Why am I coding?

A year of Reading

2011-12-30T19:20:00.000-08:00

A while ago, I outlined a system that I implemented to ensure that I a) read more books and b) read a variety of books. In short, I have books grouped in 5 lists: Recreational, Classical Reading, Technical Reading, Business Reading, and Religious reading. At any given time, I have 3 books I'm reading: a Recreational or Classical reading book, a Technical or Business book, and a Religious book. I

Final Update on book

2011-12-03T13:46:00.000-08:00

First see about my efforts to write a novel here and here. The month of November seemed to pass by in a blur. A lot happened in the month, but the one thing that did not happen was me finishing my book. Sadly, I only finished a 1/5th of the book. I'm sadly disappointed, but I've learned a few things. An idea is not enough. You need to prepare for more than a few minutes to plan things out all

Book Update

2011-11-16T20:22:00.000-08:00

It is now over halfway through National Novel Writing month. At this point, I should have 25,000 words written out of 50,000 by now. Unfortunately, I've only written 7,915 words for my goal, way short of where I'd hoped to be by now. How did this happen? For me, writing is a much lengthier process then I expected. While it may seem easy to keep all of the details about your characters to paper in

Labels in Football and Software Business

2011-11-06T13:06:00.000-08:00

It's been a tough year of football in my neck of the woods. As an IU alum, its painful to watch the slow progress the football team is making this year with its 1-9 record. There have been some games against opponents in lesser known divisions that have made a mockery of the team this year. But that is in some respects expected from a school that has never had a strong football program. What

National Novel Writing Month

2011-10-31T16:45:00.000-07:00

It seems that most people I know aspire to write a Novel at some point, including me. Writing is a lofty profession and a book or novel is a path to immortality. How many people today know of Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens? These writers have achieved a sort of immortality through their writing, as they have written books that even today we read and analyze. That

Strengths vs. Weaknesses

2011-10-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

On the recommendation of the Startupsfor the Rest of Us podcast#38, I just read Strengths Finder 2.0. From a book that came highly recommended by others, I was a bit disappointed in the book, the test that accompanies it, as well as the test results that are provided after the test has been complete. If you can find the book at a reasonable price like I did, I still think you'll get your money's

User Impersonation in .NET

2011-09-27T15:51:00.000-07:00

Recently, I've been working on a tool to manage deployments to a web farm. As part of this task, I had to modify our current tool to impersonate a shared login to perform the actions on the various servers. This was so the IT group would not have to grant access to a large number of users. This can be done in .NET, but the approach you have to take to impersonate another user is different

Be careful what you say to customers

2011-09-24T15:19:00.000-07:00

I've seen a few articles this week regarding Netflix and how they should have handled the price hike and the splitting of the company into 2 separate entities. Cringely tookto his pulpit to defend the move stating that with the name 'Netflix', it should be obvious that movie streaming was the plan the entire time. Elsewhere on Hacker News, an article popped up that provided an example of how

.NET Web Deploy options

2011-09-06T13:00:00.000-07:00

What options are there to deploy .NET applications to a server farm? Unless you're at a small web shop, you've likely never had to encounter this question. But this last month, it was this very question that I began to ponder as I began a rotation to a different group whose responsibilities include managing builds for the weekly release and the deployment to a web farm. So what options are

Inspecting the Memory dump of a .NET Application

2011-07-09T14:31:00.000-07:00

There are times when a .NET application crashes and what logging is in place is not enough. In this case, if you happen to have a memory dump of the application in a .dmp file, then the application's memory and stack trace of the application's threads can be investigated, with the right tools. The Windows Debugger is the tool for investigating Windows memory dump files. Microsoft provides this

Is the Dream of Courier about to be fulfilled?

2011-06-08T13:08:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago, a new project appeared on Kickstarter that got a bit of attention. Kickstarter is a site that allows anyone to fund projects that they like in hopes that the project will become a reality. In many cases, those who donate to a project will receive things in return, such as a copy of the application (if its software). This project, which is named Taposé, provides a few

Samsung Intercept

2011-06-06T13:05:00.000-07:00

I'm notoriously frugal, which is why when I read from Robert Cringely's prediction of the demise of Feature phones, I thought he was overly optimistic. When someone disdains monthly cell phone plans, what other options are there for a cell phone but a feature phone? Well, it turns out, there are a few options out there. In fall of last year, Virgin Mobile started offering the Samsung Intercept,

.NET Decompile Tools

2011-06-03T11:00:00.000-07:00

For many needing a tool to decompile a .NET assembly, the tool of choice has been Red Gate's Reflector. This tool is one of the fastest tools out there and the decompiled code it displays is often somewhat intelligible (of course, THAT depends on the underlying quality of the code). But, recent changes to the licensing of Reflector have left many .NET developers scrambling for their wallets or

How rake db:migrate works

2011-05-09T20:29:00.000-07:00

When I first started developing Rails applications, the Database migrations with ActiveRecord seemed so much more advanced then anything I've worked with in .NET (and I've used ADO.NET, LINQ-to-SQL, and Nhibernate). The migrations seemed so intuitive, powerful, and magically. Unfortunately, when the magic doesn't work, you need an understanding of the underlying architecture to fix it. The

Geek Reading List

2011-04-14T15:27:00.000-07:00

In an article on Tech Republic, an author listed what he (or she) considered to be required reading for a geek. While the list is a decent start, there are many books that I felt were left off of the list that are excellent reads for geeks.Lord of The Rings trilogy: Any book which defines a new language is bound to be popular with geeks, but the fact that this book is the Grand daddy of all

11 Word Monday Meme

2011-04-11T19:30:00.000-07:00

What are your personal goals? Are you 'Winning'? Change that today! (About Meme Monday)

Jquery UI Draggable and Scrollbars

2011-04-09T20:58:00.001-07:00

While working on a recent sprint on my task management software Kanban for Developers, I ran across an issue that took some time to track down. On the main screen of the application is a Kanban board with yellow boxes to represent tasks written on sticky notes on a white board. There are 5 different categories and the tasks can be dragged and dropped onto any of the categories. By default,

List of Ruby and Ruby on Rails Tutorials

2010-05-13T20:35:00.001-07:00

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been working with Ruby and Rails to broaden my skills. While books are a great way to learn a new language, for Ruby and Rails, there are plenty of online tutorials to help you get started. Here's a partial list of Ruby and Ruby on Rails tutorials Ruby Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby: While I'm a .Net guy, I do know that every Ruby developer needs

Setting up Ubuntu 10.4 for Ruby on Rails Development

2010-05-11T12:00:00.000-07:00

In late July last year, I tried the impossible, setting up a Windows machine for Ruby on Rails Development. I spent an entire weekend on the project, and while everything seemed to work at first, once I started writing a simple application, I would receive random errors that I could never make much sense of. Part of the problem may have been with my system, which had Aptana Studio installed

Running Mercurial with Subversion

2010-05-06T12:00:00.000-07:00

On the project I'm currently assigned to, we use Subversion as our version control system. Subversion is a great tool and is certainly a step up from the alternatives that we have used in the past. However, after reading a fair bit about Distributed Version Control systems (hginit), such as Mercurial, I've been wanting to play around with one of these systems in a real project. Code version

Challenges in Installing Mythbuntu 10.4

2010-05-04T20:14:00.000-07:00

While I'm a .Net guy, I've been known to tinker with Linux now and again. I've built/rebuilt many machines using Red Hat 7.3, 9, Fedora Core 2, Fedora Core 4, and most recently, Mythdora (a Fedora Core release with MythTV bundled with it). But, I've heard a lot of good things about Ubuntu, and there has been a lot of hype ahead of the Ubuntu 10.4. So when it came out last Thursday, I

The need for a Mentor in a Developer's early Career

2010-03-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

(Author's Note: I wrote this a couple of years ago after my mentor left the company. Shortly after he left, nearly every other Developer who felt the way my mentor and I did left the company. Demoralized, I abandoned this blog for about a year, but there are still some good nuggets of information here.) The old saying “When it rains, it pours” has proven very correct rather recently. Not only

A Software Engineer's Development Path

2010-03-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago, my employer jumped on the Personal Career Development band wagon. They hired a consultant, setup training for everyone, and encouraged everyone to set career goals and make plans to achieve these goals. But most of the training focused on the typical 'soft' skills of career development, such as communication, project management, organization, etc. While this may be the

Reading Lists

2010-03-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

The vast collection of Human Knowledge can be found in books. And sometimes, it feels like I have a large percentage of that knowledge in my book cases at home. Through Borders, eBay, Amazon, and Bookmooch.com, I have many places to get new books to add to my collection of Knowledge. Yet this Knowledge goes to waste unless the volumes get to tell their story. That is why I have set up numerous

Technical Writing

2010-03-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

Writing skills are a necessity in many different jobs, including Software Development. While it is one thing to be able to write code for a system, it is another to describe that change in writing. This can include the comments in the code, the check-in comments in the source control, a write-up of the fix in a bug tracking system, or a technical design. Each piece of documentation has a

Idle Hands

2010-03-11T12:00:00.000-08:00

I'm currently reading through Getting Results, a productivity book based on desired outcomes. One of its guiding principles is to eliminate Analysis Paralysis, a condition that occurs when a person, Department, or institution becomes paralyzed while analyzing a set of alternatives. So much analysis occurs that nothing gets accomplished, whereas a great deal could have been accomplished if action

The Wisdom of Elders

2010-03-09T12:00:00.000-08:00

I'm always surprises me whenever I'm told I've done a good job on something. Part of this is because I am my own toughest critic. I have not found an application where this trait has served me well, but it's who I am. The other day, I was asked to take on a new responsibility at work. The task would require learning a new code library, but I jumped at the opportunity. My enthusiasm and

Build failed on an ILog Project without an error

2010-03-04T12:00:00.000-08:00

I was recently working on an ILog project. ILog is one of many Business Rule Engines out there. Business Rule Engines are becoming more popular. How do I know? Because one Developer wrote Space Invaders using a Business Rule Engine and Business Rules. (As an aside, I'm not a big fan of Business Rule Engines because one of their touted benefits is that if will free Developer's time for other

My goals for the next 3 months

2010-03-02T12:00:00.000-08:00

What is not started today is never finished tomorrow~Johann Wolfgang von GoetheI like to set goals for myself and if I make them public. In doing so, I feel I'll put more effort to complete them. When I restarted this blog three months ago, I set several goals for myself. My first goal of the was to write 1 blog post a week on average. That worked out to 17 blog posts in all. I actually posted

A few interesting links

2010-02-25T12:00:00.000-08:00

Things have been crazy the last couple of weeks, so instead of a normal post today, I'm going to do a short little link post. Here's a few links I've found in the past couple of weeks that I've found interesting. If you are currently training to take a MSDN Certification, you can currently get a free retake exam if you take both the first exam and the retake by June 30, 2010. You can find more

Switching Projects

2010-02-19T12:00:00.000-08:00

I've had to work on a couple of different Software solutions in my 5 year career. Each time I've made the transition I've felt like a fish out of water for the first couple of months while I learn what the software does, how the code works, and what processes and tools the team uses. In order to save some hassle during the next transition, here are a few tips and suggestions for transitioning to

The current state of your Development Team

2010-02-16T12:00:00.000-08:00

If you're a manager of a software development project, how do you gauge the morale and mood of the team? I mentioned in a previous post that my boss recently took the direct approach and asked us all to answer a series of questions relating to our morale and such. For this approach to work though, I'm pretty certain everyone needs to be honest. Given the current working environment (high

Validating a Phone number field with Regular Expressions

2010-02-09T12:00:00.000-08:00

Validating user input is a very common task when building a program with a user interface. While this task may appear daunting at first, it can actually be quite easy. Once you know of a good approach. Regular expressions were born in the Unix world, but they can Be of great benefit anywhere. Regular expressions are complex and intimidating, but once you have mastered the basics they can be

Team Building Exercises

2010-02-04T12:00:00.000-08:00

My current manager recently posed several questions to the team that he wanted candid responses too. He's new to the organization, but he seems genuine in his efforts to improve our process. Several of his questions have gotten me thinking, which I'll turn into blog posts over the course of the month. The first I wanted to discuss is about team building exercises. My manager asked for

Writing my way to better health

2010-02-02T12:00:00.000-08:00

I've made a few references to the PDA that I own. I've found it very handy to use in many places where a laptop is too bulky, like the car or exercise bike. The last six blog posts were either written or edited while on the exercise bike. This is great multitasking that would be difficult to do with a laptop, though there are items out there for this task. There are a few down sides to working

Technical Sources

2010-01-28T12:00:00.000-08:00

As a developer. There are many new technological that we encounter from time to time. After several years in the industry, I have found many good resources to help me get up to speed on anything new. The first site I recommend is TechRepublic. I found this site back when I was in Desktop Support. While they cater largely to IT people, they do offer articles on Development and Project

Hello World Applications

2010-01-26T12:00:00.000-08:00

Convention dictates that the first application a developer is exposed to for a language is the classic "Hello World!" application. While this is useful to learn how to display text to a screen or console at runtime, it provides very little value otherwise. It also does not provide an obvious avenue for the developer to build upon the application to finer tune his skills. When leaning a new

Handspring Visor vs. Dell Axim x5

2010-01-21T12:00:00.000-08:00

In a previous post, I mentioned that I had destroyed my old trusty Handspring Visor and had replaced it with a Dell Axim X5. I've already compared the different Operating Systems of the two devices, so here is my comparison of the two devices themselves. Size and weight: While the Dell is slightly more ergonomical, the Handspring is the smaller and lighter of the two PDAs. Battery life: The

Comments Disabled

2010-01-19T12:00:00.000-08:00

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame has attested to the benefit of comments to blogs. Yet after the loss of his site over a month ago, he still has comments disabled. I've always found his blog posts interesting and often controversial. While conversation of his blog posts can come from other sources such as Reddit, Digg, and Hacker News, the most obvious location for these discussions is on the

Pizza

2010-01-15T14:23:00.000-08:00

It's Friday, so time for a break from the normal development post. I'll have some new posts starting next week. Pizza is a topic near and dear to many a developers heats. But finding a good pizza at a great price can be hard. Thankfully, one of the cheaper pizza chains has made a change to their recipe that makes the decision easy. In terms of price and value, Dominoes new pizzas are by far the

The one thing worse then a bad Source Control system

2010-01-05T19:17:00.000-08:00

Source Control is a necessity on any software project of any significant size. Not only does it allow multiple developers to work on the same source at the same time, but it provides a historical record of the code and a backup in case a change needs to be undone later. Choosing a Source control system for your project is a big deal and should not be done lightly. There is a massive penalty

Goals for the next 3 months

2009-12-31T15:35:00.000-08:00

It's almost a new year. So it's now time to come up with some New Year Resolutions. I've already looked back at what I've done the last year, so it is time to look forward. First, I plan to write 1 blog entry a week on average. This is an aggressive pace, but I've already written 6 posts in the last 3 weeks which I'm counting since it is my list. There are 17 weeks between now and the end

Wishful Thinking

2009-12-29T11:00:00.000-08:00

It was wishful thinking for me to think I could accomplish all the goals I set out to do over to months ago. Not in 18 months could I accomplish what I set out to do in 6 months. In some areas I was successful. For instance. I did read 1 book a quarter. However. I was woefully off target with the number of blogs I posted. Overall This is how I did: Blog posts: I posted 4 of the planned 26

Microsoft Courier

2009-12-24T13:00:00.000-08:00

I thought an appropriate post for the day before Christmas would be a wish list. There is only one tech item on my wish list: a Microsoft Courier. Now If you haven't heard of this device yet, there's good reason for that, it hasn't been released yet. It's a product that Microsoft is keeping under wraps and won't publicly comment on yet. There have been a series of videos released that showcase

PALM OS vs. Pocket PC

2009-12-23T13:21:00.000-08:00

Recently, my 8 year old Palm Pilot died. It took a nasty fall off of the counter and the screen broke. Sadly I had just started using it again. The last four blog posts had been written on it. I was relying on this device to organize many different things. Thankfully, they were all backed up on my computer so little was lost. As someone who has difficulty getting organized this came as a big

ASP.Net MVC and LINQ Tutorials

2009-12-17T14:00:00.000-08:00

I was running through several Asp.net MVC and LINQ tutorials when I ran into a problem; part of the code in the tutorial wouldn't compile. After an hour searching, I finally found the solution to the problem. This is fairly widespread, as far as I can tell. This has occurred b/c these technologies were in beta and the tutorials were written then. Microsoft has made some changes to these

Staying Enthusiastic about Programming

2009-12-15T14:00:00.000-08:00

I started in programming like many developers out there. I was a hobbyist as a kid. I picked up a book on BASIC as a kid and loved it. I enjoyed seeing something I wrote and created come to life on the monitor. It was because of this passion that I learned Computer Science at school, and this same passion kept me from directly pursuing a development job out of college. My reasoning at the time

Signs its time to find a new job

2009-12-10T14:00:00.000-08:00

1.) There's no or few other developer who are passionate about what they do. This means they've all gone elsewhere. 2.) New policies and restrictions are placed on developers, hindering the work we do. 3.) A major contract falls through or a major client leaves. 4.) Reorganization or layoffs out of the blue. This could be a sign of things to come.

Playing Ball

2009-12-08T14:00:00.000-08:00

Like many developers, I entered this career because I enjoy creating programs and solving problems. However, sometimes managers just don't understand the hacker mentality. While we as developers may strive for perfect code, as employees, we are expected to deliver results. While programmers may prefer to be judged on our awesome coding abilities, managers prefer more tangible and measurable

Challenges

2009-04-15T12:01:00.000-07:00

ChallengesI had to do something the other day that I've never had to do. I turned down a job offer. Some background infomration might be necessary first to fully understand.Last fall, I was informed that I would be moving from the domestic development group to the internation development group in late Winter. In the beginning of winter, I was given an assignment from our Implementation group to

Weekly .Net Library Review 1: TimeZoneInfo and DateTimeOffset

2009-04-14T17:13:00.000-07:00

Weekly .Net Library Review 1: TimeZoneInfo and DateTimeOffset While on StackOverflow (www.stackoverflow.com), I ran across a link to this poster.I know very few of the classes listed on the poster, but it occurred to me that I should strive to learn more of them, so in the style defined by Scott Hanseleman,

The right balance for a QA team

2008-05-02T14:29:00.000-07:00

I've spent a year and a half working in QA, and I've spent about another year and a half in development. This gives me a unique perspective on QA teams. I recently realized that the manager of the QA team that is responsible for testing my teams software is operating under a dangerous assumption; that all QA engineers need to think like she does. What would happen if you had a QA team that all

A much desired hack for IE 7

2008-04-20T18:05:00.000-07:00

If you're like most people, you're using a version of Internet Explorer (abbreviated as IE). You might not have made the switch to IE7, but when you do, there is one hack that I highly recommend. By default, IE7 runs without a menu, like shown below: To enable menus, simply go to tools (it's just a little bit underneath the 'X' in the upper right hand corner), and there will be an option near the

What I will do in the next 6 months to become a better developer

2008-04-14T18:51:00.000-07:00

I've been on a quest in the last couple of weeks to discover tips on becoming a better developer when I ran across this podcast by Scott Hanselman which suggests a few ideas but largely states that whatever it is you decide on, that you write it down and you make it public. So this is my first blog post as part of my attempts to become a better developer in 6 months. Instead of picking just

Learning and Fixing our Bugs

2008-02-21T17:22:00.000-08:00

I had a particularly nasty issue assigned to me a week or two ago. It's one of those bugs that I spent so much time and effort on that it was difficult to enjoy my evenings and weekend. It was nasty for a variety of reasons. First, it involved a program component which was originally written by a developer who had already decided he would no longer work for the company, but decided he'd finish

The Second Browser War

2007-11-27T20:14:00.000-08:00

With Mozilla's Firefox going strong, currently with roughly a 15% market share vs. Internet Explorer's 78% (source: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0), the Second Browser War has begun. For those of you who don't recall the first browser war, or who haven't been reading many articles on the recent browser war, here's a short recap for you: The first browser war started in the

SQL Server 2005 Management Studio File Locations

2007-11-27T20:07:00.000-08:00

Why is it that each new program that comes along must have a different location to save its files? What's worse is when a new version of a program requires a different location. The first that comes to mind is Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005. Each create a new folder in the users 'My Documents' directory. I recently had to install SQL Server 2005 Management Studio, which, by default,

Windows Media Player 11 Rating System

2007-10-17T18:05:00.000-07:00

I ran across an interesting item the other day in Windows Media Player 11.Let me explain a little. There are 5 stars between the length of the song and the artist. These songs have an Auto Rating, which is demonstrated by the darker stars vs. the outlined stars. But, half the songs have an auto rating 4, while the others have an auto rating of 3. The strangest thing is that once I play the song,

About me and this Blog

2007-10-13T14:48:00.000-07:00

About Me:I'm a Midwesterner through and through. I graduated from a Big Ten university a few years ago with a Computer Science degree. I got my first job at a software company in the Midwest. However, I got a job in the QA department instead of the development department. After a year and a half, I transferred to the development department. I've been there ever since. This Blog:This blog is