Accidental Technologist

43

Rob Bazinet — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:13:11 GMT

Today is my 43rd birthday. I have since my late 30’s, really disliked thinking about being another year older, I mean, it’s really only another day older than I was yesterday but acknowledging the fact that an additional year has past put me in a somber mood. Maybe it is the realization of middle-age that makes one think about their place.

In prior years I spent the day reflecting on the past 365 days and wondered if I had made the best use of my time and taken advantage of the right opportunities.

Reflection

This birthday is no different in as much as reflecting on the past year but taking a different view of it. I realized that I am damn lucky! I have a great family, I work from home and do the work I choose to do. I get up everyday and don’t take the dreaded commute to the cubical farm. I get to see my family every morning a take my daughter to school. I know many people wished they could have this life because I dreamed of it myself when I was commuting and wasn’t home when I wanted to be. It is easy to miss too much. I have reached aspect of my life that I can stand and be proud of.

I am truly happy and at a peaceful point even with the state of our economy and the climbing costs of everything. Keeping our head above water and moving forward, certainly means success.

Inspiration

I read a lot of blogs, some I read every detail and some I don’t. I find myself looking for something different now than I used to, so the sources of information have changed.

I find those people that are taking the same path I am taking or are where I want to be are the ones I find so much value in. My goals are not to be rich or famous but to provide for my family, feel good about the work I do and help others find what inspires them. It’s not always easy to be able to explain things as one might, therefore some source of inspiration.

Steven Bristol and Allan Branch with great posts like Co-founder of an Unknown Software Company by Allan.
Derek Sivers – If you think you haven’t found your passion…
So many others

It is so true, passion and inspiration mean so much. I know too many people who have a 9 to 5 “job” they never really enjoy. I think something we spend so much time doing, we should be happy doing it. It doesn’t have to be working for yourself, it can mean anything as long as it adds value to your life.

Projection

It seems part of my career always seemed to be chasing something that I knew existed but I wasn’t exactly sure I would know when I got to it. I can honestly say that I know what that goal is and I have a fairly good idea how to get there.

I won’t go as far as lay out the path to the next goal but I do have it laid out in my mind. I will blog about it here when I feel comfortable talking about it, but I will say that things will change for the better. Stay tuned, good things to come.

Technorati Tags: Inspiration,Passion

Who Here Prefers Non-Stop Flights?

Rob Bazinet — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:30:18 GMT

I wonder who designed the user experience at Orbitz? I cannot imagine the design meeting which resulted with this checkbox on their flight search page:

Does anyone look at that checkbox and decide they don’t want a non-stop flight? No, I would love for this flight to take as long as humanly possible.

I find it humorous every time I search for flights at Orbitz. At least have the box checked by default so I don’t have to. Maybe as a web developer I notice things like this that most would not and I think about it too much but I wanted to share.

Technorati Tags: Orbitz,Usability

The Crazy 80040154 COM Class Factory Error

Rob Bazinet — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:00:33 GMT

I have been working on a project recently which requires me to integrate with QuickBooks Online, in this case from a web application. I have had the pleasure (strong word) working with integrating with QuickBooks in various capacities in the past and although it is not trivial, it does work. I ran into an interesting problem recently with an error that baffled me.

While attempting to connect to QuickBooks online from my ASP.NET C# application, I received the following COM Exception:

Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {3C801F08-CDC5-4129-AAE8-CCC4F116B5BE} failed due to the following error: 80040154.

Searching the various Intuit Developer Forums led me nowhere. I was thinking it may be the fact I am funning on Windows 7 and figured it might be an incompatibility with Windows 7 and the COM components from Intuit in their QuickBooks SDK. After various Google searches I picked up a few clues to the source of the problem, which in hindsight should have been a bit more obvious to me.

64-Bit Friend and Foe

The root of the problem was not really Windows 7 but the fact I am running 64-bit and Visual Studio 2008 defaults the Platform Target to “Any CPU” when building a project. So selecting Project-> {project name} Properties show the following dialog with Any CPU selected:

By changing the choice of the Platform Target to x86 and rerunning my application, the creation of the session to QuickBooks Online works fine. The idea should have probably been more obvious to me, knowing the DLL’s from Intuit are 32-bit COM-based and the interop to my 64-bit operating system could cause some problems.

If anyone wants to add the technical details as to why this behaves as it does, I will update this post with those technical details. I hope this helps someone else with the same problem so they won’t waste the time that I did.

Technorati Tags: Intuit,QuickBooks Online,COM Interop,64-Bit

A Serious Windows Home Server Pain Point

Rob Bazinet — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:25:20 GMT

I talked about my experiences with not having a solid backup strategy back at the end of August. My solution included using a Microsoft Windows Home Server (WHS) system to handle backups for all of the computers on my home/office network. I wanted to give a bit of follow-up to the experience and explain a huge pain point I found.

Reflection

I have been using the Acer Aspire Easystore H340 Windows Home Server for the past 6 weeks, backing up several computers on a nightly basis and it has been working flawlessly. Computers are set to backup each night between 6pm and 11pm and this gives WHS plenty of time to complete all incremental backups with time to spare. Backing up from Macs using SuperDuper works great too.

The WHS has been great to store all of the software we use on a regular basis when we need to share installation files.

A Pain Point

I did run into a rather annoying problem this weekend that resulted in a kludgy workaround. When I setup the WHS in August I had purchased an extra disk to be using in the WHS after I was confident my Windows development system was functioning fine. The idea was to take out the 1TB (Western Digital Green) and replace with a 1 TB Western Digital Black drive, which is faster than the green.

I cloned the green drive to the black, took out the green and rebooted the development system, all worked great. I was informed by WHS that my system had a new hard drive and I needed to log in to WHS Console and configure to recognize the new disk. When running the wizard, I was greeted by this message when almost to the end:

This computer is not online or Windows Home Server cannot access the computer's hard drive. Please make sure the computer is powered on and connected to your home network.

After much trial-and-error I could not get the new drive to be recognized by WHS. It was aware there was a new drive but could not recognize it was a replacement for the old drive. I came up with a solution that worked but is not ideal:

Uninstall Windows Home Server Connector
While using Windows Home Server Console, remove PC from list of backed up PC’s.
Cleanup backup database using the "Cleanup Now" button in the WHS Console
Reinstall Windows Home Server Connector – install from either original DVD or by accessing via the Software share on WHS.
Retry setting up backups – should now be able to configure backup for system.

I performed actions 2-3 from the actual WHS itself by utilizing a Remote Desktop Connection to the WHS. I then had to reconfigure the backup for my system, including all of the folders I had previously Excluded. This wasn’t a surprise but don’t forget to do this or your backup might be a lot bigger than expected.

UPDATE: Joel Ross made a comment suggesting the correct way to change out the disks under WHS:

I think (and I could be wrong here) the proper way to do this would have been to do a back up with the old disk in the dev box, replace the drive in the dev box, and then do a restore on the dev box using the windows home server software. I haven't replaced a drive in any of my machines yet, but that's what I've read others doing.

Conclusion

This solution certainly worked but was not a very clean and user-friendly way of replacing a disk. This begs the question – what happens if I have a disk failure and need to replace the drive, will I be able to connect and restore? The answer is not clear at this point.

After some searching around the web and there are many reports of this issue back to the WHS CTP and it has yet to be resolved as of WHS Service Pack 2. It appears it could be due to the fact the new drive is not on the same SATA connection as the previous drive but, in my opinion, this should not matter. A fix for this is needed or I will not have as much confidence as I once had for Windows Home Server as a key backup solution.

If anyone has a better solution than the one I have found, I would love to hear it. If there is a released fix for this, I would like to hear about it as well. I am running on Windows 7 Ultimate RTM, if that matters.

Technorati Tags: Windows Home Server,Microsoft,Windows 7

Gone are the Days of Simple Developer Tools

Rob Bazinet — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:39:00 GMT

I read with interest a post by Ted Neward titled "Agile is treating the symptoms, not the disease". I will leave you to read the post in its entirety but point out Ted is paraphrasing a talk he attended with the speaker saying:

Keeping track of all the stuff Microsoft is releasing is hard work: LINQ, EF, Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC, Enterprise Library, Azure, Prism, Sparkle, MEF, WCF, WF, WPF, InfoCard, CardSpace, the list goes on and on, and frankly, nobody (and I mean nobody) can track it all.

This is so true. Microsoft used to chase the small developer is not chasing the enterprise and in doing so has created all of these complex pieces.

I think I understand Ted's point. Today's tools are overly complex, built up over the years on top of existing layers upon layers of functionality. Even new tools and frameworks built from the ground up try to jam all the functionality of an older tool times 5 over.

Gone are the days were we used great tools like DBase IV, FoxPro and Clipper to create business applications. It is very true these applications were created by 1-2 developers, not huge teams.

Do our tools today need to be so complex to justify a software development practice such as Agile or Lean to help us make efficient use of these tools? The answer is probably. We need these methodologies to keep ourselves honest to make our software work as we promised within all those moving parts in the frameworks. Even radical tools such as Ruby on Rails requires much finagling with its core and the plethora of open source gems that a suite of tests is needed to make sure we are delivering what we promised.

It's true, this was not the case in the FoxPro days, we created some really valuable applications for businesses to solve their problems and they worked well. We did not have fancy test suites (no automated ones at least) to make sure things didn't break when we added features. We didn't need to because the software was not that complex.

Maybe it’s hard for some people to understand what may be interpreted as a negative trend in our tools and frameworks. The reason may be because those folks have not been around software development long enough see it. This isn’t to say they are inexperienced, but just have not experienced the simpler tools of yesterday. As Ted eludes to, he has several people he cares about that are old enough to understand:

Others, including many people I care about (Rod Paddock, Markus Eggers, Ken Levy, Cathi Gero, for starters) made a healthy living off of building "line of business" applications in FoxPro, which Microsoft has now officially shut down.

Phil Haack had a good post as a rebuttal to Ted, which Ted kindly replied to. I felt like I was watching a tennis match while reading the posts. I am not trying to get involved in the debate other than to say I understand and agree software development has become complex. I admit I am an old-timer in software development years and miss doing projects in FoxPro. Maybe I am just nostalgic.

There do exists a few tools I am aware of which lets small teams create software with minimal fuss:

REALbasic – development tool for Mac, Windows and Linux
Alpha Five from Alpha Software

I think smaller, faster and simpler tools are a great idea, maybe these tools are worth a look. Could we being seeing a niche developing?

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Software Complexity,FoxPro

I use Balsamiq Mockups and So Should You

Rob Bazinet — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:24:18 GMT

No, I am not a spokesperson for Balsamiq but rather a happy customer. In the unfortunate event you have not heard of Balsamiq Mockups and you develop software or design it, you are missing out. Balsamiq Mockups is a tool that allows developers to create mockups easily using a library of user interface components to help ease the pain of creating screens.

Replaces Pad and Pen

This is a great little tool which helps me develop screens and workflow for the software applications I create. I use this tool instead of the usual pad and pen to determine how a particular screen will look. A recent mockup of the administration screen for a Survey tool I’m creating:

What makes this so nice is it appears similar to writing on a pad of graph paper with one key exception; I can determine the dimensions of my screen and how much space each component laid out on the screen will take up. This way, I *know* how everything will fit on screen or in the browser and won’t be surprised after the HTML/CSS is written.

I can toss aside my pen and paper and just use Mockups. I spend my time now dragging and dropping controls from the library and know exactly how much space I am taking up, keeping in mind the screen sizes of the target. I easily move controls around, remove them and customize their text. I cannot say enough about how much time this saves me. Instead of fretting over how bad I draw, I can not easily create what I need to get my work done.

Control Library

Balsamiq Mockups is not a free-hand drawing tool, I could not use such a tool. Rather it contains a library of common user interface tools which you drag and drop to the grid surface. They tout 75 ready-to-use controls:

I have yet to need any control in my interfaces that is not in this library. They even have layout components for iPhone applications.

Third-Party Integration and Support

When I decide to use a tool I often look to see if the tool with integrate with or support other tools I might be using. This isn’t critical most of the time but can be the deciding factor in some situations.

Although there is built-in support to export a mockup to Adobe Flex, there is a company, Napkee, which allows the user to create full HTML/CSS/JS or Adobe Flex 3 from a mockup, saving a ton of time to give you a great starting point.

Not enough parts to play with? Mockups To Go offers user-contributed UI components and Mock4U provides some hand UML components. I think we can all stop using Visio and save ourselves some headaches.

I subscribe to the Balsamiq blog so I know what is coming next and when I will see it. I could imagine feedback is welcome.

In the Air

Mockups is an Adobe Air application so the installation is easy. I know what you are thinking, I don’t want another run-time on my system. Stop your whining, you have a ton on there now and it won’t kill you to have another. The number of good Adobe Air applications I use is growing and are really good, TweetDeck for example.

One really nice thing about Adobe Air apps is they run on all the platforms I need; Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X. I understand they also work on Linux.

The Adobe Air runtime is super-simple, just like installing Adobe Acrobat Reader and once the runtime is installed, each application is just a simple click.

Finally

Mockups is not free to be able to save mockups but you can try it out or if you don’t care about saving, they just install and use it. The licensed version does cost $79, so a bit pricey in my opinion, but a valuable tool all the same.

Balsamiq does release updates often and you need to visit the site to check for updates and install them. I really wish this was built into the app like so many others where it either does an automatic check or allows me to check for the update.

I also wish for a way to export as a PDF to share with others who don’t have the tool. I would like to be able to annotate diagrams and collaborate with others, maybe myself and a designer.

I can’t say enough good things about this little tool, it makes my job easier everyday.

Technorati Tags: Adobe Air,Balsamiq Mockups

Solving VMWare Workstation Networking Problems after Windows 7 Host Upgrade

Rob Bazinet — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:17:31 GMT

I have been running Windows Vista 64-bit as my main .NET development system for quite some time now and pretty happy with the results. I put each client I have in a VMWare virtual machine (VM) and install the necessary operating system, this keeps things isolated and clean from my Vista host.

I decided to upgrade my Vista host to the Windows 7 RTM, to get some of the niceties I have enjoyed while testing out Windows 7 in a VM. The upgrade went very smooth but only later did I realize there was a problem upon starting a couple of my client VM’s. I was greeted by this error:

After a bit of searching the web I stumbled upon a blog post by Andreas Heil titled Broken VMware Workstation Network Adapter, which described my problem and the solution almost completely. I won’t repeat his solution here, but it turned out Bridging was not enabled on my VMNet1 adapter. My virtual adapter looked liked this:

Checking the box next to VMWare Bridge Protocol fixed the issue of not having network connectivity in all of the effected VM’s.

Technorati Tags: VMWare Workstation,Windows 7

Bing for Site Search

Rob Bazinet — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 05:01:26 GMT

I have been using Microsoft Bing as my main search provider from both Internet Explorer and Firefox for a while now and I have to say it has been working really well. I was a bit skeptical at first, mainly because Microsoft search has lagged behind Google for so long.

I decided to change my blog search to Bing tonight. I like the way it allows for local searching of a topic but then allows to see results from the web too. I have done many test searches on this site and it is working great.

Anyone can do the same for a web site for which they can edit HTML and/or JavaScript. Check out - http://www.bing.com/siteowner to add Bing to a site.

If anyone gets results they didn’t expect or any odd behavior, please let me know.

Technorati Tags: Bing,Microsoft,Google

Blog Moved to New Server

Rob Bazinet — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 03:48:18 GMT

Today I moved this blog to a new server to provide some expansion and additional speed. Please let me know in the comments or via email if you experience any broken links or other strange behavior. There should not be any issues.

Thank you.

Technorati Tags: Blog,Accidental Technologist

Thinking About Google Chrome Frame Deployment

Rob Bazinet — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 02:21:00 GMT

Today Google announced the availability of an Internet Explorer (IE) plugin called Google Chrome Frame. The plugin is designed to allow HTML 5 support and is open source. This is an interesting and pretty novel idea. Google claims:

With Google Chrome Frame, developers can now take advantage of the latest open web technologies, even in Internet Explorer. From a faster Javascript engine, to support for current web technologies like HTML5's offline capabilities and <canvas>, to modern CSS/Layout handling, Google Chrome Frame enables these features within IE with no additional coding or testing for different browser versions.

You can watch the video from Google about this released today:

The most interesting aspect, or problem, to me with this new plugin is who will use it. Sure, here are a lot of IE users but who will be installing the plug-in for use? Just thinking for a moment about all of the IE6 users today, who can be broken down into two distinct groups:

Corporate Users - these folks are in companies with a corporate IT staff who controls what is on their desktops with remote deployments. Face it, if they are still using IE6 it's the IT group be running out and installing this plug-in.
Grandma - she feels lucky to be on the Internet, being able to see Flickr pictures of her grandkids. She probably couldn't tell you if she had IE6 or something else. There is nothing wrong with this, it works for her and she is happy. Grandma will NOT be installing this plug-in.

I have the feeling that there are many IE7 users in the corporate world who are facing the same thing, the IT department controls their desktop and will not be putting some open source plug-in in the nightly deploy.

This narrows down the real audience for this plug-in, geeks and developers. I have no idea what the numbers are for any of the IE version installations and the demographics of who is using which version but I would tend to guess there are many users who will never see this plug-in.

I am interested to see how Google gets past this wall. If they can pull it off it will mean huge barriers brought down for web developers worldwide. I am rooting for them.

Technorati Tags: Google Chrome Frame,Internet Explorer