September 2006 Entries

All I have to say is, damn Justice's head is freaking huge!  I can only see about 1/3 of the screen around it.  I can't imagine what the line of sight would be like if he still had that damned perm. Oh, Gadgets are cool!  Not easy to dev (no docs) partially due to the beta state of the system still.  Although they are HTML and JavaScript, development of desktop gadgets requires support only for the IE standards of each. If Justice's ears were any wider I'd swear he were a flying elephant. At least he's now bent over sniveling...

I just wrapped up my presentation on MSMQ at Edmonton Code Camp.  I actually thought that I was going to finish pretty early, but in the end I filled most of the time slot.  The group wasn't huge, but it was quite interactive and asked some very good questions. I had hoped to show a full walk through of MSMQ Trigger Services, but alas I couldn't get my COM components to register properly.  I'm going to spend some time getting this to work and then I'll post it up here. I'm hoping to get some time in the future where...

We're off and rolling today here at the Edmonton Code Camp.  Right now the first block of speakers, Steven & Justice and Dan, are wowing the early morning attendees.  Feel free to drop by and attend our meetings.  The registration desk will be open almost all of the day.

Steven Rockarts just told me that registration has closed for Edmonton Code Camp.  We have 102 people officially registered (plus one wait-listed...sometimes it pays to just ask people!) for tomorrows event.  This promises to be a stellar event for the developer community here in Edmonton. When you show up in the morning find the registration table and sign in so you get your registration kit.  The kits are going to be awesome.  Also, stick around after the last presentations as we will gather in one of the rooms and do the prize draws.  If you aren't there to take the...

Tonight we (Edmug) hosted JP Boodhoo at our monthly gathering.  JP was, well, JP.  Great content.  Great knowledge transfer.  Great all around.  He talked about having an 'Ah-ha!' moment with TDD.  Tonight I had my own 'Ah-ha!' moment.  I actually saw JP take a drink from his water bottle!  Yes folks, it is more than just a fashion statement. The side note to the meeting was the complete lack of preparation and pre-meeting verification by yours truly.  We arrived at our location (the always reliable and very capable Milner Public Library) only to find that the room we thought was...

I'm sitting here in my pod looking out the window at the river valley here in Edmonton.  The trees are changing colour and the sight is beautiful.  Along with those trees, I'm changing jobs too.  I figured it was time for me to go out and try the independent consultant thing.  I went out and found a contract to get me started and I've taken the leap.  Tomorrow is my last day here and, in some ways, I'm a little sad to see it go.  This is the team/project that I cut my teeth on web apps, C#, CruiseControl,...

This week is going to be out-freakin'-standing for geeks in Edmonton.  On Thursday the 28th Edmug is holding its monthly meeting and we have brought back Jean-Paul Boodhoo for your 500 level presentation pleasure!  It looks like Model View Presenter – A Better Way To Factor Your Presentation Layer snuck out a win at the last minute in our polling for JP's topic.  Thanks to everyone for voting on the Edmug site.  Because of the close nature of this vote, I think we will try to get JP back to speak again in the future. The other mind blowing...

I read The Daily WTF.  I read Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror.  Tonight I read IBM's sample document for How to use a DB2DataAdapter with the DB2 .NET Data Provider.  All three are essentially the same thing.  Repositories for coding cluster-fucks.  The difference between IBM and the other two is that the code examples at the IBM site are presented as samples of how to write code. I found this sample for C# code while I was poking around.  I never expect sample code to be extremely tight, but there is this one class that I have to show you. ...

At work I've been working with a couple of my very skilled co-workers (on who is a DB2/Cobol programmer, but I don't hold that against him) to try to solve a problem in our data access layer.  Recently the IT department began a project to upgrade their DB2 servers from version 7.2 to 8.1.  As stated by the lead on that upgrade project, "There will be no problems in the upgrade process."  Yah, right.  Short version is that of course there were issues.  The rest of that story should be told over a couple more drinks than I have in...

I'm not usually that big on new fangled gidgets and widgets, but I saw this out on the web today and I'm stoked at the possibility that this desktop replacement may actually get built. Watch the video and go to the BumpTop website to find out more. Give me this and a tablet PC any day.

I stumbled on this podcast from Australia tonight that discusses the state of User Groups there and in New Zealand.  It's a pretty good podcast, but it's a shame that the audio for Adam Cogan is sketchy at best.

For the past week I've been working on a change to an application at work.  Some 'enterprisey' person decided that we needed a central session state management scheme and SQL Server Mode was the silver bullet.  Not only did it give the IT department another way to throw the word Enterprise into their functionality reports, but it was an easy, low impact change. The project (apparently this change did demand project status) kicked off and a few weeks of emails went around before anyone would even tell us if the database had been created.  At one point a DBA noted...

I'm going to the top of the mountain (cause there's so many here in Edmonton) and I'm going to shout it loud.  In my little programming world I'm turning into a boolean bigot.  So many things in the world are based on boolean values (day/night, on/off, yes/no) and yet I'm starting to find the use of true/false in code to be meaningless.  I can hear the naysayers all around the world screaming profanities interlaced with my name and that of my sled dog team.  Since none of you will trust me on this, I'm going to have to explain. People will argue...

I know someone else smarter than me has probably written a post, an article or a book on this, but I'm going to put it up here anyways. Tonight I was screwing around with some code for a small side project (also known as experimentation in a real world domain) and I figured that I needed to have a couple of classes fire events every time that any of their properties changed.  I've done this kind of thing before in my glorious VB6 past, but I hadn't had the need nor opportunity in C#.  I figured I would...

Instead of cluttering up this blog with information about my favourite recipes I've decided to create a new blog dedicated to food called Geek Tukka.  I'm hoping to keep this up to date with recipes, wine commentary and restaurant reviews. You'll also notice that I'm using WordPress to host the blog.  I figured that I'd heard enough praise from Scoble that I should go and see what it's all about.  So far I'm reasonably impress, although I've found the blog management interface a little difficult to locate information in.  Mostly this is because WordPress uses different nomenclature than I'm used...

At one of our Edmug board meetings recently we discussed making announcements for our events available in a syndicated format.  Prior to the DNIC tour event with John Bristowe on September 7th, John and I were talking and he said that we should look at making our events available in iCalendar format.  Today I was playing around with these ideas and found that Google Calendar offers the ability to publish your calendar in both formats. What does this mean to you, the rabid Edmug attendee?  You can now subscribe to our Events Feed in your favourite RSS aggregator here. ...

Another recipe that I absolutely love.  This one is a little better suited to cooler days than a hot summer afternoon, but I've had it in both and it's very, very good in either. Ingredients1 lb Chicken (boned thighs or breasts will work just fine) cut in stir fry sized pieces4-6 large (10-12") tortillas3 tbsp dry oregano1 medium onion (I prefer white, but yellow works just fine too)350 grams of grated mozzarella cheese1 bottle taco sauce (approximately 215 ml)hot peppers to taste. Pickled jalapenos or canned smoked chipotles work very well. InstructionsSweat onions in a frying pan at medium high...

Yes, you read right.....free.  Free like the wind.  Free like open source.  Free like Justice doing his Sound of Music dance routine. Now that you've spent a couple minutes trying to eradicate that image from your mind, I'll tell you more about the free stuff.  We have 3 major Edmug events happening here in Edmonton (4 if you count the start of the NHL pre-season) in the month of September. Sept. 7th, 2006:  John Bristowe is presenting on ASP.NET ATLAS at 6pm in the Centennial room at the Milner Library. Sept 27th, 2006:  Jean-Paul Boodhoo is presenting on something of your choice (vote...

So I got called out by Mrs. Loquacious last week.  Apparently I don't write enough human interest pieces on this blog for her liking.  Well, maybe after this post she'll regret the fact that I ever wrote one. So here are the 8 things that Mrs. L. never wanted to know about me. I'm sarcastic.  I leave you to determine if the rest of this post is employing any sarcasm.  If you can provide the right identification (leave a comment) to the points employing sarcasm *and* you're single, female (sorry Justice) and even remotely close to my igloo I will get...