August 2004 - Posts

27 August 2004
I've Got GMail Invites
[Update] The folks at Google must really like me...they've given me some more invites, 6 in all. Keep the requests coming! [Update] Down to 1 invite. [Update] They gave me a couple more, spent one on the g/f...so I now have 4. Geeediton! [Update] 3 left. Get 'em while they're hot! First 6 comments on this post gets 'em (comments only please, and make sure you leave a way for me to get in touch with you). Shaweeet! I'll keep giving them away as I get them, so if you don't get one this round, keep your fingers crossed. Feel free to link to this post as well. Read More...
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26 August 2004
A man, a plan, a canal. Panama!
< update > I didn't realize that my “for“ loop was garbled by .Text: line 20 should read as for ( int i=0;i<halfwayMark;i++) < / update > The folks over at channel9 recently did a whiteboard session (simulating an interview technique used at Microsoft to screen candidates) whereby the “candidate” was asked to whiteboard an algorithm to determine if a string was a palindrome. While I don't know C/C++, I decided to give it a shot in managed code (C# in this case). I also wanted to take a different approach rather than dealing with traversing the string with multiple loops. Here is what I hacked together: 1 static private bool isPalindrome ( string stringToTest) 2 { 3 char [] stringChars = stringToTest.ToCharArray(); 4 5 // format the string 6 foreach ( char character in stringChars) 7 { 8 if ( char .IsPunctuation(character) || char .IsSeparator(character)) 9 { 10 stringToTest = stringToTest.Replace(character.ToString(), "" ).ToLower(); 11 } 12 } 13 14... Read More...
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26 August 2004
Dead Modem< /taps>
Came home to a dead modem last night. Funeral services will be held tomorrow afternoon, ping me for details. I've never lost a modem before...it's so painful *sniffle*. On a lighter note, appologies to my two readers for any 404 errors received over the past 14 hours. Cheers. Read More...
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24 August 2004
BizTalk Almighty
I ran across this post today and wanted to (briefly) drop my two cents. I worked with BizTalk 2000 way back in the day (circa 2001) and immediately fell in love with the product (enough to run out and get certified ( 663335/NotANumber) on it). There was a small problem though: No one had jumped on the BizTalk bandwagon yet, so my experiences were limited to outside consulting for companies that were looking to implement some sort of EDI solution without the hassle of...well...writing one themselves. I would go in, pitch it, give a demo, and that was that. When BizTalk came out, it was one of the few turnkey EDI solutions out there, and IIRC it was the first “.Net” enabled server in that it used web services (and lots of XML) to expose the EDI functionality (.Net hadn't been officially released at this point though). One major hiccup for BizTalk (then and now) is that it's expensive (surpassing even SQL Server in licensing price), and good BizTalk admins/devs are hard to find... Read More...
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24 August 2004
GMail 3rd Party Apps?
[Update] Found one from the monster itself . Neat! Now that I'm all Gmail'd up, anybody out there have a list of 3rd party apps that are available for Gmail? I've seen a few floating around the blogosphere from time to time, but didn't note them as I didn't have a need. Oh, and if either of my 2 readers are counting, this is my hundredth post :-). As a side note, I discovered a really cool hit counter site, check out www.statcounter.com . It's FREE as well! Read More...
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24 August 2004
Olympics -- Men's High Bar Competition
I have refrained from commenting on the Olympics thusfar, however...wtf? I'm all for our American gymnasts, however the Russian guy so clearly schooled the rest of the field on high bar tonight, yet didn't even get a medal (even after 10 minutes of booing from the crowd for the unfair scoring of his routine). Anyone who watched this competition tonight knows exactly what I'm talking about. 'nuff said. Read More...
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22 August 2004
Blah Part Three -- Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS)
I was going to let my latest experience with Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS) fall through the cracks and not even blog about it (not exactly proud of the fact that I contacted them, but more on that later), but the experience was, needless to say, downright comical. First a little background about me. For those of you who don't know, I worked for MS for a year in their Developer Support division (it was supposed to be a way to get my foot in the door...obviously, it didn't work out. It actually didn't work out for anyone on my team as it was shipped overseas towards the end of our tenure, but that's another post). This was a while back, and long after I started my path as a dev in the IT world; at the time, MS seemed like the holy grail (ha). Needless to say, I know inside and out how the support process works at MS. The position I worked was _not_ consumer support...it was developer support, and the issues we handled ranged from installation issues with VS all the way to incredibly... Read More...
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22 August 2004
Got GMail?
Huge ups to Travis for hooking me up with a GMail invite. I had it in my head that I was going to switch over to gmail only (no more Outlook), however, Lookout for Outlook pretty much negates the reasoning behind this. The only compelling reason to use gmail is the fact that I can access my email from anywhere...so I am contemplating setting up some rules in Outlook to forward specific mail to my gmail account, as well as keeping it in my .pst file as well. This way, I can have access to important mail pretty much anywhere. At the very top of my wishlist for Outlook is some sort of lightweight web interface for it (similar to Outlook Web Access in Exchange...if anyone has seen the web interface for Exchange 2003, it's not hard to understand how easy ditching Outlook altogether would be...the interface is simply phenomenal). Of course, this would require some sort of webserver to host the site, but I think power users would be the largest group wanting functionality like this, and chances... Read More...
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20 August 2004
Resharper -- Anyone Have any Thoughts on this Product?
Sounding board for anyone who has any rants/raves about JetBrains Resharper VS.NET add-in. I am downloading a demo as I write this. Read More...
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18 August 2004
Blah - Part Two
The culprit for the seemingly random BSoD's? A half gig dimm of memory evidently decided it was time to call it quits on me. What was the number one nugget of advice I received via newsgroups/etc? Perform a system restore. Ha! I turned off system restore eons ago (about the same time I turned off indexing service, remote registry, and UPnP methinks). In the end, I just started yanking out hardware until the damn thing stopped BSoD'ing. I'm actually quite happy it's just a stick of RAM, if I'd lost a drive, that would have been a completely different story. As a side note, I had forgotten that MS had changed the color of BSoD from a somewhat harsh electric blue, to a much more soothing and relaxing royal blue (yeah, it's been that long...and my Win2k install before XP BSoD'd nary once, it was the most stable desktop OS MS has ever released IMHO). Read More...
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