Charles Husemann's Blog

Miami MIS Presentation

2010-04-12T17:44:00.001-07:00

This week I had the chance to talk to three classes of students at Miami about the software development life cycle. Here’s the slide deck from the presentation

SLDC Presentation

View more presentations from Charles Husemann.

As part of the exercise I had the class design a basic site. I don’t have the screen from the first class but the second two sections decided to create social network sites that are just a bit on the creepy side of the equation. Here are the screen designs we came up with:

There’s some commentary on the mindset of the next generation of users to be had here but I’m not going to make it.

Dev Bytes for 3/4/2010

2010-03-04T08:58:00.001-08:00

Sorry for the delay, things have been busy with the switch to the MVP Summit, the new job, and various other things.

PM/Methodology
10 Mistakes Adopting Agile
Why a Kanban Board is a Value Stream map but a Scrum board isn’t

Self Improvement
Distinguish yourself by increasing the granularity of your “Portable Skills”
Creating a personal Kanban board
The Brighter Side of Failure
Developers, know your audience!

SharePoint
How to Connect to a Restored Content Database in Sharepoint
Changing Page Layout With Sharepoint Designer 2010
How to mix WCF and Sharepoint 2010
Four things to do to prepare for Sharepoint 2010

SilverLight
Creating a Twitter client in Silverlight
Getting Silverlight to builds on Team Build in VS 2010 RC
Silverlight Lessons Learned Presentation/Documentation

TFS/Visual Studio
Free Ebook on Entity Framework
Next Gen testing with VS 2010
A different way of presenting the testing tools in VS 2010
Customizing Work Item Link Types in TFS 2010
VS2010 Protip – Scroll to Zoom

Azure
Azure – An Introduction
Getting Azure to work with VS2010 RC

Other/Misc
Why you should check out MVC
How to sync a website between two IIS 6 servers
What is Iron Ruby and how do I put it in Rails
Adding Location awareness to Windows 7
Some analysis of HTML 5
Staring with RIA Services
An introduction to jQuery
An Introduction to Mocking
Evolutionary Architecture
When to use what Microsoft Client Technology
Sketchflow Exploring Ideas
What do do with all these new mobile platforms

TFS/Kanban Presentation Submitted to Codestock

2010-03-01T07:21:00.001-08:00

I submitted the my Kanban and TFS presentation to Codestock yesterday. The presentation could use some more work as the WIT editing stuff on the back side is a bit weak side.

It’s also probably time to migrate the WIT’s to VS 2010. Instead of re-using the files I’m just going to start from scratch so that I can remove some of the left over crap that accumulated during the development of the WIT’s (the “It seemed like a good idea at the time” kind of things).

This will also be a good opportunity to re-tune the presentation and beef up some of the slides a bit.

TFS and Kanban Presentation slides

2010-02-02T12:21:00.000-08:00

Here are the slides for the presentation, had a bit of a fight with Slideshare so apologies for the delay.

Team Foundation Server And Kanban

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Speaking at agileLUNCHBOX on 1/27

2010-01-20T08:31:00.001-08:00

I’ll be speaking at the agileLUNCHBOX (formerly the XP/Agile User group) on January 27th. The meeting will start at 11:45 and will be held the OCLC facility in Dublin.

The topic will be TFS and Kanban: A Marriage of Convenience and will cover how we created a virtual Kanban board in TFS for my current project. We’ll cover the how’s and the why’s as well as a few things we didn’t do but should have.

Share My Password - The Worst Application Ever?

2009-11-19T18:20:00.001-08:00

One of my professional goals for the next six months is to create a Windows Mobile application that talks to Azure. These are are two technologies that I want to learn and the best way I learn things is to actually use them.

The first challenge is to come up with the application to develop. If it’s too complex I’ll never finish it and if it’s too simple then I won’t learn anything. I also don’t want to build something that I’ll have to support so the appeal should be fairly limited.

Originally I was thinking about doing something game related but instead I came up with what has to be the worst application ever. Something so dumb and irresponsible that no one would ever use.

The application? It’s going to be called “Share My Password” and the basic storypoint is:

“A user will be able to log onto the system and enter a site name, username, and password to share with the world”.

That’s right, it’s an application for people to share their private passwords with the rest of the world. I’m going to put more than enough warnings in the application to let people know it’s a joke. I was partially inspired by Lose/Lose but without the “artistic” edge. It’s not intended to be another version of BugMeNot but it could be used that way.

Eventually I’ll add a website that posts all of the stored passwords by user and maybe even an extension to Twitter/Facebook so that people can alert their friends when they’ve compromised their own security.

I have a mental picture of the design in my head but I still need to ramp up on Azure development so it’s going to be a while before I have it up and running. I’m hoping to spend some of the Thanksgiving holiday working on Wireframes and will hopefully have a clearer idea of what it will look like by the end of the year.

Dev Bytes for 11/19/2009

2009-11-19T07:19:00.001-08:00

I’m still playing with the format a bit but this looks much cleaner than the version I posted two weeks ago. If you’ve got feedback let me know in the comments.

Project Managery/Soft Skill Stuff
26 Hints for Agile development (Link)
The High Cost of Losing a Developer (Link)
Change your organization or change your organization (Link)
Fixed Price is a lie (Link)
Agile Software Qualities (Link)
When do you really need apostrophes (Link)
How do you recognize individuals in agile/scrum (Link)
Internet Explorer 9 preview (Link)

Technical stuff
What makes a good developer (Link)
Details of how sorting algorithms work (Bahrey) - (Link)
Software Engineering Myths explored (Good stuff - seriously) - (Link)
Writing Stories with True Value (Link)
Metrics in software and physics (Link)
Parsing HTML the Cthulu way (Link)
Learn how to use the Unity3D engine (Link)
Getting started with Entity framework - Simple Model first example (Link)
Getting started with Entity Framework -Templated Code Generation (Link)
Jumpstarting RIA development (Link)
There's Lazy loading, then there's lazy coding (Link)
Patterns: Factory (Link)
ASP.NET MVC a step in the right direction (Link)
Making your project pluggable with StructureMap (Link)
Saving time by using IIS instead of Cassini (Link)
Eclipse Shared Plugins directory (Link)

Twitter – Enabling Internet Drama Since 2006

2009-11-03T09:31:00.001-08:00

Twitter is an amazingly effective communication mechanism as it enables one to many communication in nearly real time. Like a lot of technology it’s fluid and can be used in many different ways so there’s really no right way to use it. There are more than a few ways to abuse it which is why I’d recommend this article as it provides more than a few ways to avoid looking like a complete jackass on Twitter.

Personally I use twitter for a number of different reasons. It’s a great way to find new content, keep tabs on the people you know/vaguely know, meet new and interesting people, and find answers to questions both technical and non-technical. I’ve met a lot of cool people on Twitter and then converted those online relationships into real world conversations.

Twitter is great resource but you really need a third party tool like Tweetdeck to get everything out of it. Sure Twitter now has lists to categorize people but Tweetdeck has a lot of other solid features that more than compensate for the programs hefty memory footprint.

My main issue with Twitter is that it is a bit like drinking from a fire hose at times. At one point I was following well over 850 people and that’s just too much to be useful. While most of those people aren’t active the rest still generated way to much information to be of use. Since then I’ve started actively grooming my list of followers to make it a little more valuable. Here’s some of the criteria I used to weed out people I follow:

- Interesting content – is there more than just what they are eating/reading/pooping?
- Do I actually know then? If I haven’t met or exchanged messages of some sort with a person then I stopped following them unless they were posting interesting links.
- Celebrities – This dove tails into the first one a bit but there’s really no reason for me to track what Neil Gaimen is up to on a daily basis. The only big name I follow is Kevin Smith and that’s just for the yucks.
- Signal to Noise – I made the mistake early on of following everyone who followed me. I know it’s a bit of an asshole move but I unfollowed a lot of people just because I didn’t find them interesting or relative to my interests.
- Website – If the feed was just links from their website I stopped following them and added them to my feed reader. I prefer to manage an RSS feed than a twitter feed.
- Dead Accounts – If someone hadn’t twittered in more than a month I unfollowed them as that’s just clutter in my account.
- Unnecessary drama – Twitter seems to feed all kinds of stupid 140 character arguments and I’ve made a point of ignoring/unfollowing the people who start and or propagate these discussions.

I’m sure this will come off as another self-absorbed blog post about twitter but like I said at the top, Twitter is what you make it and this is the road I’ve chosen right now.

Dev Bytes for 11/2/2009

2009-11-02T08:38:00.001-08:00

The Dev Bytes are a collection of links that I’ve been sending out internally at my current employer. There have been a few requests to make these public so I’m going to be posting these on a weekly basis.

There are just links to topics that I find interesting and hope that others will gain some value out of. I can’t say that I read everyone but it’s something that I’ve got saved to read later when I come across a problem or issue.

Links

Project Managery stuff
Fixed bids – The bane of Agile - http://bobtuse.blogspot.com/2009/02/fixed-bid-bane-of-agile.html

Role of PM in Agile - http://www.infoq.com/articles/project-manager-role

The 5 ways lean is the answer to the But of Scrum - http://www.netobjectives.com/blog/5-whys-as-the-answer-to-the+but-of-scrum

A developers guide to Lean (chapter 1) - http://www.netobjectives.com/blogs/lean-agile-software-development-chapter1

Personality of a Great Scrum Master - http://peterdeyoe.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/the-personality-of-a-great-scrum-master-a-recap/

Uncharted 2 review (project managery stuff at the top) - http://gamingnexus.com/Article/Uncharted-2-Among-Thieves/Item2415.aspx

Soft Skills/Non Technical
How to correctly use commas (more important than you think, grammar FTW) - http://www.dumblittleman.com/2009/10/dumblittleman-guide-to-comma-use.html

Advice for public speakers - http://srtsolutions.com/blogs/billwagner/archive/2009/10/26/advice-for-public-speakers.aspx

Re-visiting “The Fold” - http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001307.html

Technical Links
12 ASP.NET MVC Best Practices (Wingfield) - http://codeclimber.net.nz/archive/2009/10/27/12-asp.net-mvc-best-practices.aspx

Simplicity is complicated (Wingfield)- http://avdi.org/devblog/2009/10/29/simplicity-is-complicated/

Ruby Podcast (Wingfield) - http://ruby5.envylabs.com/

Rails is a ghetto (Dages) - http://www.zedshaw.com.sharedcopy.com/rants/51489cec9386f7c13f69b3a58cd50b02.html

LINQ Overview - http://geekswithblogs.net/dotnetnomad/archive/2007/11/09/116739.aspx

Pattern development with Silverlight - http://geekswithblogs.net/murraybgordon/archive/2009/10/29/135848.aspx

SOA is just outsourcing for apps (don’t shoot the messenger) - http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2009/10/29/135793.aspx

Improvement to the add Reference Dialog in VS2010 - http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/10/29/add-reference-dialog-improvements-vs-2010-and-net-4-0-series.aspx

Technical Debt Prevention - http://pillartechnology.com/blog/?p=61

Installing Team Build 2010 - http://geekswithblogs.net/Optikal/archive/2009/10/28/135769.aspx

MVC Web testing strategies - http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/jimmy_bogard/archive/2009/10/27/mvc-web-testing-strategies-verifying-content.aspx

How to play with Sync services in VS 2010 - http://geekswithblogs.net/dand/archive/2009/10/27/how-to-play-with-sync-services-in-vs2010-beta-2.aspx

Amazon’s answer to SQL Azure - http://www.azurejournal.com/2009/10/amazons-answer-to-sql-azure-amazon-relational-database-service/

WPF 4 (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0) - http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/10/26/wpf-4-vs-2010-and-net-4-0-series.aspx

Alexei plugs his dog fooding event - http://govorin.blogspot.com/2009/11/customizing-tfs-process-template-to.html

New Years Resolutions

2009-01-03T09:28:00.001-08:00

OK, so I haven't updated the blog in a bit and the plan to blog once a week fell into the crapper once the holiday game rush kicked in, I thought I would jot down a few resolutions so that I can feel bad later this year when I don't meet any of them.

1- Fitness and Finance - The girlfriend and I are working hard on what we call the F&F plan. F&F stands for Fitness and Finance and it's an area where both of us can improve. For me it means doing a better job of tracking where I spend my money and saving more. I've already maxed out the 401k for the year and I'm planning on saving money and paying off my car one year early.

The fitness part is me getting off my duff and using the YMCA membership that I never use. I'm still working out a program but between the Y and playing hockey twice a week I'm hoping to drop 50-60 lbs by the end of the year.

2- Career - The last year or so has been really focused on the night job at GamingNexus but this year I'm going to focus on the job that pays the bills. This means getting involved in the development community more and learning more new skills. My main focus is getting a better understanding of cloud computing and how to actually build services that leverage this new area.

3- Read More - I read maybe 10 books last year and that's being generous. One of the things that's very important to being a good writer is reading more so my goal is to start and finish at least 15 books this year. That's a bit more than a book a year but I got a few short books for Christmas which should help out with that number.

4- Realize that there are only 24 hours in a day - I'm constantly adding more stuff to my schedule and one of my goals this year is to dial things back at least a little bit and try to enjoy my life a bit more. I need to get outside more and get the hell out of Ohio more (and not for gaming/work events). My plans for a full on vacation this year were crushed but I'm hoping to take a few shorter vacations here and there.

5- Doing instead of stewing - At any one time I have at least two mini-projects and a handful of ideas of things that I should do or act on but end up setting on the back burner. I later regret not doing these things and I'm sick of that feeling. This also means that I need to finally write down the books and script ideas that have been running around in my head for the last six years or so.

6- Blog/write more - I'm thinking this blog is going to be more of a general writing space than a work blog so expect some random stuff here from time to time. It will probably be stupid but it is what it is. This ties into #5 a bit but I picked up one of those semi-pretentious moleskinne notebooks today that will serve as a destination for some of it as well.

I'm sure there are others but these are the big six for the year. I was going to focus on being less of an aloof asshole this year but I think I'll save that for 2010

Experiments in Video

2008-08-14T11:09:00.000-07:00

Here's a new segment we're starting at GamingNexus. It's an evolution of the old radio gig but something I've been thinking about for the last year or so. There's still a lot of rough edges that I need to work out and I'm still getting used to the tools of video editing but it's not too bad.

The video is the result of eight hours worth of work. There's about two hours of tracking down/downloading videos with about six hours of actual production time. A lot of that was learning the tools and how they integrate together correctly. I have a laundry list of improvements for next week's segment which should go up on Monday or Tuesday.

Temp tables vs. Variable tables in SQL

2008-08-14T10:50:00.001-07:00

I've had an interesting situation arise at a client site. The client was using variable tables within a proc as a temporary mechanism to store data before returning results back to the user. The problem was that these queries took more than 30 seconds to complete which is unsatisfactory to say the least.

As an experiment we converted the temp tables and the execution time was sub 3 second. While still not ideal the performance increase was a bit jaw dropping. Keep in mind we just change the @ table definition to a #table definition to get the performance decrease. Of course we had to add a statement at the end of the proc to drop that table but the users are happy and the DBA hasn't seen any decreased performance on the server. Small changes FTW.

Sometimes your clients are wrong

2008-07-28T07:33:00.000-07:00

After reading this article over at Techdirt I couldn't help but think of how these types of situations are not just limited to coffee snobs but to the IT world as well.

There are certainly times when you should not sell your coffee/services to a client because the solution they want isn't the best solution and will cost them in the long run (usually these solutions involve Microsoft Access). Sometimes you just have to walk away and wish them the best of luck.

Slacking

2008-07-09T21:57:00.000-07:00

I've got a few posts on client leadership and expectations management floating in my head but with the holiday and the run-up to E3 next I haven't had time to convert thoughts to text.

I'm still hoping to get back into the work post a week but it's going to have to wait this week and next due to my other writing duties. Try not to be too disappointed.

Friendfeed - everything in one place

2008-06-29T21:57:00.000-07:00

Not sure if it's a good idea or not but I've got everything (including this blog) hooked up to FriendFeed and can now be stalked through a single RSS feed. Joy.

Job Hunting Tips and Tricks

2008-06-25T20:09:00.000-07:00

Since I'm just out of the job hunting I figured I'd post a few tips that I've learned from my recent search.

- I didn't use it this time around but Monster.com has reached a point where's it's not that useful. I did have a recruiter tell me that if I did put a resume up there that I should keep it private to better manage where the resume ends up.
- Tried Dice.com, found a few jobs and submitted the resume but never heard anything back. Not overly impressed with the service
- As always the best jobs are the ones you hear about through your personal network.
- If you're going through multiple recruiters be sure to manage which companies they are submitting your resume to. It looks bad for you and the recruiter if the same company sees your resume from multiple vendors and it usually guarantees that you won't get the job from either of them.
- Figure out what you want ahead of time, it's always a bit tempting to flood the market with your resume but figure out what you want ahead of time so the recruiter knows what to look for.
- Know what companies you do and don't want to work for and communicate that to your recruiter.
- Manage your public profiles, in the age of Google people will find your Facebook, LinkedIn,MySpace,and Twitter profiles and in some cases will subscribe to them. It's a bit of an odd situation to know that one of the recruiters you're following is reading your tweets.
- Sometimes and offer letter is not a guarantee, you don't have a job until you have a start date. This one potentially cost me a few good opportunities.

Getting involved

2008-06-25T19:54:00.000-07:00

I was recently the victim of budget cuts at my current client and while unexpected (it's not the first time) I did have to scramble a bit to find a new job. I was lucky enough to get a job back with a former employer but there was a bit more drama involved that I would have liked.

One of the comments I received during my search was that I wouldn't have had nearly this much trouble if I was more involved in the local tech community. This is fairly sage advice as the best jobs I've ever had have been the friend of a friend kind of thing.

To counteract that I've decided that I'm going to be a regular at the Central Ohio Dot Net Developers Group and start going to the Central Ohio ALM Group meetings. Given the rise in ALM technology and my passion for SDLC's I think it's a good fit(no I'm not going to suck up to my new boss either). I'm not sure how much I'll be able to contribute to either group but I'm hoping I'll be able to learn a few new tricks

Is this thing still on?

2008-06-13T20:34:00.000-07:00

OK, so it's been over a year since I've posted anything on this blog, and longer since that any thing of value has been posted (take your shots now). That's all going to change starting this week.

I recently transitioned jobs and one of the things that I realized is that while I do a ton of writing for my "night" job, I don't really do much writing about the job that pays for the car, house, and provides me the ability to do all the fun stuff with the night job. It's time for that to change and my goal is to do at least one good post a week on stuff of a non-gaming nature. I'll probably cross post some of my stuff from GN but the goal of this is going to be work related.

I'm in no way qualified to do anything overly technical, I'll leave that to the folks who can code their way out of a paper bag. Instead I'll focus at the stuff I'm good at which is a little fuzzy at this point as I tend to be one of those Jack of all Trades/master of none kind of things. Expect passionate writing coupled with incredibly poor punctuation and spotty grammar and spelling.

Too cool

2007-05-25T20:30:00.000-07:00

Twittering the night away

2007-05-13T21:05:00.000-07:00

As you've probably noticed I really haven't been blogging that much here recently. That's mostly due to the increased amount of writing I'm doing for GamingNexus and AT&T as well as the fact that the day job has picked up recently (one project just starting and another going into design). I've also gotten hooked on Twitter and I'm finding it's a lot easier to bang out a bunch of quick posts there than a few of the more detailed ones on this blog.

Twitter is still buggy as hell and it goes down more than Paris Hilton at a night club but it's very easy to use and get into. It's essentially a public IM with a lot of people (you can limit who sees your posts if you're so inclined). It's also a great networking tool as I've already made a bunch of new connections with people in the gaming industry.

I'm not giving up on this blog but posting will be pretty sparse for a while. I'm not sure that anybody really gives a shit but I figured I'd post this in case anybody did.

2007-05-12T09:09:00.001-07:00

Link dump for whenever I have time to sit down and play with Silverlight

Scott Guthrie's big article

Info on Orcas Beta

More on Orcas

Zen of Silverlight

Silverlight Hello World

Internet sharing with WinMobile

2007-05-12T09:09:00.000-07:00

Blog updated

2007-04-06T13:23:00.000-07:00

Made a few tweaks to the layout of the blog. Added a link to the Blue Room stuff I'm doing, my Gamer Tag and Gamerscore (which is really sad, go ahead and laugh Brian), as well as a link to my Twitter blog. Got roped into twitter this week and it's cool.

Will hopefully get a chance to blog a big this weekend. Sad when Brian has more posts in a month than I do.

Scott Guthrie on RvB

2007-03-06T17:19:00.000-08:00

Given Tim's man crush on Scott Guthrie this should make him feel all tingly in his developer area.

Leaving Las Vegas

2007-03-02T06:43:00.000-08:00

Las Vegas is one of my guilty pleasure shows. The plots aren't necessarily the best but the show is entertaining and features more eye candy than E3 in it's heyday. Well it looks like the show is going to be back next season but Nikki Cox and James Caan will not be back. Feh, there's three less reasons to watch the show now...

Fun conversations with the girlfriend

2007-03-01T05:59:00.000-08:00

Had a fun talk with the girlfriend last night about Second Life, the MMO that seems to be all the rage these days. It turns out that the son of one of the people she works with is doing a school project with Second Life for school and Batelle. The fun part of it is that he's only 14 and according to the SL EULA you have to be 18 to get in (which begs the question of why Dublin City schools and a major local company are letting under-age teenagers play the game...I just hope they are supervised). The GF then asked why this was a big deal I responded with:

"Second Life is the Mos Eisley of MMO's"

"What's that mean??"

** sigh **

Bagged lunch FTW

2007-02-28T13:58:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting article about how you can save almost $1000 a year just by bagging your lunch. Not only do you save money but you can eat slightly healthier as well. Of course this does require you to like sandwiches...a lot but $1000 is a $1000.

I've been bagging much lunch a bit for the last few months for three reasons. My lunches are slightly healthier, I'm saving money, and my current client is kind of out in the boonies. Sure I could drive 15 minutes to get lunch but I'd rather save the gas and time by eating at my desk so I can get home quicker.

Game development methodologies visualized

2007-02-28T13:54:00.000-08:00

Lost Garden (a blog devoted to coming up with solid articles on game development) has posted a nice article covering some of the methodologies used in game development. They really only cover three main methodologies (Waterfall, Agile, and Stop-Gate) but it's still a good read.

Software development is software development but the one interesting thing about the article is that it talks about software porfolios, the concept of having multiple projects going on in the same time that meet different needs. It's something I really haven't run into on my current job so I found that interesting.

More Blue Room fun

2007-02-28T13:48:00.000-08:00

It looks like both my entries for the Blue Room were posted yesterday. Nothing major, just the list of games shipping out this week and a short piece on the pricing problem Sony has with the PS3 right now.

Not sure if it's worth while to post links to these pieces but since the Blue Room doesn't have an RSS feed now I'll continue to post until it annoys someone.

Next week I've got three entires and right now it's probably going to be some impressions of Def Jam Icon for the PS3 on Monday, some experiences with the SIXAXIS controller on Wednesday, and Is Photorealism worth pursuing on Friday. May swap weekly releases in there on Monday if John doesn't want to do it.

Moving on

2007-02-27T08:10:00.000-08:00

Rather than dither around the topic I'll keep it short and sweet. This is my last week with my current employer as I'm moving on to a new job starting on 3/5.

I really like my current employer and they've treated me really well but I had one of those rare opportunities come up that I just couldn't pass on.

It wasn't an easy decision as I had a lot of friends at the current employer and there are a lot of good people that I'm not going to get a chance to work with but this was the right decision for me. Everyone at the current company has been really cool about my leaving the company which was fantastic

Putting together the new gaming rig

2007-02-26T10:41:00.000-08:00

Decided against building a low-end system for the Home Server box and instead I'm going to take the current gaming rig, turn it into the Media Center and then convert the existing media center into the Home Server box. I lucked out and Microcenter had a nice 20% off sale this weekend. This is what the new box will looks like

Intel Core 2 Duo - E6400 chip
Gigabyte 965P-DS3 motherboard
2 GB of Corsair DDR2 800 memory
GeForce 8800 GTS video card
Raidmax Volcano 530W Power supply
75 GB Raptpr hard drive
160GB Seagate drive (from the existing rig)
Antec Nine Hundred case

System should overlock pretty well so I shouldn't have to upgrade for a while. Decided to try the new high speed (10K RPM!) Raptor drives as I've seen a lot of positive press on them. I would have liked to have gone up to 4GB of RAM but RAM prices are up right now. I'll probably add another 2GB later this year if the prices go down. There's about $1100 worth of hardware there but I lucked out and our hardware editor had an extra vid card that he made me a good deal on (ok, it was free). Should get the memory and the hard drive in tomorrow so it should hopefully be up and running by this weekend.

Crackdown impressions up

2007-02-26T06:30:00.000-08:00

My initial impressions of Crackdown are up over at the Blue Room. I played the game a bit more over the weekend and it's really starting to grow on me. I'm digging just running around collecting orbs and building my skills with the plotline of saving the city taking something of a back seat. The game really used the Havok physics engine really well as you can do a lot of fun things in game like throwing exploding barrels and them blowing them up mid air or picking up cars/dumpsters/bodies and throwing them at the bad guys. Fun stuff

iPod finally ships

2007-02-26T06:24:00.000-08:00

I got the notice on Friday that my refurb iPod shuffle is finally en route from Cupertino and should be here on Thursday. That's right it took Apple a week just to pull the thing from inventory and hand it off to FedEx. I'm not sure what the hell took so long (perhaps there was a sale at the gap or they were too busy patting themselves on the back for being so awesome) but I'm still looking forward to getting my hands on it.

In the meantime I've been using the Girlfriends old Creative Touch Zen and the hardware is decent but the software is pretty bad. I still need to futz with a bit but I'm thinking I'll use the Zen for music and the iPod just for podcasts/something to take to the gym.

Well this sucks

2007-02-24T05:21:00.000-08:00

It looks like Wendy's is closing the original Wendy's restaurant. I'm a little bummed out by this as I used to eat there a lot when I worked at STRS (my first consulting client out of college). It's a bit disappointing to see them go but it looks like the economics to support the restaurant just aren't there any more. Feh

Fun picture that will end up in someone's SOA presentation

2007-02-23T17:44:00.000-08:00

Loving Google isn't hard to do

2007-02-22T07:49:00.000-08:00

Jeff has posted a few reasons why he loves Google and it's hard not to agree with him. I don't own stock in the company but I've been using their products more and more each year. Here are a few more reasons to love their products:

We used Google calendar to coordinate our E3 appointments for GamingNexus this year. Since GN's email is using Google's hosted service everyone already had an account and just had to share it to me. I then booked all the appointments and everyone was able to see their calendar and where they were supposed to go. The calendar will even SMS you your appointments ahead of times so you don't have any excuses for being late. Much easier than maintaining one spreadsheet with a full list.

Right now I'm using google docs to write and track topics for my writing at the AT&T Blue room. Since I'm alternating days with our hardware editor we're using one shared document to make sure we don't over lap topics. I still prefer Word/Excel for doing stuff that I'm doing on a day to day basis for the real job but Google docs is slowly growing on me.

I've recently become a big fan of Google Reader. After having problems with Bloglines and Newgator I made the switch over and I'm not going back. While it's not perfect (I'd like to see items sorted by source when I click on a group) it's easily head and shoulders above the other products I've used. The stats part of it alone is amazing and I dig how you can see which blogs on your blogroll aren't posting anymore and can be weeded out.

I do wonder how Google is going to survive if there's ever another burst in the .com bubble. They seem so dependant on advertising revenue and if that goes away I'm not sure they will be the same.

The Mists of Ohio

2007-02-22T07:19:00.000-08:00

The Mist is one of my favorite Stephen King stories. It's about a small town that's is enveloped by a thick mist and then attacked by strange creatures who show up shortly after the mist hits. The real horror of the story is that you really see the monsters because the mist obscures them.

I bring this up for two reasons. The first is that they are making the short into a movie (I'm guessing the fog machine budget is going to be pretty huge) and we've recently had a nice bout of major fog here in the Central Ohio area. Driving home from hockey Tuesday night around midnight I was amazed with how thick the fog. Driving through the moors of Hilliard visibility was maybe about 10 feet in front of the car and I had to slow down lest I nail a deer or one of the other critters that inhabit the area. Of course I later learned it was "Freezing Fog" which helped delay school for most of the area school children.

Cha-ching

2007-02-21T08:42:00.000-08:00

My first post for the AT&T Blueroom is now up. It's a general overview of why 2007 has the potential to be one of the best years for gaming ever. It's a little on the generic side but I think it serves well as a good starter post. Hopefully the paragraphs are in place by the time you read this

It's a nice feeling to actually get paid for writing. I've freelanced a few articles for the Dispatch before but this is actually something that I'll be doing on regular basis and that's pretty damn sweet.

As a side note, my contact at NBC4i is leaving so it looks like that will be going away for the time being. Should know next week how it's all going to shake out.

Windows Homer Server beta

2007-02-19T07:13:00.000-08:00

I found out over the weekend that I've been accepted into the Windows Home Server beta. I'm pretty stoked about it because I was really impressed with it at CES and because it solves a few problems a few problems at home. I still haven't installed it yet (or the Vista Ultimate upgrade I bought a few weeks ago) but I think it's something I'm going to try and do this weekend.

I need to sit down and figure out what I want the topology of the home network to be right now. I have an old Win2K3 server that I could re-purpose for the Home Server but it's a bit on the old side and doesn't have a lot of hard drive space. I could use the Media Server box but it's the media server box and I don't want to lose that capability (especially now that I've finally got Orb running on it correctly). The main rig is out of the question so I'm starting to think now might be the time to put together a new box. I'll figure it out this weekend so look for updates next week

New writing gig

2007-02-19T06:20:00.000-08:00

While it's not final yet I've managed to pick up my first re-occuring (and paying) gaming writing gig. Starting later this month or early next I'll be contributing a few posts a week to the gaming section of the AT&T Blue Room. These posts will be a little longer than what I normally write for GN (around 200 words) but I've already got a stable topics lined up so more than likely I'll write a few of them over the weekend so during the week it will be more editing than actual writing. It's not enough that I'm quitting the day job but it should be enough so that I'll be calling the hopefully soon to be finished basement the AT&T Bluerooms.

I'm still going to be writing for GN and NBC4i for now.

The first step to the dark side

2007-02-19T06:13:00.000-08:00

Last week I made an impulse buy that may come back to haunt me. On a whim I picked up a refurbished second generation iPod Shuffle for $60. I had purchased the girlfriend a 30GB video iPod for her birthday last year and I was really impressed with the support for podcasting that came with iTunes and so the Shuffle made more sense than a full blown video iPod (if I want to watch video on a tiny screen I can watch it on my phone).

I'm not a huge fan of the empire of Steve. I think their ad campaign, while funny, perpetrates a lot of common industry myths and spreads the stupid elitism and smugness that overpaying for a computer allows you to own. Feh, I need to go scrub my hands...with lava...

Link Park

2007-02-13T17:51:00.000-08:00

Parking a few links for future reference, sick of them cluttering up my Google Reader starred folder

CES 2007 Coverage

2007-02-02T09:52:00.000-08:00

For anyone who's interested, NBC4i has posted my CES wrap up. I'm not particularly fond of the new design but I had nothing to do with their re-design.

Codemash - 2 weeks later

2007-02-01T09:03:00.000-08:00

It's almost been two over weeks since CodeMash and I'm still impressed with how smoothly the event went. The challenge now is to figure out how to apply all the stuff I learned at CodeMash to the day job which is proving to be difficult.

As a consultant I am bound to the technologies and methodologies of the client I'm assigned to. I'm also the only FTE on the project currently which makes my morning stand-ups very quick (although they are now quiet sit downs now as standing up in my cube and talking to myself was drawing awkward stares from the client staff).

The client is also Microsoft through and through and we're working on a package Smart client application so I won't get a chance to play with Ruby or anything else. I will get to leverage a lot of the Smart Client and SOA stuff though which will be nice.

Orb 2.0 test

2007-01-31T17:52:00.000-08:00

Orb is one of my favorite little apps as it allows you to access/share media files from one PC to any device with an internet connection. The 1.0 version was good but had a very crapola user interface but they just released a new beta of the 2.0 version of the software that's much improved. What's cool with the new version is that you can create custom playlists of music, pictures, and movies and share them over the internet. Here's a test of sharing an album of music that I have on my media box at home.

So far I haven't really gotten this part of it to work (it might be a Vista RC2 issue). I have gotten the person to person sharing working though.

Brushes with fame

2007-01-30T22:47:00.000-08:00

Occasionally I watch Attack of the Show on G4 from 7-8. There's really nothing else on and it's good background noise while I write or post on GN. Today was the Vista launch day so they had Chris Donahue on from Microsoft on their Loop segment along with Patrick Norton. I have talked Chris twice this year (at E3 and CES) and he's a cool guy. At CES he even remembered me from E3 which was pretty cool (and unexpected). So I look over at the girlfriend and tell her that I had met him and that if I was in the same room as him he would vaguely remember me, that's right she's one degree of seperation with the guy who's currently on the TV

She was unimpressed but I still thought it was pretty cool.

Testing on the Toilet?

2007-01-28T19:52:00.000-08:00

It looks like the folks at Google really do maximize their time. I'm just waiting for them to implement this back at the office.

Found over at Slashdot.

My first Amazon order

2007-01-23T13:43:00.000-08:00

Continuing the meme I first saw over at Furrygoat, my first order from Amazon was made on May 6, 1998. I ordered a copy of "Casual Day Has Gone Too Far : A Dilbert Book" and "Data Smog : Surviving the Information Glut". It's interesting to scan through the history and see all of the crappy books I've wasted money on over the years.

Fun with Amazon Web Services

2007-01-23T10:28:00.000-08:00

I'm going to be giving an internal presentation on Amazon Web Services to my company in May. Rather than doing this last minute I'm starting now with the hope of delivering something interesting and semi-refined.

Rather than doing the standard API in a web-page or smart client I'm going to use this presentation to build something that I've been wanting to do for months. My girlfriend and I spend a lot of quality time in Barnes and Noble and I would hazard to guess we are in there every other week if not every week. This isn't a bad thing but the one thing that drives me nuts about shopping at a bricks and mortar store is that I know that I can get a better deal buying it online and I don't know how good a book is (I'm willing to pay a little extra for a good book to get it right now rather than waiting for Amazon to ship it to me).

Since I have a Sprint PPC 6700 smartphone I'm going to write a small Windows Mobile 5 application that will allow me to query the AWS service to see what their price is as well as gathering review data for a book. I think I can also order the book through the service but that could get expensive in a hurry. I'm trying to figure out if there's any additional functionality I want to add to the application and what data is good to search for (right now I'm thinking about searching on Title, author, and ISBN #).

Scott Guthrie's materials online

2007-01-22T05:19:00.000-08:00

Scott Guthrie has posted the slides and demos from his ASP.NET tips and Tricks presentation as well as from his presentation on building apps with LINQ. I didn't get to hit either of these presentations but they were pretty good from what I heard from friends who did make it.

CodeMash - Day 2 - Closing thoughts

2007-01-21T19:00:00.000-08:00

Well, I've had a few days to stew on CodeMash and the event went exceedingly well. My only regret was that I didn't get to Neal Ford's Practical Programming presentation (although I got a good chunk of it on the way home from the conference) or do anything that was really outside my comfort zone (like the Flex UI presentation). That said I got a lot of of the conference both in new things to do and try out as well as validation of some of the things I'm already doing.

The conference itself was great and it was nice to never have to leave the hotel.

Possible Speakers to invite (bring back those from this year as well as everyone I went to was excellent)
- Martin Fowler if possible
- Michael Russell - testing guru - excellent perspective on testing and development as he's done both game development and business software development
- Speakers on multi-threaded development/patterns

General improvements
- Whiteboards or flip charts for the speakers
- Central repository to download slides/podcasts (may be coming though)

As you can tell these are just minor complaints on what was an excellent event.

Keith Elder's materials online

2007-01-21T18:27:00.000-08:00

Keith Elder has put up his slides and demos from his presentations.

Not only is Keith a good speaker and software developer but he's a gamer as well. Might have to see if we can setup a LAN party after hours for next years show...

Code Mash - Day 2 - Windows Gadgets

2007-01-19T12:48:00.000-08:00

Drew gave an excellent overview of the power of Windows Gadgets (one of the cool new features of Vista). Developing them is pretty simple as you just use a little bit DHTML, graphics, and an XML file to tie it all together. I had thought that MS would have a Visual Studio template for building these but right now it's just notepad only (although I bet you could use Expressions to design them).

It's a pretty cool technology and fairly accessible but it's very much a 1.0 product in that there seem to be a lot of little quirks with developing them. Hopefully we'll see some better development and debugging tools as this could be a nice little niche for home programmers to work in, especially since it seems fairly easy to move between Windows Gadgets and Live.com gadgets.

Code Mash - Day 2 - Introduction to Ajax

2007-01-19T12:37:00.000-08:00

Greg Huber gave a pretty solid overview of Ajax and how to quickly get up and run a few applications. I knew some of the concepts and how it worked but it was nice to see things in action. Greg also showed off some alternatives like InstantRails which I'm going to have to check out after the show.

Greg pointed out something that's fairly salient to the entire Web 2.0 thing in that Ajax totally dorks up the back button function in browsers and you can't bookmark Ajax applications. These are two things people forget when building these apps and represent ways that Ajax breaks some of the fundamental concepts of web applications.

CodeMash - Day 2 - Lean Programming

2007-01-19T12:17:00.000-08:00

Mary Poppendieck gave a very solid presentation on Lean Programming. About half way through I kind of realized that Lean provides a bit of the basis for Agile/Scrum. More justification for breaking things down and it shows the methodologies roots in manufacturing. There are seven principles of Lean

Eliminate Waste (find value –waste !=value)
Focus on learning – pursue relentless improvement
Defer Commitment
Deliver fast
Respect People – make work self directing
Optimize the Whole – measure UP – not just looking at the software

CodeMash - Bloggers list

2007-01-19T07:52:00.000-08:00

Found a list of other bloggers who are at CodeMash. Some other nice posts about the show there, plus I love the fact that Google groups is still in beta

CodeMash - Day 2 - Posting for hair

2007-01-19T07:47:00.000-08:00

There's a contest for all of the people blogging the show to hit 400 post so that Josh Holmes will shave his head. If we hit 600, Brian will shave his...consider this my one contentless post to reach these goals (assuming that I can get Technorati to see my posts...)

CodeMash - Day 2 - Opening Key note

2007-01-19T07:31:00.000-08:00

Scott Guthrie kicked off Day 2 with a solid presentation on LINQ. LINQ (Language INtegrated Query) is Microsoft's Object Relationship tool and I was interested to see how it stacked up against nHibernate. It actually looks a little better than nHibernate if only because it does away with the pain in the ass mapping files that you have to create in nHibernate to create the data mappings. Instead you write your data queries within the code using a near SQL like language.

Cool fact: You can use link to combine SQL and XML data which is pretty sweet.

Overall it was a fairly solid presentation and Scott brought up the multi-core issue again. Interesting to see that this is something that's turned up in most of the keynotes so far.

CodeMash - Day 1 - General thoughts

2007-01-18T20:54:00.000-08:00

It's almost midnight and I need to grab some sleep so that I can continue to soak in the programming goodness tomorrow. I don't have a lot to compare it to as the last non-MSDN event I went to was the fourth W3C conference in Boston in 1995 but I really haven't found anything to complain about. The speakers have been excellent, the conference center is good place to have it (although that may change if we get a lot of snow tomorrow), and the topics have been varied.

General notes:

Presentations in conference room 5 are at a bit of a disadvantage as they don't have a big screen to project on. This seems to be the only room with that problem though (I haven't been in 4 or 3 yet though)
Impressed with the sponsor turn out, that hallway could be even fuller next year
I know it's early but a good way to go out tomorrow would be some announcement of CodeMash 2.0 or at least a vauge statement on the future of the conference. People start planning out their vacation time early so always good to have a rough date to keep in mind for next year
Juggling bartenders make a hockey game more entertaining, even when they are getting killed
A master schedule of events at the main desk would be a great addition even if it is just on big paper (this isn't my idea, Mr. Holmes from Microsoft brought it up, I'm just putting it here in case I forget it).
I'd post about the food (which is good) but posting about the food in software development conference is like talking about the plot of an adult movie.
Over 2000 items in the news reader...mark all as read is starting to look like a good idea
I should do a full post on Bruce Eckel's Lunch keynote but I'm knackered. It was really good though, a nice challenge for people as well as a good advertisement for Burning Man

CodeMash - Day 1 - Networking for Nerds

2007-01-18T20:45:00.000-08:00

It was much better than cats, I want to keep going again and again and again....

OK, serious posting time

I have to admit that I knew most of the stuff that Brian covered in his presentation today (Senior year in college I took graduate level course in networking in college) but I always like Brian's presentations as he usually incorporates a lot of humor into them plus the opportunity to heckle was too much to pass up.

After 8 ego slides (I can't believe his gamerscore is over 100 points higher than mine, time to bear down on Lost Planet this weekend) we got down to business. Brian gave a fairly solid overview of the networking basics most developers need to know including fun things like how to use ping and tracert, different networking schemas, the joy of Firewalls, and what DMZ's are. It's a lot of good stuff to know, especially for people who are working on web applications. If you're working on a public website and don't know what a DMZ is or how to do a traceroute to the server then you're doing your client something of a disservice

CodeMash - Day 1 - Martin Fowler is (not) in the building

2007-01-18T20:41:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure if it's a CodeMash mandate or not but Martin Fowler's name has been mentioned in almost every Key Note. Might be someone for next year's conference (I'm guessing his recent surgery has some influence on this but he's be a great speaker for next year).

CodeMash - Day 1 - Smart Client fun

2007-01-18T20:25:00.000-08:00

I have to admit that I stayed in my comfort area of .NET apps today. I'm starting to regret not hitting the Ruby session but I did learn a bit from the two Smart Client sessions I hit today. My main reason for going to the sessions was to validate some work I had done on a previous client as well as see what other items I could be doing better with Smart Client development. My current client is probably going that route so a few more tips couldn't hurt.

Keith Elder did a fairly good job of showing why ClickOnce development is one of the best technologies that Windows developers don't know about and why there is still a lot of room in the world for Smart Clients (of course my favorite Smart client application is Battlefield 2142 right now so that has some bearing on the discussion). He also pointed out that Smart Clients are the best WYSIWYG development environments out there and that you really only have to know one language to develop Smart Client applications (no CSS, Javascript, etc). Smart Clients also have the advantage of using installed apps on the machine (word/excel).

The only thing I wish he had covered (and he may have if he wasn't rushed for time in the first session) was some general guidelines of when Smart Clients are/are not the right thing to do. If you have a homogenous Windows environment then Smart Clients are a perfect for Intranet applications...and that's about it.

The second session had Keith showing off how to incorporate SOA into Smart Clients. It was a pretty good session as well but it seemed like he lost focus towards the end as it became more of a "Why Enterprise Library kicks ass session" (not a bad thing). Would have been nice to have a few more SOA examples but I'm not really sure how that would work out. Still a fantastic session though and I learned a few little tips for the new client.

CodeMash - Day 1 - Opening Keynote

2007-01-18T20:17:00.000-08:00

CodeMash kicked off with an excellent keynote speech from Neal Ford this morning. The topic was Domain Specific Languages (DSL)'s and their importance. Excellent speech that will hopefully be posted online somewhere that will help ease a commute or make a few miles on the treadmill a little easier.

He had a good point that we are using a lot of languages that have built in limitations that come from their roots in C (notably C# and Java) things like 0 based arrays and object syntax trees are artificial constructs that we can live without. I think it's a lot like how there are still pieces of DOS and other backwards compatibility constructs built into Windows XP.

There's really too much to summarize in one post (and I'm tired and not nearly smart enough to really do a good job of compressing his information) is that we may be looking at a lot of specialized languages like Ruby that are doing one particular thing (for Ruby, it's web applications) rather than general languages.

CodeMash - Day 0 - Opening discussion on languages

2007-01-18T20:14:00.000-08:00

I arrived that the Kalahari around 6:30 last night and I was just able to make it to the opening night panel on programming languages. I was a little disappointed to show up and find a stage with chairs and not the fighting pit I had imagined on the drive up to Sandusky. Instead of lashing two people from different languages at the wrist and giving them knives to fight it out Thunderdome style I was instead treated to a fairly good discussion on languages and where programming

The panel was hosted by Bruce Eckels, with the panel being comprised of Jay Pipes (last minute addition for Ted Nolund who was delayed), Neal Ford, David Stanek, Bill Wagner, and James Ward.

The panel was driven by questions from the audience and we were able to get six questions in about the conference. Rather than give you my somewhat sketchy notes on the panel I thought I’d just post my highlights of the panel. They recorded the session and I imagine you’ll be able to download it at some point but I’m not sure where or when that is going to happen.

The first question of the night was “In your opinion what will be the most significant advancement for development languages?” and Bruce’s response was a solution for the concurrency problem, i.e. multi-threaded applications running on new multi-core CPU’s. It seems like there has always been some balance in the race between software and hardware but as of late hardware has gotten much farther ahead with the new focus on multi-core processors. I touched on this a bit with my CES post last week so it was nice to see other people seeing the same problem.

Neal answered the question with the rise of Domain specific languages, David with Pattern development, and James talked about better User interface development (no disagreement here)

The final question of the night was also fairly interesting (the other four questions asked were good but the first and last were my favorites). The question was which languages should people learn in college. Most agreed that Java was not really the best language and that something like Ruby or Python were best as they didn’t force you to see the world a certain way. Assembler was also recommended as people need to learn how things work as it should make them better programmers.

I found this interesting because I actually took COBOL in college and as an elective took some C++ since I knew it was something that was fairly hot in the market (note: my degree is in Management Info Systems and not Systems Analysis so it’s not a hardcore degree…people who know me are know saying “Ah, it all makes sense now…”). I’ve gone back to my school to talk a few times over the years and they’ve since moved to Java and .NET. I might have to forward this info back to some of my old professors to see what they think.

Meetings and getting their early

2007-01-16T06:44:00.000-08:00

Brian has a nice post up about why you should always get to meetings 10 minutes early. It's a good read and you should go check it out.

I agree completely with Brian to a point. If you are selling them something, or meeting with them about something important you should be there at least 10 minutes early, preferrably 30 minutes early.

Where I'm going to disagree with Brian is on the day to day meetings you have at a client (assuming you are currently working at a client full time). These are the usual standing meetings such as weekly status meetings. For those meetings it needs to be client arrival time (CAT)- 5 minutes. I've found that each client culture has their own time when they show up to meetings.

Some clients show up a little bit early, some show up on time, and some clients show up at least 10 minutes late. Of course you should be at least 10 minutes early until you determine what their CAT is but once you do, you're just wasting your valuable time sitting in a conference room by yourself. I've found that CAT - 5 works out well as it gives me time to get the optimal spot in the room as well as giving me enough time to get ready for the meeting. If I'm running the meeting I might add a few minutes to that to prep hand outs and review the agenda so the meeting runs a little smoother.

Podcasts for the trip to Sandusky

2007-01-12T13:23:00.000-08:00

It looks like I will now be car pooling with some co-workers up to Sandusky for Code Mash. It's about a 2.5 hour drive (2 if the sub-light drive is working, hell the car could make Kessel run in under 12 parsecs in the right conditions) but that's still a lot of dead air. So I'm thinking about bringing along the mp3 player and downloading a few podcasts for the trip. The first thought was to download a couple of episodes of dotNetRocks to get every one in the mood for the show but that might be going overboard. Major Nelson also puts on a great podcast but I don't think everybody in the car is a big gamer so that might not work as well. Right now I'm open to suggestions so if you have any post them in the comments.

A different form of SOA

2007-01-08T20:25:00.000-08:00

What company had hardware in all three next generation consoles? If you answered IBM them pat yourself on the back and give yourself a cookie.

We started off today talking to IBM about their involvement in the next gen console wars and it was a fairly interesting talk as this isn't your father's IBM. Head over to GN for a full report on the meeting. There was one interesting segment of the meeting that I wanted to talk about though.

The CELL processor (the 9 cores in one processor that powers the PS3) is an exceedingly hard piece of software to code for so I talked with the IBM guy about how hardware was finally way ahead of software. It turns out that IBM has realized this and is working on middleware components to help people manage it and one of the ways they are doing it is through SOA applications. So instead of using SOA to do build your typical business apps like accounting and what not you use it to build multimedia editing tools, compress video, and do other rich media tasks. I didn't get a lot of the details of how it works exactly (we were running out of time) but I thought it was pretty cool that there were some non-business implementations of SOA.

Codemash sessions

2007-01-05T10:46:00.000-08:00

CodeMash

Finally had a chance to sit down last night and look through the Code Mash sessions and right now this is a tentative list of the sessions I'm going to hit

Day 1
Building and Deploying Smart Clients with Visual Studio 2005
SOA as a Conversation
Building Enterprise Smart Clients using a Services Oriented Architecture
Networking for Nerds

Day 2
Lean Software Development
Intro to AJAX
Building Gadgets for Windows Vista
Developing Data-Driven Web Applications with LINQ

As you can see my main focus is going to be on Smart Client development with a dash of SOA and a garnish of web development. The reason behind this is my current client is developing a Smart Client app and I'd love to get some more information on the topic and well as validation on existing techniques that I learned on my last Windows project. The project also has some networking components which is why I'm going to the networking session (I also know the speaker which helps...I'm guessing I will be picked on at some point in the session so come watch Brian make fun of me).

CES Time

2007-01-05T10:35:00.000-08:00

I'm flying out to Vegas Sunday morning for CES 2007. This will be my first time going to a CES and apparently the show is two to three times as large as E3. I've got a pretty full schedule right now but I'm hoping to have some time on Tuesday to try and walk around the show floor. Here's the basic schedule right now.

Sunday
Sony Press Conference
Digital Experience Party (a nice hodge podge of companies showing off their wares

Monday
IBM Consumer Division (they make the chips in the Wii and PS3)
Majesco (some new PS3 and Wii games)
Ageia
Sony Consumer products
Sony Online entertainment

Tuesday
Microsoft

I'm sure I'll end up catching the OSU/Florida game somewhere on Monday and then head out to another event but not sure what that is just yet.

Code Mash Coverage

2007-01-03T09:28:00.000-08:00

CodeMash

As I mentioned earlier I will be attending CodeMash in two weeks. Right now I'm trying to figure out the best way to blog/cover the event.

I've been covering E3 for GamingNexus for the last five years or so and I usually did so by taking notes all day and then spending the rest of the night writing and posting about what went on during the day. It's a great way of doing it and worked well as I was too booked with appointments to write about it during the day. The problem with that is that I was up until 2-3AM in the morning writing about the events which was not a lot of fun (especially the year we stayed an hour and a half south of LA and had to get up at 5AM to get to the show)

The second idea is to take the laptop with me, take notes during the sessions (Onenote FTW), and then post between sessions/end of the day. The advantage is that everything is already typed and just needs to be edited and then posted. The disadvantage is that I sometimes miss things trying to type everything in and the laptop provides distractions (especially if I've got wifi) such as e-mail, Newsgator, and IM.

I'm guessing I'll go with the second and try a little self-restraint while I'm there but I'm open to other options. Either way, I'm looking forward to going. As soon as I figure out which sessions I'm going to I'll post a list

Classing up the joint

2007-01-03T07:29:00.000-08:00

When I first started out in the consulting business 11 years ago my first mentor used to reject any documentation that didn't have any identifying details on it (page number, time & date, and document description in the footer). It's something that I did for a while and then promptly stopped doing about a year or so after I left the company as I was using templates after that which contained most the same information.

On my current project I don't have the luxury of those template so I've started creating my own (meeting minutes, agendas and various visio docs). To make life easier on myself (and the client) I found it good to add those little details in as it helps keep track of what you were thinking at any one point in time which is helpful after a long holiday break.

Here is the basic info each document should have
- Page number/# of pages - I like this in the bottom right corner of every document
- Short Description of the document (Meeting Minutes etC). If it's not at the top of the document I usually like to put it at the middle of the bottom of each document
- Current Date - This is important as this shows when the document was printed out. this is critical for me as we will often revise meeting minutes more than once and it make it easier to track multiple versions

If you've got any other tips feel free to drop them in the comments

First post/Hello World

2007-01-03T06:17:00.000-08:00

This is the first post of my new work blog. The primary purpose of this blog will be as a repository for my experiences at the 2007 CodeMash but I'll probably post here from time to time about my day job. I may also post some non-work stuff but I promise not to go as out there as Rory does.

The primary reason for the sparse posting will be that this is something I will probably only be able to do in my spare time and I've got other writing committments that I need to get done as well as other weekly obligations. Plus it's not like you really need yet anothe boring blog to track and read.