Rants & Randomness
...because you might get it... Today I finally got Office 2007 installed on this machine at my client's facility. They even installed OneNote for me. But I made one small teensy error... I neglected to consider what all I am supporting here, and of course the IT's install policy which involves tromping all over the PC with muddy boots. Office 2003 was uninstalled, which under normal circumstances would have been a nice surprise, but then I started thinking about the 4 large MS Access applications...
This isn't necessarily Silverlight, but it's important to bloggers, so I'm using that tag. If you're not using Grafitti and don't care to read my rant, just delete! I was using the free version of Grafitti for our Phoenix Silverlight User Group. I really didn't feel I had the time or inclination to write yet another site, and nobody was jumping up and down asking to do it for me :) Notice I said 'was'. During the Silverlight FireStarter yesterday, I wanted to Twitter that we also have a User Group...
Yes I know it's been a while since I blogged about my *favorite* development tool... but that's only because I haven't had to touch it! That smooth series of events was shattered yesterday with me experiencing the Thrill of Victory and Agony of Defeat in multiple cycles... and as you can guess it involved Crystal Reports. So here's the deal... I'm working inside what a fellow developer called a 'Draconian' environment. .NET 2.0 is the 'standard' although I installed 3.5 SP1 on this box (and either...
Absolutely nothing technical or Silverlight-related so feel free to pass on this one... I truly agree with the adage that "You're only as old as you feel", but hey, today I feel about 110. I'm sore head to foot and have come to the realization that I'm too old be to crawling around in the attic all afternoon :( Almost 20 years ago I ran two new circuits and installed two identical light/fan kits in the two bathrooms at the house. The master bath gets all the use and the fan in there is starting to...
I just realized than Monday started year 3 of me blogging at GeeksWithBlogs, and kudos to Jeff and everyone at GWB for great service! What began as an experiment in blogging on my own site expanded into something with a LOT more reach at GWB just in time for WPF/E in December of '06. Then after Mix '07, I began what is now the SilverlightCream posts, and anything else I may have to say is drowned out by that! I've been watching the blogger list at GWB, and although I began later than some, I'm now...
I've left comments open on this blog so that people could respond easily. Unfortunately as some of you have probably found out, someone with a room-temperature IQ has been making spam comments of a very rude nature to many of my posts, and they've probably been forwarded to other posters as well. I've added Captcha to the comments, and if it turns out to be a live person and he persists past that, then I will moderate... as it turns out, while I was typing this, another came through, so I'm going...
As it turns out, my client has a piece of software running on a server called "Freeloader" ... it's written in VB, has very bad resolution for some reason, but they're quite proud of it... picture of the guy responsible and listing of all the folks that helped in the About box. Freeloader is a list of all sorts of free software that's been vetted by the IT department for use inside the company. You select what you want, and it downloads the software to your system so you can install it. It will optionally...
In relating the last post to someone (another productivity enhancer this exercise fosters), I was reminded of a similar exercise I went through 'back in the day' at either Sperry or Honeywell, I don't remember which version of the company it was at the time. I was at a point in my career that I was learning Windows programming, and they were trying to figure out where to put me. So I found myself in 'Desktop Support' for a while. This was about the time that Viasoft almost imploded by having some...
I can understand my client's IT department blocking MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. I might not like it that Twitter is blocked, but I do understand. I don't understand if they work so hard keeping their employees off Internet sites, then why they allow them to use IM on the Intranet, but hey... that's why I write software, not set policy I guess. So today's exercise in useless time is spent getting ready for a software audit. Now, of course, I'm not dumb enough to be running a cracked copy...
The customer agreed with me that the amount of time I've spent is plenty, and I've not heard anything back from anyone else getting more than 10 reams of blank paper inserted between two lines in a Crystal Reports PDF file... hmmm did Business Objects buy one of the printer paper distributorships?? I agree that producing a PDF file and then printing that PDF file produces a very nice output, primarily because there is no header/footer text on the printout and the paging is handled a little better...
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