 Friday, August 05, 2005
Time for everyone to update your RSS readers. The Atlanta .NET Regular Guys will not be posting to www.devcow.com/weblogs anymore. We've moved to www.devcow.com/blogs.
Why?
Because the new blogging engine we're using will allow us to host other people's blogs. We have recruited a few select individuals to blog with us:
- Todd Fine - RDA consultant/Microsoft Regional Director
- Mark Dunn - .Net Rocks co-founder/VB.Net MVP/Training guru
- Eric Thompson - all around bright guy who got in b/c he and Brendon are good friends (I suppose now I'll have to be his friend too)
- Dan Attis - co-leader of the Atlanta Microsoft Professionals User Group and part of the team designing the content for the SharePoint 1, 2, 3! event
Of course, you can continue to expect the same quality content from Brendon and myself, posting together as the Atlanta .Net Regular Guys. Feel free to read the blog's aggregate post or jump directly to the ADNRG blog.
-- Matt Ranlett
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Are you a geek? Let me assure you, if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably a geek. If you’re a geek of the male variety (the most common variety) you might enjoy geeky things AND scantily clad attractive women. If so, check out http://geekfantasies.com. Be warned – this is designed to insult you and is therefore worth looking at.
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
The installation of the latest service packs for Windows XP includes something for Internet Explorer called the Information Bar. This is a new feature that provides the user a banner message that tells the user when web content has been blocked based on the settings in Internet Explorer Options. By default, this info bar is turned on, and can cause issues when you attempt to launch certain ActiveX applications. The information bar can be turned off by changing the following setting:
Launch Internet Explorer
Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced Tab
In the options under the Security heading, click the check box next to "Allow active content to run in files on My Computer". Click OK to save the setting and then re-launch Internet Explorer. The info bar message should no longer appear.
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
Monday, July 25, 2005
I guess I'm not any more famous today than I was the Friday before. Still - Scoble did link to me - twice!
-- Matt Ranlett
This is starting to happen with increasing regularity. I'm using the phone (a Nokia 3650) with the hands-free headset (the wired kind, not a Bluetooth thingy) and I finish my call. I disconnect the headset but the phone doesn't realize it. I still have the little headphones icon on the screen and the speakers and microphone don't work. Effectively, my phone is useless. The thing still works if I put the headset back in, but I don't always have my headset with me. Even more annoying, occasionally the phone switches to headset mode when I'm not using the headset - in the middle of the call. Suddenly I can't hear or say anything! Occasionally the phone will realize that the headset is gone if I plug and unplug the headset several times. This morning it didn't work and I since I left the headset at home, I had to run out at lunch to get a new one. $20 for a new headset. I must have plugged the headset in and out 50 times before I was forced to buy it. I get in the car and try 5 more times and the damn phone turns off the headset!
Anyway - if this keeps up I'll eventually be getting a new phone. Of course, I want a cool phone, but I'm fighting the forces of brokeness - so I probably won't get what I want. Damn technology! Why does it have to be so expensive and yet so cool and desirable? It's like socially acceptable (albiet geeky) form of crack! While I was at the TMobile store I asked about fixing the phone. $70 and they mail me a replacement phone for the one I have. But $70!?! That's like half (or 1/5th) of the cost of the phones I want!
-- Matt Ranlett
Saturday, July 23, 2005
I spent a good portion of today and I'll be spending more time tomorrow painting the interior of my house. I'm getting ready to sell it and officially move in with Kim. The problem is that painting sucks. Does anyone want to buy a partially painted house inside the Perimeter for about $180K? I'll cut you a deal if you don't make me paint or clean anymore.
-- Matt Ranlett
I had a great time at the geek dinner. I started the evening off with great conversations with Glen Gordon, Jim Wooley, Chris Wallace, and Brendon. Glen was telling me that at MGB they just were going over the sales analogy for the year - winning a race, all teams working together like all the cylinders and pistons working together, the race car and the pit crew, blah blah blah. Then Mario Andretti came out on stage. Yup - THE Mario Andretti. Awesome!
After a while, I wandered off to chat with almost the entire INETA board, who showed up from the MGB conference happening downtown. I had a great chat with them and ended up pitching them an idea Glen mentioned. They loved it, Glen loved it, and it looks like we're going to do it. I'll post more on THE IDEA when we do a bit more planning and it looks like a reality.
I chatted with Shawn and Michael about independent consulting. Shawn's doing well and Michael is excited about the future. I'm sure they're both going to do well - they're among the brightest people I know.
I wandered back over to the INETA people and Brendon and I sat there for a while bragging to them about the dynamic and highly active Atlanta user group community. They loved some of the ideas we talked about with them and they were highly impressed at how much stuff actually goes on here in Atlanta. I think Brendon and I might have come across as a bit more super than we actually are (they called us Super UG Leaders) but they were impressed by the cohesion of the entire UG leadership team and the dedication of the UG members. I think that right now INETA is struggling to find it's value for the average UG member, and the board is interviewing the community to find out what we need.
It was also good to talk to Paul for a while. I've not seen him for a bit as he's been working hard on stuff that actually helps him pay his mortgage. Paul's a great guy and I hope he manages to work user groups back into his schedule on occasion. Even if he doesn't, I'll make sure I don't lose touch with him.
Over all, I had a great time at the meeting, even though I never got a chance to talk to Robert Scoble. Oh well. I'm sure he's a great guy, he just kept happening to be on the opposite side of the room I was on all night until he left and skipped out on his tab 
-- Matt Ranlett
Shawn Wildermuth organized a great Geek Dinner, co-hosted by Robert Scoble. Everyone shows up and orders overpriced specialty beers and food at 5 Seasons - our favorite Geek Dinner spot. To keep everyone's order straight with their bills, the waitress takes everyone's card and runs it through to open a tab for each individual order. At the end of the meal, the cost is charged to the card now on file and everyone just has to sign a receipt. Every but Scoble, that is! He managed to leave without signing his slip and b/c his card didn't run through correctly (unnoticed by the waitress at the time) she doesn't even have a card number for him.
So now Robert owes Paul Lockwood $45
-- Matt Ranlett
Thursday, July 21, 2005 Wednesday, July 20, 2005
In honor of the historic landing on the moon, the folks at Google have combined high resolution maps of the moon with their Google Maps technology to give you an incredible interactive view of the lunar surface. Zoom all the way in to see the footsteps! Check it out at http://moon.google.com.
-- Matt Ranlett
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Author(s): Ingo Rammer and Mario Szpuszta
Publisher: APress
Publisher Link: www.apress.com
Published: February 2005
Categories: .NET, Remoting, Distributed computing, C#
ISBN: 1-59059-417-7
Online Order Links: Amazon.com, BN.com, …
Review Date: June 2005
Reviewers Name: Trent Whiteley
Summary:Although the title of this book, Advanced .NET Remoting, obviously indicates that the designated audience for this book is the “advanced” programmer, the initial three chapters deal with the basics of remoting. Those already familiar with remoting will, more than likely, be bored with this introduction and will be better off starting off in chapters 4 and following. The authors present the latest distributed application development technologies available as well as weakness in each technology leading up to the presentation of .NET remoting and justifying its existence. While not presenting .NET remoting as the Holy Grail of distributed computing, they do provide grounds for using it in most situations over the current distributed technologies. By chapter three the reader has already learned how to write a basic remoting application and is presented with the basic concepts of .NET remoting. These concepts are clearly explained with great supporting examples.
After the introductory chapters, the authors delve into a number of disjoint topics covering chapters four through ten. Some of these topics include security, configuration and deployment, object lifetimes, versioning, best practices, and debugging/troubleshooting. By isolating these topics in their own chapters, the reader can treat this book as a quick reference when questions arise in dealing with one of these areas. Again the authors provide excellent examples to support their topics, thus aiding in grasping some of the more difficult aspects of remoting. The authors also present, from their vast experience, a number of different ways of achieving the same results, after which they reveal the advantages of one method over the others or motivations and scenarios where each method can be used to better advantage. At times, while reading, it appears that there is no one sure way to write remoting apps properly. This is exactly what the authors are trying to impart. There are numerous ways to use remoting, but each one has drawbacks or weaknesses and the authors try to give you a broad range of knowledge to deal with them. There is no silver bullet to writing remoting apps and this sometimes leads to information overload while reading this book. The reader will likely find himself returning to this book to gain clarity in resolving design issues.
Finally, in the remaining five chapters, the authors get into the nitty gritty of .NET remoting. Beginning with the underlying structure of remoting, the authors give the reader a baptism by fire in proxies, dispatchers, sinks, channels and messages. If none of the previous terms are familiar to you, then you may find this chapter a bit of a challenge. However, it is an extremely well-written section on exactly how remoting works and reading it is time well invested. Mastering this chapter provides the basis for proceeding through the remainder of the book with your sanity intact as the proceeding chapters deal primarily with extending and customizing .NET remoting. The chapters on sinks and developing custom sinks provide the reader with some of the best knowledge for creating custom remoting apps as they are the conduits through which all communication passes between client and server. Understanding channels allows the reader to customize the transport mechanism through which all communication passes. After successfully navigating through this book, the reader should be well-equipped to handle a vast array of remoting projects. This book is in no way for the timid and is a challenging read for all but experienced remoting programmers. Having persevered through its reading, though, the reader will not regret the time invested and the knowledge gained.
This book is most useful to:This book will be most useful to those developing multi-tier, distributed applications, webservice developers and C# developers in general.
Recommendation:Reviewer's Overall Cow Rating: 5 out of 5 Cows
I would highly recommend this book to anyone of moderate to advanced experience in .NET and C# with any degree of distributed application development experience. While the authors present the foundation of remoting early on to provide a basis for understanding to those new to remoting, the remaining sections of the book deal with far more advanced topics (even dealing with the underlying structure of remoting) which will appeal to the more advanced developers.
Friday, July 15, 2005
I work in a place where we have lots of clients with lots of servers and hundreds of remote terminals. If you ever have a problem on a terminal while it's in use, it's inconvenient to the users to tell them that you need to take over their teminal for a while just so you can look at the event log. So you use remote tools to read the eventlogs. I do this quite frequently, but I thought it might be worth sharing this article someone sent me.
***********************BEGIN ARTICLE************************
Viewing remote Event Logs
By Adrian Grigorof, B.Sc., MCSE
The description of events is not stored in the Event Logs but in Message Files specific to each application. The Event Viewer is able to open remote event log files (binary files with the EVT extension) but not the Message Files. The Message Files (actually DLL or EXE files) are required in order to properly display the description of the event.
For example, assume that computer APPSERVER is running an application called "Smart Application", a service called "smartapp". When the service is started, smartapp generates an application event log entry. Running Event Viewer on APPSERVER on can see the event description as follows:
"The Smart Application service has started successfully."
Running the Event Viewer from the administrators workstation (ADMINWKS) and connecting to the remote registry of APPSERVER, one can see the event description quite differently:
"The description for Event ID (100) in Source (smartapp) could not be found. It contains the following insertion string(s): The Smart Application service has started successfully."
All this means that the Message File specific to Smart Application events is not installed on ADMINWKS or there is no message file defined for that application. In case that there is a message file and if it is desired to display the event properly on the administrator's computer (or on any computer) the Message File dll has to be installed.
Here is the procedure:
1. Locate the dll
All the application event logs messages DLLs are defined under the following registry keys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\EventLog\Application
All the system event logs messages DLLs are defined under the following registry keys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\EventLog\System
So, for example, Smart Application would probably have an entry for its Application-type events like the one below:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\EventLog\Application\SmartApp
EventMessageFile (of REG_EXPAND_SZ type): C:\Program Files\SmartApplication\smartapp.dll
All the application event log messages are defined in the smartapp.dll
2. Export the registry keys
Using REGEDIT select the applicable registry keys. In this example:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\EventLog\Application\SmartApp
On the Registry menu, click Export Registry File and select a file name (for example,SmartApp.reg).
3. Import the registry keys into ADMINWKS
Copy the SmartApp.reg to ADMINWKS and using REGEDIT import the keys in the local registry.
4. Copy the message file on ADMINWKS
From APPSERVER C:\Program Files\SmartApplication copy smartapp.dll to the ADMINWKS C:\Program Files\SmartApplication
5. The events should display the description properly when viewed from ADMINWKS
In some cases, there is no Message File so the description is not displayed properly not even on the computer running the application. This usually indicates a poorly written application (that is the application is creating event log entries but the programmers didn't bother creating Message Files) or the installation of the application was incomplete or corrupted.
In many cases, one can deduct the actual description by reading just the last part of the message. So for example, from "The description for Event ID (100) in Source (smartapp) could not be found. It contains the following insertion string(s): The Smart Application service has started successfully." one can discard everything but "The Smart Application service has started successfully.". This would work for events that do not contain parameters and sometimes may offer clues even for those that do use parameters.
***********************END ARTICLE***************************
-- Matt Ranlett
Thursday, July 14, 2005 Wednesday, July 13, 2005
I’m really excited to share this – I’ve been keeping it semi-secret ever since I found out about it. While I was at Tech Ed, I won a contest sponsored by Microsoft and the Excell Data Corporation. The grand prize was a portable media center from Creative! The same model Michael has. It finally came in the mail last Friday and I’ve been playing with it ever since.
It’s really a cool device, about a third larger than my cellphone (although it does have a protective case that makes it seem much larger than it really is). The thing (and case) actually does fit in my pocket, but not entirely comfortably. Anyway – about the device itself: think of it as an iPod capable of displaying movies! It is way more than that, but that seems to get the message across the best. It runs Microsoft’s Portable Media Center shell on top of Windows CE – which means it turns on and off instantly. It plays music – both WMA and MP3 (WMA results in a slightly smaller file). It shows photos (JPG is the only format I’ve tested). It plays videos (WMV videos, but the process of putting AVI and MPG videos onto the machine encodes them into usable WMV format). It even allows you to play music while watching a slideshow of your favorite photos! The 20 Gb drive holds so much stuff that with 465 songs, 173 pictures, and 66 videos (including a full length movie) I’ve only used up 3 Gb. I took a 2 hour movie (The Missing with Tommy Lee Jones) off a DVD and encoded it down to 318 Mb and put it on the thing.
Check out this great review from a Media Center MVP
I don’t know if I’ll attempt developing for the device, I’ve got lots of stuff on my plate at the moment and I never have free time. I’m sure I’ll be randomly posting about what I do with my PMC (like, if I ever write a useful program for it).
-- Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
At least she is when it comes to famous people on TV. It has happened twice now – once with that movie Be Cool with John Travolta. In one of the early scenes there is this guy off in the distance and she sees his face for .02 seconds and says that he’s the Rock. It looks nothing like the Rock, so me and the two other people I’m watching the movie with all bet her money that it isn’t. We were all wrong and she should have made $15 if we’d paid her. The second time was while watching the Family Guy. There was an episode where Death comes to Peter on a golf course. I swore the voice was Norm MacDonald and she swore it wasn’t. Turns out that Norm MacDonald did play the character of Death on the Family Guy once, but not in this episode! It was Adam Carolla. Can I help it if these two guys sound the same to me? Anyway, instead of paying money, I now have paid in 2 hours of massage! My hands are getting tired!
— Matt Ranlett
Thursday, July 07, 2005
I took one of those disposable cameras with me to Hong Kong so I wouldn’t risk losing something valuable. Here are some of the photos I took while in the Far East. Let me just say in advance that I’m slightly disappointed with the quality of the photos. Oh well.
The view from my hotel room:
 Nice pool. Never went in it.
 The sky is indicative of the weather every day I was there – overcast and rainy.
Random shots of populated areas:
 I know, it’s blurry. This is a photo of the “Ladies Market”, an open air market named after the ladies who shopped here when it used to sell clothing. Now it’s a free-for-all of thousands of different kinds of products, notably copy watches and handbags. You can get some good deals here!
 This is Stanley – an area of Hong Kong Island famous for an open air market and the Murray House (the two story building in the center-left). The Murray House was built by the British in the early 1900s and later moved block by block to this area of Stanley so it’s original location could be used for a gigantic skyscraper Bank of China building. Now the Murray House is full of restaurants
 Central Hong Kong. What you can barely see is that between the tall buildings, in the middle of the photo, is a mountain wreathed in fog. The entire city is built into and on mountains! Lots of steep hills here. I’m taking this photo from the dock where the Star Ferry arrives on Hong Kong Island.
 This shot is really grainy, not sure why. Anyway, the glittering glass tower on the right is the Bank of China building (I think) – the original site of the Murray House. The city stretches on past what the eye can see.
Lantau Island is home to Hong Kong’s homage to Buddhism – the world’s largest outdoor, seated, bronze Buddha. Apparently every country boasts that is has the worlds largest Buddha of some sort (standing, reclining, stone, bronze, etc). This big guy is about 30 feet tall, on the top of a plateau. To get there you have to climb 261 extremely slippery marble steps. Underneath the Buddha is an educational museum and vegetarian dining hall. The project to build this statue was conceived in the early 1970s and finally completed in 1991.
 Standing on the ground, you can get a real feel for the size of the Buddha. The 261 stairs are directly in front of me. I’m currently standing in some sort of spirit circle.
  In these two shots I’m climbing up to the top of the plateau.
 These bodhisattvas (there are six statues of them at the top of the platform) are shown giving gifts to Buddha.
 Finally the fog cleared for a moment. Long enough for me to take this photo.
 Looking down from the top. On the left you can see the spirit circle I mentioned before. To the right of that is an enormous free standing gateway. To the far right you can see the dormitories and study area of the monastery.
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Kim had a really nice SLR style Kodak digital camera that died a horrible death when it met pavement accidentally (not either of our faults). We’ve been researching new cameras together for a while now, and yesterday before we got home from the lake we stopped into Best Buy to get it. We were spurred into action b/c we forgot to bring a camera to the lake with us to capture the high flying inner tube action (along with Heidi’s dragboat racing skills).
We picked the Canon S2 IS: 
It looks like a great camera with loads of nice features (including a 12x optical zoom) but the reason we bought it is because it passed the moving hand test the best. Kim’s biggest pet peeve with digital cameras (and Brendon’s too, apparently) is that when you look through the view finder or LCD screen and pick what you want to capture, you press the button and some time later an image is captured. The moving hand test demonstrates this. Take your hand and move it in an exaggerated arc slowly from one side to another, in front of your face. Have the person testing the cameras try to capture an image as soon as your hand is in front of your face. Most digital cameras will catch your hand way off to one side, if it’s still in the frame. The ideal camera will catch your hand exactly in front of your face, as it was when you press the button. Of the half dozen cameras we tried – the Canon S2 IS came closest to this ideal image.
I haven’t really played with the camera yet – I was too sore last night with my sunburn to actually do anything other than whimper. I’ll test it out later – maybe a shot of how sun-burned my back is or something… I know everyone wants to see something like that, right?
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
The last three days I was in Hong Kong, I spent wandering around the town shopping, eating, and generally mixing with the population. I noticed a few things I found interesting, so I thought I’d share them:
- Toyota cars rule the road, but I did see plenty of other models, including a Ford! No GM vehicles, but plenty of cars I couldn’t identify. Lots of the familiar manufacturers were selling models I had never seen before. All of the taxis were Toyota Crown Comforts – big and boxy. I didn’t write down the rest, but aside from the ever present Corolla and Camry, some BMW, Lexus and Mercedes cars, there were lots of cars I couldn’t place
- The public transit is so good and so effective, that most of the vehicles on the road were being driven by professional drivers – cabs, buses, and trucks. Lots and lots of trucks. The entire time I was driving around (in a bus) I didn’t see a single accident nor a single person pulled over by the police. Must be nice to not have traffic jams caused by morons and moron rubberneckers!
- If Toyota rules the road, Nokia rules the cellphone market. Three out of every four cellphones are made in Finland! The majority of the rest of the phones are Sony Erickson. I even asked someone about the Nokia phones vs the other phone brands and they told me that no one liked anything else. Nokia was where it was at.
- Everyone has an MP3 player, even people my grandmother’s age! When you spend lots of time waiting on buses and trains, you want something to help you zone out, I guess. The variety is HUGE. I’ve seen every model Best Buy carries and then some. My favorite little ones were tiny little cubes the size of a single die (you know, from a pair of dice). Apple has pretty good penetration here as well, but I think the most popular brand was JVC – they have a cheap little 1Gb player popularly worn with a neck strap.
- It is far more common to tie a strap to your cellphone and hang it around your neck than it is to put it in a belt case. With all the cellphones, MP3 players, random ID cards, and more hanging from around people’s necks, it made me wonder if their clothes didn’t include pockets!
- The people there were super nice. Most of the people speak some English, and if they don’t speak enough English to talk to you they go get the person who does speak English. I only walked into one restaurant where I was immediately given silverware instead of chopsticks b/c I was the Westerner. Everywhere else I was treated like a native (except of course for the people trying to sell me copy watches and suits from the side of the roads.
- I’ve already commented on how the schools in Hong Kong are starting to minimize the importance of English next to Mandarin Chinese due to China’s booming market. On my way home, I was pleased to meet two good ol’ boy college students from Alabama who were spending two years in school in China so they too could work with the booming Chinese market. After ten months in school, immersed in the Chinese language and culture, these two guys were anxious to get home and relax for a bit. We found a Subway in the airport in Korea and all had subs for breakfast – food they’ve not had since December! Taco Bell and Chick Fil A were also high on their TO DO lists. Great guys, we spent time chatting and watching movies during our 5 hour lay-over in Korea. They were bringing home several pirated movies purchased on the streets of China and we managed to find a plasma screen TV and a DVD player not currently being used. Good times in Korea!
Hong Kong was like New York City. You should visit both if you get the chance, but a visit to one of them is a requirement for a fully rounded life.
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
It’s been a quiet couple of days on the blog as I have been trying to get back to a normal sleep pattern after my visit to Hong Kong. I’ve generally been falling asleep as soon as I get home from work, which means I haven’t been able to get anything done after hours. Oh well, the trip was fun and I think I’m back to Eastern Standard Time now.
Yesterday, Brendon and his wife Heidi invited myself and Kim to meet them at their vacation house on the north shore of Lake Lanier. Ok, so it’s really Heidi’s parents house, but even so… We took the pontoon boat out for a few hours, enjoying lunch in a relatively quite cove, plenty of slow drifting and conversation, and some inner tubing. If you’re not familiar with inner tubing, it’s loads of fun. You attach an inner tube to the back of the boat by a long rope and drag it (with someone in it) at 30 miles per hour across the water. The poor schmuck inside (usually me in this case) tries to hang on for dear life while the cruel boat driver (usually Heidi) tries their best to dump you out with whip-like turns and ramming you over the wakes of other boats. I think I rode the inner tube ten times! It’s exhausting, trying to hang on so hard. Actually, getting back on the inner tube once you’ve been dumped off is the most exhausting thing.
The lake was great, and I’m hopeful that Kim and I get invited back, but I’ve learned my lesson. The sun-block I used clearly was not as waterproof as it’s label suggested, and I look like I’ve been boiled! While I was at the lake, everyone was commenting on how red I was, but I didn’t feel bad at all. By the time we got near the house, I was forced to stop at CVS to get some aloe vera gel. Kim and I both got burned, but I’m worse off by far! Maybe it was all the dragging? Kim only volunteered to be dragged once. Anyway, we slathered ourselves with aloe vera and sat around trying not to touch anything for a while before falling asleep from sheer exhaustion.
Good times at the lake. I’m sorry that the other people who were invited couldn’t make it out. We spent hours drifting around talking, and Brendon and I only talked about our computers and the .Net community activities for an hour or so of the time. We did get made fun of by the girls when I opened Brendon’s water bottle for him, but I don’t understand why…? It’s not like we’re a married couple or anything…
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
Friday, June 24, 2005
It is funny how you stumble onto one thing, by looking for something else. I was looking something up on the web for a friend and ran across a blog, guess who it was. It was our old friend Rusty. I don’t know how long he has been blogging here, but check his blog out. http://vitaminzrecords.com/blog/default.aspx. I am glad I found his blog again.
—Brendon Schwartz
Posted with BlogJet
Monday, June 20, 2005
If you are looking for components and want help selecting one, check out this site for How to select guides. This is for .NET applications and the first article is on PDF components. There should be more coming soon.
— Brendon Schwartz
Posted with BlogJet
Saturday, June 18, 2005
The Hong Kong Octopus Card is a wonderful kind of smart card where you can put money on the card (and the money is stored on the card itself, not on some central server) and use it like a debit card. The nice thing about the card it that it works via radio signals or something, similar to the security systems in lots of corporate buildings where you hold a card up to a plate to get through a door. So you don’t even have to take it out of your wallet or purse. This payment system is the de facto method of paying for the subway system here, but tons of merchants accept it too. There are even vending machines that accept it! All I have to do is press my butt up against the vending machine and I get a soda! Pretty darn cool!
I know that this kind of thing exists in other places, but I doubt it is as well integrated into the culture as the Octopus Card is integrated into Hong Kong. The thing is pretty much everywhere, and I love it. I see that in the US some of the movie theaters are starting this up with a MasterCard type of smart card. I’ve seen them at Regal Cinemas. The problem is, in Atlanta, I don’t know where to buy a card and recharge it. However, it is a great way to give money to someone (I’m thinking of children here) and them not being able to use it for anything other than what you intend them to do with it. I’m hopeful that this takes off in the US as it’s really really convenient.
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
Works over for me out here and I’ve got three days of vacation. I spent one of them yesterday wandering around Hong Kong on my own. I’m going to compare my visit to Hong Kong to the time I wandered the streets of New York City.
First of all, Hong Kong is actually made up of two islands and part of mainland China. My hotel and the place I’ve been working are both on the mainland, which they call the New Territories. The hotel is nice, but it’s way out in the suburbs. I took a shuttle from the hotel to the edge of the mainland, a place called Tsim Sau Tsui or TST for people who can’t say Chinese words. Wandering around here was a lot of fun. I’d compare this to the Times Square area of NY. Lots of neon signs pointing your way into electronics shops, lots of music blaring from the various CD and movie shops, and lots of little restaurants. I ate dinner in one of the restaurants here. You know how they say back in the States that if Chinese people are eating in a Chinese restaurant, it must be good? Well, that’s harder to decide in China, but I picked on where the Chinese people were forming a line or a queue (crazy Brits and their crazy words) outside waiting to get in. It was worth it. I’m not sure I can tell you exactly what it was I ate, but there was chicken, beef, and rice. I picked it from a picture. I also got a “special drink” which translated into a kumquat smoothie. Tasty! I think I spend a total of 5 or 6 hours walking around TST looking in the electronics shops and the various curio shops (I wish I thought to bring my pedometer – I’m sure I went 5 miles). I didn’t buy anything, but I did notice that prices vary wildly from shop to shop. I found that I could save nearly $120 US just by looking in each store. Of course, that was on the really fancy new cellphone I lust after but won’t allow myself to buy. Back at TechEd, Glen Gordon showed the i-mate JAM off to me and told me it ran at nearly $650 in the States – I found it for around $520 here. Le sigh.
The other thing I noticed while wandering around TST was that I got hit up by street vendors for nearly everything – especially what they call copy watches and massages. I’ll get into the copy products in a moment, but let’s focus on the massages. There’s a huge cottage industry built up around reflexology and foot massages here. I couldn’t walk a single block without being asked at least twice if I wanted a foot massage. Of course, I also got offers to massage pretty much all the other various bits of my body – including the kind of “massage” where I’d be concerned that I might catch leprosy and have the various “bits” fall off.
The people I call the “copy people” were very intent – they want to sell me a fake Rolex or something really really badly. There’s a guy on the street and he’ll show you his watch and ask if you want one by reciting a litany of watch brand names. I didn’t even recognize all of them. Should I have said I was interested, they would have taken me to show me their wares somewhere. Apparently they have rooms inside the tall buildings somewhere. I didn’t go with anyone to find out.
The only people more intense than both the massage people and the copy people were the tailors. There’s at least one guy pimping for a tailor shop on every major street, and these guys follow you around trying to talk you into buying a custom made suit or something. They’re doggedly persistent and they’ll follow for half a block or more calling me “boss”. Avoiding these guys was half the fun of walking around TST.
I noticed the copy people and the tailors ignored the locals, but the massage people were equal opportunity panderers. Men got way more focus than women and Caucasian men got the most focus of them all.
After getting tired of TST, I jumped on a train which went under the water to Hong Kong Island and dropped me off in a place called Central. This is the heart of downtown Hong Kong and was kind of like being in the really nice area of Manhattan. I wandered into a really large, really nice mall (looking for both A/C and a restroom) and actually got lost on a single floor trying to find the right exit. Way bigger than Lenox mall back in Atlanta, it also had nicer shops. It was kind of like the Forums in Caesar’s Palace back in Las Vegas (which I saw when Kim took me to meet her family in Las Vegas), only larger. There were four floors in this mall, and I only went on one of them.
Central was mostly a high end shopping district and way out of my budget, so I wandered uphill to an area called Soho. Soho in Hong Kong is exactly like Soho in New York – lots of nice little restaurants and bars. They close down some of the streets at night for people to walk around on, and I’m sure this is a happening party district. The problem with Soho in Hong Kong is that it’s built on the side of a mountain. One lap around this place and I was ready to call it quits. Those hills were intense! They actually have built escalators which will take you to the top of Soho so you can wander in a downhill fashion. I didn’t find them until the end, so I was really done. I walked back to the MTR train station and headed back to the hotel where I passed out at 9:30 from sheer exhaustion.
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
Friday, June 17, 2005
How many times do you sit down at your computer and think about patches and security updates on your own PC? Probably not all that often. Well, make today patch and security update day!
- Go to Windows Update and makes sure you have all the latest critical patches installed. If you are running without some publicly available security fixes, you DESERVE to have someone take over your machine via a security flaw
- Update your Anti-Virus. Even if you use an automatic updater, make sure it’s been connecting and getting the latest and greatest stuff. I personally use AVG AntiVirus – the Free Edition. Works great!
- Update your Anti-Spyware program. I personally like Spyware Blaster because it doesn’t run all the time, taking up system resources.
- Download Microsoft’s Baseline Security Analyzer and scan your system. This great little tool will scan Windows 2000, XP, and 2003 machines looking for configuration problems and missing patches in IIS, SQL Server, IE, Office, Windows Media Player, Exchange Server, Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC), MSXML, Microsoft Virtual Machine, Commerce Server, Content Management Server, BizTalk Server, Host Integration Server. Using this I found that I was missing 4 critical Office security updates and that I had too many admin accounts on the box. I had unnecessary services installed and WAY too many file shares open. I hadn’t run IIS Lockdown and my SQL Server 2005 Express product wasn’t configured correctly for security. Lots of holes!
- Check your Windows Security Center to make sure your three critical services are up and running – AutoUpdate, Firewall, and AntiVirus. If these aren’t set to ON, fix it now. If you can’t find your Security Center under Start/Program Files/Accessories/System Tools, install XP SP2 (not sure which 2000 or 2003 patches get you this)
Doing all of these things will help make your computer part of the solution to rampant computer viruses and spam instead of part of the problem. If you administer more than one machine, do these things on EVERY machine you own. Security is your responsibility and affects many people beyond yourself.
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Delta Airlines – “Please be careful when opening overhead bins as the contents may have shifted during flight”
Korean Airlines – “Please be careful opening overhead bins as contents may fall out”
I’ve been in New York’s subways and Hong Kong’s subways. The crush of people are about the same. In the middle of New York and the middle of Hong Kong, the cleanliness is about the same. You hear the same mix of languages. Some slight differences in the food vendors in the stations – I found a Mrs Fields Cookies in Hong Kong…
The cabbies in Hong Kong are even ruder than the ones in New York. I swear people walking (ok, jay walking, but there are no crosswalks) across the streets have to literally JUMP out of the way. In NY they’ll stop and swear at you, but at least they stop. Not here in Hong Kong!
I can’t comment much about the food. I live in Chamblee, Georgia (that’s Chambodia – Atlanta’s Chinatown, for the non-locals) so I’m not seeing anything unusual. The people I hang out with have gone out for Mediterranean two nights in a row now, so I can’t say whether or not the Chinese food is good in China. I have seen from the signs that the stuff that looks authentic in Chambodia is probably authentic.
The people here are all super friendly and all speak English. This is not true back in the States. However, English is no longer considered a top priority for foreign languages in schools here. With the huge Chinese market opening up right next door, Mandarin is becoming the most important language. This info comes from the mothers of children enrolled in Hong Kong schools.
Most of the people here have picked Western style names so they can better interact with the British and Americans. I personally know an Alex, Susan, Raymond, Marcy, Vivienne, and Ben. However, they apparently pick the names out in elementary school. I also know a Kitty, Pinkie, Fanny, Lit, Bong, Candy, Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury. Lots of fun, Western style!
I know that there is more stuff I want to say in this category, but I’ve not yet fixed my sleep cycle so I’m about to fall over. I’ll post more fun Hong Kong facts when I have a clearer head.
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
Monday, June 13, 2005
It’s 4:30 AM in Atlanta as I write this in the Seoul, Korea airport. I’ve just flown for 14 hours on a Korean Air jumbo jet. I have to say, the flight was actually not very bad. I boarded at 1pm and found myself sitting next to an American woman who’s husband had to come out of retirement after the DotCom bubble burst and took their retirement savings. He’s apparently been in Hong Kong for several months now and she’s flying out to vacation with him for a few weeks. She and I have been getting mistaken for mother and son while walking around the airport. It is nice to have someone to talk to though.
Anyway, on the flight I got to watch “In Good Company” with Dennis Quaid and Topher Grace (again – saw it in the theater with Kim). I also watched a bizarre Korean movie about a crooked cop and a gangster looking for a woman who absconded with a $16 million lotto ticket. They find her real identity and go wait for her at her home village on some island populated exclusively by some hard working, pot-smoking grandmothers. The movie was actually pretty funny with some decent physical comedy. Of course, in the end, the cop straightens out and no one gets the money. The gangster is reformed and falls in love with the woman they were pursuing while the grandmothers all happily go back to smoking pot. Like I said, bizarre.
The fed me two meals on the plane, but b/c I specified the kosher meal, they were the exact same meals. Beef stew, pasta bowties, green beans, gefilte fish with carrot and olives, kim-chi, and coconut jam dessert roll. Odd combo, but OK. I don’t keep kosher, but I specify either the vegetarian or kosher meal everywhere I go to ensure I get food I recognize. I’ll experiment with food when I’m not locked in a metal tube 35,000 feet above the ground.
We flew from Atlanta, up over Chicago and Winnipeg (I thought of you, D’Arcy) and over the Berring Straits, over part of Russia, and back down the coast of China to Korea. Next up is a smaller plane to Hong Kong itself. I’ll be staying at the Gold Coast Hotel (no idea how to get from the airport to the hotel). I’ll figure it all out when I get there.
The Korean airport was nice and the plane from Korea to Hong Kong was the exact same double decker type of plane I took from Atlanta to Korea. This time I got to sit upstairs. There is no difference between upstairs and down, except that to go upstairs I had to walk up some stairs. I got another meal on this flight – salmon and rice with two desserts. Some kind of whipped cream filled chocolate cannoli looking thing and a piece of chocolate cake. All pretty good. The sleeping pill I took hours ago was still kicking so I spent most of this flight unconscious.
I arrive in Hong Kong and find out that there is a shuttle bus that costs HK$88 to get from the airport to the hotel. That’s about $11.50 US dollars, so I’m cool with that. I stood outside talking to the airport based concierge for a bit. It’s really humid here. Warm too. I don’t know how close I am to the tropics, but it’s more humid than Florida right now and there are palm trees all over the place. Good thing I brought a bunch of long sleeved shirts! I’m clever like that!
So now I’m finishing up this post from my room in the hotel. I’ve got a small balcony that overlooks some water, but it’s 11pm over here, so I have no idea what the beach looks like. I can just see lights reflected in the water. I brought a camera, but it’s a disposable one so you’ll have to wait for me to develop the film to get any photos on the blog.
It’s late and I’m going to bed to sleep as much as I can. I’ve got to reset my internal clock to HK time so I’m not late for work…which I have no idea how to get to…
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet (from China)
Saturday – the day after TechEd. Brendon and I take a cab to the airport from the hotel and get our same driver that took us from the airport to the hotel. His car had been rear-ended and he complained about not having “his” car until Tuesday.
We get on the plane at 2:00. Eventually they get everyone loaded and close the doors. Then there is this knocking at the airplane door so they open the door again. A bit later the pilot comes on announcing that there had been a mechanical problem but it had already been fixed and all that was necessary now was some paperwork. An hour later the pilot comes back on the intercom and tells us that the maintenance people had noticed a hole in the plane while loading the luggage and that they’d just now gotten permission to fix it. A HOLE in the PLANE! It reminds me of that movie with Kevin Klein and Meg Ryan (French Kiss) where Kevin Klein’s character says “The pilot says there is a crack in the engine but we’ll take off anyway”. We take off at about 4:30.
Kim picks me up and we meet Brendon and Mark Dunn at a gas station in Alpharetta to get our stuff back from Mark. At this point Brendon and I are so tired that we just pile back into our respective cars without even saying goodbye. So much for our plans to go out for dinner. Kim and I get home, order Chinese food, and dump out all the stuff from TechEd so I can show her what I got. She’s utterly unimpressed by my branded techie doodads – mostly she just wants me to get them out of the house and give them away at the UGs. Fair enough.
I do laundry and pass out at 10 and sleep till 7am. I packed my bags again (but I somehow managed to leave my tablet stylus behind) and head back to the airport. This time I’ve got a 10 am flight to Hong Kong. At least, I THINK I do. I get in the line for international Delta flights. I stand there for an hour until the clerk at the counter informs me that my Delta flight is operated by Korean AirLines and that I’ve got to go stand in their line! It’s now 9:10 am. I get to the Korean Air counter and it’s CLOSED! so I flag down the next flight attendant I see, who politely tells me that their counter doesn’t open till 9:30 am and that my 10:00 am flight is in fact a 1:00 pm flight. I apparently can’t read an itinerary. Oh well, at least I’m not going to miss my flight.
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
It’s already the first day of TechEd as I write this. It’s actually 7am and I’m sitting in the convention center in front of one of the Hands-On Labs (a SharePoint lab). I wanted to save the actual TechEd day one notes for a separate blog entry, so I’m going to focus on the INETA User Group Leadership Summit which took up the entire day Sunday.
Brendon and I, always the eager beavers, started out volunteering to help out with organizing and checking in attendees. We met with Sara Faatz (now one of the INETA Vice Presidents) and Samantha Spears (Atlanta’s own INETA head honcho). They rapidly realized we were just going to pester them until they let us do something so we started carrying boxes full of books, nametags, t-shirts, etc up to the checkin table. Then Brendon, Sara, and I checked everyone in and made sure the people had nametags, t-shirts, books, and more.
The morning was filled with keynotes and introductions from the Microsoft INETA and Culminis liaisons, the VP of the Exchange team, and a really cool demo from Ari Bixhorn, part the Indigo team. Lots of great information was flowing around the room, most important in that was the actual introduction to INETA (the International .NET Association – an entirely volunteer organization with a single paid executive director (Samanatha Spears)) and Culminis (equivalent to INETA but for the IT Pro side of the technology workforce as opposed to the developer side). Brendon and I came away with a great impression of the guys from Culminis and a resolve to try to meet with them and wrap them into the collective mind-share that has been happening with the developer community. It’s great to share the leadership experience amongst the group and have the other people as resources to lean on.
Lunch was provided by the hotel, and was one of the best conference meals I’ve ever had. If you feel like throwing a convention in Orlando and the JW Marriott is in your price range, I heartily endorse it based on the quality of the meals alone! After lunch a group of us took off to go through early registration at the Convention Center (a huge place comparable in size to the Georgia World Congress convention center).
The second half of the day was filled with user group leadership workshops. Lots of different topics including financing your UG, maintaining members, writing effective newsletters, developing an online presence, etc. Each of the sessions that I attended began with fantastic information and usually ended with the various UG leaders talking about their own various successes and problems. Everyone present was a fount of information and experience, and I took three pages of notes based solely on what’s worked at other UGs. I’ll be typing up these notes and sharing them with the rest of the Atlanta UG leadership team (Doug W, Doug M, Jim, and Keith – and of course Michael E in his role as the INETA liaison and general advisor).
After all the workshops ended, INETA threw us a party (open bar) where anyone who didn’t have a chance to meet and mingle from before got to sit down and swap stories. Mark Dunn even managed to show up (why did he only make it to the part with the open bar, I wonder?). Once we finished eating and drinking our fill, my crew and I (Brendon, Caleb, Chris, D’Arcy, and Rob) all took the bus back to the convention center to play some Xbox games and relax for a bit. Rob and Brendon quit playing Xbox with me after I beat them too badly at Halo 2. Quitters! We hung out a bit more and then all got back on the bus to head back to the hotel. The trip back was filled with really bad jokes (I broke out my library of Guys with No Arms and No Legs jokes) and general good humor. Everyone is excited.
We all have had a great time and I really want to thank the folks at INETA who managed to make this event possible and of course our omnipresent sponsor Microsoft. Thanks for everyone’s hard work and participation!
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
I'm very frustrated with the state of the wireless connections here at TechEd - it seem this wireless connections thing has caught on and now all the connections are being taken by other people. I can't get my tablet to connect wirelessly anymore. That and it's getting heavy to carry all the time so I left it home in the hotel this morning.
I've got stuff to talk about but it's all written on my tablet in BlogJet and I'm not retyping it all here on the common use CommNet PCs:
- keynote with Steve Ballmer
- keynote with Paul Flessner
- lunch with Rocky Lhotka
- BizTalk sessions with Mark Dunn
- Community Cabana pranks
- swag, swag, swag...
-- Matt Ranlett
Sunday, June 05, 2005
I get up at 6am the day before the main TechEd event so I can be downstairs bright and early. Today is the INETA User Group Leader summit – 12 hours of how to be a better User Group leader. In talking last night to several of the people who are already here, Brendon and I have some great new ideas to try out on the groups in Atlanta. I have a feeling that today is going to be a whole lot of fun.
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
It’s Saturday, two days before the official start of TechEd 2005. I’m travelling down to Orlando with Brendon, courtesy of Microsoft and the fine folks over at the CodeZone Refresh department. Brendon and I participated (along with about 20 or so other people) in the beta testing program for the Code Zone refresh, and our participation in the beta test program earned us scholarships from Microsoft – free travel, hotel, and TechEd registration. I want to thank Doug Turnure for getting us into the beta program, as it’s been AWESOME so far!
Brendon and I get on a 4pm flight to Orlando where I end up sitting next to a guy from California who works for a Defense Department subcontractor building and maintaining armored vehicles for the military. Interesting conversation, that one. He also bore a striking resemblance to the guy who played Bernie from Weekend at Bernie’s (the dead guy). Brendon and I get off the plane at 5pm and go down to get our luggage. On the way to the luggage carousel, we meet Hugo, our limo driver, who is holding a sign with our names on it. No shit – a limo (well, a Lincoln Towncar, but still nice)! We get our luggage, drive to the HUGE J.W. Marriott which is attached to the Ritz Carlton down here, and get checked in by a pack of greeters and desk clerks who swarm over to us like bees to honey. We thought we’d done something wrong, but they were just trying to be incredibly nice and helpful. We get our stuff dumped off in our rooms and go to explore the area. We managed to find the INETA pre-conference prep room and wander in to say “Hello”. We meet Samantha Spears, Chris Wallace from Denver’s UG (not to be confused with the Chris Wallace of Atlanta), and more. We chat and help them get all the name tags set up, along with Caleb Jenkins from Tulsa and D’Arcy from Winniepeg. After helping out for a while and talking to the fine folks, Brendon, D’Arcy, Caleb, and I decide to share a cab over to the Geek Dinner hosted by Jeffrey Palermo. $25 one way! Anyway, we find the dinner and Rob Zelt of Raleigh and Chris Williams of Charleston. Also in attendance is Scott Hanselman (who makes it away before Brendon and I can introduce ourselves) and lots of other really nice people. We eat some food and make fun of Canadians (D’Arcy and Rob are Canadian) while the main group retires to the bar. We were going to join everyone in the bar, but the true geek pops out and Chris announces he’s got to get back to his room quickly so he can charge his PDA. Chris and Rob aren’t staying at the same hotel as Caleb, D’Arcy, Brendon and I, but because we’ve decide that the $25 cab is too expensive to take back to the hotel, so we convince Chris and Rob to give us a ride back to the hotel. We then discover that, “Yes!”, you CAN fit six developers into a two-door Chrysler Sebring hardtop! Expect fun photos from D’Arcy’s camera soon. Everyone goes their separate ways back in the hotel. I get back to my room to find a welcome food basket on my bed – chocolates, cheese straws, truffles, fancy water bottle, and a pocket knife of some kind. I didn’t open the shrinkwrapping yet, so I don’t know what else is in there.
 
 
 
— trouble with the photo uploads = photos at the end of the week.
Expect sporatic reports from TechEd. I’ll be recording as much as I can, but I don’t have Internet access in my room (I’m not paying $10 a night for Internet!). Why do the more expensive hotels charge for the stuff you can get for free from the cheaper hotels? Courtyard Marriotts give away wireless Internet access like it’s going out of style!
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
Thursday, June 02, 2005
By creating a news reader for your online community won’t you lose sponsorship because not as many people will see the ads? Then we'll have to face the possibility of embedding the ads in the downloaded content.
—Brendon Schwartz
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
I am not sure where most people find tools to motivate themselves, but I tend to find music inspirational. As far as music goes Hans Zimmer is the best composer to me. You may ask who he is, if so check out the movies he has worked with. Rain Man, Backdraft, Radio Flyer, A League of Their Own, The Lion King, Crimson Tide, The Rock, The Preacher's Wife, As Good As It Gets, The Prince of Egypt, Gladiator, Pearl Harbor, Black Hawk Down, The Contender, and much more! I really feel that with motivation you can push yourself beyond the limits that you thought were possible. I suggest checking out one of his albums (scores) and see for yourself. Usually when I feel like I am tired or can’t do anymore I put on some Hans Zimmer and complete what needs to be done.
—Brendon Schwartz
Posted with BlogJet
Friday, May 27, 2005
 I am Kung Fu Master.
I like to be in control of myself. I dislike crowds, especially crowds containing people trying to kill me. Even though I always win, I prefer to avoid fights if possible. What Video Game Character Are You? |
-- Matt Ranlett
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
So I’m getting ready for an international business trip (more details in a later blog) when I notice that my brand-spanking new passport has my name spelled wrong! I’m apparently Matthew Steven Rancett. Rancett? I even gave them my old passport with my name spelled correctly! It’s RanLett! The lower case L and C don’t look anything alike and they’re located on opposite sides of the keyboard! Come on, people…. Now I’ve got to call the Passport office and see if this is going to be a problem. And I need it in 2 weeks!
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
I’m not talking about the original Showtime series. I don’t know who’s been reading this blog, and for how long, so I’ll catch you up. After six years of marriage, Deanna moved out of the house in October of 2004. Our divorce was finalized the following January. In the time between now and then, I’ve met Kim. We’ve been dating for several months now. I’ve spent a lot of time sorting out my feelings these past several weeks, and now I feel like my head is on straight. So last week I used the L word and told her that I love her. I think I could possibly have been more romantic, but I’m a computer programmer, not a soap opera star. Anyway, she says she loves me too…
Anyway, I figure a week went by, so I’d share with the rest of the world…
You may now all go back to your regularly scheduled programming. Pun intended.
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
I freely admit that I’m a Microsoft fanboy when it comes to the Xbox vs PS2 discussion. Sure, the PS2 has like 10 times the number of games, but 90% of them suck!! The original Xbox had so much going for it (hard drive, online play, etc) when it came out that I couldn’t even consider the PS2. Sony seems to be coming back with some improved features for the PS3, but Microsoft is widening the gap, crushing the PS3 with provable hardware superiority:
(from Bit-Tech.net)
- 3 CPU cores, each with a form of HyperThreading for 6 simultaneous instructions
- The graphics engine of the Xbox 360 is nearly 2 years in the future for PC cards
- Heatpipe based liquid cooling = quiet in the living room
- Wireless controller that charge batteries via USB (plug in when not in use)
- Built in Media Center Extender (dammit – now I have to buy a Media Center PC)
( from the “Xbox Live Director of Programming”, a 4 part series )
- Xbox 360 has more general purpose processing power and more memory bandwidth than PS3
- The PS3 excels at floating-point operations, which are less important in the time of GPUs
- Xbox 360 has a faster GPU w/double the texture samplers of the PS3
- Xbox 360 has over 5 times the RAM bandwidth for SPEED!
More hardware based reviews here
CNet previews the Xbox 360 here
PlayStation.com shows off the PS3 tech specs
CNet previews the PS3 here
All of this has me so excited that I’ll probably be in line somewhere at midnight to get mine (provided I don’t pre-order or win a free one).
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
[Edit] – Microsoft has announced that the Xbox 360 WILL be backwards compatible with existing Xbox games. The announcement was made at E3, ending months of speculation. The post I’m linking to is actually from a Microsoft Xbox developer working on backwards compatibility. This is fantastic because I currently own 24 Xbox games (I buy them off of Ebay at an average $9.00 per game, including shipping). That would be a big waste if I couldn’t play my existing games on the new console.
I've apparently got too many e-mail addresses to manage. I found out through an e-mail from the local radio station that I won free tickets to an AudioSlave concert. The concert was Monday at about 9pm. I checked my mail on Monday at 11pm! D'oh!
-- Matt Ranlett
Monday, May 23, 2005 Sunday, May 22, 2005
A while back, a post on the Atlanta .Net Regular Guys site and a post on the Cerebral Kitchen site explored Digital Rights management and the iffy use of technology to protect IP or intellectual property. (Here is the original post, but all comments have been lost during the transition from .Text to DasBlog). The end result of the conversation seemed to be that everyone agreed IP requires protection but current technical implementations of digital rights management software are either completely ineffective or way to restrictive. I just found this article where Microsoft Research seems to agree that the illegal spread of digital content is unlikely to stop, especially since it’s so easy to find what you want on the darknet – the collection of networks and other technologies that enable people to illegally share copyrighted digital files with little or no fear of detection.
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
Thursday, May 19, 2005
I use Trillian as an instant messanger tool because it connects to both AIM and MSN Messanger services. One of the neatest features of the new Trillian tool is to identify some words in the IM conversation and look them up in Wikipedia (my favorite starting point for random facts). At least, that's what it says it's doing, but I frequently can't find the definitions Trillian finds when I go looking myself. Anyway, I was mentioning Keith (Rome) in a conversation with someone and Trillian underlined his name as having a Wikipedia entry. Curious, I looked at the list - mostly famous people with Keith as the family name. But it told me to see also Keith numbers.
Man, I love math. I am terrible at understanding and solving math problems, but the more I learn about it, the more I like about it. This page just set off the Geek Alarm - big time. I love this stuff!
FYI - a Keith number is a number who's digits make up a Fibonacci sequence including itself. For example, 197 is a Keith number:
197: 1, 9, 7,  ,  ,  ,  , 
-- Matt Ranlett
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Thanks to the traffic-weighted formulas used by search engines, the Atlanta .Net Regular Guys blog is in the top 3 returns on Yahoo if you search for "guys feeling other guys legs"
Man, that's just odd...
-- Matt Ranlett
I've just upgraded versions of DasBlog, the engine that cranks out this website's blog and RSS feed, and turned on the "Post title as Permalink" option. This means that I will no longer have ugly links with GUIDs and commas in them. Instead I'll get nice, human-readable links. I hope this doesn't break everyone's links to me, but I bet it does. Sorry about that.
-- Matt Ranlett
[Edit] - I just tested and it looks like the DasBlog team made everything backwards compatible - all the external links to the ADNRG blog still link to the correct posts. Great job guys! Just for that, I've contributed $10 to the DasBlog Community edition. I forgot to log in, so my name isn’t on the supporters page. Oh well, I wasn’t donating money for personal recognition.
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
I just wanted to thank Keith J. Rome for coming up with his book review template and getting me going on doing a review. Check out his reviews of books for great suggestions.
— Brendon Schwartz
Posted with BlogJet
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Author(s): Dino Esposito
Categories: .NET, ASP.NET 2.0
Published: August 25, 2004
ISBN: 0–735–62024–5
Online Order Links: Amazon, BN.Com, …
Summary:
Going into this book, there are two things you have to remember. The first is that this book was written and published before most of the other books on the subject and is based on Beta 1 material. Maybe Dino will edit this book for a second edition, but everything may not be exactly the same as it was for this release. Secondly, this book is called “Introducing ASP.NET 2.0”, and not “Step by Step ASP.NET 2.0” for a reason. This book shows the differences and enhancements from ASP.NET 1.x to ASP.NET 2.0. If you can remember these two simple facts, you will find the book much more enjoyable. At the time of this writing I was not able to find any corrections to the material in this book. However, I have been told that some of the features written about have been changed from Beta 1 to Beta 2 and the final release when it comes out.
I found this book to be great for learning the new topics of ASP.NET 2.0, but it is not for a beginner just looking to get started with ASP.NET. I did enjoy the fact that there are comparisons of ASP, ASP 1.x and ASP 2.0. This made it much easier for me to know what the differences were and reason behind them. However, the flow of the book is not always easy to follow, and some of the topics are not discussed in-depth very well. In those areas I tended to get lost in what Dino is explaining and I had to reread a couple of sentences. The explanation of the topics and the step by step examples were usually very well written and easy to understand. Dino’s does his best writing when he explains things using examples in this book. The book is well worth the price and time that is involved in reading it. I would recommend this book for anyone that knows about ASP.NET and needs to know the differences and how to use ASP.NET 2.0 components. It is a good book to get you up to date. The writing style in the book is not always as straightforward as it could be, but he gets the points across and makes them easy for you to try out.
I feel the book covered what it set out to cover which is to give developers a head start or introduction into ASP.NET 2.0. Without a doubt, this book covered that and is one of the first books to come to the market about ASP.NET 2.0. I don’t think you can hold it against the book that changes in the software were made between Beta 1 and Beta 2, as this fact is recognized and mentioned in the beginning of the book. This book allows for developers and architects to plan for the future and to know what is coming soon. Dino makes sure to cover topics that have a different approach and methodology than they used to in ASP.NET 1.x so that you can know how you might implement a problem using ASP.NET 2.0. Dino does make sure you understand that in ASP.NET 2.0 there is less code and you use more controls in order to create web applications. In fact, these chapters where he shows the new controls and how to use them are my favorite chapters.
Highlights from this book that I enjoyed most are: MasterPages, WebParts, Rich Web Controls, security logon and the DataSource controls that were covered. These sections alone made the book worth the purchase. He is able to show how a complicated or code heavy web application in ASP.NET 1.x is much simpler in ASP.NET 2.0. Actually, there were not many chapters that I didn’t enjoy reading and that did not give me insightful information to ASP.NET 2.0. If anyone is excited about ASP.NET 2.0 this book should keep you just as excited and get you ready to try out some of the new features in a short time span. Now I would like to see a book by Dino on just the UI part, similar to the one he did for the Datagrid in ASP.NET 1.x “Building Web Solutions with ASP.NET and ADO.NET”.
I felt that the chapters on data access were not very clear and or straightforward. The chapters went on too long for a simple introduction and tried to explain data access in too much detail for an ASP.NET book.
Overall I think that this is a great book for someone that is moving from ASP 1.x to ASP 2.0 and just wants to know what Microsoft is planning and how they are planning on implementing each feature. If this book is not updated to reflect changes to ASP.NET 2.0 as it releases, I think people will start to turn to other books because of the many differences between the release and the beta this book was written from. If you want an in depth look at ASP.NET 2.0 this book will probably not cover everything you want from beginning to end, but it is a great book for the topics I needed as a developer ready to see ASP.NET 2.0.
This book is most useful to:
- web designers / developers that know how to use ASP.NET 1.1 but want to know just the new features of ASP.NET 2.0
- Technical decision makers that need to know what the technology can do
- experienced web developers looking to get a jump on things by learning about ASP.Net 2.0 before it is released
Recommendation:
4 out of 5 stars
If you want a book that covers only ASP.NET 2.0 this is a good book to start with. The size of the book and content that is covered will get you up to speed on the new features of ASP.NET 2.0. This book was written based on Beta 1 so make sure that you realize that some content of the book may have changed.
This book will take you less than a week, and will get you up to speed on ASP.NET 2.0 concepts. You will also see that he compares some of the changes to the way it is done in ASP.NET 1.x or ASP which will help you understand some of the uses of the new features.
-- Brendon Schwartz
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I filled my car up at the local BP this morning and noticed a sign – buy $15 in gas and get a free 2 liter Pepsi product. I’m always game for free stuff, so I walked away with a 2 liter of Mountain Dew. I don’t know how long the promotion lasts and I don’t know if it’s happening at all BP stations, but you might as well check since you need to buy gas eventually.
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
Monday, May 16, 2005
Today, for the Atlanta Mobility User Group, I managed to acquire 50 samosas as a snack. 25 vegetable and 25 chicken samosas feed 16 people with only 10 left over at the end. A lot of the people at the meeting had no idea what they were eating, but I didn't hear a single complaint about the food. In fact, I think everyone liked what they had! And what's not to like about a fried pastry stuffed with potatoes, peas, spices, and in some cases chicken? Even the spicey tamarind sauce we had to go with them was delicious.
So if you're interested in acquiring some of these samosas yourself, go to the India Market at 3547 Old Norcorss Rd, Suite E, Duluth GA 30096. The people there are really nice and the samosa are $1.00 apiece. The proprietors are quick to point out that they have lots of great sweets as well as a large selection of vegetarian and ethnic foods. I can only vouch for the samosas, but I'll be returning to try out the other things they've got to offer.
-- Matt Ranlett
Criticism is a good thing, and very different from general complaining. I was told that some of my blog entries are getting to be too long. I don’t take this to mean that they are too wordy, but that they are becoming aimless and hard to follow. So I’m going to accept that criticism and post entries with better structure and clearer language. Thank you for the helpful tip – I hope to start with the next post about the Atlanta Mobility UG. -- Matt Ranlett posted with BlogJet
Thursday, May 12, 2005
I swear I’m not a paid endorser, but I have to mention BlogJet again. I just found out a new feature (well, new to me anyway) that I thought I’d share with the world. I was browsing through the BlogJet website looking to see the status of my feature request when I decided to look through the screenshots. I’d been having trouble with the properties tab – I can’t seem to get it to let me add TrackBack URLs through the tool. Anyway, I was flipping through the screenshots when I saw this unfamiliar view:
Recent Posts.
You can look through your recent posts and edit any one you want to! That’s pretty cool for making corrections to old posts (like I did for this one). I knew that I could get and edit the last post, but I didn’t know I could flip through all the old ones (complete with previews). I like it!
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
I was reading a post from Steve Vore where he asked for recommendations about RSS tools – readers and writers. I couldn’t help but tell him about my favorite tools (which I’ve mentioned on here before, but I’ll mention them on here again)
“I went on a quest similar to yours a while back - looking for a good reader and a good editor. Here's what I like. In the reader category, I can't say enough good things about JetBrains Omea Reader (www.jetbrains.com). It's free if you get it quickly - they're going to charge soon. It has offline reading - indexed in a database so searches are lightning fast. It goes beyond simple folder organization of feeds with a workspace concept - where you can group feeds together and only see the ones you're interested in. For example, I have 60 feeds total, but I have a .Net workspace with only 25 feeds in it. I have a News workspace with 4 feeds in it. I can look at these workspaces to focus my blog reading energies. Omea reader is also great b/c it does more than just RSS. It is also a NewsReader, so if you want to follow newsgroups, you can subscribe to them and see them in the same window with your blogs. You can even sort them into workspaces. For example, I've subscribed to the two Microsoft Tablet news groups. Omea will also keep up with bookmarks for you, so if you have a favorite website that hasn't caught on to the RSS phenomenon yet, you can keep yourself up to date here as well. If you shell out the cash for the Pro version of the Omea product, it will also receive e-mail. I haven't done this for the exact reason you want to get your RSS out of Outlook. Time management.
On the editor side of things, I wholeheartedly recommend BlogJet (www.blogjet.com). It works really well - allows Rich text editing of posts with a tab to edit HTML when the occasion warrents it. Spellchecking in multiple languages. It integrates into IE so you can open it when reading an interesting page and blog about it while it's fresh in your mind. User profile controls allow you to connect to many different blogs, with over 20 different blog engines supported. Drafts are supported (and I use that all the time) and the developer(s) are pretty responsive to change requests. I use this tool almost as much as I use Outlook.”
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
Monday, May 09, 2005
Thanks to our omnipresent sponsor, Microsoft (personified by Doug Turnure), the Atlanta .Net Regular Guys have some t-shirts with the ADNRG logos to give away. Start showing up to the user groups regularly and you’ll get a t-shirt of your very own. Remember – Brendon and I aren’t the only .Net Regular Guys in Atlanta – anyone who shows up regularly to two or more meetings a month is eligible to receive a shirt.
Don’t forget to sign up on the www.devcow.com site to be an Atlanta .Net Regular Guy!
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
I like to tell really bad one-liner jokes, and one of my favorite categories is the "guy with no arms and no legs" variety. I've written down the ones I knew and then I've culled some from various websites. I know you'll laugh at some of these!
what do you call a guy with no arms and no legs sitting on a doorstep?
Matt
what do you call a guy with no arms and no legs hanging on a wall?
Art
what do you call a guy with no arms and no legs stuffed in a mailbox?
Bill
what do you call a guy with no arms and no legs in a lake?
Bob
what do you call a guy with no arms and no legs in a lake being dragged behind a boat?
Skip
What do you call a guy with no arms or legs in a pile of leaves?
Russell
What do you call a guy with no arms or legs in a ditch?
Phil
What do you call a guy with no arms or legs in your hot tub?
Stu
What do you call a guy with no arms or legs on your grill?
Frank
What do you call a guy with no arms or legs going over a fence?
Homer
What do you call a guy with no arms or legs In your girlfriend's lingerie drawer?
Teddy
What do you call a guy with no arms or legs Who every one takes a dump on?
John
What do you call a guy with no arms or legs who holds up your car?
Jack
What do you call a guy with no arms or legs who's upside down in the end zone?
Spike
What do you call a guy with no arm and no legs in a coffee cup?
Joe
What do you call a guy with no arms and no legs on a poker table?
Chip
What do you call a guy with no arms or legs nailed to your spice rack?
Herb
What do you call a guy with no arms or legs on a stage?
Mike
What do you call a guy with no arms or legs under a car?
Axel
What do you call a guy with no arms or legs in a bank?
Buck
What do you call a guy with no arms or legs on a piece of paper?
Mark
What do you call a guy with no arms or legs in a British restroom?
Lou
What do you call a guy with no arms and no legs in a field of marijuana?
Bud
A girl with no arms and no legs, lying on a grill?
Patty
What do you call a girl with no arms or legs on a beach?
Sandy
What do you call a girl with no arms or legs in your dishwasher?
Dawn
What do you call a guy with no arms or legs between two buildings?
Ali
What do you call a girl with no arms or legs hanging on a clothes line?
Peg
What do you call a girl with no arms and no legs who is stuck on a fence?
Barb
What do you call a girl with one leg shorter than the other?
Eileen.
What do you call an Asian girl with one leg shorter than the other?
Irene.
What do you call a cow with one leg missing?
Lean beef.
What do you call a cow with no legs?
Ground beef.
What do you do with a dog with no legs?
Take it for a drag
Why does Snoop Dog carry an umbrella?
Fo' drizzle.
What does Snoop Dog use to do his laundry?
Ble-atch!
-- Matt Ranlett
Monday, May 02, 2005
Large companies can frequently act out like an 800 lb gorilla, throwing its weight around. Microsoft, with its 40 billion dollar cash reserve, makes an awfully big Goliath. Don't get me wrong, I like Microsoft. Heck, they enable me to make a living. I am an avid follower of MS user groups (averaging nearly 30 hours a month) and I'm even going to Orlando for TechEd! But every once in a while, David gets in a good shot, and that makes for a good story.
An article was recently published documenting the story of a legal battle between Microsoft and a college student over a cash value of $143.00. According to the article, a college student at the U. of Akron sold 2 pieces of unopened software on Ebay. Microsoft sued for "Microsoft has suffered and will continue to suffer substantial and irreparable damage to its business reputation and goodwill as well as losses in an amount not yet ascertained … [the] Defendant's acts of copyright infringement have caused Microsoft irreparable injury." Rather than giving up, the student, David Zamos – a student attending Kent State U for a biochemistry degree, fought back and browbeat the MS lawyers into submission with a combined 37 court filings.
http://clevescene.com/issues/2005-03-30/news/feature_print.html
For a similar, humorous incident, recall the legal threats made by Microsoft against 17 year old Mike Rowe for his domain www.mikerowesoft.com. [Screenshot]
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet
Friday, April 22, 2005
May 2nd Brad Abrams and some of the CLR team are going to be at the C# user group. I have just received a wonderful package from Addison Wesley that has a couple small gifts. This is nothing big, but it was very nice of them to send something for the group. I don’t think I will have enough for everyone so if you would like a gift put a comment/trackback on this post with your name and I will make sure you get one at the meeting.
Fine print: You must put your name in a comment on this post or a track back to a blog post about the C# meeting with Brad Abrams and you must be at the meeting to get the gift.
Update***** In response to a request from the UG leaders, we will be giving out the gift packs as raffle prizes like normal. The people who have already signed up on the blog for gifts will get ones as promised (after the meeting), but the rest will be given away as part of the C# meeting. The ADNRG want to thank the C# group for their hard work in getting great speakers and would like to continue to help them in any way they see fit.
—Brendon Schwartz
Posted with BlogJet
The time has come for us to get rid of the intro to cell phone messages that takes a minute and half. When I call Matt I really don’t want to hear my options on how to leave a message after the tone, I just want the phone to let me leave the message. If anyone works for the cell phone companies or knows someone that works for the cell phone companies can you ask if we can make it an option to turn OFF.
—Brendon Schwartz
Posted with BlogJet
Thursday, April 21, 2005
It seems you can actually say a lot with out really saying anything. As many of you might have noticed both Matt and I became really busy at the same time. I have been working on a bunch of technical projects such as BizTalk, SharePoint, ASP.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005 TS and Mobility, so I ran out time to blog (not that I really blog that much). Due to the fact that Matt became busy at the same time we didn't put much on the website, didn't change much on the blog and as it seemed to the world didn't put much effort into the community. I just wanted to let everyone know that we are still working as hard as ever to figure out what the .NET community needs and what we can do to improve the Atlanta community. There are a bunch of good events coming up soon so make sure you don’t miss out. If this month and next month got any better we would be in trouble.
Atlanta .NET User Group April 25th (Wow)
Shawn Wildermuth – Author of a great book Pragmatic ADO.NET
Alan Griver – Group Manager for the Visual Studio Data group
Atlanta C# User Group (Wow Wow)
Brad Abrams and the .NET CLR Team – The CLR team that is all I have to say
Atlanta VB.NET and Atlanta .NET User Groups (Wow Wow Wow)
David Chappell on Indigo
David Chappell will be in town to discuss the next version of services and remoting codenamed Indigo. The presentation is scheduled on our regular meeting date so we will likely just use this presentation as a substitute for our regular meeting.
Atlanta Code Camp (Too much excitement for one month, but we will take it WoooooooooooooW!)
So as you can see we have a lot of planning and work coming up for the user groups in May. Thanks to Doug for getting this done for us. I can’t believe how many great speakers we have coming to all of our groups.
—Brendon Schwartz
This blog posted with BlogJet
I have been super busy at work these last several weeks. After a long period of development with a defined schedule (I was on loan to the development team – I’m officially part of the “customer team”), I’ve entered that hectic mode where I’ve been preparing demos, testing and tightening up code releases, travelling to the customer site to ensure they feel as warm and fuzzy about our new version as we do, etc. All of this has meant lots of late nights, phone calls, and general craziness. I’m hoping that once we get the final code drop to the customers (bug fixes repairing issues discovered in the client’s labs) things will calm down again and I’ll have time to breathe. As it is, last night I ended up missing the VB meeting b/c I stayed at work until 8pm then had to rush to a local FedEx shipping facility to drop off a demo system that needed to be in the UK overnight. I was running so late that I had to call the FedEx 800 number, get them to transfer me to the local office, and pretend to be lost so they’d stay on the phone with me and stay open! It worked and I made it by the skin of my teeth. Once I was out of there, I was going to head over to the VB group, but they’d pretty much finished up so I just went home to visit my poor, neglected doggies.
Work, work, work. I’m tired of work – I want time at home so I can study up on some of my .Net stuff. Different work! Work with no deadlines feels different from work where people actually expect things from you. But seriously, it is a statement about us, those of us who work all day then go home to do more work, isn’t it? Is it a good statement? I hope so!
— Matt Ranlett
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
When learning .NET I find it useful to have a couple different methods of learning. Here are some of the learning resources that I use.
First, I find that if I want to learn a topic thoroughly I turn to books or SDK documentation. I find that books give a more straightforward approach to many topics than just trying to find article to read on the web. Next I go to training classes, which could include anything from webcasts to in person training such as Dunn Training or Developmentor. These classes can help get you up to speed on a topic in fractions of the time it would take you to learn them on your own or to ask your friend in the cubical next to yours. Then to stay up to date or to learn new topics I attend user groups or free events. These are such thing as the C# User Group or MSDN Events. These are a great way to talk with other developers and to learn about a topic that you find interesting.
Here is my list of how I would rank these training materials based on Content per dollar:
1) Books – Best return on the amount of money they cost and if you have time to read it you will probably know more about the topic than listening to someone tell you about it.
2) Training classes – Even though it costs a little more than a book, these are well worth the cost and are life savers if you have to learn something very quickly. These are also great if you are not directly paying for them because the content per dollor goes up considerably. Also you have the opportunity to ask the instructors questions on topics you don’t understand, which will make learning much faster and more in depth.
3) User Groups – Well I bet most of you thought I would put this as the number 1 bang for the buck deal, but in most cases I feel that the books and training are more in depth on topics. I think that user groups are great if you want training that is low cost and you have time to go to them. Don’t get me wrong even at number 3 it is still a very important part of being a developer.
Based on cost:
1) User Groups – These are the best way to learn current and new topics without having to spend any money and they are usually after hours, which make them easy to get to. Also you might win prizes that make them an even better deal.
2) Books – If you are willing to put in the effort to read the book you will have a great return on the money. What I have found is that most people actually don’t read the entire book they skim through chapters they don’t find interesting. I feel those people are missing out a little bit because it always happens that I find something I didn’t know about in those chapters I wasn’t interested in reading about.
3) Training classes – Aside from Microsoft Webcasts which could be consider under user groups, training classes usually cost more money and are held for a limited amount of time. If you don’t think of your questions during the event, people tend to usually shy away from emailing the instructor to ask how to accomplish something.
Overall summary:
1) Books – 1.5 Ranking
2) User Groups – 2 Ranking
3) Training – 2.5 Ranking
Like I said in the beginning, I use all of these resources. Just because I list them on how I use them doesn’t mean that is how you have to use them. Actually, let me know what you think, tell me how you would rank these learning resources or if you have others that I didn’t talk about.
--Brendon Schwartz
Thursday, April 07, 2005
I’m out to dinner with 2 coworkers and several of the client’s IT staff. We’re talking about all kinds of stuff that people talk about after work (OK, mostly complaining about the coworkers who aren’t present) when we get to the subject of travelling for work. I won’t bore you with the details of the conversation except for the part where my potential travel to foreign ports of call were discussed. Specifically Paris and Hong Kong. I would love to travel to those places like you wouldn’t believe. Even if some of the time there was for work, I’d love to go. I’ve been overseas to London as a teenager, but as an adult I’ve never been further out of country than the Caribbean.
Let’s go into story swapping mode. Tell me about the coolest place you’ve ever visited (and let’s stick to the places you go for work related purposes – I don’t want to hear about how your vacations are better than mine).
I’ve been to several decent American cities for work, including Nashville (Gibson cafe = cool) but the best place I went to was Chicago. I was consulting for Amoco Oil and got to go to all kinds of great restaurants and whatnot while I was there. I even got to sit near Jerry Springer at dinner once (while he was there with some girl who absolutely had to be a stripper). The work was decent, the pizza was good, the beer was better, and I got to be friends with a guy born on leap year. Every leap year I get an e-mail about the other (famous) people born on leap year from my 36 year old friend celebrating his 9th birthday. I had fun in Nashville (the work environment sucked but the fun I had after work was great – I saw a bunch of bands and hung out talking to the lead singer of once of them (hot chick) for a while) but I have to rate my time in Chicago as tops while at that job. I’ve also spent a lot of time down in Orlando working for a client who could get me into Disney World for free. While the people were nice and Disney World is Disney World, I think I spent so much time down there that it kind of lost the magic. But of all the places I’ve travelled, I’ve never gotten to/had to travel internationally for work.
So let’s share some stories. Here’s mine. While in Chicago I met a guy who worked for Amoco. He was part of the lab team responsible for wiring the network cables and whatnot. I don’t know if you guys are aware of this, but that job can be filled with union people in large companies. This is the case at Amoco – I would get in trouble if I plugged a machine into the hub right next to it if I didn’t call a union guy to do it for me. Anyway, this guy was part of the union. Great guy personally, I don’t know how he kept his job. He shared a story about how he went on vacation one time for two or three weeks without telling the company that he was going. He paid for the entire $15,000 trip with the company card. This was three years before I met him. He STILL had his job!!!! Amazing!
— Matt Ranlett
Note – this post was written at 12:30 am after 3 beers and 4 glasses of whiskey. Aaaah, there’s no travel like business on the road!
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
So I’m now down here at the client site, and I’ve just recently been introduced to a new contractor down here. Keep in mind that I’m out of state. The new contractor knows me from the Atlanta User Groups – he remembers me from when I was “instructing” the VB user group back in November. Apparently the topic was a Windows Mobility topic.
I thought that was a fascinating event – running into someone I know so far from home. I mean, the last time I was ‘introduced’ to someone I already knew, I was just hanging out in Barnes & Noble in Alpharetta. Now I can’t even escape you guys when I leave the state! Seriously though, it’s nice to see a friendly face, and it’s nice to see that people keep their skills sharp via the user groups and that translates into real job opportunities.
— Matt Ranlett
Howdy folks! I’m back from my blogging vacation (I hope). The past few weeks haven’t really been a lot of fun for me – first I was sick with both the flu and strep throat at the same time. Follow that up with a week or two of intense “get it done” pressure at work so we can make a major delivery to our largest client including a weekend where I put in 30 hours this past Saturday and Sunday alone (16 hours on Saturday, 14 on Sunday). Of course, since we managed to get our delivery out the door in time, but with some potential instability (after so much last minute work, confidences weren’t as high as we’d hoped they’d be). So that meant someone has to travel with the delivery down to the client site so we could hold their hand. Included in the “someone” is yours truly! I’m writing this entry in the airport lobby, watching my plane pull up to the terminal listening to the Garden State soundtrack on my Creative MuVo MP3 player. Of course, last minute air travel for work wouldn’t be complete if it didn’t bump up against some personal travel, so I’m flying back into the Atlanta airport exactly 8 hours before I’m supposed to fly back out again. This time I’m headed out for a quick jaunt to Las Vegas.
All of this work and illness has left me feeling a little bit out of touch. I’m missing or have missed 5 user group meetings. Brendon has been doing an excellent job of covering for me, and I appreciate it. It’s good to be part of a team that works.
OK – plane is boarding soon. I’m putting the laptop away for the evening. I’m looking forward to some well earned sleep.
— Matt Ranlett
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Q: Is Matt on vacation?
A: No
Q: Is Matt ok or was he in a terrible accident or something?
A: Yes Matt is ok and No he was not in any kind of accident.
Q: Does Matt not like me anymore?
A: Matt still likes you and still enjoys hanging out with you especially at user groups.
Q: Are the user groups just too much for Matt?
A: No, going to 8 to 10 user groups a month is not too much for Matt he loves hanging out with his friends.
Q: Will Matt ever do a good review of the user groups again instead of Brendon’s?
A: We can all only hope!
Q: Does Matt still have access to a computer or did he move to country where they don’t have power?
A: Matt still does own a computer and has running water and electricity; he should be blogging again soon and near a computer any time now.
Q: Will we ever see Matt again?
A: Yes so here is the deal
Matt was sick a couple of weeks ago, in fact he was not able to show up to 1 or two groups because he was sick which is a good thing for the rest of us. (Thanks for think about the group Matt and not getting us sick). Then Matt had a lot of work he had to do for his actual job since he doesn’t get paid to go to user groups. And finally Matt had to go out of town and will be on vacation later next week to relax a little. He should be back on the scene after next week and back in action soon. See you at the user groups soon Matt.
--Brendon Schwartz
I wanted to get other peps feed back on what book they would recommend if their friend asked them to recommend an excellent C# book.
Give me your two cents on what a good book would be.
--Brendon Schwartz
Friday, March 18, 2005
New Scientist magazine recently published an article of 13 things that do not make sense. These are 13 things which so dramatically violate the laws of physics and chemistry as we know them that we might find ourselves reconsidering the universe. For example, does cold fusion work? In 1989 an experiment said it did. 200 US Navy experiments later and we’re not sure one way or the other. What about Dark Matter – the stuff that supposedly makes up 90% of the mass of the Universe and is the only thing that prevents galaxies from spinning apart. According to our understanding of physics, it MUST exists, but no probe or telescope has EVER seen a single sign of it, aside from the fact that it MUST exist!
My personal favorite is from the medical field, concerning the placebo effect:
“DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.
So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.”
This means we might be able to make real medicine from nothing! Also consider this one:
“Belfast homeopathy results
MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.
In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.
So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.”
This means we might make water think that it is some kind of medicine!
Check out the entire article: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/space/mg18524911.600
— Matt Ranlett
Remember a while back I talked about what is required to increase your rank in Google? I found this interesting article in Wired Magazine where a Search Engine Optimizer is interviewed. In the article, Greg Boser talks about how his company, WebGuerrilla manipulates Google’s PageRank software – the software responsible for ordering the list of search results.
Per Google, "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important.'"
The gist of the article is this – if you want your site to rank really really high, get lots and lots of people to link to you. Link exchanges DO work, but you need lots of them.
— Matt Ranlett
Michael Hyatt writes a working smart blog with all kinds of helpful time management and productivity tips. I like to read them even if I don’t implement most of them. But this particular tip, with regard to presenting using PowerPoint, is very cool:
“display your slides through the projector as usual while simultaneously viewing the slide on the projector, your upcoming slides, your notes, and a timer—all on your laptop. It took about 60 seconds to setup.”
http://michaelhyatt.blogs.com/workingsmart/2005/01/powerpoints_pre.html#more
— Matt Ranlett
Thursday, March 17, 2005
At the book club meeting tonight there was a short discussion about being a Microsoft MVP. This got me to thinking… do we all know our MVPs? Do we even know what an MVP is? For those of us who don’t know, an MVP is an outstanding member of the technical community. These outstanding people are recognized by Microsoft for their willingness to participate and help other community members. These are the smart people around the world who write the interesting articles, newsgroup postings, and websites that we all read when we need help. *MVPs are not tested for their technical skills, this award recognizes only their community service efforts.
We have a ton of these folks in the Atlanta/Georgia area. I wanted to try to list a few of them out, but this is going to be an incomplete list as this information is not necessarily easy to come by. My apologies in advance for anyone who got left out or mistakenly credited for living in Atlanta. If you know something is off in this list, please comment on this post and I’ll update the main list.
Jim Behning – Small Business Server
Dave Bernard – Visual Foxpro
Tom Bishop – Tablet PC
Dana Coffey - ASP/ASP.Net
Thomas Divine – Windows Embedded
Mark Dunn – Visual Basic.Net
James Hambleton – Windows Embedded
Geoff Hiten – SQL Server
Teo Lachev – SQL Reporting Services
Dennis Rice – Tablet PC
Michael Sanford – Windows Server SDK
Jerold Schulman – Windows 2000
James Shaw – ASP/ASP.NET
Shawn Wildermuth – C#
Paul Wilson – ASP/ASP.NET
— Matt Ranlett
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Everyone has something to complain about with their various RSS aggregators, so it is a really good thing that there are so many of them out there. Should we add Microsoft to the list?
— Matt Ranlett
Friday, March 11, 2005
In case you haven't heard Chris is going to do something that I am very interested in. It is what most of us developers do, but never really package together. He is going to do something like community server, but using DotNetNuke as the front end. I look forward to it and would love to use it when he gets it up and running.
http://tamasii.com/blog/archive/2005/03/11/48830.aspx
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Williem Odendaal posted some helpful Google tips a while ago. I thought I’d share them with you.
- After the search phrase, type site:microsoft.com. This will return only results from the microsoft.com domain.
- To find out what a word means, type define insane. With define being the keyword and insane the word I'm unsure of.
- To do conversions, type 12 pounds in kilograms. Very nice. Obviously this works for a lot of other conversions as well.
- And I just read about this this morning - to search for a word and all it's synonyms, use the tilde key. For example - ~food ~facts.
— Matt Ranlett
As an avid fan of mobile computing and a big believer that this is the direction computing is heading as far as consumer computer devices are concerned, I thought I’d share this blog entry from JKontheRun
Pocket PC Magazine- The Bright Future of Mobile Computing
Bibhu Choudhary and Suvarna Singh have written an article in Pocket PC Magazine that gives a good look at the future of mobile computing. The article concentrates on new technology that is either just appearing presently or on the horizon and they provide a thorough overview of the mobile technology we should be seeing in our devices down the road. The authors cover everything from tiny hard drives to flexible displays and how they will impact devices of the future. The article is a must read for anyone interested in what might be coming at us in our soon to be gadgets.
— Matt Ranlett
I have tried out about a dozen different blog readers and I currently like my Jetbrains Omea Reader the best. However, that doesn’t mean that I think it’s perfect. I just sent them this detailed list of feature requests:
“I LOVE Omea Reader and am considering purchasing Omea Pro to put my e-mail into the same application.
A few change requests:
Newspaper view - I like the ease of use of the newspaper view but I prefer the way the newspaper view works in the Onfolio tool. (almost but not quite enough to
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Highlight which blog entry I'm reading in the newspaper view (draw a box around it).
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When I hit the space bar move to the next blog entry.
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When I'm reading a blog entry, mark it as read. I am annoyed that I have to mark a blog entry as read manually after I've looked through them in the newspaper view.
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Give me the ability to flag items in the newspaper view.
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Give me the ability to read Recent and Unread categories in a newspaper view. I don't understand why that doesn't work now.
Comments - comments are what make blogging such a powerful tool and I like the ability to download comments by clicking a button.
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I'd also like to have a global option to ALWAYS download comments.
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If the comment is posted via RSS I should be able to get new comments on old posts (and be notified that that post has changed) without having to check manually. I'd like an old blog post with a new comment to be highlighted as changed in some way (maybe just marked as unread)
-
I'd like to be able to read the comments in the newspaper view
Plugin request - I like the idea of the post to confluence plug in. But I use a different tool to write my blog posts and I'd like to see Omea send the post to it. I use BlogJet to write my posts offline and post at my leisure. Can we add a "Post to BlogJet" button to the UI so I can have a BlogJet format document created for me with the contents of the particular bit of information I'm reading in it (and a trackback link).”
With this nit-picky a list of requests, you ought to be able to see that it’s a pretty complete tool. Check it out for yourself. It’s free if you download it before the end of this month.
— Matt Ranlett
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/custom/blogs/index.html
BIG problem - no RSS feeds. To me, that makes this totally useless. Plus they turn off comments after 5:00pm. I guess they don't want to queue up comments for review. I can't imagine they're currently getting lots of comments on a site that doesn't allow syndication.
AccessAtlanta.com also promises RSS feeds, but they don't seem to be working. Oh well - no local news in my RSS reader
-- Matt Ranlett
If you don’t mind reading the books online there are some free EBooks from APress up on their site.
A Programmer's Introduction to PHP 4.0
Dissecting a C# Application: Inside SharpDevelop
Writing Perl Modules for CPAN
Programming VB .NET: A Guide For Experienced Programmers
COM and .NET Interoperability
http://www.apress.com/free/index.html
--Brendon Schwartz
Do you ever get irritated that some sites require registration to show you free content? Take the New York Times for example. Why require me to register for free stuff? So you can have my e-mail address and spam me with junk I don't want to hear about. What if I only want to read one article? Very irritating. I'll usually abandon my attempts to read that article as soon as I'm required to register for it.
- A coworker showed me this site this morning and it's fantastic.
- Go to http://www.bugmenot.com.
- Drag the bookmarklet link onto your links bar.
- Visit a random website that requires a free account to be created so that they can spam you to hell.
- Click on the bookmarklet link you added to your links bar.
- A page pops up with a login and password.
- If the first one doesn’t work try the next one.
-- Matt Ranlett
I love BlogJet. I don’t care that it has the ability to connect to 2 million kinds of blogging engines, I only care that it makes it easier for me to connect to mine. I like the offline editing of my posts. I used to write such long stuff online that my session would time out and I’d lose my post if I forgot to CTRL+A + CTRL+C the contents.
For a while there I was frustrated with BlogJet because I couldn’t figure out how to get it to FTP my images up to the blog for me. Turns out that Michael Earls gave me the right advice when I was complaining about it to him, “play with the slashes”. I found what I messed up:
Chris Wallace also offered to give me the solution. I’d already solved it by the time he offered, but I’m only getting around to posting it now. Sorry for the delayed reaction.
— Matt Ranlett
I work in a company where the same product has been around since before I started 4 years ago. We just keep refining and adding functionality to our product. These years of work have resulted in a much better product than we had originally, but we've been butting our heads against a problem with seemingly no good solution:
How do you manage the documentation for a product where dozens of different people are adding features to the same product?
- We've tried keeping one central document but Microsoft Word isn't very good about sharing the file and letting 20 people edit it at the same time. VSS tends to want to check out to one person at a time and merging the doc changes in don't seem to work because VSS treats the file as a binary object.
- We've tried having people write design documents that show the new features but the problem here is that we end up with one out of date functional document and 300 out of date design documents. People write the design document as they think things WILL be and then write the code as things HAVE to be. The two are not always the same. But deadlines being what they are, the design document doesn't get updated and becomes useless. Also, when Person A writes a design and code for something then Person B makes a change for a different feature in that same code, Person A's document is now out of date because the changes are detailed in Person B's document.
- We've tried to force people to accept the "living document" model - where if a document dealing with your area of functionality exits you should be changing that document. Only create new documents as a last resort. The problem here is that we don't currently have a good framework of documentation covering all the areas of the code. We have a single document that covers everything and hundreds of sub-documents dealing with new features, not specific areas of code functionality. For example, if I want to add the ability to sell an non-inventory decrementing item I'll write a document about how to do that. Then the next person comes along and wants to write about refunds for tax-free items. My document didn't deal with Sales and Refunds so the next person will write a document about their specific feature. These "delta" documents talk about how the new release has changed from the original Functional Specification (the 1 big umbrella document) but they're generally useless
- How do you relay this information to the customer? You need something a customer can refer to for configuration and troubleshooting. We need something internally for the same reasons.
We're a small company and we don't have the budget to implement a massively expensive product to help us manage this problem. So I came up with an idea that I pitched to the management team (to lukewarm reception). I proposed we implement a wiki internally. A wiki is basically a website that allows anyone who views it to easily change it ("wiki" means quick or fast in Hawaiian). The best example is the world's largest wiki - the Wikipedia, with over a million articles. The beauty of a wiki for document management is that anyone who wants to can easily create marked up, cross linked documents with very little effort. If I put my functional spec document into the wiki as a page, whenever I find a word I want to expand on (like Item Sales or Item Refunds) I can simply add a link and have a new page for my new information created automatically. Since the effort to create entirely new documents suddenly becomes less than the effort to simply expand on an existing one, the document management process will slowly solve itself.
I picked FlexWiki for several reasons. 1) - it's free. 2) - it's based in .Net. and 3) - it's markup syntax is really easy to use. I slapped together a random sample of what it would look like and presented it to two of the managers. They both liked the flexibility but both are worried about the lack of structure. The other problem is that a wiki isn't very presentable to clients. I picked FlexWiki because it supports user authentication for making modifications, but that still doesn't help us print up a fancy deliverable. The other problem is that the lack of structure is great for adding content as you see fit but not necessarily condusive to easily understandable document structure.
A coworker was looking at this same problem and came up with an alternate solution. He felt that some forums would be the way to go. He chose the free Snitz forums. Structure is very rigid and easily understandable. Just like a wiki, anyone (with access) can add to a forum topic. The problem I have with the forums is that it does even less than a wiki does as far as creating documentation of a product. Forums are great for trouble shooting (which is where my coworker started his forums - documenting our troubleshooting guide) but suck as far as readable documentation goes.
I personally prefer the wiki. Look at the Wikipedia - a little effort can turn something small into a tremendous resource. Forums have their place too, but especially where documentation is concerned, I don't think they fit the bill.
I know that I am not the only person working for a company that has struggled with this same issue. Anyone have any advice or thoughts?
-- Matt Ranlett
I wrote a post asking if anyone had any comment requests and got a comment from Kevin. Well, it wasn’t really a request for comment ideas but Kevin took it as such and asked me to speak about something he and I had talked about on the phone a while back.
Is it OK to use someone else’s wireless access to the internet if you have the ability to do so? This applies to all kinds of situations, but the basic theory here is that you live near someone who has not secured their wireless router. You are close enough to use it. Should you?
There are several ways to think about this. Let’s take the pro-using side first. To begin with, are you really stealing anything? I mean, wireless internet bandwidth has no additional cost per additional user, at least to the individual paying for the subscription. As long as the paying customer is able to use their internet connection as they see fit whenever they want (within the limits of whatever contract they agreed to with the internet provider), should they care if someone else uses any leftover bandwidth? Probably not. The internet provider shouldn’t really care. The additional traffic is throttled to the limit of the bandwidth pipe they provide to the user and if the paying customer took up every bit of that bandwidth pipe they can’t say anything about it. So that cost can’t really be argued, can it? So, in these circumstances it really can’t hurt to steal wireless bandwidth you come across because there is no real impact to anyone. Can that even be called stealing? That’s like letting your neighbor water part of your lawn with overspray from a carelessly placed sprinkler. If the neighbor with the wireless router really cared about protecting their bandwidth, couldn’t they have taken some steps to prevent you from accessing the network – such as a password on the router?
Of course, the devil’s advocate would then pop up and say that using another’s internet access is bad because there are always consequences. When you siphon off some of the paying customer’s bandwidth you are taking up potentially unused bandwidth. By taking this bandwidth you are increasing the load on the internet provider’s servers and driving up costs. This will eventually result in the provider having to spend more on their servers and passing those costs on to the paying customers. In this scenario there is a direct financial impact – easily comparable to taking money from someone’s wallet. Even if your neighbor incorrectly places a sprinkler such that it waters your lawn, that water is going to cost your neighbor, not you. In this case, isn’t it your moral obligation NOT to take advantage of an unsecured wireless internet connection?
But people don’t view issues in a moral black and white vacuum. At least, they don’t usually act like that. Consider this example – a waitress returns with your change and hands you too little change back. Most people will complain about this and get the problem rectified. But if that waitress hands you too much change, people’s attitudes change. Generally, if the amount of the difference is large, most people’s consciences get the better of them and they inform the waitress and return the extra money. But if she’s off only by a little bit (a sliding threshold for all of us) we tend to walk off with the extra money thinking, “It’s not my mistake!” Stealing wireless internet access is kind of like that. If all you plan on doing is downloading your e-mail every once in a while, it’s easy to overlook the transgression. If you plan on downloading 600Mb movie files, you might see this as a larger impact activity and spring for your own access.
I got an e-mail from Kevin where he was talking about this same issue with a friend of his. Kevin and his friend were comparing the stealing of wireless access to pirating a copy of MS Office. I won’t paste the entire conversation into this blog entry, only a few words:
“… MS Office comes with a license that bars distributing copies. ISPs, by contrast, don't require their customers to promise not to allow others to use their wireless. There's no breaking of promises, or the suborning of the breaking of promises, by the person who uses an unsecured wireless network.”
So tell me what you think. Is using someone elses wireless access really stealing? Is it borrowing?
— Matt Ranlett
I keep telling people to read my blog and subscribe to it so they can keep up with what the Atlanta .Net Regular Guys are doing around town. The problem is that I frequently get blank stares from people when I tell them to subscribe to my blog.
“What’s a blog and how do I subscribe?”
If you are reading this webpage, you are reading a blog. A blog is short for a weblog. A weblog is basically an online journal where a person (or persons) can write down anything they want the world to read. Some people write about technology, some people write about politics, and some people write about their girlfriends. This blog tends to focus on technology, but you know that because you’re reading it.
Blogs are a great way for people to keep in touch with a wider audience. Just like any web page, all you need to read a blog is an Internet connection and a web browser. But blogs are more than just simple web pages because they offer the ability for someone to subscribe to the web page and get updates whenever something changes. This way, you can more easily keep track of what changes on a particular blog like this one without having to remember to go back to it and check it. This is really great when you read 50 or 60 blogs like I do.
What do I mean by “subscribe” to a blog? How does one “subscribe” to a web page? This is not the kind of subscribe where you give me your e-mail address and I send you stuff to read in e-mail. A blog actually publishes what is known as an RSS feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is basically all the editorial content of a website without any of the human readable formatting. No colors or anything like that. It looks a lot like this – a specific flavor of computer file called XML. There are programs out there, called RSS Readers which read this RSS feed and presents it to you much like e-mail. The difference here is that I, as the publisher, don’t have to worry about sending e-mails out to people, and you the reader don’t have to be concerned about your privacy and spam. The person with all the power in this relationship is you. You decide which websites you want to subscribe to. You decide how frequently you want to check for changes. You decide when you want to stop reading a specific RSS feed. All of this without the publisher doing anything other than posting their content to the web. In fact, most blogs support comments, so if you are interested in a topic you can tell the author what you think and your comments will be put online under that topic so that everyone else can read what you said.
What kind of programs read RSS feeds? There are actually tons of programs out there that can do this for you. You have to decide which one you like the best. Some of the RSS readers are services provided by websites like Bloglines.com. The advantage here is that you can read your RSS feeds from any computer. There are some that fit inside your web browser and pull all your RSS information into a web format for you. An example of this would be Mozilla FireFox’s “live bookmarks”. The advantage here is that you can seamlessly be reading a blog post, then link from a blog post to a completely new website. Finally the third category is my personal favorite – programs that handle grabbing all the RSS feeds, or aggregating all the feeds for you. I personally prefer programs like these because they offer the most flexibility and power. For example, RSSBandit allows you to work in a program similar to an e-mail program. The interface is very familiar and comfortable for me. Some of these programs, like NewsGator, actually fit inside your e-mail programs and deliver RSS information to you as if it were e-mails! Other programs like Onfolio combine several aspects – there is a standalone reader AND one that fits inside your web browser. My personal favorite is Jetbrain’s Omea Reader. I like the organizational power I get with the Omea reader that I can’t find in other programs like RSSBandit and Onfolio. Some of these programs are free, others are not. Some of these tools will actually help you write your own blog!
How can I get a blog of my very own, as I am a very clever person with lots of clever things to say? This can be both deceptively simple and complex at the same time. The easiest way to get your own blog is to ask someone you know to host it for you. That’s what Brendon and I did for three months. Then we felt confident enough to go out on our own, purchase webspace, and put up our own blog engine. A blog engine is the software program that actually turns the text I type into BOTH the webpage you are reading now AND the XML based RSS feed. There are several free blog engines available to you, notably .Text (that’s dotText) and DasBlog. This weblog uses DasBlog. There are also tools that help you publish your blog postings. I prefer to use BlogJet rather than type on a webpage (which is the default method for getting blog posts into DasBlog)
How do I find interesting blogs to read (aside from this one, of course)? This is actually the easiest part. Start with this blog and follow any links that interest you. Odds are you’ll find me referring to another person’s blog. Search for interesting topics on Google. Lots of interesting topics have people writing blog entries about them. Check with central blog services like Technorati and BlogStreet. Check with famous Internet writers like Robert Scoble.
One final note about RSS. RSS feeds are not just restricted to individual blogs. RSS is rapidly becoming THE way for an individual, group, or company to keep in touch with and establish a rapport with interested parties such as customers. Nowadays it seems like you need to have RSS publications of your sites to keep people interested. What better way to find out what’s on sale than to publish the information to the world of people who are interested enough in your products to subscribe to your RSS feed. This is what Overstock.com did with it’s WOOT.com initiative. Take a single product and sell the hell out of it with RSS until it’s gone. You know what? It’s working! RSS for shopping!
— Matt Ranlett
PS. David Cumps has an enviable internship – read his blog because it’s excellent. Read his post about blogging in general to get a different perspective of blogging 101.
Monday, March 07, 2005
Brendon, the other half of the Atlanta .Net Regular Guys, has suddenly become a bloggin’ fool! He’s posted eight of the last fourteen posts! Good Job! We need more content! More, more!
— Matt Ranlett
I took a little break from blogging on account of how much time I was spending at work finishing up this code I’ve been working on. But now that’s pretty much wrapped up and I can get back to writing the posts you have all been waiting breathlessly for. If you’ve not been waiting breathlessly for this, don’t tell me. It’s good to have your little illusions…
Coming up this Thursday will be the next edition of the Tales from the Trenches column. This week we’re talking with Paul Wilson, Atlanta’s ASP.Net MVP.
Reminder – tonight is the C# UG meeting. Doug Turnure will be talking to us about how the .Net framework handles memory management internally. This is a really fascinating topic to me, because when you know what happens under the covers you know why your apps behave the way they do. This is great when you have to debug bizarre memory related problems like Keith Rome had to do.
— Matt Ranlett
Sunday, March 06, 2005
<Brendon Rambling>
If you just want the point of the article read the last paragraph, otherwise if you got this far keep going.
You wake up at 2:30AM because you were so tired that you fell asleep at 7PM. Welcome to the world of the busy programmer. Many of you probably know exactly what I am taking about or just don’t go to bed until after 2:30AM. Part of this problem is due to the fact that I am always thinking, coming up with ideas and solutions. These traits can be look at as a blessing and a curse because I do them all of the time, just ask Matt. It is a blessing because I am able to help solve difficult problems with logical solutions quickly, but it is a curse because I am always thinking of something new to do or coming up with a new idea that I want Matt’s help to implement. I appreciate Matt for putting up with me and all my crazy ideas. Hope that they are as fun for all of you as they are for me.
Time update: 5:15AM
Talk about a distraction. Who me? Get distracted? Are we back yet? Oh hi there audience let me tell you what just happened. Well this is how it went down. A friend ours, Jake (hi Jake), was kind enough to sign up to be a .NET Regular Guy. Thanks! I noticed this and was going to check the other people that signed up. NOTE: Thanks for those that have signed up I will make sure and hook you up. Well once I checked out who was signed up I was looking around the site as I normally do and I didn’t like the fact that the site wasn’t working right. So I took the next bit of time to fix the code and make sure everything looked ok and was set up right. If anyone has some feedback on our site please let us know how we can make it better for you, and by let us know I mean tell Matt =). Or what we can add to make it a useful site for the Atlanta .NET community. So back to why I started writing this blog.
I have a new idea, image that. I want to start a weekly blog entry of Atlanta .NET How To’s written by people in the community. I got this idea after reading Chris Wallace’s follow up blog to our Tale from the Trenches. Here is the idea, you can tell me if you don’t like it or if you do. Once a week we will put a blog post called “HOW TO: <whatever is figured out>” on our site from an Atlanta .NET person. We will have a link to their blog, article, or copy and paste from an email if they send it to us. If no one in Atlanta writes something that we can link to, which I think would be crazy there are a million people in Atlanta, then Matt or I will write a HOW TO article from the requests of the community. The idea here is that you will be able to read the HOW TO article and talk to the person through email or at the .NET user groups to ask questions. So thanks to Chris Wallace we will start with his post of HOW TO: Create Dynamic Buttons using GDI+ for WebPages. Please keep me posted if you read a good how to posting for us.
--Brendon Schwartz
Wednesday, March 02, 2005 Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Are you wondering what I did this past weekend? Probably not, but you know I am going to tell you anyways. I created a new calendar for the ADNRG (Atlanta .NET Regular Guys) website and create a page to let you join the ADNRG. I will list the features I added this weekend later in the blog. All of the code is on the devcow web site, but I still consider it beta until it has been tested a little more. Please let us know if you have any trouble using anything or if you would like any new features.
Calendar Features Addition: www.devcow.com/calendar2
1) Created calendar to use same data as all other calendar and notification systems
2) Added vCalendar functionality to let you click an event and let you add it to Outlook or any system that supports vCalendar
3) Added an RSS feed of all the events for this year on the calendar
Join the Group Feature Addition: www.devcow.com/regularguys
1) You can now sign up to let us know who you are and join our group
2) The ability to view all users that want to show their name as being one of the Atlanta .NET Regular Guys
On top of these features I worked on the site in general to make it better. In the long term we will try to make the site easier and better to use for anyone trying to keep up with what is going on with .NET in the Atlanta area. Please let us know if we are missing anything or can change anything to help you keep organized.
Thanks,
--Brendon Schwartz
Monday, February 28, 2005
I have always loved movies and especially trailers. Trailers give you a look at what is to come. The problem is I do not have all of the skills to create a good trailer. Here is what I need to know to create the trailer I want.
1) Create a story board
2) Find a way to put two or more audio tracks together (i.e. Spoken track and music)
3) Find a way to film movies with professional quality.
4) Find a way to put the film or movies on the computer
5) Find photos into the movie
If anyone is interested in helping out or knows people that can put me in the right direction, please let me know.
--Brendon Schwartz
Sunday, February 27, 2005
Why are there so many authors today thinking that it is a good idea to write an entire book on the internet? Ok. I did find it interesting when Scoble said he would do it, but my first thought was that I am not going to read an entire book on the internet. Then, the next thing I know he makes a post that they are going to actually publish the book, but write it on the web. Fair enough.
Today I read Don Box’s blog and he was talking about writing another book, which caught my interest. Most of you know I look at Don’s work as being some of the top work in our industry, but then he talks about writing in a wiki. Now don’t get me wrong, I do see a point to the wiki’s. However, I also see too many of them with too much information that is not organized. I really don’t get it, I mean I love reading books. Not books on the computer screen, but actual books. Books I can take with me, books that don’t reflect on the computer screen with bad lighting, books I can hold in my hand and read whenever and wherever I want to, without a power cord attached.
I know I may be old fashioned, but I still buy books today. I am always looking for good deals on places like amazon.com. Maybe I am crazy, or the only person who will not start reading entire books on the computer today, but I thought there were more of us out there. If anyone else actually reads paper books you should join us at the Atlanta Book Club and help us show that people do read books (made of paper). Sorry Don, there is just too much indexed information out there already. I enjoy my stories to be all in one place with a binding on the side. --Brendon Schwartz
Thursday, February 24, 2005
"A picture is worth a thousand word"
Do you believe that? Can a picture truly tell a story that would take a thousand words? Sometimes I feel that is very true - some pictures can tell you things that no amount of words can convey. Take the news, for example. A print story about the horrors of the tsunami just can not convey the devastation like a photo or video can.
For people who think an picture is worth a thousand words, Internet news sites like Google News must seem very dry - a thousand words and three images (does that equal four thousand words?). Enter a new way to look at the world. 10x10. 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale. http://www.tenbyten.org
Rather than attempt to tell you in my own words, let me link you to the Wired article about 10x10.
-- Matt Ranlett
PS - Another fascinating site by the same people is WordCount - an interactive ranking of all of the words in the English language as found in a sample of "100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written" I learned from this site that my name "Matthew" appears more frequently than "Microsoft", which appears more frequently than "Matt". Those Brits sure are silly people!
OMFG! I just read the funniest article! The article basically states that rappers and bloggers have a lot in common with each other. While not coming out and saying that Scoble is Eminem and Lotka is Snoop-Dog, Levin talks about rappers as a social group and bloggers as another very similar social group. I have to give you my favorite quote from the article:
"...[R]appers' and bloggers' self-importance also has something to do with the supremely annoying righteousness that rides along with those who believe they're overturned the archaic forms of expression favored by The Man—that is, whitey and/or the mainstream media. Ninety percent of rap lyrics are self-congratulatory rhymes about how great the rapper is at rapping, the towering difficulties of succeeding in the rap game, or the lameness of wanksta rivals. Blogging is a circle jerk that never stops circling: links to posts by other bloggers, following links to newspaper stories about bloggers, following wonderment at the corruptions and complacency of old-fashioned, credentialed journalism."
http://slate.msn.com/id/2113913/
-- Matt Ranlett
PS: In case you want to know how I found this awesome article, I was reading Wired Magazine. Wired Magazine has this great info graphic in every issue where they take some phenomenon like the emerging market for pollution credits (this month's issue) and charts it out in some really slick way. I just noticed that the title of this great feature is "Infoporn". Awesome title! So I went looking for it on Google - surely there is more of this stuff out there. I came across Paul Boutin's blog - he's one of the writers who works for Wired and occasionally creates Infoporn. You'll definitely want to check his blog out. Not always technical, but funny!http://paulboutin.weblogger.com/2005/02/24#a1137
Friday, February 18, 2005
I've been looking around on the web and have seen loads of people criticize Microsoft for announcing that they were "moving quickly" with the Internet Explorer 7 announcement. Don't be too quick to knock Microsoft - they sat back on the IE front after they totally killed Netscape and concentrated on other areas. Now that Google and FireFox showed Microsoft that there are still growth areas out there on the internet where consumers are concerned, expect to see lots of action on that front. We've recently had mention of a new version of IE (the focus will be security - think phishing), a new search tool, a new version of their mapping software which kicks MapQuest's butt, and more. Microsoft is a big company but it's competing on a hundred fronts at once. Even the US Army prefers fewer battlefronts!
-- Matt Ranlett
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Shawn W rants about the new HHGTTG trailer in his blog post. I think this movie has great geek potential. Anyone up for a social geek gathering to go watch this? I think Chris Sells is planning something like this out on the west coast. If he can do it, so can we!
-- Matt Ranlett
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
I guess I'll have to start editing the images when I am ready to post them to the website. Oh well. I'm not going to bother with my existing images.
Nothing kills my productivity at work more than interruptions, from both people and computer based interruptions. Sometimes those interruptions are warranted but frequently they're not. One of the main killers is Outlook - it keeps popping up those cool e-mail notifications. I think they're neat but I tend to pay too much attention to them. 43Folders.com has a set of 5 e-mail productivity tips that I'm going to start following tomorrow.
http://www.43folders.com/2005/02/five_fast_email.html
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Aren't we cute? This is who I've been dating since Dec. 27th. We just spent our Valentine's day eating at Savu - an excellent French/Asian fusion restaurant inside of the W Hotel on Ashford Dunwoody. The food there was absolutely FANTASTIC! Be sure to bring your wallet though - it's a tad bit pricy!
-- Matt Ranlett
Monday, February 14, 2005
Are you one of those people who has to manage a large number of documents in various assorted places on your hard drive? Maybe you have dozens of folders inside of your My Documents directory or somewhere else, easier to get to with VSS. Have you ever been frustrated by the Open dialog in MS Word or Excel – you keep having to drill down to your various different directories starting from your My Documents directory? This can especially be a pain in the neck when you have networked drives mapped on your machine – that seems to make your machine slow to a crawl when using the location pull down.
Finally some help – Microsoft has built in a My Places list of shortcuts you can use in your Open and Save dialogs. I’m sure you’ve seen it before:
You can add to the My Places shortcut list. First you want to set the current list to display with small icons. Then you use the Open dialog to drill down to your preferred folder. Once you’re inside of the folder you want to see in your shortcut list, use the Tools menu to add to My Places. Finally, by right-clicking on the new entry, you can move it to the position you want it in the list. Simple stuff like this is what I love about Windows!
-- Matt Ranlett
Friday, February 11, 2005
There’s a guy here at work who has an office he can close the door to. He sits in there all day and listens to a radio while he works. His favorite radio station is 96Rock, one of the Clear Channel stations around town. As he sits there and listens, he calls in for any radio contest he hears. He’s won so many prizes that we had to give him a nickname – “Punk Bitch” or PB for short. He’s not only won tickets and free CD and DVDs, he’s won cash and free trips – including a trip to the Bahamas to see David Bowie!
Anyway, I couldn’t very well let him win everything, so one week after he won a DVD prize pack AND $200 in two separate contests, I went out and bought a radio to keep at my desk. My little radio paid for itself in one week. I’ve now won a $75 gift certificate to buy CDs from Criminal Records, movie tickets to two movies, tickets to the Sinner’s Ball, and just today tickets to the Saturday Gwinnett Gladiators’ game. My problem is scheduling – every time I win tickets to something I can’t go! I’ve either got a user group meeting or I’ve got other plans I’ve committed to. So I’ve been giving them away. Building the good will. The only thing I kept is the gift certificate and I haven’t even used it yet! I was going to use it last weekend but I was sick. Maybe this weekend I’ll have all kinds of new legal music (Michael).
— Matt Ranlett
Thursday, February 10, 2005
Last Thursday I came down with something which knocked me out of commission for three days. I made it into work on Monday but only just barely. At least three other people at work are sick as well, and I have friends in New York and California who I talk to – they were sick too. It’s easy to see why John Barry’s study of the influenza pandemic and current fears of the bird flu and SARS are so much at the forefront of national concern.
Wash your hands often!
— Matt Ranlett
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Everyone who came to the main .Net user group meeting on Jan 31st saw a sample of Microsoft's Photo Story 3 when Michael Earls put up a slide show of his San Francisco trip using Windows XP Media Center Edition. That was the animated slideshow featuring the automated pan and scan of photos. Well, if you want to do that for yourself but you don't have XP Media Center Edition, you have another option. Microsoft has released Photo Story 3. This nifty little tool will import a bunch of pictures, allow you to set the slideshow to music, and create a WMV video file which you can distribute. Fantastically easy to use, I created a slideshow of nearly 300 photos complete with 8 different songs in the background in under 3 minutes. I showed this off at work and everyone with kids is already downloading it. Try it out - it's completely FREE!
-- Matt Ranlett
Monday, January 31, 2005
What's your favorite candy?
Sunday, January 30, 2005
I didn't move any of the comments over, but I got all the posts moved from the old blog to the new one. Nearly 100 posts - not bad for a months!
-- Matt Ranlett
Everyone needs to mark their calendars RIGHT NOW! The upcoming Atlanta Code Camp has been scheduled for Saturday, May 14th. Leaders, tracks, dates, etc are all online now. Check out the Atlanta.Net UG’s page on this. Click the link that says Code Camp on the left (directions for the blind). Start making your plans to attend and if you want to present, send a message to the people in charge (Atlanta’s Mark Dunn of .Net Rocks fame and our own uber-blogger Michael Earls)
— Matt Ranlett
If you really want to waste some time, check out the free, networkable artillery shooter game Scorched 3D. An update of the old Scorched Earth DOS game, this one is an excellent 3D game which offers you the ability play across a network or even on internet servers. Buy big guns, protect yourself with shields and parachutes, and nuke your enemies off the map!
www.scorched3d.co.uk – Free download and free source code!
— Matt Ranlett
Yesterday Microsoft hosted an open house in their offices for all the local Certified Partners. There was a 30 minute introduction slideshow (which I missed most of thanks to traffic) and a short tour of the offices. Aside from that, you were supposed to wander around and talk to people. Of course, I was perfectly willing to talk to anyone but I had other things on my mind. So rather than talking to more than 4 people I retired to a corner office and whipped out my tablet. I brought it in b/c I didn’t know what kind of meetings to expect. Brendon and I sat together and wrote the blog entry about not being able to create an ASP.Net application.
Microsoft brought in a catering company to put out some food – they must have spent a fortune, there was a TON of food. Like 10 different catering stations. Everything from salad to dessert (all the other courses too) and a beer and wine bar. Since I was heading out to dinner afterwards, I didn’t really eat much. Just a sample of the sesame chicken strips and a brownie. MS also stepped up with the door prizes – 2 Xboxes and 2 portable DVD players. I didn’t win anything (and neither did Brendon, for a change) but they gave us some consolation T-Shirts (while supplies lasted).
— Matt Ranlett
Just a general last minute notice that there is an Open House at the Microsoft offices today at 4pm. Register on the web (and keep up with the Microsoft Events page). Sorry for not updating you guys earlier, this totally slipped my mind.
— Matt Ranlett
It is funny how you can draw similarities between two different ideas but still point out their similarities. At first thought, Baseball players and people that work on .NET are usually on two totally different ends of the spectrum, but let me explain why they might be the same.
Similarity – Baseball is at a stage where players have now been around for 20 some years, just like some of the heavy hitters (pun intended) in .NET have been around Windows for some time now.
Difference – Baseball players like to play catch. Developers tend to always be playing catch up, even when a project manager thinks there is plenty of times.
Similarity – The great baseball players try to get together to form better teams or work out groups. We have seen many times in .NET that there are banks of great developers that band together to create an environment that is right for them.
Difference – Baseball players hit things for a living. If a .NET developer hit things for a living, they would probably be sued.
Similarity – Baseball players tend to strike out quite a bit. So do .NET developers, or any computer person for that matter.
Difference – People pay good money to see baseball players at work. I will guarantee that no person in their right mind will come to watch me at work. Ever!
Similarity – Once baseball players get to a certain age they let the younger guys fill in for them and they start to step out of the lime light. Once a .NET developer gets to a certain age, they usually start to move to a manager role (see any similarity yet?), or they start to step out of the lead role and let some younger person take over.
Difference – Baseball players usually only last a couple of years. Most developers last much longer than that.
The point of all of this is that eventually the top dogs in the .NET world will move on and the question will be: who are the rookies today? Is it you? I plan on keeping my batting average as high as I can, you should too. Hope to see you in 20 years when I will reflect on where I have gotten. Hope this one was a little more fun than my usual technical entries. Please add ideas you have on the subject and let me know.
— Brendon Schwartz
TIME Magazine’s 50 coolest websites:
http://www.time.com/time/techtime/200406/list.html
This is a pretty good list – I actually go to 8 of these sites on a fairly regular basis. Some are aimed at kids, or people with kids, but many of them are quite interesting. This is not aimed at the excessively techie people such as anyone likely to be reading this blog. Those people might like to just look through BlogLine’s top blogs:
http://bloglines.com/topblogs
-- Matt Ranlett
Earlier today I was having a conversation where I called someone 'hysterical' and a 'lunatic'. That set me to thinking about English words and their origins. These two words clearly come from Greek roots but frankly, who cares? The people over at the Oxford English Dictionary, that's who!
I like to browse around Amazon.com occasionally - find a book I like and click through their recommendations and “other people are buying THIS book” links to see what else is out there which might interest me. I've got something like a dozen books on my wishlist as a result. I was browsing around the Amazon inventory in this fashion when I found The Meaning of Everything: the Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. I normally stick to my geeky roots with sci-fi types of books, but this one really caught my eye. Here is the story of a massive database project done before databases existed. A handful of men guided this sixty year long project to find the meaning of every word in the English language. Where did the word periwinkle come from? Stuff like that. It's a true life story of dedication, madness, and mice living in the letter B. I've not managed to start the book thanks to my hyperactive social life, but I'm really looking forward to it.
-- Matt Ranlett
So I've got a friend, Jeff Loose, who maintains his own web site (after I taught him HTML). Check his site out at http://www.studioglassatlanta.com. He manufactures custom stained glass windows and he’s damn good at it. Here’s the thing – he’s not very tech savvy and he’ll be the first to admit that. I taught him to do his own site so he wouldn’t depend on anyone else doing it for him. Now he wants to be listed in search engines. He’s not asking for the top hits nationwide, but when you type in certain relevant keywords, such as ‘Stained Glass Atlanta’ he wants to come up near the top.
So how do you increase your relevance in Google’s rankings? I know one of the ways to do it is to have lots of other people linking to you from their sites. I know about meta tags and the keywords. Surely there has to be more. What else can be done? Think of this particular guy’s site. He does one thing. It’s location specific. You live in that location and want that one thing, you go to Google and type it in. Why shouldn’t you get his site popping up near or at the top? Stained glass in Atlanta isn’t a very populous business. He’s been doing it for 2 or more years now and he’s excellent. When you want custom made art or stained glass windows in Atlanta you should be able to find his site (www.studioglassatlanta.com) without any problem. How’s a guy with a little web site like this one, without a ton of techie friends to help him out, how’s he become a big item in Google?
— Matt Ranlett
PS – shameless plugs to www.studioglassatlanta.com are on purpose – I know THIS site gets hit by Google fairly frequently and I wanted to use whatever hits I get from Google’s crawler programs to help his site out. Good luck Jeff, awesome custom stained glass window maker at in Atlanta at www.studioglassatlanta.com!
I’ve long complained that I didn’t like writing my blog posts online – too suceptible to timeouts and stupid errors which make my text simply disappear. I was originally asking for a solution which would let me e-mail my posts from Outlook, but I didn’t find anything I was happy with. So I’ve turned to BlogJet as recommened by Scott Densmore. A wicked cool app which grants great flexibility in an offline posting tool. I’m really new to this tool but I’m liking it so far.
— Matt Ranlett
"I have installed an interesting application - BlogJet. It's a cool Windows client for my blog tool (as well as for other tools). Get your copy here: http://blogjet.com" - test message
I just wanted everyone to know that I'm dating a special girl - and her name is Kim.
It might not seem like a long time since my posts about the divorce, but rest assured that I was 1) ready to date and 2) my previous relationship ended long before the legal paperwork acknowledged that fact.
-- Matt Ranlett
I cooked dinner last night, for a girl named Kim! The remarkable part of this story isn't that her name is Kim (while that's cool, it's not the focus of this entry), it's that I cooked. I don't normally cook. I think that I've prepared dinner for myself twice since early December. Mostly I've been eating out or just skipping eating. But I got a recipe (from my mother - don't snicker) and I made it. It required use of the oven. I normally hate the oven. You know how you put stuff on the grill and there's fire telling you what's hot? The oven is different - the entire damn thing gets hot! I mean, you flip a switch and PRESTO - burn central! I'm a wimp when it comes to pain and I reserve a special kind of wimpiness for burns. However, I faced down my fears like a man, or at least like a wimpering little girl, and put a chicken dish in the oven. 50ish minutes later I had edible food - food that actually tasted good! This exceeded my expectations. Now I'll have to try again.
-- Matt Ranlett
And to those of you snickering about how my Mom helped me to cook (long distance), you should know better than to knock Jewish boys and their mothers!
Prepare yourselves!
At some point in the next 2 to 6 months we will be hosting a Code Camp in our fair city. Things are still in the early early planning stages, but take a look at the Florida Code Camp's lineup. If the Atlanta Code Camp get's even half as good a lineup it will be a can't miss event.
Speaking of can't miss events, let's chat for a moment about the local developer community. We've got tons of awesome tech firms in the area. We've got dozens of “famous” developers in the area. Atlanta has several Microsoft MVPs. Why is it that we don't get many of these people at our local area user groups? I go to pretty much EVERY UG meeting and we've topped out at maybe 120 people at a single UG meeting. Most of the time we hover between 15 to 40 people per meeting, and a lot of these are the same people showing up at multiple groups. Come on, people! Start showing up to some of these meetings! They're a free resource for you and even if you don't use a single thing you learn at these meetings, I promise you that you'll learn SOMETHING!
With few exceptions, Atlanta seems to be a town full of lazy people. We don't support our local sports franchises and we don't support our local user groups. The user groups are FREE! Most of them have their acts together enough to post what the next topics are at least a week in advance of the meeting. Keep up with the websites and plan to attend at least one UG meeting a month. I promise it will be worth it. And when you come, drag someone along with you. The first meeting I went to, I was dragged to by a friend. Now I'm hooked. I've managed to drag three or four other people along occasionally and they always enjoy themselves.
Paul Lockwood does an excellent job of maintaining a calendar of upcoming events in town. Keep tabs on the calendar and plan accordingly.
-- Matt Ranlett
Thanks to my apparent inability to read e-mails and tell time, I missed our dinner at Nava. To those of you who spend half an hour waiting on me, I apologize. I will do better next time.
-- Matt Ranlett
Let's share some fun airplane stories. I was just talking to some people at lunch about this and recalled my favorite airplane ride:
It is a 3 hour flight from San Antonio TX to Atlanta GA. I was flying back to Atlanta after doing some consulting work out in San Antonio for my previous employer. A late flight on a Friday night, I was looking forward to sleeping for most if not all of the flight back, as I was scheduled to land at 1am. I remember there only being two seats on the side I was sitting on, because I had the window seat and the guy sitting next to me was on the aisle. The guy sitting next to me was an older man, gray hair, and he clearly had the same idea I did about sleeping the entire flight back. As soon as we had taken off, he put his seat back and slouched down as far as he could. He fell asleep before I did and quickly revealed that he had sleep apnea - he started choking and gasping for air every time he fell asleep. He'd choke so badly that he would wake himself up for a moment before falling back asleep for more choking. I have never come so close to killing another human being out of shear rage! I never touched him or said anything (I really should have) but that was the worst flight I have ever been on.
-- Matt Ranlett
It's been so long since I've been to the grocery store that I'm starting to run out of food at home. So I'm rummaging around the fridge for what I have left that's edible and is not a condiment or beer and I came up with some cookies. I brought them into work to share and the best comment I received was, “Baklava for breakfast? That rich!”. To which I replied, “Want one?” “Sure! Yummy!”
Yesterday I at breakfast at the Crescent Moon diner in Decatur - I had a half order of their Elvis skillet, potatos, smoked chicken, mozzarella, and scrambled eggs cooked together in a cast iron skillet. The day before that I skipped breakfast. Today, I had Baklava!
-- Matt Ranlett
Michael Earls has been kind enough to host my blog on his home server for the past 4 months. Problem is that now he's getting killed with spam at home so he's going to be taking down his server. We're going to be moving to a new site - www.cerkit.com/blogs/regularguys.
When the move does happen (probably this week) we hope to have a referrer link for a few weeks, but this server (weblogs.cerkit.com) will be decomissioned soon.
-- Matt Ranlett
Shawn Wildermuth has been doing a great job of bringing stability to the Atlanta Geek Dinners. Check out the blog on the NerdDinner.com site to keep up. The reason I mention this is that we're meeting TONIGHT! 6pm at the 5 Seasons Brewery on Roswell Road. Everyone better be there!
-- Matt Ranlett
I went to court Wednesday morning to finalize my divorce. I showed up at 7:30 for an 8:45 appointment and didn't get to see the judge until 9:50. Of course, once I got in front of the judge, I didn't have to do a thing - Deanna was sworn in, asked about 4 yes or no questions and we were done. Took 3 minutes.
It was good while it lasted and it ended well. We parted as friends. In fact, when we were done getting divorced, I took her out to breakfast. I think we'll be able to remain friends.
-- Matt Ranlett
Well, if you believe my crazy uncle, I know two people who work for the CIA. But I really do know someone who is an intelligence analyst for the CIA. We went to high school together and she was a brilliant student. I just heard from her recently and found out that she's going to be moving to Belgium for two years. She's currently brushing up on her French (back in high school we were in the same French class) and she'll be moving at the end of the summer. Best of luck to you Tammy!
I realize she'll never read this post. That's ok - I don't mind.
-- Matt Ranlett
I've bitten the bullet and started dating again. I got fixed up (kinda) and I've tried Match.com. Should be fun and I'm looking forward to whatever comes next. I'm just hopeful that I meet someone I really like. I don't think of myself as a really shallow person. I think that it's what you have inside that counts. I really want to find someone I can talk to for hours without having to search for things to talk about. Of course, I'm a little shallow - don't neglect the physical chemistry. That has to click as well!
Anyway, here's to clicking!
-- Matt Ranlett
With very few exceptions, I have been highly diappointed by what Hollywood has offered us this year so far. However, I'm looking forward to the newest remake of H.G. Wells' classic War of the Worlds. This time with Tom Cruise. I can't help liking all of his movies.
-- Matt Ranlett
Last night Michael Earls was kind enough to have me over to his house for dinner. His wife Laurie cooked up some incredible Indian food and the four of us (including Laurie's sister) chilled out drinking some kind of mango concoction Michael whipped up. Great food and great company.
Mr. Energy was a bit doped up on allergy medicine (welcome back to GA) so we kept the geek level down to a dull roar. Only a bit of talk about XP Media Center, Smart Phones, and Microsoft's developer evangelists. We're both really excited about how technology is enriching the lives of everyone around us. Mobility, entertainment, communications - more than you can shake a stick at. I'm really glad I get to be a witness to these incredible technologies being created and delivered. I'm hopeful that my involvement in the User Groups brings me closer to all of this great stuff.
Michael and Laurie, thanks for the great dinner. Remind me to get the recipie for that Indian dish. Thanks again!
-- Matt Ranlett
With it being the holidays and all, I feel the need for a bit of reflection. I read a saying somewhere, “New friends are silver but old friends are gold.” I was thinking about that over these holiday parties. I've got a few old friends I've been able to keep as the years have dragged on. I recently ran into a guy I knew well from college. Having dinner with him was great. Just this past Sunday I went to a holiday party with one of my best friends from High School. It was awesome to talk to her as well. However, this has been the year of new friends for me. I started going to the user groups this year, and that's not only brought me closer to Brendon, it's introduced me to Paul, Keith, and Michael. There are actually so many people out there now that I see on a monthly if not weekly basis; I can't name everyone's name. And it seems like my meeting new people has been speeding up as the year draws closer to a close.
I just wanted everyone to know that I've been having a blast and I can't wait for next year. I haven't had this much fun since college.
-- Matt Ranlett
PS - you'll not be seeing me link to MSN Spaces anymore. I've not got the time nor energy to maintain two blogs. I never put anything up there anyway, so consider it dropped.
I'm a fairly intelligent guy, right? Some of you know me. I might not be on Doug T's level when it comes to being an uber-programmer (I never worked for Developmentor), but I'm not an idiot. However, I'm the dumb kid in my family. One of these days I'm going to have to convince my brother to come down to Atlanta and meet some of you guys. You guys might be smart, and you certainly know your technology, but I think that next to my father, my brother is the brightest person I know.
The kid is a lawyer (well, law clerk at the moment) in Chicago. I've been talking about him a lot recently to various folks, so I thought I'd mention him here. He occasionally checks out this blog, so he'll be all self-conscious when he gets to this entry, but that's ok. He has worked hard (harder than any of you slackers to take Sundays off) and he deserves some recognition for it.
Tell me some stories about the smartest people you know.
-- Matt Ranlett
MSN Spaces
Anyone interested in a social gathering of geeks and geek families? No geek talk allowed? OK, minimal geek talk allowed. But there are a lot of familiar faces at bunches of these UG meetings. Would anyone be interested in going somewhere to dinner and bringing spouses along for the ride? I'm sure we can swap stories that don't involve transistors and using blocks.
-- Matt Ranlett
MSN Spaces
Wow, I'm going to have to stop and catch my breath. It's been crazy this month with all the holiday parties. Let's see what I did, this week alone. Monday was the SQL Server UG meeting. Tuesday was the company Christmas party. Wednesday was the VB.Net UG meeting. Thursday I met a friend from college for dinner (but if I hadn't been there I would have been at the Geek Dinner). Friday I went with friends from work to dinner and a hockey game. Saturday I went to Brendon's for a party. Sunday (tonight) I went to an old high school friend's for a party. I've had more food and more alcohol this week than I can shake a stick at. I don't exactly know what that saying means, I can shake a stick at an awful lot of stuff, but I think it still applies.
Next week I've got the Mobility UG presentation on Monday, dinner with my ex and other friends on Wednesday, drinks with a friend on Thursday, and Christmas with other friends all day on Saturday. And for New Years I might be driving all the way out to Dawsonville for a new-years party Brendon's in-laws are throwing. Wow - I'm a busy guy.
Somewhere in the middle of all this stuff I have to find the time to be a geek. I've got a tech book (as yet undecided which one) to read and I've got some presentations to plan. With all the partying and drinking, I might not get anything done!
PS - Does anyone remember the Atlanta Multimedia UG? I'm not sure if it was a programmer thing, but I think I recently met the founder. Just curious if anyone remembers it.
-- Matt Ranlett
MSN Spaces
So I provide free tech support for the place my (soon to be ex-I wife works, and today I found and fixed an interesting bug involving Adobe's Acrobat Reader. The problem was that the Acrobat Reader would show its splash screen and then freeze, taking 100% of the CPU. There were a few other programs on the machine which had also started to take a really long time to start, but none were as bad as Adobe. No amount of reinstalling seemed to help. I did some online research and found not a whole lot. So I turned to SysInternals. I used Process Explorer and didn't see anything, so I went back online. I found a site mention that Adobe used temporary files. So I checked the Local System Temp directory and found a big surprise, over 66,000 zero-byte temp files! Now, if memory serves, you shouldn't have more than 65,000 files in a single directory. I removed all of the temp files and now Adobe and all the other programs are happy. It seems like Adobe can get into a state where it doesn't clean up after itself. If this goes unchecked, problems can occur which can affect other software. FYI, keep your temp directories clean!
-- Matt Ranlett
I didn't want to be very dramatic, but I felt the few people who read this (most of whom I see on a weekly or monthly basis) ought to know what was up. I've especially been motivated by all the really nice stuff Michael has been saying about Laurie (and visa versa). It's nice to hear about stuff that doesn't necessarily require a computer or computer degree to understand. But here's the thing; I've been thinking for a while about how to mention this in the broadcast medium of the internet, but I haven't thought of anything really witty. So here goes the brute force approach:
Deanna and I met in high school - 10th grade Government class to be exact. She sat behind me and kept talking to her friends near her and laughing all the time. I wanted in on the jokes, so I persisted in being near to her over the coming months (some say I won by attrition). We started dating in December of 1992, 11th grade. She's still the only girl I've ever really kissed. We dated steadily through college and decided to get married immediately after graduation. I proposed on Christmas of our junior year. We've been married for six years now, and we've had some really great times together. She'd always been by best friend and closest confidant.
But all good things come to an end somehow, and we're currently in the process of getting a divorce. She moved out in October and we filed for divorce in the DeKalb courthouse in November. January 10th is our court date, when a judge named Linda will sign a paper saying we're officially not dating anymore. She asked me for a separation in June and we discussed the details of the separation over our sixth year anniversary dinner. She when she moved out in October, she moved into a life she preferred over life with me. I don't feel like I did anything wrong and I don't hate her for leaving. It has not been a bitter split - we're both still friends who still talk and do things together. We both decided that our lives had gone in seperate directions and we now were not right for each other anymore. I've had plenty of time to get used to the idea, and I've slowly been letting other people know about it.
So there it is - more a news brief than a touching message like what Michael's been writing recently, but something that I needed to get off my chest. Also, now everyone know why I've been able to spend 20-30 hours a month on user group meetings!
-- Matt Ranlett
MSN Spaces
It's good to do something new every once in a while. I just went to my first ever hockey game tonight - I watched the Gwinnett Gladiators beat up on the Carolina Inferno. Even though my only exposure to hockey had previously been with the Sega Genesis and the NHL game my little brother and I played (he usually won), I had a great time. It was the minor leagues of hockey, so the players were really young and hot headed. I got to see a knockdown fight on the ice and the ice skating Santa Claus was able to jump 2 kegs of beer! Can you say red-neck fun? It was good silly fun and I was there with some great people. Brendon, I'm sorry you had to miss it - I expect your cave to be spotless when we come over tomorrow!
Matt Ranlett
MSN Spaces
My company just had it's annual holiday party, and this year I got the be the lucky guy who dropped a glass of red wine on his lap! Lucky me! Whoohoo! Now, I'm not a heavy drinker by any means. I have a strict limit of two drinks (and a lapful of red wine) when I'm out. However, this time my drinks apparently wanted to wrestle the food for space on the table, and the food won by knockdown.
-- Matt Ranlett
So far, this blog has mostly been me posting a review of all the UG meetings Brendon and I go to. Brendon occasionally manages to interrupt me and sneak in something not directly UG related, but I take up most of the bandwidth here on this blog. So after the Atlanta MDF meeting tonight, Brendon and I stood in the freezing cold parking garage talking about a bunch of different things. The last thing we talked about was this blog space and how we're not really using it in true Atlanta .Net blogger fashion. Not enough technical topics.
So, the goal we've laid out for ourselves is a minimum of one technical blog post a month on a continuing technical topic. My topic will probably be the Tablet PC (probably Ink and Speech related). Brendon suggested he might pick BizTalk as his topic. Neither one of us is sure exactly what we're doing, but we figure if we don't change things up we'll stagnate. Plus, who couldn't use an additional challenge to an already crunched schedule?
-- Matt Ranlett
MSN Space
I know that some blogging products give you the ability to e-mail your blog entries to the posting engine. I'm thinking specifically of RadioLand. I might have taking too long a pull from the digital crack pipe, but I want to do this with .Text. I think I'd be faster about getting stuff posted if I could use Outlook to write my posts rather then the online webform. Anyone know if there is a tool?
-- Matt Ranlett
MSN Spaces
I don't know if anyone is interested, but I posted an article to the site. I don't know if articles get pulled by RSS readers like posts do so I'm mentioning it in a post for anyone who might be interested
-- Matt Ranlett
MSN Space
Been so busy, I haven't had the time to post anything. Well, hopefully that's going to change. I've got a plan to get some stuff done this weekend and I'm going to start by posting the two blog entries I've had saved as Word docs on my tablet. These blog entries were partly experiments in alternate entry methods - speech and pen based input. Then I've got about a dozen or so entries I want to comment to - mostly to friends, some to strangers. I've recently started making my voice heard in a newsgroup or two (rather than just lurking). Busy busy! And somewhere this weekend I need to start preparing a presentation for the Mobility UG about tablets and polish a presentation for the VB.Net UG about Sharepoint. Busy busy. Plus, my boss would really be happy if I could dial in this weekend some time and fix a bug I just found Friday (which I may have caused, so it would be good to make this go away)
-- Matt Ranlett
MSN Space
The reason I can only get an hour and 15 minutes (on average) out of my battery is my wireless network connection. Even if I'm not connecting to a network, the thing is constantly soaking up power in the ongoing search for unsecured access points.
Turn off the wireless network (little switch near the screen hinge) and turn down the screen brightness slightly and now my battery life advertises 3 hours and 30 minutes. I haven't tested it to see how close to that I actually get, but this, combined with the Max Battery power scheme, will get me all I want from this little guy. It takes less than a minute for the network to come alive and connect to my wireless AP if I flick the switch on, so some judicious manual intervention here when I'm not intending to spend hours surfing the web will really extend the battery life.
-- Matt Ranlett
I accept the fact that I am part of the tech support generation. Nothing shows that like the 10 hours I put in working on my mom’s computer this week. 1 was happy to do it to. In fact, it was a lot of fun. I was basically playing with a pair of tablet pc’s. I finally learned hour to use the floating input panel on mine while I showed my mother how to best use her tablet. As a matter of fact, I’m using MS Word and the pen to site this blog post. While sitting in the airport. I worked with her to pick out a new tablet, we moved all of her old programs and data from her old computer to her new and, and I made sure she knew how to sync her IPod and Palm Pilot. By the time we finished, I’d spent about ten hours and had gotten more familiar with tablets in general. Ihara yet to play with the speech recognition, but I’ve learned that the handwriting recognition kicks ass. I have not really used mine for any work purposes yet so right now it is just the best toy ever! I wouldn’t trade it for the best desktops anywhere.
-- Matt Ranlett
I brought my brand new tablet pc with me when I went home for Thanksgiving.
It so impressed my parents that they went out to purchase one of their own. So this review is a comparison of two tablets, the Averatec 3500C and the Toshiba S810.
I have the Averatec 3500. I really think it is cool, with great features and excellent usability. But is isn’t without it’s problems, which are highlighted when comparing the Averatec to the Toshiba.
This Toshiba has a better digitizer integrated with the screen. Where the Averatec seems to have trouble with the calibration of the pen to the mouse pointer around the edges of the screen, there is no such issue on the Toshiba.
The Toshiba comes with the Intel Centrino wireless Ethernet hookup while the Averatec uses a Ralink wireless setup with its AMD processor. I have noticeably weaker connections to the wireless access point in the back room as compared to the Toshiba. Sitting in the living room in their house, I would frequently lose my connection based on where on the sofa I was sitting. Not a problem for the Toshiba.
The biggest difference is in battery life. I don’t know what the Averatec advertises as far a battery life, but I know that I get about an hour and a half. Part of the problem might be the heat – the Averatec 3500 does get uncomfortably hot, and this heat might be affecting the battery life. I turned down the screen brightness and turned off the wireless NIC to extend the battery life (not sure how much this buys me, but it does make a difference). The battery doesn’t charge extremely quickly, so this is my biggest complaint. The Toshiba is remarkably better – with more than three hours on a charge and a speedy recharge.
One other thing I should mention is that the Toshiba comes with some better software offerings. My favorite is the Sensiva Symbol Commander – sketch a symbol on the screen with the pen to launch a command (lower case “e” = e-mail). Both machines came with full copies of Microsoft Office OneNote. OneNote is really cool, but I haven’t figured out how I want to integrate this into my life yet. Both also come with the standard compliment of Tablet PC software, including InkBall (pen based game), Microsoft Journal and Sticky Notes. The Toshiba also shipped with half a dozen demo programs which take advantage of the Tablet features. I didn’t really like any of them but they do show people what’s out there. The Averatec came with a flyer informing me about a program aimed at students (OneNote seems like a better program that does the same thing).
Put all of this together and my conclusion is that the Toshiba is really a better machine. But here’s the thing, the Toshiba cost over $1,000 more (and this is AFTER rebates). With my biggest complaint being the battery life and the weaker wireless connections, I can’t personally justify paying the extra $1,000. The Averatec is an excellent machine with an AMD XP2200M chip (seems to work as fast as the Intel 1.5 Ghz chip in the Toshiba).
So that winds me down to my advice. If you are looking at buying a new computer, buy a laptop. The portability of a laptop vs a desktop is a far better advantage compared to the extra processing power a desktop machine can give you. If you are going to buy a laptop, do yourself a favor and check out the tablets. I think that pen-based computing has finally reached enough maturity that it’s ready for everyone to use. Even my mom. If cost is a concern when you buy a new machine, look into the $1300 (before any discounts/rebates) Averatec. If you can afford the extra money, get the Toshiba and you won’t be sorry. The extra features are worth the extra money, if you can afford it.
-- Matt Ranlett
I'm having Thanksgiving with my folks for the first time in 11 years! The last time I was able to be with them for this particualr holiday was when I was a senior in high school. When I was in college the vacation breaks were too short to go home for Thanksgiving, just the Christmas break. So I'm writing this message from San Antonio. This also means that I'm going to miss the UG meeting with Mark Dunn. Which I am upset about, so someone better take good notes.
-- Matt Ranlett
Went to see this last night. Man, this was really funny. Pixar movies have been getting better and better. I think that this is the last one they developed with Disney, so I'm interested to see what they do on their own. Go see this if you really want to laugh.
-- Matt Ranlett
I've cut the cord on my home and now I'm 40% wireless! That's right, I've switched from DSL to cable modem and that let me cancel my Bellsouth DSL and home phone service. Now, the next step is to cancel cable (probably keep the cable modem vs some kind of satellite deal) and figure out how to generate my own power.
-- Matt Ranlett
http://www.aspnetwebcasts.com/
Watch 3 webcasts and get a free gift - a free copy of VB.Net and an ASP.Net book worth a total of $125.00 (according to the site). Good till Nov 30th.
-- Matt Ranlett
So I'm reading Scoble's blog (well, one of them anyway) and I scan past a post where some guy says he just bought a Creative Labs MP3 player. Talks about podcasting and such. Very cool, very cool. Whatever. So I click on the link to Amazon b/c he says it's on sale. I'm not really interested in getting an MP3 player, but what the hay. Normally $149.99, on sale for $1.50!! I got 4.
-- Matt Ranlett
UPDATE: OK, so I did not get them at that price. Read my comments to see what really happened. Flaw in Amazon.Com?
Why is Sharepoint so perfect for my company? Let's get a history lesson and learn why Sharepoint was designed for groups like us, why Sharepoint rocks so hard.
My company is actually two companies, one half works in the US (mostly but not entirely Atlanta) and the other half works in the UK (mostly but not entirely NOT in America). We work on the same product, usually different versions of the same product but still the same product. Over there, they do all the new features work. Over here, we get the customer requirements from the customers who have kept us out of bankruptcy for the last three years. We should be talking.
We've tried Outlook's public folders as a means to keep everyone informed. Sucks - too many folders, poorly organized, no way to see what is really in there.
We've tried a home grown bug tracker tool as a way to track new features and fixes to the product. That's ok, as long as you know what you are looking for and happen to think to look there first.
We've even recently launched an internal blog. That's pretty cool, but not a team tool - only the owner (CIO) can create new posts. The rest of us have to just comment on his ideas. No ideas of our own.
VSS - store documents and code, but again, if you don't know what to look for (and where, we have 30 archives) you're screwed.
AIM is pretty much a company standard, cuts phone bills. But those conversations only involve two people
E-mail chains - to quick to explode into a million disjointed comments and get dropped. And again, if you aren't in the e-mail group, you don't know what's going on.
What we need are discussion groups, like news groups but easily threaded. It needs to allow anyone to create a new discussion or comment on an old one. People who care about a topic need to know when new stuff is added to the discussion. It should allow documents to be stored in the same area as the discussion. Splinter off side discussion groups when a topic is big and heavy. What we need is Sharepoint. All the benefit of a community portal - events, announcements, calendar, discussions, links, etc. and more. You can store documents like VSS. You can actually integrate a document with the workspace discussion group so that when you open a doc, you also open via the Office 2003 task panel the discussions about that topic so the reviews can be completely caught up. Sharepoint!!!
Brendon and I have been pumping this for months. I gave the decision makers a book on the topic. We held meetings. We've sent out countless e-mails. Everyone kept telling us, it sounds good but... but what? Free product here! They're worried about the cost of setting it up and managing it. I kicked off the install and went to the bathroom. When I came back it was ready to go. Where is the setup cost? Manage it? It should grow and go wild. This is a communication tool - don't manage communication, encourage it.
Anyway, I'm giving a live demo of this next Friday and I expect to have people buy-in by then because of the simple fact that it will already be done and ready for them. No problems. Otherwise I'll slit my wrists on the conference room table out of sheer frustration!
-- Matt Ranlett
Paul Lockwood, Brendon, and I got together over some delicious Indian food to discuss the nascent Mobility User Group. We discussed what the first meeting should look like - Paul plans to ramble on about the “general idea”, I'm supposed to demo some vaporware, and Brendon's going to wear a cheerleadering outfit. We talked about trying to get some decent speakers and how, with INETA backing (read $$), we ought to be in like Flynn with about 3 speakers of quality a year.
We dove off topic to discuss some of the other meetings about town, notably the Wireless Technology Forum (bad acronym, or don't you read your Daily WTF?) and how it excels as a personal networking opporitunity (for a mere $25/meeting).
Oh, speaking of my demo, I wanted to thank Paul for lending me two of his Compact Framework books. Maybe now I'll be able to get started?
-- Matt Ranlett
I need a new RSS Reader/Aggregator. I want the following features:
1) - I want it to be online!! I read blogs on more than one computer and I hate having to keep the OPML synchronized manually and I am bother by having to mark as read all the posts I've read on other machines.
2) - I would really like it to be able to read newsgroups as well. So much information flows through the newsgroups, it would be nice to integrate my two readers into one. I tried Mozilla's Thunderbird, which can read RSS and newsgroups in the same tool, but it is missing one important feature. I can't click on a toplevel folder and read all my subscribed blogs in one view. Instead it forces you to read each individual blog, one at a time. I'm just used to this feature from RSS Bandit and SharpReader.
Any suggestions?
-- Matt Ranlett
My little brother is taking a weekend away from being a big city (Chicago) lawyer to come visit me! I asked him what he wanted to do while he was here and he said, “Let's go get drunk!” Don't think I'm going to get much done by way of the wireless project.
-- Matt Ranlett
Ok, so some people think that Brendon and I are maybe a little bit obsessed. I'll let you be the judge. We've bothered three different people into offering us blog space! But Michael was first, so he gets the pleasure. Thanks Michael!
We've got some stuff going on, and I want to sort of get things out as a list. You can usually find either Brendon or Matt (I'm referring to myself in the third person here!) at one of these meetings (we both usually go to all of them!)
-- Matt Ranlett
The Atlanta .NET Regular Guys are:
- Matt Ranlett
- Brendon Schwartz
© Copyright 2010 Atlanta .NET Regular Guys
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| a great FREE 3D artillery shooter game |
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| Microsoft Certified Partner Open House today |
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| Upping your rank in Google |
| Blogjet |
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| Holiday craziness |
| Found and fixed an interesting bug |
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| An early resolution for the new year |
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| Article posted - non technical topic |
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| Extending Averatec 3500C Tablet PC Battery Life |
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| The Incredibles |
| Cut the Cord |
| Free VB.Net and ASP.Net book |
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