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ie7 beta and trillian |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
7/30/2005 4:00 PM
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note to all:
if you install ie 7 beta, you'll trash your trillian app. Cerulean knows about it and have no plans to patch until ie7 is out of beta. too bad, cause i was really liking explorer 7.
uninstalling ie7 beta:
on add/remove programs, remember to check “Show Updates”
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Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
7/28/2005 4:00 PM
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| Messed around with the IE 7 beta today. I was hoping that it would run as a stand alone app rather than integrating, but it seems to be o.k. no problems with running as default for visual studio. I'm really digging the tabbed browsing experience; yeah i know firefox already had it. its nice to see it in the ie world now too. The RSS feed discovery is a nice addition as well. Its cool that it lights up as it finds the feeds and gives you the option of setting a favorite for it. 7 doesnt seem to be too drastic of a change, so maybe i'll leave it as default for a bit and see how things go. |
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hooray for the sun...not. |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
7/27/2005 4:00 PM
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| k...so i was sunburned really bad a few weeks ago. and it did something really bad to my skin, so that now whenever i'm exposed to any direct sunlight - i turn red. quickly. doc says that i've become hyper sensitive to sunlight but i should be o.k. after medication and staying inside for a few weeks. so i'm taking this prednisone crap. and wow. it really screws up the brain. like i only sleep for very short bursts (1-2 hours) and then i wanna wake up and do something. only i cant concentrate because my brain isnt rested. its strange. i think i'm almost back to normal. fortunately i've built up the time off so its not too big a deal. I'll be back to the coding express lane first thing in the morning. so many cool things to work on in the next few weeks. should be a blast. hard, but fun regardless. |
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quality developers |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
7/24/2005 4:00 PM
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joel spolsky from www.joelonsoftware.com has an awesome article on developer quality that really nails the concept of quality developers make quality products and why. get it here. |
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if you dont want to spend time reading, here's my take on it, using his diagram as example:
The Best Working Conditions -> The Best Developers -> Best Software -> Profit!
Its now becoming an industry standard that developers placed into awesome environments will tend to excel. so as a project manager, you need to assess your working conditions to see if it fosters an environment of innovation and collaboration to the point that your developers WANT to work there. We've all worked those projects where its such a dread showing up to work. Nobody smiles there. People only work late because they absolutely have to. And it would be just plain dumb for someone to think that type of jungle would produce anything of corporate value.
< NOT_KISSING_BUTT_HERE >
Nusoft Solutions has that kind of environment. The company puts in place an attitude of learning, mentoring and corporate health.
< /NOT_KISSING_BUTT_HERE >
Well anyhoo..you really should check out joels post. he demonstrates thru data, whereas i'm just paraphrasing most of his work. :)
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my excitement level |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
7/19/2005 4:00 PM
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had to stop at teksystems for a bit, to discuss software development/skillsets with a pair of noob recruiters. the questions they asked are the fairly generic queries that someone new to the i.t. world would ask. and i found my self repeating alot of information with emily that i had just discussed with keith, only minutes before. and you wanna know whats really strange? i loved every minute of it. theres something exciting going on in software development and I realized afterwards, that being a part of that is very invigorating and challenging. I probably confused and astonished them both by talking too much and way too fast. emily is probably still pushing down tylenol after the conversation we had. its hard for me to restrain myself when i'm talking about coding. I'm so passionate and obsessed with it, that I forget to moderate my level of speech.
They'll both do well with Tek. They're inquisitive and determined and that really came out in the meetings that I had the pleasure of attending. i hope they're able to find the talent to drive the Tek engine forward. Its definitely an exciting time to be in this business. |
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Enterprise Library Update |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
7/19/2005 4:00 PM
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| Microsoft Enterprise Library Update |
| if you're using the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Enterprise Library, you'll need to whip on over to their site and grab the latest build. It corrects a memory leak issue with the configuration block that affects the entire package. |
go get it! | One note of caution! If you want to avoid blowing out your project references, change the default Folder name on the install to match your current EL install (Probably - program files/microsoft enterprise library.) Not sure why they changed the directory naming scheme, but watch out for it!
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movie review time |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
7/19/2005 4:00 PM
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 | fantastic four: sucked. marvel really pushed out a piece of crap on this one. the whole movie led up to a 5 minute battle with dr. doom? and it was lame. the acting was crap. the script was crap. don't waste your money on the price of admission. this movie blows. |
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charlie and the chocolate factory: johnny depp pulls off the role of willy wonka beautifully. and i enjoyed the movie. the film was entertainingly sinister in that eccentric tim burton kind of way. i have a few minor grievances that i'd like to file, however. #1 - this movie wasn't really necessary. Usually when a remake is done, its to add a new twist or better effects to an already established film. And I'm not really sure that this newer version adds to the license that is willy wonka. it was good, but was it better? enough to warrant another release? And I'm also a little saddened by the fact that willy wonka doesnt sing. I dont know if its because mr. depp doesnt have the voice for it or if mr. burton was trying to avoid the "musical" genre tag. I was hoping to see johnny depps rendition of the rowboat song, but no such luck with this film. But it was a good film, don't get me wrong. I only wish that there had been something to differentiate it as an improvement upon the original. | |
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late nights |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
7/17/2005 4:00 PM
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well thanks to the miracle of prescription drugs, i was unable to sleep tonite. I had to go to the emergency room on Saturday nite for an allergic reaction. Not sure what triggered it, but not being able to breathe wasnt especially pleasant. so now i'm on prednisone to help clear up the red skin and itchiness. i look like i've spent too much time in the sun. :) other than that incredible loss of productivity for the weekend, everything else is going well.
we did find out that some of our really cool dhtml stuff looks like butt in firefox.
so now we begin the javascript feature comparison and workaround nightmare.
tables dont render all that well in firefox and clientHeight isn't exactly client height either. wonderful. fortunately there's no shortage of information out there on javascripting and firefox.
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swamped |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
7/12/2005 4:00 PM
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| been really busy with the new project. we made some schema changes on monday that will force some coding changes. spent most of tuesday rewriting business and data layer objects. modified a bunch of stored procedures and implemented the table changes in the database. At night I've been working through this awesome DHTML book "Modern Web Design - Using Javascript and DOM" by Stuart Langridge. Its very detailed, although not project based. It dives deep into the various dhtml aspects that i've been wanting to concentrate on, so i can overlook the lack of "now you try" style of chapter projects. The week should ease up a little by the weekend, once we have the new design in place and tested. | 
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batman begins |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
7/9/2005 4:00 PM
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finally got to see batman begins on imax. it was awesome. everything about the movie perfected the image of what i think the true batman persona is supposed to be. awesome fight scenes, cool toys and an engaging plot. a few scary parts that my son wouldnt have enjoyed so i'm glad i took in the movie on the solo.
cant wait for the dvd. |
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AJAX.NET |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
7/7/2005 4:00 PM
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i've been spending a considerable amount of time in the last two days working with the ajax.net library. its an awesome experience. the dhtml stuff that we're putting together now is really cool. i was able to make a slideup shopping cart element thats loaded dynamically and runs c# code thru the ajax.ajaxmethod().
i've been scrambling to get a grip on javascript and dom work, but thankfully its very similar to c# syntax so the learning curve isn't too bad.
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google earth |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
6/29/2005 4:00 PM
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| i cant stop using it! its soooo addictive. its similar to nasa's worldwind app, but with finer detail. for those unfamiliar with google earth, its a zoomable (is that a word?) satellite imaging application. basically, i can zoom down on to the earth and depending on the quality of the sat captures, i can zoom down to the car level. some of the better scans are of new york, l.a... i was able to zoom down to the statue of liberties torch. thats cool...really cool. check it out at: http://earth.google.com. its an application, so you'll have to download and install. and high speed only. dialup users would only be frustrated with the speed of the refresh rate. |  |
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sleep deprivational coding |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
6/28/2005 4:00 PM
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i keep telling myself that i'm going to go to bed before 1 a.m. but it never seems to happen. I get so much done at midnite that its hard to turn off the puter. its great for the customer but its probably not the healthiest thing i could do. i get lost in what i'm doing and find myself obsessing over the solution to the current problem. i guess thats a huge sign that i love my job. i think about it all the time. nick and i get to work with some of the newest stuff (not 2.0 framework tho) and while its awesome, it does mean an incredible amount of time spent in books and online docs. but we're enjoying it. hopefully it shows, even when i'm tired at 2 p.m.
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commerce work |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
6/23/2005 4:00 PM
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finished up most of the shopping cart functionality last nite. (laaaate last nite). Created a custom control to handle the add to cart functionality, so that we can just drop that control on any module where we'll want to have purchasing ability. this will allow us to retail product anywhere on the site.
will move on to order processing and verifying everything in vault. i say verifying, when really its just checking it in and letting cruisecontrol.net take over. so cool.
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more on cruise control .net |
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The Woolston Blog
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By daniel on
6/21/2005 4:00 PM
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i wanted to elaborate a little more on my excitement over cruisecontrol .net. we have the application sitting on our dev server, and its primary task is to sit and watch the source control folders for new or updated files. if it finds a change, it fires off a Nant build script and waits for the results of the new build. if the build fails for whatever reason, cruise control sends me email stating the nature of the failure. there is also a utility that comes with cc.net that i highly recommend using: cctray. this little service runs in my tray and polls the cruise control build. if theres a failure, i get a popup bubble stating that the build on the dev server is bad. what awesome integration. no more weekly build chaos (note previous job where they used rational's toolset.) I'm going to jump into cc.net and nant some more on the weekend on my own system at home, just to become more familiar with the apps.
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