Why on earth do I find myself reading whitepapers on the NASA or ACM websites? (read more …)

[A DevLife post]

Scott Hanselman comes out with his confession of being an A/V geek. I am always happy to know that I have a room filled with closet a/v geeks at the Vermont.NET meetings when we have problems iwth the project, or the screen, or the light bulb. Check Scott’s latest list to see if you exhibit signs of an A/V geek.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

I have a web service that I wrote for one of my smart client apps to check for one of three states of connectivity: no network, local network connection to web server, web connection to the web server.

So I ping the web service at the local i.p. The operation returns a mystical “hello world”. If that times out, then I ping the service at the i.p. of the web server as it is exposed to the web via ISA Server. If that times out as well, then they are told (politely of course) that they are S.O.L. and need some type of network access to run these particular functions.

I have a client side assembly dedicated to this as well as the web service.

Now Visual Basic .NET 2.0 has My.Computer.Network.Ping to which you pass a URI and a timeout period. There is one small code benefit to me as I have to dynamically construct the web service URL and using the new method, I can just ping the i.p. and not care about a complete path to the web service. However, the Network.Ping method requires a bunch of permission that I don’t need in order to hit the web service. So I think that for now, I’ll leave it alone and wokr on other things for my migration.

Pondering about being a user of development tools vs. being an inventor of these same tools… [read more…]

[A DevLife post]

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Writing a conclusion or summary at the end of an article is hard work. In addition to it being deflating after the fun of hashing over lots of ideas, you have to be careful to avoid cliches like “powerful features”.

Do you even read that last paragraph of a technical article? Does it help you get closure or is it just a dangling preposition, so to speak?

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Filing all of the payroll and other tax paperwork. Not just paying the taxes, but getting all of the paperwork done for federal and state every quarter (if you are small like me, monthly if you are a big company) and the year end stuff. Hooray for accountants. I just got an envelope filled with forms all filled out, the envelopes already to go and a list of checks to write. Then slap the stamps on and off they go. This is not the biggie – doing the corporate return quite yet as I still have a lot of review to do before I send her all of that paperwork.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

There was a time when indies felt a need to pretend they were a big company. That’s changed a lot. [Read more…]

[A DevLife post]

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

One of the pain in the rear parts of doing a lot of travel is doing a lot of travel coordination. It actually is quite time consuming to find the right flights at good times, with short layovers and not overly expensive rates. Then there’s finding hotels, dealing with the usual variety of room rates and lastly coordinating anything else that might be involved. Even when you have a travel agent helping you, there are still a lot of decisions to make. I think for every event I go to, I probably spend at least a few hours on this.

Even with my little overnight trip to do an INETA gig at TechValley .NET in Albany next week, I spent time figuring out where to stay (finally settled on a hotel in Saratoga Springs with the benefit of meeting up with a friend), if I should take a train (turns out it would be a lot more hours than driving and still include driving) or even rent a car (though I discovered the only option there was to drive 30 miles north to Burlington to get a car before heading south to Albany). So in the long run, I  have a simple plan – hop in my car and drive to Albany. But given the options, the budget and my own schedule, it was not a “no-brainer” and I infectiously put way too much thought into it.

When Kate and I sent to South Africa, we spent hours and hours on i.m. trying to find flights that we could meet up on that would be amenably priced for Microsoft and would get all of the mileage credits to our own frequent flier accounts. Then we had to go back and forth with Microsoft’s travel coordinator over a series of about 20 emails. I bet we each spent at least 4 hours doing that. This, of course, does not include planning our outings.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

How rare is it for clients to ask for access to archived data? Would you believe the only two requests I have had in 8 years came on the same day? [Read more…]

[A DevLife post]

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

I was a little taken aback to see this Feb 2006 cover of ASPNET Pro Magazine 🙂

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org