Daily Archives: March 23, 2004

VPN and Windows Messenger

Tools

I use VPN to work on my client’s computers that are 300 miles away. Sometimes I have to connect many times during the day. Whenever I connect VPN (which means I am working), I automatically get signed into WIndows MEssenger – which gives people the signal that I am available to chat – which I am not. I have never heard of a solution to this problem. Is this supposed to be a feature? If so, I’m not a big fan.

April at Vermont.NET USer Group – XML Night

dotNET

Our next user group meeting for Vermont .NET is “XML Night”. We have Joe Stagner, a Microsoft Developer Community Champion who is located in the Northeast (and has been a big help to our user group along with our D.E. Thom Robbins) coming to talk about Secure XML and also Altova‘s Trace Galloway is going to give us a whirl around XMLSpy. It is easy to get these guys to come here. The New England Microsoft folks LOVE Burlington and Trace went to college here. Old home night! April 12th. more info…

Microsoft desperate for Tablet PC Applications??

Tablet

Boy, first it was “write a tablet pc app and win a tablet pc”, then the “Does your code think in ink? Win $15,000” contest. Now Microsoft has really raised the bar with the “Does Your Mobile Application Think in Ink? Win $100,000” contest for ISV’s (found via Brian Keller’s weblog). While Tablet PC manufacturer’s continue to have to lower the prices of the tablet pc’s to encourage people to buy them, Microsoft is being pressured by these vendors to give people more reasons to want a tablet – apps with mass market appeal.

Something is just not right here.

Where to find DevDays demos

dotNET

I had an email from a Boston attendee who was trying to figure out where the demos could be found on the dvd. I looked myself and realized that although the OpenHack and IssueVision source code were on the cd, the actual little demos during the earlier sessions were not. I told him I would keep looking and pointed him in the meantime to DevDaysBloggers.com. Then he discovered through those blogs that the demos were available on the MyDevDays website.

Remember that ALL of the good practices code is wrapped into the applications. The demos can let you compare good/bad, before/after. I think that this is sometimes a useful way to really understand how things work and why you want to do things in a certain way.

If you were an attendee, you can log into the www.MyDevDays2004.com website. I had to dig around a little bit but here is where you can find the demos:

but zombies don’t run…

Purely Personal

Poor Rich (that’s my hubbie). He is, for some wierd reason, a big fan of zombie movies. Every time he finds some variety at the video store that he has somehow missed, he brings it home to watch. So of course, he was VERY excited about the new revised “Dawn of the Dead” that was released last week. Being a good wife (and he comes to chick flicks with me, so…) I promised to go see it with him. We had planned to go on opening night, but that didn’t work out. I could not believe that there were actually FORUMS on the Dawn of the Dead (new movie) website! He is not alone.

So we saw it last night. Like most of these movies, it is a balance between scary, gross, silly and ridiculous. THough for the first 1/2 hour I really wanted to leave – I don’t like scary or gross. The movie wasn’t so bad. Pretty creative and not just a duplicate of the original. Some funny twists and a nice tribute to Mad Max. But the zombies were just all wrong. They RAN. They didn’t do their zombie thing – you know, arms up, swaying back and forth and just slowly coming at you and coming at you and coming at you. This was a huge disappointment to Rich. I did think that the opening and closing of the movie were pretty interestingly done….pretty hip. There was some wierd camera shit going on during the movie – that was maybe a little wierd.