buttons…

I know stereotyping is bad, but so many just crawl to mind after reading this article.

So a few fun things that have happened on the home front (New Orleans & Slidell) since Katrina.

Speakeasys:
A few bars in New Orleans have taken up the old tradition of Speak Easys, that is you give a passcode at the door to get in. This is mostly to get around the midnight curfew so that patrons can still some semblance of normality, i.e. sitting in a bar until 6am. No details on which bars or the passcodes because well I don’t feel it’s my right to give it away.

Police Entertainment in Slidell:
So what do you do when you’re an out-of-state police officer trying to find some entertainment in a city that has not quite come back to life. (This story is from some time back but due to slow information passage I’m only just getting it). My old roommate, a current Sherrif’s Deputy in St. Tammany parish related this story to me when we finally were able to get together for dinner one night. Basically he pulled up on a Kentucky State Trooper dealing with a drunk near the Hwy. 11 on-ramp to I-12. They pulled up on the man wandering around, trying to find a place to eat and clearly to drunk to be attempting to cross the street. So they talk to him for a while and eventually tell him they will let him go if he can pass a simple test. The test? First they tell him to point down at a rock by his feet and say “Rock”. He smiles and easily accomplishes the task. They then tell him to point up at the sky and say “Star”. He again does the task with relative ease. Then they have him combine the two which turns into the old disco dance move while saying “Rock Star” the entire time. The two police officers have to take turns walking away to laugh. A few other entertaining tests ensue before they question the man on what he’s doing. He explains that he’s trying to get to Mississippi and that he hitched a ride to Slidell. The police look baffled at the man and tell him that he’s not in Slidell. The man in turn insists that he is when the police officers point to their car and say “Do you see what it says on the side of the car? It says Kentucky State Police, you are in Kentucky.” This causes a bit of distress in the man, all the while my old roommate is off to the side enjoying a good laugh. All the fun ends though when a Louisiana State Trooper pulls up and sends the man back to his perch under the overpass, telling him to stay there until he sobers up or they will arrest him.

New Orleans Pictures:
Pictures to come soon from a friend that recently went back to survey his house in New Orleans. Wow, those were amazing pictures. Things like cars and boats in places that they shouldn’t be. More to come when I get copies.

So the interesting things you learn by doing nothing really other than clicking on random things on websites. Today’s find? E-mailing through text messages. How did I find it? Well the first thing was catching on to GeoURL which I found on Nathanael’s site. So I registered myself, set up that nifty tag in my tags section and then clicked on it to see who was around me. That led me to Steven’s site and the article he posted on e-mailing through text messages.

So enough of how I found out, here’s how to do it: (this is only tested on Cingular)

Send a text message to the provider’s gateway (for Cingular it is 121) and format the text like so:

name@email.com(Subject)Body of Message

Make sure that you don’t have any spaces between the address and the subject or the subject and the body, parantheses required.

So I haven’t finished with this project, in fact I haven’t made it very far into it other than some initial research. Got to love the programming business, figure this out and at the same time get x, y, and z done. So what is the conclusion of the research? Well according to Microsoft, it isn’t very good practice to create Word documents from the server dynamically, at least not using the Word COM calls.

Why not?

Well because every request made for one of those documents instantiates a copy of Word. So if you had fifty people request a word document at a given time you have fifty copies of Word open and well that’s never good. I’ve also read that you have to have Word on the machine in order to use those COM calls. Can’t confirm or deny that one because any time I’ve ever done work with Office it’s been on one of my personal machines that’s always had Office on it anyways, and generally was just a program to leverage something in Office anyways. Like a few people have said and I’ll agree, there generally isn’t any reason to ever install Office on your server.

So what do you do?

Well the other solution (this is what I love about programming, there’s always another solution) is to use XML for the data and XSLT to transform the XML into a word document. This is about where I stopped for the day, keeping a link bookmarked (on my office PC so I can’t give it right now) that gives a good rundown on how to achieve this. Sounds good to me, I’ve been wanting a good excuse to devote time to learning how to use XSLT.

Today’s Agenda:

After making sure there aren’t any bugs in my latest web part I get to try and tackle creating two word documents from the data stored in the database. I’m sure it can be done, but I’ve never done it so this should be a fun little project to tackle. Details to come as I figure it out (hopefully).

Want to neuter your pet but don’t want him to be picked on by the other dogs well I have a product for you. It’s Neuticles.

Yikes… Who comes up with these things?

“What can go wrong will!”

Yeah but why last night Murphy? So we were practicing last night, going through a couple new songs and making sure we have everything down for the three songs we are going to record tomorrow when our lead guitarist’s amp stopped working. At least this didn’t happen while we were in the studio, but we don’t know if he’ll be able to get it fixed today. If not, well we borrow another amp, but that of course changes the sound of the guitar.

Bleh, I say, Bleh!

Who would win in a match between a 6’ American Aligator and a 13’ Burmese Python…..

computer simulation running

... and the answer is, neither!

Check out this link.

And the moral of the story is: If it’s your time to go, bring someone with you, preferably the rotten bastard that is trying to eat you.

Sun joins Google to battle Microsoft Office, Why is Microsoft Afraid of Google, Google and Sun beat at the gates of Microsoft’s PC Empire, Google vs. Gate in Office battle, and so on….

STOP!

Seriously, do people really believe what they are writing, or is it just the fact that google is the buzzword of the year and as such putting it anywhere gets you headlines. If that’s the case, everyone reading this leave a comment if this topic is what actually brought you to my website. So yeah, I’ll buy into it that this may be the best thing that has ever happened for OpenOffice, but it’s not going to put a dent in Microsoft’s market share in this field. Why? Well for starters Office is probably one of the best products if not the best product Microsoft sells. Also Open Office has been out for quite some time and still hasn’t made any noise. I mean sure, put a google sticker on it and it’s the latest and greatest thing. To believe that Google and Sun are going to knock down Microsoft in this field is like thinking Google is going to take over the IM business as well. That’s just a google sticker on Jabber.

Bah, stop cluttering up my news feeds with this garbage, it’s almost as bad as the Michael Jackson trial. I’m glad Open Office is getting the recognition it deserves, it’s a damn good product, but I don’t need the Open Source Bible thumped at me all day long.

So I’m constantly asked, “How can you sit at a computer programming all day?” and alot of times people just don’t understand how fun it is. I believe, more often than not, that they think it’s just the same thing day in and day out. Well sometimes sure it can get to that, especially on a long running project, but it also seems to me that if that’s the case it’s not really a project you want to be on. The best projects, at least for me, are usually the ones that start out with something I know how to do, or at least have used enough to feel comfortable with.

I will use the current project I’m working on right now to illustrate what I am talking about. Currently we are writing custom web parts for a Sharepoint Portal for a training center. So what did I know about this going into it? Well I had used Sharepoint from a user’s standpoint so I understood that side of it, but I had never really heard of web parts or anything like that. That’s easily rectified with a quick google search. Ahhh, it’s kind of like gadgets on start.com. Still confused, basically it’s a small little part on the web page that performs a specific task I guess would be the best way to put it. Ok, I also know ASP.NET and that seems the obvious thing to use within Sharepoint since it is a Microsoft product. Hrmm, a little more googling and you find out that it’s not necessarily that easy to write them yourself by hand (read that as: there is no visual developer for them yet) which I don’t particularly like the visual editor in asp.net, but you take that away and you also take away the html editor which is VERY useful.

Ok, well I don’t want to just do this all by hand, that does not seem productive, so is there a way to make this web part just load an asp.net user control? Sure there is, there’s plenty of things out there about it, but what about SmartPart? Well what about it, oh, you just tell it what user control to load and it just loads it for you? That’s fantastic. A few minor customizations later and you are developing web parts like a champion.

Well this is getting old, but here’s this reporting section needed so time to go learn something else new…

That’s the way things should work in my opinion, start with something you’ve learned and continue to build upon it, then take a small branch off to the side and pick up something new to tie into it. Most improtant thing beyond that is to document your code so you remember why you did something a certain way, and then of course store copies away so you can refer back to it and build upon it.

Ever wonder how everything went down with Napster? Or just want an inside perspective as to how the company worked and well didn’t work? Go check out Don Dodge’s weblog, he’s on the emerging business team over at Microsoft and before that was the VP of product development at Napster.

How to give Syphillis with love. Or perhaps you are feeling a little more old school, then how about the Black Death. Well follow those links to find out how.

This was damn hilarious, WFMU presents the contractual obligation albulm of Van Morrison from his days with Bang Records. Damn it if it’s not a good listen.

DivX is giving away their Create Bundle for free right now, so head on over and grab a copy.

Forget the Windows Treo phone, this looks so much sweeter. The Haiti Hv-KH1000 is one of the best looking phones I have seen in a while. It looks fairly small, which is always a plus with me, and runs on Windows CE, another plus, making both use of a stylus and phone keypad inputs. On top of that it has an accessible SD slot, which is my biggest complaint with my iMate. Well maybe the second biggest complaint with the iMate, the first being that it uses miniSD instead of the normal sized that you can find just about anywhere.

Anyways, couldn’t find more on the Haiti phone but I hope it will eventually make it out west.