Johnny Can't Code

On My Way to the LessConf!

Johnny — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:03:00 -0500

I just arrived in Indianapolis where I am staying overnight in order to catch an early flight out to Jacksonville, FL tomorrow morning. Our plane leaves at 7:50 am and we don't arrive until 3:30pm. That is the last time I let Todd book our travel. :)

I am looking forward to a great conference and spending some time in the Florida warm weather. It is about 45 degrees currently in Indianapolis.

I will post more about the conference later.

LessConf - Technology Conference for the Rest of Us

Johnny — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 07:03:00 -0500

LessConf coming in October!

There is a new trend among web 2.0 companies; share, inspire, motivate, help and encourage!

I will be attending the LessConf on October 17th. The LessConf is a technology conference where some of the best people behind some of the best web 2.0 companies will be presenting their stories and insights. But what I find amazing is the novel concept of companies helping other companies and individuals to become a success. The LessConf is being hosted by LessEverything and two of the guest speakers are Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibrary.tv and VaynerMedia.com, Mike McDerment of Freshbooks.com. Mike McDerment's FreshBooks.com is a direct competetor of LessAccounting, a product of LessEverything yet he is one of the speakers at the LessConf. I have seen this over and over in the web 2.0 marketplace, companies helping other companies, even if they are a competitor.

I am currently working on several web 2.0 projects and I hope to return from the LessConf with new ideas, new motivation and a burning desire to help others.

So my question for all my readers, what is it that I can do to help you pursue your goals?

Google IS taking over the world!

Johnny — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 10:11:00 -0500

A couple weeks ago I signed up to participate in yet another Google.com free service, Goolgle Voice.

Here is a general overview of Google Voice.

I have been accepted into the beta and will begin using it over the next few weeks and report back my findings here.

Stay Tuned!

It's Official! BetAssistant is now on the iTunes app store!

Johnny — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 06:23:00 -0500

BetAssistant has just been made available in the iTunes app store. You can find it under the category of Sports or just search for "BetAssistant".

If you are interested in the app but do not want to spend the $0.99 then contact me and I will gerenate a code for you which will allows you to get it for free.

Great Simple Online Accounting System - FreshBooks!

Johnny — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 08:38:00 -0500

I have been using an online billing/accounting system since the first part of this year (2009). It has allowed me to move closer to my goal of utilizing the "cloud" for all my data including email, accounting, project collaboration and everything else. The service I have been using with great success is FreshBooks. It allows me to invoice my customers quickly and efficiently. It also allows my customers to view their invoices online.

FreshBooks has a neat feature that compares and rates your business with other businesses in the same category. My category is "Programming". They compare things such as average invoice amount, number of invoices, revenue from new clients and more. I was very satisfied to see that my rating was the highest you could achieve. Not sure what this actually says about my company except that I am doing really well compared to other FreshBook customers.

Here is my rating:

A couple other nice features I like and use:

- Estimates
- Time Tracking
- Emailing of Invoices and Estimates
- Expense tracking
- Allows others to bill me and automatically convert to expense

There are many more features. Click my rating if you would like to learn more about FreshBooks.

My Full report card:

Another iPhone application - BetAssistant

Johnny — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 10:57:00 -0500

I have been in business for a few years now creating application for small to medium sized businesses. I find my customers primarily through word of mouth and online sites such as craigslist.com and guru.com. Over the past year I have seen an ever increasing amount of projects which involve creating a new iPhone app or updating an existing iPhone app. I have written applications for many mobile platforms and decided to add an iPhone application to my repetior.

BetAssistant allows the user to select the amount of the bet, the bet type, such as exacta, trifecta or superfecta and then select the horses. Once a user has done this BetAssistant automatically calculates the cost of the bet for you.

BetAssistant will be available on the iPhone app store soon.

buckleFISH.com for sending large files.

Johnny — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:30:00 -0500

How many times have you needed to send project files, graphics, archives or other large files to a customer? I do this all the time and me being the tech geek I am, have my own FTP server which I upload the file to and then move the file to a location available for my customer to download it, usually http://downloads.gologictech.com or some similar URL. As I have been sending more and more files this was taking way to much of my time so I started to look for an easy to use alternative. After searching the web and not finding anything that met my needs I decided I would create a tool that I would use and offer it to the public for free. The site is www.buckleFISH.com. Please take a look and let me know what you think.

Remember Microsoft's BackOffice?

Johnny — Tue, 12 May 2009 11:56:00 -0500

In another life when I was a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer working with products like Systems Management Server, Windows NT 3.51 Server, MS mail and MS Exchange there was a logo Microsoft used for all of it's server products. You can read about the program and logo here.

Here is a look at the image. See the squiggly lines?

Well, what is the point of this post are you asking? Back in 1997 I became permanently enthralled with these 3 entangled lines.

More to come.... Stay tuned...

Office remodeling completed... By my wonderful wife!

Johnny — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:43:00 -0500

After working in a partially finished basemement of my house for about a year my wife decided to do a "makeover" on my lousy office space. She did an amazing job! Thank you!!! Anyway, take a look at the pics and let me know what you think.

Scientific American on the defensive when it comes to Evolution

Johnny — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 05:57:00 -0500

"The Evolution of EVOLUTION, How Darwin's Theory Survives, Thrives and Reshapes the World", "The Future of Human Evolution", "Molecular Proof of Natural Selection", "How Life Invents Complex Traits" and "Creationists' Latest Tricks" are all title of articles in the January 2009 issue of Scientific American magazine. I am a subscriber and huge fan of Scientific American magazine but I have a problem with the latest issue. Webster's dictionary defines science as "knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method."

In this blog post I am not taking up one side of the evolution issue or another but trying to point out how politics and ideology have corrupted the science community. I always thought of scientist as open minded, thorough and in general, interested in discussion from opposing points of view, however the latest issue of American Scientific magazine does everything except call for the "burning at the stake" of all those whose ideals are contrary to the Theory of Evolution. Here are some excerpts from the magazine;

In an article titled "The Latest Face of Creationism" there is a section which provides suggestions as to actions that can be taken if "controversy over the teaching of evolution erupts in your area"

The first action suggested is this; "Resolving the controversy requires thinking politically..." Does politics really have a place in science? Science is science and does not depend on opinion nor political ideology.

The second action suggested in this article is "Keep in mind that the goal is not only to keep creationism out of the science classroom but also to ensure that evolution is taught properly - without qualifiers such as 'only a theory'"... Well, isn't the Theory of Evolution still a theory? When was it proven via the scientific method?

I'll stop there but the magazine continues an all out assault on creationism and intelligent design throughout several other articles. My question is this, Are we at a point where our scientific community has abandoned the scientific method and are replacing it with ideology instead? A similar issue which also represents ideological views instead of scientific views from a majority of the scientific community is global warming and the cause and effect of it. But I will save this for another post.

Well worth the money!

Johnny — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:45:00 -0500

After a few days of working from my new Herman Miller Aeron chair I have noticed a significant reduction of lower back pain. The great thing about this chair is that I never think about it throughout the day. My previous chair was canstantly on my mind. I was always shifting my weight or changing position to aleviate pain in one area of my body or another. So far it is worth every penny.

I finally broke down and did it! My new Herman Miller Aeron Chair.

Johnny — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 14:54:00 -0500

After weeks of continuing back aches, poor nights rest and searching online for the perfect computer chair I decided on the Herman Miller Aeron Chair.

Take a look:

I will occassionally post updates letting you know if I think this obsurdly expensive chair was worth it.

Terrorism or just a bad economy?

Johnny — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 12:40:00 -0500

I don't normaly write off topic much but this is something I have been researching for the last couple weeks. I am going to continue to research the facts but here is the general premise of my theory. (Conspiracy therory even!)

Over the last 10 years Americans have extended ourselves right to the edge of what our budgets could afford. In general, we took out home loans for houses we could barely afford because we were short sighted and thought the price of housing would just continue to rise. During this time a lot of Americans stressed there financial situation to the point they were living paycheck to paycheck.

During this period the middle eastern terrorist organisations along with some of the middle eastern countries (you don't think they are really our friends do you?) had a plan to push Amreicans over the perverbial financial cliff. For most americans living on the financial edge anyway a monthly increase in fuel cost along with everything else that was affected by the price of gas was enough to crumble the house of cards. Suddenly Americans, living paycheck to paycheck, had an extra $200+ per month gas cost. With the increase in their monthly expenses something had to give and that was their mortgage. Thousands of Americans suddenly faced with an increase in monthly expenses can no longer pay their mortgages and go into forclosure on their homes.

Because of how deeply integrated the mortgage business was in the core of the American economy this triggered a massive collapse of our financial system. I am still researching this and will have more details in future post but it is a plausible scenario and one that could have been easily manipulated by middle eastern powers? Is this the case? I'm not sure but....

More to come!

A Few Performance Comparisons

Johnny — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 04:20:00 -0500

I have recently been reviewing a lot of code from other developers. I always try to keep an open mind so if I see something another developer has done that I do a different way I am curious to which is the better way. Of course "better" is a very abstract word so I decided to look at it from a performance perspective since performance can be concretely measured.

The code that caught my attention was:

bool isNotify = Convert.ToBoolean(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["SomeSettingGoesHere"]);

normally I would have written the above code like this:

bool isNotify = bool.Parse(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["SomeSettingGoesHere"]));

Convert is a little more flexible than Parse but which one performs better? I did some test...

The Test:

In a method called TestParse() I looped 1 million times creatint an instance of a string, string varA = "true". I then Parsed that string using bool varB = bool.Parse(varA).Prior to starting the loop and after completing the loop I set a variable equal to the DateTime.Now and returns the TimeSpan between the two DateTimes and displayed it in milliseconds.

I also created a method called TestConvert and did the exact same thing except instead of using bool.Parse(varA) I used Convert.ToBoolean(varA).

I ran both of these methods from a console app and displayed the results:

as you can see the Parse method completed significantly quicker than the Convert method. I ran similar test of different types such as Int32 and decimal and received similar results.

C# Classes vs. Structs

Johnny — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 05:20:00 -0500

A few days ago I was in a discussion with a friend of mine who interviewed for a senior level developer position. He mentioned that one of the questions he was asked in his technical interview was "Describe a scenario where you would use a Struct instead of a Class.". He told me he could not think of one. So this article is an attempt to both explain the differences between a Class and a Struct and also describe when a struct should be used instead of a class.

Reference Type vs. Value Type
One of the primary differences between a Class and a Struct is that a Class is a reference type and a Struct is a value type. What does this mean? Well, let's take a look at other value types. All of the primitive types such as int, bool, decimal etc. are value types. Value types are stored in the stack as a single space in memory whereas refernce types are created in memory and a reference to that space is also create. The reference type is always accessed via the reference and not directly. For example;

Point p1 = new Point(); //Point is a Struct
Form f1 = new Form(); //Form is a Class

Point p2 = p1;
Form f2 = f1;

In the above code example p2 is an independent copy of p1. If you were to change a value of a property of p2, p1 would not be affected. Whereas f2 is a copy of the refence to f1 there for f1 and f2 are both references to the same object in memory. If you were to change a value of a property of f2, f1 would also be changed.

Heap vs. Stack
The stack is a simple FILO (first in last out) memory structure. The Stack is a highly efficient memory structure that "bookmarks" the stack when a method begins execution, Dumps data into the stack during the method execution and once the method exection completes the stack is reset to the bookmark releasing all the method's allocated memory.

The heap is just the opposite. The heap can be considered, for lack of a better term, a random access memory structure. Objects can be allocated and deallocated in a random order. The heap requires the use of a memory manager and garbage collector to maintain it's structure.

When you instantiate a class the instance of the class itself is stored in the heap whereas the reference to the instance of the class is stored in the stack.

Form f1 = new Form();

The actual object created by the above code will be placed in the heap and the reference, f1, to that object is stored in the stack.

When to use a Struct
Keep the following rules in mind when using a struct:
- a struct should represent a single value
- a struct should have a memory footprint less than 16 bytes
- a struct should not be changed after creation.