All posts by Julie

Never realized how many people dowloaded my session materials

Just Rambling

I have Urchin on my website for site analysis but never think to look at the stats. It is an amazing reporting tool with the amount of detail and analysis it does. My site is hosted on Alentus and this is one of the tools they offer.

I was surprised to see that blog folder alone is getting about 400,000 page views a month. I know from my referrals that an enormous amount of that is coming from Google.

Another stat I noticed that surprised me was that in the past month, there have been over 2,000 downloads of powerpoints and zip files(containing my demos) from my presentations page. I sure hope people are finding them useful!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Ken Levy, Windows Live, Antartica and FoxPro

Community Cheerleading

Ken Levy has written a wonderful historical post tying all of these things together. As I have blogged in the past, Ken was something of a Wunderkind in the FoxPro world back in the day. I had no idea how extensive and impressive the rest of his background was. The story he weaves in this post, becomes, in the end, a lovely welcome to Danny Thorpe (if you don’t know who this is, it’s another great excuse to read this blog post!) who has just joined the Windows Live team.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Loren Heiny shows a great next step for Ink on the web

Tablet

While I have merely enabled ink in my own controls on my own web pages , Loren Heiny is working n something really cool!! A way to place inkable edit controls over existing text boxes on web pages. For example, in his Camtasia video demonstrating his tests, he opens up Google and can write directly in he google text box, then it will get recognized and converted to text. This is instead of using the TIP.

This is big U.I. problem that many tablet pc developers struggle with. We like the idea of users opening up forms and writing directly in them and having that get recognized. What we lose, though is the editing flexibility of the tip. So the conundrum is how to get these two things to merge!

Loren is using some magic to get his inkable edit boxes placed over the fields, which means that this needs to be predefined somehow for each page. But that doesn’t seem worriesome to me. It sounds like his tool might eventually enable anyone to create the definitions for any page and share them. Or the developers of those page could create the placement definitions for their own pages and let end users download them. Something like the how the context tagging works for tablet pcs. Or better yet, anyone could just hire Loren to create the mappings for their pages. 🙂

Anyway, check out Loren’s post and accompanying video demonstration. Neat stuff!

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Trouble in Paradise: Recent spate of local robberies

Vermont

Last week our neighbor’s house was robbed in the middle of the day. I sent an email out to a list of about 30 local people to let them know and suddenly many of those people were reporting back about a number of other recent local robberies. Many of these had the same signature which was the door being kicked in. My carpenter husband had even repaired one of these doors.

A positive effect of this is that we are now planning to have a community meeting about setting up a neighborhood watch and hopefully having a state trooper come and advise us as well. I already feel like the Mrs. Kravitz of Moody Road since I can see who is driving up and down the road all day long while I’m at my computer. There are not very many houses on my road and it’sa dead end road, so an unfamiliar car definitely stands out!

Happily, it seems that the perps of some (maybe all??) of these robberies have been caught, according to this news report in the Burlington Free Press.

This has definitely had an effect on us and some of our habits in the past week. I prefer living in my little fantasy bubble where nothing bad can happen to us.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Vermont IT Jobs: Green Mountain Power: IT Point person (interpretor for the development team)

Jobs

Green Mountain Power

IT Point Person

Do you have great programming and communication skills?

We’re looking for an energetic professional to join our programming team who has that rare mix of programming and people skills. If you like a fast paced user-driven environment working on a wide-variety of systems, we have a great job for you. You will be the point person for a high-powered software team responsible for triaging requests, writing specs, coding, and project work in order to satisfy a diverse group of users. This position has plenty of opportunities to grow.

The development environment focuses on Microsoft’s tools and Oracle databases on Windows, Tru64 UNIX, and VMS systems. Fluency in a cross section of Visual Studio, Oracle, SQL, PL/SQL, C#, Microsoft .NET and Object Oriented programming techniques is highly desirable.

 Green Mountain Power offers a very competitive benefits package for our employees including medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your family, a pension program as well as a 401-k plan with a dollar for dollar match of your first 4 % contribution.
 
You can email a resume in Word doc form to brown_p@gmpvt.com and please cc aghareza@gmpvt.com indicating that you found this on the VTdotNET site or on my blog.

Green Mountain Power Corporation
Green Mountain Power, a Vermont company committed
to the development of its employees, to serving customers and to the
Vermont value of preserving the environment

                                                                          AA/EOE

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

DevConnections Demos and presentations online

Presentations

I have been doing a bit of organizing and gotten the following two sessions from DevConnections on-line.

  • Advanced Data Access with ADO.NET 2.0
  • Five (Supposedly) Scary Things about .NET

These can be found on the “talks” page of my website.
The talks are listed alphabetically with links to the PPT and ZIP files just after the descriptions.

I still have to package up the code from the third talk: “Preparing WSE3 Web Services for WCF Clients”.



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Planting Peas

Purely Personal

The power went out for a short while today. Though I have no idea what stroke of luck caused this to happen on a 70 degree sunny day, I took great advantage of it and planted peas in the veggie garden bed. Most things can’t be planted until after memorial day. But to sate my need to get gardening, I have seeds for a bunch of things that can get started early.

ok I retitled the post – didn’t want to trick anyone into reading about my garden ….<g>

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org