The Definite Article

Party Photos

2008-05-17T18:29:00.004-05:00

We had a small get-together last night to play some Rock Band. Alex took some awesome pictures:

The rest of the pictures are available here.

Twitter, BrightKite, FriendFeed, and IWantSandy

2008-05-06T23:06:00.002-05:00

I've run across a few new (to me at least) online services lately, and I thought I'd talk a bit about what they do for you, and what I like about them. All of these services are free, and I don't think any of them took more than 5 minutes to sign up, so give them a try if they sound interesting.

Twitter

Andy got me hooked on Twitter about a year ago, and I use it quite a bit. I have a hard time explaining what I like about it, but the basic idea is that you can post short updates ("tweets"), and they are broadcast to anyone who is following your feed. The idea is pretty simple, but since it is so loosely defined, a lot of different uses have emerged. My circle of Twitter friends uses it somewhat like a persistent chat room, so there ends up being quite a bit of back-and-forth conversation. A lot of people use it as a micro-blog, throwing links up as they see them. Also, quite a few conferences are using it as a simple way to throw together a news feed without having to set up an RSS feed: here's MOSSCamp and MIX08.

BrightKite

BrightKite takes the Twitter idea a bit further. Rather than just allowing textual posts, BrightKite lets you "check in" at a specific location, and ties your posts to that location until you check in somewhere else. They also let you post photos, which is kinda cool, especially since they are automatically geolocated using your last check-in. On the backend, they run your check-ins through a geocoder (basically a web service that looks up addresses and place names and returns lat/long, geonames.org is a good one.), and store your current location. There is an iPhone app that was just released that takes care of checking in for you, but there are some fairly nifty things you can do even if you don't care to shell out for an iPhone. You can use SMS to check in: just text @ to their service, and it will check you in. If you're out at a restaurant, and want to check in, you can text ? and BrightKite will respond with a list of possibilities near your last check-in.

I like the idea that your location is an implicit part of each post, rather than having to be encoded in the message. Both Twitter and BrightKite have a 140 character limit on posts, so handling locations behind the scenes saves some overhead. BrightKite seems like a small improvement in functionality over Twitter, but I'll be interested to see where people take it once the BrightKite developers open up their API.

FriendFeed

Twitter and BrightKite both provide a new channel for publishing information. FriendFeed is a bit different. FriendFeed consumes feeds from your other online identities (Pandora, LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogger, etc.), and re-publishes the data through a uniform presentation layer. There isn't any huge technical leap there, although pulling disparate data feeds into a single application is non-trivial... The thing that they did right was to make it really easy to add common services. I know I never remember to check my friends' Flickr feeds. Even if they Twitter that they posted, I rarely click through. FriendFeed puts everything in a single place, and I like that.

I Want Sandy

I saved my favorite for last. I don't remember how I stumbled on to it, (possibly BrightKite -> GetSatisfaction -> IWantSandy) but it has made my life easier. I Want Sandy is an email-based personal assistant that will remember appointments, to-do lists, and notes for you. Once you sign up, you get a unique email address that you can use to send in things you want to have remembered. There is some rudimentary text processing going on, so if you send "Remind me to mail that package tomorrow", you'll get a reminder at 7:00 in your email the next day. Everything can be manipulated via email, Twitter, and SMS, so you don't actually need to sign in to the web site to retrieve information. My short-term memory has been entirely replaced by plots from Stargate SG-1 episodes, plural forms in languages which I don't speak, and the Dewey Decimal number for American Fiction (813.54), so I find it incredibly useful to get a text message on my way home from work reminding me to pick up the mail.
I can't really explain how useful I find I Want Sandy. I think you just have to try it out to see if it works for you.

Photos

2008-05-01T01:34:00.003-05:00

I took a couple days off at the end of last week, and I took a long hike through the woods over at McDowell Grove. I took my camera with, and took something like 300 photos while I was out. I posted quite a few to my Flickr account, but I thought I'd put up a few of my favorites here.

I walk across the the flood gates for the DuPage river to get into the forest preserve from the back, and I came across this cool stump right near the path.

Here's a macro shot of a fallen tree I saw in the woods on my way over to the dam. I almost moved the piece of wood leaning against the log when I came upon it so I could get a clear shot down the length of the log, but I changed my mind, and I think this came out really well as a result.

This is a macro shot of a ladder up to the controls for the flood gates on top of the dam. The ladder looked like it was welded up prior to installation, and then galvanized, which created a really cool pattern on the steel.

I spooked a couple of deer walking through the woods, but I managed to switch to my long lens without scaring them off, so I got some good pictures. I was in a pretty dense area, so there's a bit of clutter in the foreground. I managed to clean a bit of it up by applying some sharpening to the images. Next time I'll have to be a bit less noisy so I can get some clearer shots.

Code Monkey

2008-04-30T13:09:00.004-05:00

One of the guys on my team linked me to this video. It is a claymation video set to "Code Monkey", by Jonathan Coulton that his younger sister made. I'm friggin' impressed.

Update (April 30 - 6:01 PM UTC):
Indeed, as Colin mentions in the comments, the creator is his sister, and not Jonathan Coulton's. Scope resolution is easier when you can see the curly brackets.

MoOM

2008-04-28T14:25:00.000-05:00

The Museum of Online Museums! Fantastic!

Still Alive

2008-04-16T06:00:00.002-05:00

It's been a busy few months for me, and my blog has suffered for it. It looks like the last time I posted was - holy crap! - January 15!

Sooooo... here's the round-up of what's going on with me (in order of descending importance)

Ashley and I got engaged on the 11th of January, and we'll be getting married in September of next year on the lawn of the Morton Arboretum's Thornhill Education Center

I signed up for the Masters program at North Central College, and I should be finishing up my degree somewhere around the end of the decade.

I went out to the MIX conference back in March, and had a rockin' good time out in Las Vegas.

I got a bitchin' new camera that I'm really enjoying.

umm...

Got my taxes done just under the wire today... okay, that's boring...

I also got a big box of old family photos from my grandma and grandpa that I've been scanning in and uploading to my Flickr page. I'm planning on building a Silverlight application that allows you to navigate a family tree and browse pictures. I'll post some code as I get into it.

This is my favorite picture from the lot. These are my great-grandmother's parents. The picture was taken some time in the late 1800s.

Debugging exceptions in VS2005 and VS2008

2008-01-15T08:56:00.001-06:00

There's a really simple technique I use to debug exceptions in Visual Studio, and I can't even count the number of people I've shown it to over the last few years. Here is the scenario: an exception gets thrown somewhere deep within your program, goes through some error handling, perhaps gets logged, and by the time it gets up to the level where you're aware of it, you have no idea what it means. This could be because you neglected to include enough information in the exception, or it could be because some library you're using choked on bad input, or any number of things. The problem is that you have no idea what caused the exception.

Below is a simple program that throws an exception when you click a button.

Here's what you get when you run it. Not terribly useful.

This message clearly doesn't contain enough information. If we hadn't handled the exception in our code, VS would have stopped execution an notified us of an unhandled exception, and we could dig into it from there. However, as long as we handle it, VS will continue execution without notifying us. In the case of this example, we could open up the editor while the message box is displayed, pause execution, and walk up the call stack, but there is a simpler way.

If we go into the Debug menu and click on Exceptions..., the following dialog comes up:

These are the default settings under the Exceptions menu. The column of check boxes on the right indicates that VS will break when there is an unhandled exception of any of the listed types. If we check any of the boxes in the left column, VS will break when any of the listed types is thrown. I usually only use this when I'm trying to track down a nasty exception, because certain programs and libraries throw exceptions under normal working conditions.

Here is what my exceptions screen looks like:

If we go back and run the example again, we'll drop into debug mode as soon as the exception is thrown, and we can start debugging right from the site of the problem.

The example project is available online: ExceptionExample.zip

No PIN required, just shakin'

2007-11-20T10:51:00.001-06:00

I love this idea: http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn12912-synchronised-shaking-con%0Anects-gadgets-securely.html.

It is simple, reasonable, and solves a problem that is an absolute pain in the ass for me. If you have any bluetooth devices that don't have an input device (headsets, mice, stuff like that) there is always some wonky ritual you have to go through to get them paired with your phone or computer. The basic idea, if you skipped the above link, is that the two devices you want to pair contain accelerometers. To pair your devices, you hold them together and shake them. Since the devices are being shaken in the same pattern, the accelerometers are producing the same bitstream, so you can use it to identify the devices being shaken.

This is really similar to the concept of a one-time pad in cryptography. A bitstream is produced by some method that ensures that it is random, and a copy is distributed to the two parties that want to communicate. The transmitting party XORs her plaintext with the bitstream to produce the ciphertext. The receiving party then XORs the ciphertext with the one-time pad to reproduce the plaintext. The issue in cryptography is transmitting the one-time pad. If the pad is known to any other party, they can decrypt the message. Also, if the pad is re-used, the messages can be attacked mathematically. What these researchers have done is developed a simple way to produce an extremely short-lived key independently on the two devices from a fairly decent source of entropy. The best part is that they made it easy enough that anybody can use it. Now, I'm not qualified to judge the security of this method, but it seems like it would be fairly easy for a determined observer to grab the bitstream out of the air unless devices are specifically designed to prevent that sort of thing.

I think that this idea is at least a step in the right direction as far as usability goes, and I'll be keeping my eyes open for more stuff like it.

Tutorial : Creating Visual Studio Add-Ins

2007-11-08T11:39:00.000-06:00

This is a bit of an old article, but it looks like it could be pretty useful. It walks you through creating a visual studio add-in that automatically adds copyright headers and file comments, either on file creation, or after the fact.

This is exactly what I was looking to do, because I'm always forgetting to add the copyright banner to my files, and VS2005 doesn't let you specify what to put in a new file by default like Eclipse.

Tutorial : Creating Visual Studio Add-Ins

Pervasive computers and the GRID: the birth of a computational exoskeleton for augmented reality

2007-11-07T13:47:00.001-06:00

I was reading over the latest SIGSOFT publications in the ACM Digital Library, and the above title (from the keynote talk at a Foundations of Software Engineering conference) caught my eye. The rest of the paper (ACM Digital Library membership required) is just as good. This is the kind of writing that reminds my why I do what I do. It is almost like reading Charles Stross' Accelerando or the early William Gibson books (which makes sense, the author cites Neuromancer).

Anyway, I have a printed copy of the talk at my desk, come find me if you'd like to borrow it.

Jack-o-lanterns

2007-10-30T16:47:00.001-05:00

Ashley and I carved pumpkins on Saturday night.

The squirrels got to them Sunday night.

A solution for the VSeWSS "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" problem

2007-10-30T13:38:00.001-05:00

For anyone still struggling with the above error in VSeWSS, Paul Liebrand left a comment on my earlier post that really helped me out.

The issue apparently stems from a mismatch between the features in the content database and the features in the filesystem, so Paul posted an app that identifies the dangling pointers. For full details, check out the WSSWiki.

http://wsswiki.com/Visual_Studio_Extensions_For_WSS_3.0

The solution worked great for me. I ran the app, set up the connection string to point to my local content database (the connection string that worked for me is pretty vanilla: Data Source=localhost;Initial Catalog=WSS_Content;Integrated Security=SSPI;), and it spat out the GUIDs for the features that were causing me trouble. Once I had the list, all I had to do was open up SQL Server Management Studio and delete the offending rows from the dbo.Features table.

UPDATE (10/30/07 3:38 PM):

I did a bit more research today, and it appears that one cause of features getting out of synch is retracting and removing features without deactivating them first. I always suspected that my features weren't getting cleaned up correctly when I removed their solutions, and I've confirmed today that there is an issue there. Now, this isn't a huge deal, and VSeWSS doesn't use solutions, so you won't run into this problem if you are using VSeWSS exclusively, but if you have requirements beyond what VSeWSS can do, and are packaging your own solutions, watch out.

Technorati Tags: MOSS, SharePoint, WSS, VSeWSS, .NET

LINQ to Flickr

2007-10-29T14:29:00.001-05:00

One of the new features in .NET 3.5 is LINQ, which lets you do SQL-like queries on various data sources in code, including objects, XML, and eventually, databases. I'm waiting for the VS2008 release (some time next week, as far as I can tell) to start playing with it, but quite a few people at the office have already switched to take advantage of LINQ.

I just ran into this blog post about a LINQ to Flickr provider, which is pretty neat. I'll have to take a better look at what is involved in writing a LINQ provider once I make the switch to VS2008.

Technorati Tags: LINQ, Flickr

MOSSCamp - November 9

2007-10-28T01:38:00.001-05:00

Andy sent me a pointer to MOSSCamp, which is being held downtown Chicago in a couple of weeks. It sounds like a fairly informal chance for SharePoint developers to get together and trade tips on SharePoint development. Registration is free, so if you're in the neighborhood, and you're doing MOSS or WSS development, come check it out.

I've been doing MOSS development for something like three or four months now, and I feel like there is a lot of potential there if you can work your way around the quirks. I think I've managed to get most of the way there, but there are still a few things that drive me crazy almost daily. It seems like a lot of MOSS developers feel this way. This event is a good chance to see other people are running into the same roadblocks you are, and see the solutions they've come up with.

Technorati Tags: MOSSCamp, MOSS, WSS, SharePoint

An etymological revelation

2007-10-25T22:46:00.001-05:00

Ashley picked up "The Omnivore's Dilemma" from the library, and I'm finding it pretty interesting. The first part of the book is about corn, and there was something in it that I've wondered about for years. The word "corn" used to refer to any kind of small grain, so instead of saying "an ear of corn," people might have said "maize corns" or something like that. The interesting thing is that this is why we say "pepper corns" and "corned beef" (corned beef is salted, and those grains of salt used to be called corns). Ever since the first time I had corned beef (actually not more than a year or two ago), I've wondered why it was called that.

Online Reputation Management

2007-10-23T14:38:00.001-05:00

As an ACM member, I get about a bunch of emails each day notifying me of journal articles, tech news, stuff like that. Most of them get filtered into a folder for later, but my filter missed one, and I noticed a link to this article about online reputation as I was looking through it. It explores the topic I was talking about the other day a little bit further.

Blogging - like golf for tech people

2007-10-19T11:50:00.001-05:00

One of my good friends and I were talking the other day about why blogs have become so popular, and I think I figured out how to articulate the way I see my blog.

Networking (the kind with people, not cables) is not easy for some tech people. Given the choice between sitting behind a keyboard and going out and talking to people, most techies (especially developers) will choose the former. This applies in varying degrees. Some people are more social, some are less. Our developers are actually a pretty chatty bunch, and we have a good time when we go out, but that's because we spend so much time together and we all know each other. When it comes to networking, meeting new people, a lot of technical people have a hard time. The most difficult part is establishing a context to start a conversation.

Blogging is good way to set up that first conversation. Even if you're only posting about the music you like, or the movies you've seen lately, it gives someone some common ground to start from. Social networking sites have become popular for exactly the same reason. When I initially set up my Facebook page, it was mostly to keep in touch with people from school, but I've actually met quite a few new people there. The ability to expand your network is actually much more powerful than the ability to keep in touch with those already in it. This is especially true of the more business-oriented social networking sites like LinkedIn.

I think it is really cool just how much user-created content is driving the web these days. I'm probably a bit late getting on the bandwagon, but as a software developer, I think it is just incredible how a simple application like Flickr or Twitter can become a household name in just a few years based on a single idea.

FeedBurner

2007-10-15T00:29:00.001-05:00

Andy and I were talking about blog stuff a while back, and he told me I should check out FeedBurner. Well, I checked it out this weekend, and it is absolutely killing my productivity. There are a million options that you can customize to make your feed look just how you like. I think I've blown at least three hours this weekend just playing with FeedBurner, and that doesn't include the time updating my blog layout and such to bring it up to par with my nifty new feed.

The coolest thing about it is that it is entirely extensible. For a lot of the work I do, it is important that we can just get it installed and then extend it in place, so I find the model that FeedBurner uses particularly interesting. The following is a FeedFlare that adds a "Twit This!" option to my feeds and posts (Thanks go to Eric Olsen over at FeedBurner for the example FeedFlare):

The FeedFlare is just a simple XML document, but the FeedBurner API allows you to walk the DOM of each post and add value to the content. By setting up a really simple way to integrate with the page, FeedBurner enables developers to tie into their own server-side code, and do all the heavy lifting there.

Jonathan Coulton

2007-10-14T16:49:00.001-05:00

Jonathan Coulton is one of the funniest songwriters I've heard in a long time. He wrote Still Alive, the end theme to Portal, as well as the theme to Code Monkeys. He is also featured on the audio version of "The Areas of my Expertise", as John Hodgeman's troubadour.

Check out his web site, he's got free versions of quite a few of his songs, and you can buy his albums online. I especially like "Skymall". If you are planning on buying any of his music, they each song is $1, albums are about $10, and it is all DRM free. You can get his stuff on iTunes, but if you go through his web site, more of that money goes to him.

Kittens!

2007-10-14T01:11:00.001-05:00

Ashley and I adopted two kittens today.

The darker one on the left is Vala Mal Doran, and the lighter one on the right is Lieutenant Colonel Samantha Carter. You can start making fun of us . . . . Now. Go ahead, get it out of your system. Done? Ok, good.

Sam is pretty nervous, and runs around like crazy when you try to pet her. She crawled into a drawer in the coffee table and spent about an hour sleeping in there before we managed to get her out. It was a bit tricky. We had no idea where she was until I looked under the table and saw her tail hanging over the side of the drawer. There is space above the drawer, so we couldn't pull it out while she was in there, and couldn't reach in to lift her out, so we just had to wait her out.

Here is a better picture of her:

Vala is a bit shy, and spent the better part of the afternoon hiding behind the water heater.

In this picture, we can actually see her, but for most of the day, she had actually walked around behind it all the way, and we couldn't find her without the help of a mirror and flashlight.

They both seem to be settling in now, though, and were running around playing with each other earlier.

BoA gets some AJAX love

2007-10-07T00:07:00.001-05:00

Bank of America added a "Manage Your Portfolio" tab to their online banking app a few months ago, and I gave up on it pretty quickly. I tried to add my 401K account, and their connector for the PayChex site was still in beta, so I couldn't get it to work.

I took another look tonight, and my 401K is still out of reach, but I'm willing to bet that the problem is on the PayChex end, and not BoA. Their site has a host of issues that I don't want to get into right now, but I'm fairly certain that they throw my password away as soon as I reset it, because every time I try to log in (which is generally about once a month) I can't seem to get it right. When I do reset my password, they assure me that a letter is being sent to me indicating that I've changed my password. Now, I'm well aware that I just changed my password, but the questionable necessity notifying me of what I've just done notwithstanding, I've never received one of these letters. I'm sure they're all sitting on someone's desk over at PayChex, just waiting to go out...

My frustrations with PayChex aside, I really like the "Manage Your Portfolio" feature, now that I've given it a second chance. Bank of America added enough little AJAX tweaks to speed up the page response without going overboard. When you're looking at your transactions, you can page through them without a refresh, and if you want to update a transaction category or add a note to a transaction, there is some basic functionality for that too.

The reporting features are okay, but it looks like their charts are all done with ImageMagick or something similar, and they aren't interactive at all. (Maybe they could use some nice -- ahem ahem -- Web 2.0 visualizations?)

The best part about the whole feature is that it will take all of my transactions -- debit card, credit cards, loan payments -- and slap them all into the same list. There is a basic rules engine (substring on the description field, transaction amount < = >) that lets me assign transactions to certain categories (which is nice, since it automatically assigns purchases from Borders to "Education", when I treat them as "Entertainment"), and the entire thing is searchable. That's really nice for seeing just how much I spent at DeepDiscount last month...

Music and Videos

2007-10-04T14:00:00.001-05:00

I've been working a lot of hours lately, and I got tired of the music I have on my iPod pretty quickly, so I've been looking around the online services to find some new stuff. I turned up a few nifty things that I thought worth mentioning.

iTunes opened up a new area of the iTunes store, called iTunes U. They offer free audio and video recordings of college courses, which I think is just super cool. So far I've listened to the first few sessions of the MIT algorithms course, the first two lectures in the MIT linear algebra course, the first lecture in an introductory Greek course.

iTunes radio is still a bit lame. I check it out every once in a while, but they don't really add content very often.

Pandora is just as cool as ever. I keep forgetting about it, but the site periodically emails me to remind me it's still there, and the volume is low enough (maybe one email every two months) that I don't get annoyed. I fired it up today, and found a few new bands on my Nightwish radio station: Elis, Theatre of Tragedy, and Luca Turilli's Dreamquest (their band photo is awesome...)

SPExtremeFrustrationFeature

2007-10-03T20:06:00.001-05:00

I've been working with Windows SharePoint Services for a couple of months now, and I thought I finally had a handle on what went where, who did what, how it worked, and various other phrases containing the letter W.

However, today I ran into a bug that has had me stopped dead all night. I'm using the Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services (VSeWSS for short), which are intended to make deployment to your SharePoint farm part of the build process, and my projects suddenly stopped deploying correctly. The only feedback I get from Visual Studio is the chillingly familiar "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" error, which any programmer will instantly recognize as a surefire sign that someone didn't check if their pointer was null, but seems like a strange bug in a deployment project.

At this point, I'm thinking that I'm going to need to rebuild my deployment project from scratch, which pretty much blows away any utility VSeWSS might have given me.

On the upside, after rebuilding one of my other projects from scratch (because VSeWSS wouldn't build it correctly for entirely different reasons) I am intimately familiar with the WSS solution deployment strategy, so hopefully this won't take all day.

metaplace - Second Life done right?

2007-09-19T14:36:00.001-05:00

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/19/metaplace-open-diy-v.html

Cory Doctorow posted an article about this new virtual world project. This looks like a better cut at what Second Life tried to do. Everything is web-based, and hooking into the web is expected. I signed up for the alpha, so hopefully I'll be accepted and be able to play with it some more.

Still Life

2007-09-11T14:04:00.001-05:00

I ran into this series of photos over at Signal vs. Noise. I think it is about the coolest thing I've seen in quite a while.

The most interesting thing about it is that the setup is extremely simple. Its one of those things where the process is the cool part.