archive: 2005

2005

Web 2.0?

What the fuck is up with the use of Web 2.0 to describe emerging trends on the internet?  Sure there are bunch of newer things out there like blogging, AJAX/ATLAS, tagging, podcasting, etc. but h

Yosemite Sam

After writing up the post about Chicken Little Syndrome, I had flash backs to an earlier time when I worked with this bloke Yosemite Sam who had a bad case of Rebootitis.  The first thing you hav

Driving Tunes

Don’t remember where I found this, but damn are these tunes good.  Thanks to Mercedes-Benz for putting it out on the web for free. www.mixed-tape.com

Java Kills

This is great.  ”The software product may contain support for programs written in Java. Java technology is not fault tolerant and is not designed, manufactured, or intended for use or resale as o

Chicken Little Syndrome

I’ve been unfortunate enough to work with all kinds of people.  Life would be so much easier if everyone were trying to be all they could be.  But nooooo….people are far to sati

IT Related Articles

I was somehow led to Philip Chu’s site technicat.comthis morning and I found it to have a great selection of essays thatcover software development process issues, company management issuesand some tha

Christmas Cheer

So no post from me about spreading the Christmas cheer.  Instead I’ll regale you with tales of my Christmas trip. I get to my parents place at about 7pm on the 24th after driving forover 6 hours.

Northern Bureaucracy

Seems like the big fella in the red suit can’t help but be bureaucratic.  The least he could do is have this online and create a good mashup with an online mapping site. I’m the Igloo

Festivities

I was out last night doing the festive thing with some friends who were visiting from out of town.  We started the night at La Tapa on 99th Ave between 105th and 106th Streets.  As advertise

Visual 2005 Add-Ins

I was poking around that little place they call the internet and somewhere I found a link to the C# Shiznit.  The last two posts include a Project MRU (Most Recently Used) Cleaner AddIn and the P

I love winter

Call me sick.  Call me twisted.  Call me a Canadian. I love winter.  I love the way it muffles the tire sound on streets.  I love the way it turns a grimey fall into a pristine whi

More on Software Installations

Recently I posted this on my experiences with multiple installations for multiple environments.  I got a response from David Lockwood that suggested I look into using MSI Transforms.  After

SQL Server CTP Removal

Okay, so my uninstall of the Visual Studio and SQL Server Betas didn’t go as well as I’d thought.  No problems on the VS side of things, but I’ll be damned if I could get SQL Ex

NUnit and your project

I was out with Slim the other day and we discussed how our current project is using NUnit and what difficulties we were running into with it.  This certainly wasn’t a discussion about how w

Software Installations

Recently I’ve started doing the installations, into a number ofenvironments, of our software at work.  One of therequirements that we had to meet for our software deliverable was thatthe ins

Attensa RSS Aggregator

Recently I made the change away from SharpReader as my aggregating software.  I was tired of having SharpReader’s tendency to error when reading feeds.  At first my thought w

VS 2005 RTM

So I finally got my lazy ass into gear and un-installed VS 2005 Beta 2 and installed VS 2005 RTM.  No real big issues here.  I manually un-installed all the pieces of SQL Server Beta 2 and t

The Big Ad

Trust a beer company to come up with this. It’s funny to see the same song (O Fortuna) being used for a beer ad in Australia and Canada (Rickard’s Red…couldn’t find a link to the ad

A view on the economics of software development

Certainly thisisn’t the full encapsulation of the economics of software development,but it certainly is the portion that we developers are most likely tosee clearly.  I know that I was in the “bu

Design Patterns

K. Scott Allen’s design pattern explaination for bar rooms.

Edmonton VS 2005, SQL 2005 and BT 2006 Launch

Today I spent the day at the Edmonton Launch event.  The sessionswere fairly interesting, the swag was great and the check-in anddeparture processes were horrific.  Pictures courtesy of Sash

Today's the day of the teddy bear picnic

It’s picnic time in the forest folks and all the little ants are goingto be showing up to take a piece of it away.  Last night I was outat the MS/.Net User Group VIP event (I felt so VIPish).&nbs

Damn shoelaces

Don’t you just hate it when you go to tie your shoes and you’re greetedwith a pleasant snap followed by a lessening of resistance in one arm(two if it is going to be an excessively crappy day)? 

The silence has been deafening

For the last few weeks I’ve been busier than all get out at work andthus haven’t been posting much.  We’ve been working to push thefirst release of our software to the client’s productionenvironm

I'm all geeked up

Yep. I did it. I relived the pressures of my Math 8 final. I’m pretty sure I perspired a bit more at the real final though. I don’t know who this mm53bar guy is, but damn he’s starting to freak me o

MSMQ Triggers and COM Components

The other day I found that any emails you were sending me weren’tgetting through.  One of the emails sitting purgatory was arequest for more info on how to make MSMQ triggers call a COMcomponent.

Programmer Characteristics

I'm sure you've all seen or made jokes about the things that make us programmers such a unique bunch.  Things like socially inept, introverted, and fashionably challenged.  Sure, you

Damn Email

I hadn’t noticed that the email for this darn place wasn’tworking.  You could contact me, but your email would end up inpurgatory.  I also noticed that comments had been disabled. I thi

Coding Responsibilities

Today I saw this article focusing on a statement made, at Secure London 2005, by Howard Schmidt.  The statements included:     _“In software development, we need to have personal q

The End of an Era

Friday was the end of an era.  Buddy moved from our team to becomea burden on someone else’s.  He sprinkled a few gems over the lastfew weeks that had me shaking my head in confusion and awe

VS & SQL 2005

For the last month I’ve been working on a little side project usingVisual Studio and SQL Server 2005.  So far I’ve been quite pleasedand for Beta software it is amazingly stable.  One of the

The complexity of simplicity

As you may have read, I’ve been working on some MSMQ configuration andcoding for the last little while.  In the past I had always heard“Asynchronous System” and hid under my desk where the left o

On Again, Off Again Relationship

Yes folks, my normally stable life has had one rather shorton-again-off-again relationship with MSMQ.  A while back I postedthat I was starting to do some work with MSMQ,but it ran into one rathe

The fork and the spoon

Sounds like a quaint little bistro or pub a small town doesn’tit?  No?  Perhaps it sounds like two things you’d do withthat special someone (although I’m not exactly sure what a forkis)?&nbs

Society

Ok.  I don’t usually make political statement.  My societalstatement are usually limited to rants about life in IT.  TodayI’m going to veer from the norm (like any of you think I’m norm

Happy belated B-day Alberta (and Saskatchewan)

    The first was the centennial b-day for the two landlocked provinces in the confederation.  Thursday saw a big partythroughout the province including concerts and fireworks.&nbs

Peace is shattered in Middle Earth

Friday saw the peace, which had endured for three weeks in MiddleEarth, shattered by the return of Grima.  The rumble of the comingdoom could be felt the day before (it’s the only reason I can th

C# and Visual Basic

Unlike the many million posts, comments and mindless shouting matchespreceeding this date, I will not delve into a discussion that one isbetter than the other.  Instead I’d like to talk about a s

Queuing up to locate the Queue

Yesterday I attended a meeting that was to determine where in thecorporate environment we were going to locate our MSMQ.  This wasthe first time that I’d been involved in this type of conversatio

MSMQ Trigger Invocation Parameters

Today I figured out why I was successful at failing yesterday. Actually, all I figured out was why I was failing.  Why I wassucceeding at it still eludes me.  The configuration that I w

Names

I got to hear a great statement from a co-worker a few days back. He was telling a story about a friend, named Bob, who had changed hisname.  The reason?  “Every Tom, Dick and Harry is

Successfully Failed

Today I was back at building the structure and logic code for the MSMQmessage sending, COM component that the MSMQ Trigger fires and the webservice that the COM component calls.  It was pretty ea

One order of MSMQ, a glass of .NET and a side of COM

I haven’t been posting much about the technical aspects of the workthat I’ve been doing.  The primary reason is that all I’ve beenworking on is data modelling and writing the data layer for theap

Grima

I really haven’t posted all that much recently.  Mostly its due tothe fact that I’ve been stressed at work and probably wouldn’t haveposted anything constructive. The short of the past weeks is t

The grocery store

Today I had a nice long wait in the grocery store to buy my 7items.  While waiting for hte 10 people in front of me (expresslane my ass) I began to wonder what I could figure out about the people

Home sweet home

Welcome to the new block of ice.  As you can see, the style of thesite doesn’t really speak to an igloo, but rather the home of RonaldMcDonald.  Over the next little while I’m going to get t

My Window

So I’m sitting here at work this morning dreading the fact I will beworking on the Physical Model to bind them all.  It’s a stunningday outside and with the long weekend on us (one of only three

Time Management

Today I heard a good one.  It’s right near the end of the day and one of my coworkers (I thinkwe’ll call him TheUdderFeller) comes over to Slim and says somethingalong the lines of “I’ve found a

Igloo wear

After seeing what Rory did, and having a number of ideas for a number of years, I created a line of Igloo wear.

Data modeling requires a BA with an English major

Have you ever had one of those days where an event sucks the will tolive out of you? The type where if you got sucked into a toilet you’dflip the world the bird and leave with a smile? Well, today wa

Anorexic Rollerblading Pirates

I was out and about the other night after work.  Well, out andabout in my own special way.  Fine!  I was walking home afterbuying groceries and yes, that is out and about. Anyways, back

Remote Programming

I’ve worked in some environments that have tried to use a decentralizeddevelopment team.  Perhaps it was the way that they wereimplemented, but none of them ever were successful. Every Monday, We

Patterns & Practices

So I’ve slowly decided that when people speak of patterns I’m not going to whip out my trusty Butterick Summer Dress cutouts. Instead I’ll actually start to move towards these. Sigh…..I never got to

MS is whoring

Yes, it’s shocking, but MS is giving it away like a prom queen at her last dance. SQL Server 2005Visual Studio 2005ASP.NET Sigh….if only I could find a girl this morally corruptable. Well, one that d

But it's not natural

I’m certainly a proponent of having the team work in a more “intimate” environment, but some days it’s just makes it hard to hide and laugh. Yesterday Buddy and Slim had a very animated discussion ab

web.config? Why not use an XML file?

This is the second post in what I’m sure will become an ongoing seriousabout Buddy the developer.  Yesterday it was source control beingunnecessary.  Today Buddy argued that using the web.co

Source Control? What a hassle...

Yesterday I heard on of the funniest things ever. I have a feeling thatthis will become a regular thing. It’s just the way the guy is. Hecan’t help it. He’s funny when being serious.So Buddy decides t

Thank you to the less technically aware

I just wanted to send out thanks to those people who don’t knowbetter.  I’m not supposed to be online in my new apartment untilTuesday afternoon (the phone jacks are just holes in the wall rightn

Happy Canada Day!

I hope you all are having a great Canada Day today!  For youYanks, Canada is the big party that we throw on the 1st of July (wejust had to be drunk before you lot) where we barby and drink real b

Network Connection Disconnected

Well folks, I’m going offline for a while. I’m moving into a new place and my phone and internet won’t be set up for a number of days. I love the precision that Telus gives. “We have an opening bet

Finally

Well folks, I’ve finally started to be a profit center for the company. Actually, let me rephrase that. I’ve finally started to be a revenue center for the company. I have 2 full months of nothingn

A geek you say?

Let me tell you how surprised I was to hit the CBC website this morning and see that a Canadian had won the Miss Universe competition. I’ll also say that I just about collapsed when I saw that she wa

In the beginning.....

Back in the day (1999), this was the hardware setup used to run all of Google. The scary thing for me is that this is what the server setup at one of my former employers’ looked like. And that was s

Friday Night Excitement

This certainly proves that I am not the only one that has had the occasion to bask in the glory of geekdom. I do wonder what the hardware that is running Excel is though?

The Code Room

Normally I’m despise reality TV. If you want to put 10 people to the test on a deserted island, dump them from a boat 1 km. off shore, make them swim to shore and then don’t provide them with any sup

Googlepoint?

Have you ever wondered why Google’s main page is so simplistic and bland? Do you get excited when the Google logo changes for a special event (even if you don’t know what the event is)? Well folks,

Marketing

I have never been the type of person that chooses interaction with marketing types over a decade long stay in a Turkish prison. I know I’ve only met a small subset of these people, but they have been

VS Tips and Tricks

Well, I’m still sitting on the bench here at work and it looks like it will last a couple more weeks. My many journeys around the internet have led me here. This is a nice collection of Tips and Tri

Is this foreshadowing for my life?

For those of you that know me in the real world you might find this to be a funny take on where my life could be going. I think I’d start by changing my name to Daisy.

Formatting Code for Your Blog

Found this today. It’s a great little HTML formatter that will convert unformatted code into a piece of HTML that will appear as it would in the VS IDE. Probably the sweetest thing is that you can c

This is every project I think I've worked on....

I think that I was the person in every one of these frames at one time or another. Once you have accomplished that your perspective on the whole software development world does change somewhat.

Am I that scary?

I will admit to the fact that I have been known to try and succeed atintimidating co-workers before, but I’ve moved on from that place in mylife.  With my new job I get to ride the commuter bus f

Ahmerkan Anglish

I just had to do it…..odd for a Canadian to be so southern wouldn’t you say? ### Your Linguistic Profile:55% General American English20% Yankee15% Dixie5% Midwestern5% Upper Midwestern

Put Me In Coach

So, I’ve started my new job at Fujitsu and things are going well. The people are exceptionally nice and I’m looking forward to working with what seems to be a group of nimble and knowledgable minds.

Security

Primary my job is as a software developer, but in the past I have spent a large number or never-to-be-recovered hours installing and configuring network systems. Even when developing I have built, fr

Unexpected Results

Today at work was told that the IsNumeric Function in VB.NET wasn’t returning the results that the developer expected. When I got home I created a sample program that goes through some permutations an

Sandboxes

Maybe it’s a guy thing, but as a kid I loved my toys. I had a great all metal 6 wheel grader that I used to landscape with. Since I lived on a thirty thousand acre farm, I had all the sandbox any ch

Geek Posters

I can’t remember if it was when the company I worked for got a shipment of SQL Server or MSDN, but we did get a poster that detailed all the SQL Server 2000 System Tables. Since my office mate and I

SQL 2005

Finally I have gotten around to installing the latest CTP of SQL 2005. I’ve had it sitting here for almost a month now and haven’t had the time to get around to it. I installed it into a Windows XP

What I'm Drinking

I saw this idea on a blog which I can no longer find. Instead of the ubiquitous “What I’m Listening To” foot note on posts, this blogger had a foot note on “What I’m Drinking”. Being that I, like him,

Ch-ch-changes...

I can now blog about this. During the past couple weeks I’ve been in the process of pursuing a new programming opportunity. As of April 15th I will be leaving my current position and joining the Fujit

Alex Papadimoulis' Paste As Add-In

I downloaded this addin from Alex’s blog today and was instantly impressed with its features. I regularly am doing copy and paste stuff and always have to format the pasted value by hand. Many thank

VB .NET code documentation

I found this article that outlines how to provide code documentation features, that exist in C#, to the VB.Net IDE. The ability to provide an XML file, containing comments, directly from the source c

Wizards

I’ve built enough applications to know that the UI acceptable to the developer is completely non-functional for the end user. In my VB6 life I built a number of wizard based work flows for applicatio

And we wait

It appears MS has decided to<ahref=”http://news.com.com/Microsoft+delays+tool%2C+database+updates/2100-1007_3-5628166.html?tag=cd.top"&gt;delay the releases</a> of VS 2005 and SQL 20

The ***

Found this on <ahref=”http://www.thespoke.net/MyBlog/Bernard/MyBlog.aspx">AnotherDay in the Antz Farm</a>.  Thanks to Bernard You keep asking us who called the cook a bastard; wh

VB.NET Coding Guidelines

<a href=”http://addressof.com/blog/">Cory Smith</a> haspublished a <ahref=”http://addressof.com/blog/articles/CodingGuidelines.aspx">manifesto</a&gt;for coding guide

Emotional Software

I watched part of Mr. Holland’s Opus tonight (Movie Night in Canada –please bring back hockey!) and one of the things that I startedthinking about was how communication is so much more effective whend

Sherlock Holmes

If anyone is Edmonton and your feeling parched, a stop at the <ahref=”http://www.thesherlockholmes.com/">Sherlock Holmes</a>downtown is a must.  I visited this Thursday past and

Computing in 2004

I saw this <ahref=”http://www.bearcanyon.com/etc/HomeComputerEvolution.jpg">posted</a&gt;on <a href=”http://pluralsight.com/blogs/mike/">Mike Woodring’sblog</a>.&nbs

Why I like VB

When I was working in Australia, I was asked by non-technial types whatdevelopment tools we had used to create our software.  I casuallyreponded with VB, SQL and Crystal.  The blankly looked

Crystal Reports vs Active Reports

This blog post is from 2005 and has not been updated for newer versions of these products. Update One of the things I’ve since found, while using Active Reports, is a very poor implementation of expor

Assimilation

I have become what I fear.  Today while creating a data structure,I created a foreign key field that allowed NULL values.  I knowwhat you are saying to yourself as you read this, so see this

VS .Net 2003 IDE wackiness

For the past couple of days, we’ve run into this problem at work wherethe VS IDE was acting really weird.  If you edited something inthe design window, and went back to the code window, none of t

Is your code running in development mode?

I’ve had to determine the answer to this question in a number ofdifferent applications that I’ve worked on.  Most recently it wasVisual Studio .Net 2003. What I ended up doing was creating a simp

ComponentOne FlexGrid .Net

I was working in depth with this product today for the first time andfound some interesting anomolies.  There is a Selection Modesetting for the control that is called ListBox.  The documnta

Sports Team Names

This is a great follow up article illustrating the wide variety of unorthodox names pinned to teams around the world. <a href=”http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/02/18/1108709429228.html">

SQL Tools

Since this is supposed to be tech blog, I should start including alittle more tech and a little less crap.  Here are a couple oflinks for some software that will script database differences. <

Valentines

A very Happy Valentine to all you out there.  If you’re in thesame boat as me (paddling with one oar), drop by your favourite spiritshop and get yourself a little self-love present.  Perhaps

Patience

In the past I worked in an environment that had a very fast developmentpace which created high stress and, ultimately, some developerturnover.  My current job is not like that at all and this is

Women

<span style=”;font-family:Arial;font-size:100%;”  ><spanstyle=”;font-family:Arial;” >It has now been proven in practice, aswell as theory, that no matter where I work, women will goss

Architecture

Today interesting quip was spewed forth during a security systemarchitecture meeting. Don’t get me wrong here. I’m all for security insoftware, and I’ve written a couple of security modules for financ

Against 3rd Party

Today I was “schooled” on the problems with using 3rd party controls ina software project.  The arguments were valid, if you hadn’t evergone through the process of using a 3rd party control. 

The Big Day

Yesterday was my transition for two-nine to three-oh.  It wasn’tall that exciting.  I did have a good bottle of wine last night. I’m starting to think that I should start another blog that i

To Print or Not To Print?

Today the (backup) copies of the DVDs were completed with the scanningand printing of their respective covers. Of course all on the company’stime and colour printer.

The Four Horsemen are coming

I continue to see signs of the apocalypse when I’m a work. Today it wasthe implementation of a “dirty” flag (indicates when a form has beenedited and should trigger a save). Most people would create a

Why?

Why do 3rd party software developers continue to insult us with theirease of use statements?   Have they not used their owncreations?  Have they no idea that there usually is competitio

Training Day

There’s nothing like the joy of sitting in on training.  The ceaseless fight to suppress yawns and avoiding the temptation of nodding off.  I suppose I will be tired right out by the end of

Payday Scandle

Will there be another payday scandle?  Will the accountantactually figure out direct deposit to my bank?  Stay tuned formore exciting accounting news………

The BIG time crunch

So I’ve started this new job and even during the interview, I was toldthat the application being built was slated for a Fall 05 release.Based on what I knew that the program was required to do, I figu

Prosecuted by another CASE

In my prior job I was know for my willingness to create very advancedTSQL queries.  I have written queries exceeding 10,000 charactersin length without any WHERE clause.  I know this because

Fight like the little guy

Shannon Noll Aussie Idol runner-up in 200(3?). I was down there when hesang this on the show and saw it on TV. It’s not too often that modernartists send a tingle down my spine, but this did it. <A

Punctuality

I got to work five minutes early yesterday morning and found that I wasthe first person there. This would normally be no problem except thatI’m leery of disarming the alarm system since my instruction

Accountants and Guano. Is there a difference?

Last Friday was my first pay day.   On the first day of myjob I spent some time with the company accountant to ensure that thedirect deposit of my pay would work without a hitch.  Hell

Installations Crashing the 3rd Party

Once again I’m going to indulge in the systematic and destructive analysis of my new workplace and coworkers. The 3rd Party……I remember when this was an event that startedshortly after the bars closed

Relationship Hell

I’ve been working with the software and the data structure at my newjob for a week now and, although some things about the job are nice,today placed me right in the middle of a relationship quagmire.

Week 1 complete

I have successfully completed week one of my new job. The people at thecompany are very nice, leaving a welcome card and sweets on my desk thefirst morning and buying me lunch that same day. I’ve been

Work looms large

After five glorious months of reduced stress (and reduced pay cheques)I am officially back in the work force tomorrow.  I’m not overlyexcited about the company, or the work itself, but perhaps I’