Notes From My Basement

Continuing Education. A month of learning.

guillermo — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:11:53 -0500

A couple of weeks ago, more precisely on March 31st, I attended the ArcReady event on Architecting for the Cloud. Sparing you of all the details, suffice it to say that it was much needed motivation to take action on a few personal goals around something that has always been a passion of mine… Continuous Education.

I am currently working on some personal tasks pertaining to that goal, as I said before inspired and motivated by the contents of that ArcReady event. Expect a stream of content coming from me on the topics around cloud computing, specifically developing for Azure.

Be it learning through trial by fire, attending a more structured lecture, seminar, conference or class or a combination of them, doing *that* allows me to frame my actions within the right mindset. It is a way to cope with the routine of our daily grind, where implementation of current technology is not always a welcome approach and other priorities take precedence.

This coming Friday April 17th, I will be attending an all day seminar on ASP.NET MVC, presented Jeffrey Palermo. Its a paid event at $125 for the day, including food. Not bad. Work is not picking up the tab (at least proactively), and I have no problem paying for it out of my own pocket.

I wouldn’t usually be willing to pay the $125 for a conference of this nature, but I’ve seen Jeffrey speak at a user group meeting and I genuinely enjoyed his style. At times, speakers either by choice or inadvertently focus their tone and message towards a certain audience, leaving some others with much to be desired and some others lost in the land of glazed eyes. In this case, Palermo certainly spoke to my “level”. Lets leave it at that.

I know Brennan and Scott Isaacs will be there. I don’t know who else, but I am sure 70% will be familiar faces as it always ends up being.

Next on the agenda for this month is an MSDN Events Unleashed afternoon session coming up Tuesday April 28th on Internet Explorer 8 for Developers and Developing on Microsoft Windows 7. Interesting topics, enough to coerce my attendance. On that, I wanted to comment on the fact that some people expect too much of these sessions, and honestly, they are what they are (isn’t that enlightening!)… You should attend with more than one point on your agenda. It is a chance to network and a chance to be there when perhaps this one bit of information which you weren’t aware of gets revealed to you. You may think on topics like these, having done your homework is good enough and “what else could I learn from going there?”, but you’d be surprised.

constipation

guillermo — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:37:28 -0500

apparently, that is what I am going through. In the classiest way anyone could have described it, Ted tells us that what we are experiencing is constipation.

quite a way to anchor a post, and I am allowing myself the same eloquence but I’ll do so in the form of a quote

Don't write just because you want to spend some time on the pot. Do it because you really have to go.

A decent rig?

guillermo — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:21:32 -0500

So looking around bensbargains.net I realized I could put together a very decent machine, for less than or very similar price to, the “brand name” junk we are all accustomed to.

Here it is:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 2.33GHz Core Processor	$152	CompUSA.com
PNY Geforce 9600 GSO 768MB PCI-E Video Card	$50	Frys.com
WD Caviar WD10EADS 1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s HDD	$90	NewEgg.com
Asus P5Q-E Green Motherboard	$131	Buy.com
Thermal Take VJ70001N2Z Steel Mid Tower Case	$42	ZipZoomFly.com
OCZ Technology ModXStream Pro 500W PS	$44	ZipZoomFly.com
Corsair 4GB PC2-6400 DDR2 Memory Kit	$20	NewEgg.com
LG GH22NS30 Black 22X DVD+-RW Drive	$23	NewEgg.com

Total Cost	$552

Indicates a rebate. All prices used include shipping.

Just over $550 for a QUAD Core based rig, is not bad at all… add memory at will if you want more than 4GB. 1TB HD should be enough for all the junk we tend to accumulate, and even accounts for the “green” factor.

I assume you still have your old keyboard and mouse and a decent monitor laying around.

I don’t think these deals will be around too long, as we all know they come and go but this is gearing up to be a weekend project!

The Teenager Audio Test I seem to have passed

guillermo — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 09:24:11 -0500

Created by Train Horns

I head this loud and clear and was quickly annoyed by it… since I am 0x26, I thought I’d be less annoyed… not so!

This comes to me via the hand waver. Hey, thanks for nothing buddy!

3 times a papi

Guillermo — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:30:00 -0500

I am on my way out the door today, with many expectations yet, however with a certain degree of certainty that not before the day is over this coming Monday the 12th, I'll be a dad for the 3rd time.

My wife Tammy is scheduled to be induced that day, and if baby Mia comes before then we'll be extatic. If she doesn't we are ready to coerce her into coming to us and making our lifes that much richer. I can't wait for yet another round of incredible experiences and constant learning... for all. My kids have been not only a source of inspiration but also many, many life lessons. HA! If they only knew ;)

I've just recently realized that I hadn't realized that if I thought the last 3 or so months have been incredibly busy and crazy, what awaits us the next 3 or so is orders of magnitud those 3 previous in the crazy department. We adjust and then develop amnesia for how it was "before", and then even if we do remember, never ever what to go back to the mundane life of a single guy (you know I am just kidding right?).

Don't wish me luck! I don't need it, because I have just that. I have all the luck in the world having them in my life. Wish me continued happiness, and that I take all of what I can get my hands on.

you don't say?

guillermo — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:00:54 -0500

If we keep having to include copy like this one, without making basic assumptions, I can't help but realize we are in deep trouble...

Better regular expression for URLs

guillermo — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 16:00:25 -0500

Via Jeff Attwood's post, in summary (because his posts tend to be very, hmm, thorough):

The primary improvement here is that we're only accepting a whitelist of known good URL characters. Allowing arbitrary random characters in URLs is setting yourself up for XSS exploits, and I can tell you that from personal experience. Don't do it!
We only allow certain characters to "end" the URL. Ending a URL in common punctuation marks like period, exclamation point, semicolon, etc means those characters will be considered end-of-hyperlink characters and not included in the URL.
Parens, if present, are allowed in the URL -- and we absorb the leading paren, if it is there, too.

The regular expression is:

\(?\bhttp://[-A-Za-z0-9+&@#/%?=~_()|!:,.;]*[-A-Za-z0-9+&@#/%=~_()|]

The perfect code comment

guillermo — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:00:23 -0500

Via a dear friend of mine, this gem was made available for my enjoyment in all coincidence written the day of my birthday, and since being selfish is not in my nature I decided to share it with the five of you (literally).

Framework 3.5 Enhancements (SP1) Training Kit

guillermo — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 22:18:29 -0500

I love these as a quick, hands on way (my favorite) to get up to speed with skills and technology you may otherwise miss or take longer to catch up to.

Here is the training kit from the horse’s mouth:

The .NET Framework 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, demos, and event materials. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the .NET 3.5 Enhancement features including: ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET AJAX History, ASP.NET Routing, ADO.NET Data Services, ADO.NET Entity Framework, WCF 3.5 SP1, and the .NET Framework Client Profile.

Download the kit from here.

Adopting a new base

guillermo — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 22:12:57 -0500

for my age… and it will be officially the Hexadecimal base to define my age.

So today, I am 0x26!, yes 26 (hex).

Local companies recognized by innovative use of technology

guillermo — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:37:01 -0500

The September 15th issue of InformationWeek (perpetually mistakenly delivered to me for 3 years), features their 20th annual ranking of companies they deem “The Top Innovators In Business Technology”.

The listing has a regional breakout, and so I thought It would be easy to just go through it and identify & extract all of those companies with headquarters in our state of Wisconsin. It is in a way a means to show my regional pride.

Here’s the list of companies in alphabetical order, containing the company name, city and the company’s highest ranking IT executive & title:

Free Source Code Analysis from Microsoft.

guillermo — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:14:30 -0500

I recently came across Microsoft StyleCop, that analyzes the code, within the IDE for style. This includes things like naming conventions, formatting and other matters of visual appeal. It differs from FxCop in that it doesn’t check for use patterns, it simply checks style.

I’ve been looking at this tool in order to implement it at work, where we have a pretty consistent and adhered to coding standard, who’s style enforcement could be done by a tool and save some people some time.

In any case, I am sure most of you are familiar with it but I deemed it worth noting, writing about and referencing.

The team’s blog is a great resource for help, release announcements, and general information about the tool.

The tool itself is available here in its latest 4.3 release.

Introducing SQL Server 2008 Free eBook

guillermo — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 22:00:28 -0500

Me and my addiction to books, especially FREE books. Sorry.

Go to the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Learning Portal, click on Special offers (or scroll down a bit), and follow the link.

Via the author's blog post.

Acronym hell

guillermo — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:00:57 -0500

International Conference Calls
by tferey

the impact of words

Guillermo — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 09:33:00 -0500

I am not one to get into any political discussions, I reserve my opinions and understand it when others passionately get into it and make it their main content. This however is not the latter, but a very interesting and unbiased way to present content in a visual way.

Below is a wordie of both candidates acceptance speeches at their respective national conventions. McCain’s on top, Obama’s the bottom one.

work by Thomas Hawk