Saturday, December 28, 2002

Google

Google is tapping into their data mining capabilities as a public relations tool. This timeline has a slight USA today flavor in that it ignores alot of the statistical noise that would make the soundbites feel like hard facts. But still, It's interesting.

posted by Christopher @ 10:00 AM

KM Culture?

Our operations department has been creating and distributing a set of reports every week for many many years. These reports, call them X reports, totaled about 50 pages and went to 20 different recipients.

It was a relatively painless thing to create a web based version of these reports, so we went about the termination of the printed version. I contacted the partner in charge of all of these recipients and told him our plan. His first response was "what the hell is this report? It's probably ancient history, and I doubt it has any value today" I explained the subtleties of why it may be useful and told him it was little effort to continue with the on-line version. He O.K.'d this and I continued on my path.

Monday I emailed the recipients that the paper report would be discontinued and that the link to the on-line version was attached. Friday the request comes that one of the lawyers on the list desired a print out of the on-line version for review. Arrrgghhh.

posted by Christopher @ 9:03 AM

.net

I've been exploring windows service development with .net. First of all, I think it's great that this even exhists. But as of yet, the debugging envirionment is still kind of crude. Hopefully I'm missing something. But the whole, build, install, test, uninstall, (reboot sometimes),modify, rebuild. Process is very tedious. Please, somebody correct me here.

posted by Christopher @ 8:52 AM

Tuesday, December 24, 2002

Da hoo, Doray!


Merry Christmas all.

posted by Christopher @ 9:14 PM

Monday, December 23, 2002

.Net

An essential article for anyone wishing to customize the asp.net datagrid.. Fun stuff.

posted by Christopher @ 7:50 AM

Friday, December 20, 2002

The real value of the Internet

Without the internet, I'd have completely missed this story. I wonder if these people are connected with the mysterious disappearing sock drier vortex?

posted by Christopher @ 6:16 PM

Wednesday, December 18, 2002

Congratulate me.

Passed my Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET exam today. Now my brain hurts.

posted by Christopher @ 10:12 PM

MS Application Center

Someone ought to find this useful:

If you want your Application Center Test script to send you an email add the following code:

Sub sendMessage(strMessage)
dim MyCDONTSMail
dim MyBody
Set MyCDONTSMail = CreateObject("CDONTS.NewMail")
MyCDONTSMail.From= "AutomaticTesting@someDomain.com"
MyCDONTSMail.To= "yourToAddress@anywher.com"
MyCDONTSMail.Subject="Test results: " & strMessage
MyBody = "While testing at " & now() & vbCrLf
MyBody = MyBody & "" & vbCrLf
MyBody = MyBody & strMessage
MyCDONTSMail.Body= MyBody
MyCDONTSMail.Send
set MyCDONTSMail=nothing
end sub

Then call it from the test

if instr(oResponse.Body, "Some text that is in the expected page") then
Test.Trace "Got to the expected page"
else
Test.Trace "Did not get to the expected page"
call sendMessage("Did not get to the expected page.")
end if

posted by Christopher @ 10:55 AM

Outages

my personal site is unavialable due to a dns error. Sigh.
Passport is showing me a real cool 'outage' page when I try and access hotmail... Hmmm. Isn't 6:00 AM Eastern time, peak usage?

posted by Christopher @ 6:03 AM

Friday, December 13, 2002

Techie

We've been using a fairly modest machine for a database server for the last couple years. I think it's a dual proc 500 mhz Compaq. It's performed admirably, but we're upgrading to take advantage of the San. I've been very cautious in the migration. Yes, it's clustered 8 processor machines. The power should be great. But I haven't had the greatest confidence that the people supporting the OS and infrastructure have go their act completely together. So I've delayed about six months.

This last weekend we cut over. Things went smoothly. But there's been no noticeable improvement in response time. That's a little troubling. Should I be this nervous?

posted by Christopher @ 9:28 AM

Tuesday, December 10, 2002

Project Time

Did some more work on Project Time. Now we have Clients, Projects, and time. What fun!

posted by Christopher @ 11:04 PM

Ebay battles

I'm always baffled at stupidity. We recently purchased a small statue from an individual in Georgia. Buyer paid shipping and insurance... OK, no problem. They guy tossed it in an old box with some bubble wrap and didn't insure the package. Now he thinks he has no responsibility for refunding our purchase price. Hmmmm?

posted by Christopher @ 11:02 PM

Saturday, December 07, 2002

Why is art theft so fascinating?

News of the theft of two Van Gogh paintings today makes me question my interest in stories like this. Yes, I'm an art lover, but think of the motives behind stealing a work of art like that. The society of people who would plan and carry out such a crime have to have some degree of sophistication that most criminals do not possess. I'm sure the logistics of turning the painting into cash of some sort are tremendous. But is it possible that the criminals just wanted to possess the art for themselves? Unlikely. So then there's some mastermind art lover willing to steal something in order to enjoy it for him/herself. That's something to think about.

posted by Christopher @ 11:02 AM

CMS

Dids some work with Microsoft's Content Management Server. Interesting stuff. More big-ware. More opinions as the gel.

posted by Christopher @ 9:13 AM

Wednesday, December 04, 2002

The holy war continues..

Roger Session's latest news letter does an outstanding job of laying out some of the issues in the latest exchange between java and .net. Somehow it's all to clean and simple. My question: does any of this matter any more?

posted by Christopher @ 4:28 PM

Tuesday, December 03, 2002

My tutor

posted by Christopher @ 8:55 PM

MS ACT

Well, I'm through the worst of it. I have Application Center Test, beating up my extranet fairly well. I'm still looking for a good way to break of the RSA session between test iterations. We'll see.

posted by Christopher @ 7:39 PM

Sunday, December 01, 2002

It's nine PM. Do you know what 'platform invoke' does?

posted by Christopher @ 9:11 PM

Scott Johnson reveals what I feared was true about computer book publishing. This begs the question why we haven't been able to propogate e-books effectively. Or why some enterprising outfit hasn't really fleshed out the idea of real time printing and fulfillment of books as they are ordered. I know there was talk of this some time ago. But it seems to have faded.

posted by Christopher @ 9:25 AM