Brian Takita

What is Encryption?

Brian Takita — Mon, 15 Nov 2004 19:26:00 GMT

SlashDot has a good article about an Encryption Primer.

How much has your state spent on the War in Iraq?

Brian Takita — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 09:05:00 GMT

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=229415

California spent $19.5Billion on Iraq so far. Since California has 35,484,453 people as of 2003, each Californian has spent about $550 on Iraq.

Exercise, Nutrition, and Programmers

Brian Takita — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 08:40:00 GMT

I know this may seem like a strange issue, but it makes sense for programmers to have good exercise and nutrition habits. When given the chance, they have a lot to say about nutrition and exercise.

Hours of sitting in front of the computer can wreak havoc on the back, arms, hands, fingers, shoulders, and legs. Extended periods of concentration is also taxing on the body and mind.

The study of Ergonomics, though not a true science, has produced numerous resources to minimize the physical impact of a desk job. For exercise, they encourage stretching.

http://www.askergoworks.com/stretch_breaks.pdf

http://www.3m.com/cws/selfhelp/stretch.html

I wonder what other kinds of exercises would be beneficial to protect against RSI as well as raise productivity.

As far as nutrition, it seems like a healthy meal plan high in vegetables, fruits, complex carbohydrates and protein would give a steady stream of energy throughout the day. Mainly, avoid this food pyrmid.

I imagine good quality vitamins (not the generic WalMart brand) would also help to achieve peak mental performance.

The .NET Developer's Guide to Windows Security On Wiki

Brian Takita — Mon, 08 Nov 2004 08:34:00 GMT

Read the book of the Month at…

http://pluralsight.com/wiki/default.aspx/Keith.GuideBook.HomePage

Reported here and here.

Generic Query Analyzer 0.2.1 released

Brian Takita — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 05:54:00 GMT

The Generic Query Analyzer is a Database Independent Query Analyzer that uses ADO.NET (OLEDB) technology. This Query Analyzer is run off the .NET 2.0 platform on Windows.

https://developer.berlios.de/projects/gqa/

This release…

Adds an icon for the Generic Query Analyzer
Is refactored to remove a little used dll

I got some positive feedback on it so far.

Let me know if you have any suggestions, requests or found some bugs.

Right now the GQA implementation is well factored so its at a good position to move forward.

Generic Query Analyzer 0.1.1 released

Brian Takita — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 05:15:00 GMT

I developed a Query Analyzer that can Query any database that has an OleDb adapter. This means you can query an Excel spreadsheet or Access database.

It requires .NET 2.0.

Despite its version number, it is a beta release and works well.

You can get it as http://developer.berlios.de/projects/gqa/

Keeping in Control of Events

Brian Takita — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 08:27:00 GMT

At work, I'm having an issue with losing control over events in my code. One big issue I'm having is recursion in the DataRow.RowChanged event.

In this case, I'm trying to update the database, during every whenever e.Action == DataRowAction.Changed. This also means having a call to DataRow.AcceptChanges() which raises another DataRowAction.Changed. I also have instances when e.Action == DataRowAction.Changed but DataRow.RowState == DataRowState.Unchanged.

Some thoughts I came up with to try to combat this madness is to...

Lock the object that fired the event
Check if the object state matches the event state. If not, throw an exception.
Implement an event counter.
Unit test the event count.

What kinds of things do all of you do to keep events under control?

The Third Sector

Brian Takita — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 10:32:00 GMT

Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book about how the private and public sector are unable to support productivity growth caused by technology. There is an abundance unskilled and semiskilled laborers who find that their jobs are made redundant by advances in machinery and general productivity. There are not enough service and "silicon collared" jobs being created to balance the regular loss of jobs in the manufacturing and farming sector.

He proposes strengthening the Third sector, or volunteer organizations, as the means to care for the displaced and to create work. Indeed, the third sector is perhaps, the foundation that brought success to America, yet it is underrated in today's religions of free market capitalism and big government.

Rifkin briefly mentions a "social" economy based on volunteer work where the currency is how much one spends time helping other people. Kind of like communities looking out for each other on a national level. To do this the role of communities must be strengthened.

Its hard to imagine such a life where work is not paid for. How can this coexist with capitalism? Probably taxing the corporations and using the gains in productivity and profits to subsidize the Third sector. Not a bad idea, but it would take a grassroots paradigm shift. After all, our media is saturated with capitalists perpetuating their dogma of consumerism and their rationalization that only corporations bring innovation. It also flies in the face of the individualistic tendencies of America.

The government cant lead such a project because it would die in red tape from the massive bureaucracy. A decentralized effort will provide agile solutions to societal problems that continue to plague the world. The world matters very much to America: case in point as September 11. But this is greater than just reducing terrorism, this is a chance for us to tendency to stop exploiting and start empowering other peoples. If we see other people as not competition for the world's resources, but as partners, we can usher in an age where everybody mutually benefits. Such a world is richer than all of DeBeers diamonds and the Saudi Arabia's oil.

I admit this is idealistic, but it is a good ideal to move toward. It certainly beats consumerism.

Excellent Managed DirectX Tutorial

Brian Takita — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 21:01:00 GMT

Craig did an excellent job in explaining the basics of Managed DirectX. Before you purchase a book, this is probably a good place to start.

Deploy Any File Type using Whidbey Click Once

Brian Takita — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 03:21:00 GMT

One of the great things about Whidbey is ClickOnce Deployment. At work, I use it to deploy rich client internal applications

ClickOnce can be used to not only deploy .NET applications, but also to deploy files. Yesterday, I deployed an Access adp application to our organization. To do so, I simply...

Create a Console Application
Add the adp file to the project and set it as Content
Write a bootstrapper application in the Main method
Configure the ClickOnce deployment

Here is the bootstrap..

#region Using directives
using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
#endregion

namespace AdpApplication {
    class Program {
        static void Main(string[] args) {
            System.Diagnostics.Process p = new Process();
            p.StartInfo.FileName = "./file.adp";
            p.Start();
        }
    }
}

Nice and easy. Also, if you are using a web server to deploy the file, don't forget to set the MIME type.

Thank You Jeff for My New Home

Brian Takita — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 19:38:00 GMT

Many thanks to Jeff Julian for setting up an account for me at geekswithblogs.net. I am excited to start blogging and thankful Im on a .NET related blog site.

Edits:

Added links

Subversion Source Control

Brian Takita — Sat, 18 Sep 2004 19:31:00 GMT

I am very impressed with Subversion Source Control.

I've used SourceSafe, Vault, and CVS but none of them matched my needs.

I really like Subversion because is it is fast, lightweight, and, when coupled with Tortise, easy to use, administer, and set up. Commits are as easy as going to Windows Explorer, select the folders and files to commit -> right click -> select Commit. I dont need to integrate the source control with Visual Studio, and suffer the performance hit and a more complicated development environment.

Branching, merging, rollbacks, and conflict resolution are easy. Subversion makes source control fun, rather than a chore like the other tools I used before.

Now, Im version controlling items that I edit, including my blog posts and articles.

Subversion can be run on a desktop, file share, or as a web service. The web service interface for Subversion can be run off of its own svn server or Apache. If you use the svn server on a Windows server, you may want to consider using SVNService to register the svn server as a Service.