about what he thinks is happening. Best guess is that people are submitting the wrong url in their .blogger.com website, which is resolving to www.blogger.com (no linky for you for screwing up Daypop) and it's Fresh links section was being given way too much weight. Hopefully Danny can tweak it a little bit and get those rogue sites off the list.
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MSDN installs
Is there a way to install the MSDN library on a network share? If I've got 16 people in a class, having that 1gb of data on each machines seems silly. I would think that they could just put the index on each machine locally like the VS6 MSDN, and then retrieve the content remotely. Am I just overlooking an option here?
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Development Computer
Ok, so I've gotten my home PC up and running. Seems to be going great. Here are the requirements I set forth when building the thing:
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my monkeys wanna go to Arnhem
According to Daypop, this is the #19 entry:
i am back ! :) my monkeys wanna go to Arnhem,so i'll be alone here..wOw man cool..!! ey guys i lost my ring :( i really need it and i'm still looking for it,but till now i can't find it..my dolphin's ring,my favorite's ring :( ada pesen neh..buat ollie,bagus tuch layoutnya! gitu dong lie,it's cool man!!, erwin,lha ko biru? lagie ngedit layoutnya yah? moga² sukses slalu ;),L,oke deh tenang ajah...tgl 15 ya?
I'm going to set myself on fire. I wonder if blogger.com did this on purpose. I mean, it is pretty clear that someone submitted sites to daypop that would drive blogger.com marketting onto the list (which I believe happened a week ago), and now those sites are junking up everything else. I wonder how hard it would be to create a .NetPop service that handles all the .NET blogs (or any dev blog for that matter)...
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Daypop and Blogspot
Man oh man has
Blogspotblogger.com ruined Daypop. I'm not saying I have the best weblog in the world, or perhaps even in even in my apartment complex, but how do Lucy's Website, ::BUTCHER KNIVES::, +eye-candy+, caricature, and other crap make it on the list. We'll, because all these people submitting their sites to Daypop, and then having on the left hand side "most recently updated Blogspot web pages." They hit the daypop traversal magic hour, and suddenly they are on the Top 40. I'm calling shenanigans and saying that Daypop should just ignore links to Blogspot.com sites fromother blogspot.comblogger.com sites. -
Shellacking
Louisville is taking it to Houston right now, so I thought I'd play with my little blog for a bit. One thing I'd personally like is a toolbar icon for inserting an image, that'd be kinda handy and some how keeping the toolbar from scrolling too...
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Vrrrrrrrrooooooooooooom
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Linux.Slapper.Worm
http://www.redhat.com/support/alerts/linux_slapper_worm.html
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Hey, do they have Krusty's Partially Gelatinated Gum-Based beverages?
Looking good Scott!!! And look at little ol' me up there. Just 1315 more posts until I'm the first person listed on the left.
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Windows Update
Just put together a new PC, so I'm windows update installing all the fixes (32 Critical Updates and Service packs for the record). Sweet sassy mollassy is this thing slow. It's been installing for the past 30 minutes. I'm worried it has something to do with the PC, but it seems pretty peppy in everything but Windows Update. The problem is that this machine is for my dad, so I need to make sure it is solid as can be before he takes delivery. I think I'll download Sandra and run some benchmarks...
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Mobo
My new motherboard and video card are sitting at the UPS hub at the airport here in Louisville. Won't be delivered until tomorrow it looks like. My family ordered a PC from gateway and had to pay $100+ to have the computer shipped 4 miles.
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Joel vs Dave
Joel's latest post about being slashdotted, followed by Dave's response, has led to Joel responding about reads vs hits. You hit a radio blog, there isn't much to keep you along like there is on Joel's page. It's pretty simple. He has articles, and a booklist over there. It is easy to find more content on Joel's site, while if I hit Dave's site for example, holy jeez is there a lot of just junk on that page. Now, don't get me wrong, I've found some neat blogs to read, but not much to keep you there.
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The only thing better than a crawfish dinner, is five crawfish dinners.
Michael Bush signs with U of L. I hope this doesn't hurt our chances getting Brohm froooom ... Trinity High School. The best high school in the world of course. Tonight the Cards play Cinci. I fear that this game is going to be pretty rough with the Bearcats hungry for a win. Either way, the cards will have to win by eleventy billion points to stay ahead of UK in the polls after last nights game. Holy jeez, I think my little sister could have scored 14 on Florida last night.
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Presentation Skills
You'd be surprised how often people comment that they really like my teaching style, which they say is "not reading to them." I've had people that have been taking technical training for 30-40 years, and they ask me where I learned my teaching techniques. It just seems almost common sense that if you are teaching someone something that you need to be filling in the blanks. There are many different ways to do this, and I've never been able to pinpoint how it happens. Some classes you get everyone on the ball, who really like digging into stuff and playing. Good times. In some classes, the students have been moved from data entry and they need to learn how to maintain a simple VB front end. Sometimes, nothing seems to be going right at all.
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Crystal Report Book
I've seen some links floating around to Brian Bischof's Crystal Reports for .NET book. Brian's a good guy, and also an MCT / MCSD like me. His error log for course 1016 is a thing of legends. Here's a course that features NT 4, MTS, MSMQ, SQL Server 6.5 and VB6 and MCT's are still looking for that log for when they teach it in 2003. His The .NET Languages: A Quick Translation Guide book is usually a big hit with all the Visual Basic developers coming into my classes. They like such a short and to the point book to get them over some hurdles and brain farts between the languages, plus the C# helps them at least read some of the more advanced .NET books like Essential .NET or Applied .NET Framework Programming.
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Link, link, link
Importing an OPML file would be handy on the links. Doing this sucker by hand is a weee bit slow.
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Beta 2
Scott, really digging the new interface for editing. I'll keep playing around today.
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Windows 2003 Server
A little more information about the worm, from a technical point of view. Now, from what I understand from Sam is that there is built in protection from these types of attacks. Anyone running SQL Server (unpatched) out there on Windows 2003 Server that can tell me the results? I'd give it a whirl myself, but our firewall "unfortunately" prevents me from infecting anything here.
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Honker Union of China
Missed this article in eWeek about the source of the SQL Slammer worm. Some experts are saying the code signatures point towards it being at least based on code from the Honker Union of China. They point out their anti-American standings and then go on to talk about how it did the most damage in Asia. Interesting that most of the unpatched servers where Asian though, I wonder if the wide spread piracy had anything to do with it. I'm willing to bet there are H0nk3rs all over the place there running copies of SQL Server unpatched because they got it for $5 bucks of the street.
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A flute without holes, is not a flute. A donut without a hole, is a danish.
I'm setting up my SQL Server 2000 course for this week. 12 machines, twelve copies of SP3 that need to be installed. I'm sure this could be done in some sort of automated fashion, but I've never learned all those methods because AutoIt has been so good to me. Just throw SP3 on a network share, and run the script from all the machines. Pretty painless.
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I'm picking out a Motherboard for you! Not an ordinary Motherboard for you!
Argh, I'm putting together a new PC for playing around at home. I've been using my Gateway laptop for the past year, and it has worked fine. I just need more power (laptop is a PIII 1.2GHz) for VMWaring, VS.Net and the ever important Sim City 4. So I dig around and decided to go with a motherboard built on the NVIDIA nForce2 chipset. It's getting some good reviews and also shows some excellent performance, along with the added bonus that it has on board LAN, Video and Sound. I specifically went with the Leadtek WinFast K7NCR18G due to its dual CRT feature built in. A risky motherboard manufacture, I know.