Friday, November 19, 2010
Starting immediately, I'm moving my blog to WordPress (http://sspotts.wordpress.com). I'm seeing more integration with other social networks and more Microsoft action there, so it's time to fold up shop here and take the plunge, along with any other metaphors I can throw out here.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
SteveB is animated, but didn't do the dev monkey dance for us. He did reference it J.
HTML5 getting love and IE9 … great, great, great is Steve's take.
IE9 – good demo showing how it uses the power of the PC to support HTML5 in IE9. Video and canvas… full HW acceleration kicks Chrome's ass in fps and smooth display. Cool javascript additions for sites to support pinning web sites in Win7 desktop. Couldn't be easier. CSS3 2D transforms supported, cute demos.
http://ietestdrive.com for demos and samples.
Windows Phone 7 of course getting play. Man do I hate my BlackBerry.
Paradigm is user centric rather than app-centric. Nice.
Attendees are getting a WP7 phone and registration on Windows Phone Marketplace! W00t!
During demo, used term "glancability". Never heard it before, probably a UI designer standard term. J
Scottgu, as usual, gives great demo. Building first WP7 app.
Announced new odata library, showed using it to talk to eBay.
New profiler tools coming for WP7 dev let you download app to physical phone and profile it. Deploys instrumented version of app to phone. Can drill down to specific item causing issues.
Bob Muglia's Azure talk showed Microsoft's commitment to Platform as a Service (PaaS).
Chris Ford's demo of Pixar's RenderMan app on Azure, showed elasticity a value scale (time vs. processor costs). Small shops don't have to have to build out their own huge "render farm" and can pay for usage only.
Announcing the ability to move a Win2008R2 image directly to cloud. Windows Azure Virtual Machine Role. Win 2008 and Win 2003 coming later.
Server Application Virtualization coming. Deploy an app to a windows server app role with no cloud install).
Coming full IIS support, RDP, smaller instances, VPN, elevated privs (admin mode), Win 2008 R2 roles, multiple admins.
http://blackstock.cloudapp.net – TFS in the cloud (trial). Does SCC, Work Items, Builds… didn't see SharePoint site. Test center, Excel, Project – can also access it.
AppFabric – Access Control service improved, Caching Service moving to Azure this year, Service Bus adding durable message support, connecting to BizTalk.
SQL Azure – multi-tenant Reporting Services, data sync between cloud-cloud, cloud-on-premise coming.
New Windows Azure Marketplace available today. DataMarket aisle open, too. New app composition designer support for AppFabric in VS 2010.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
So I got back the results of my filed grade dispute with University of Phoenix, and evidently my Marketing 421 instructor, Cassandra Baker, still refused to give me the 7/10 of a point I needed for an A. What's the point of a grade dispute process when the instructor is unreasonable yet the faculty members decision is final?
As I mentioned in the original post (http://geekswithblogs.net/sspotts/archive/2010/05/13/im-a-phoenix-and-im-miffed.aspx), the day a paper was due my little Ford Focus was totalled by a woman in an SUV, and I supplied pictures of the car, my bruieses, and had the accident report number in hand, as well as the ER information. I wonder if Ms. Baker was holding out for an amputation or paralysis, or if she is just so narrow minded that she won't make an adjustmen regardless of reason.
I've had a lot of good instructors at University of Phoenix so far, and I've gotten A- grades from a few that were also pretty close. Mostly I missed the required number of discussion board responses because I was traveling, which is not a good reason for missing the requirement. This is no problem. Refusing 7/10 of a point to someone who could have been killed (the officer at the scene said 10 MPH more from the SUV may have done it) and was in the ER?
What would your 'reasonable" response have been?
Thursday, May 13, 2010
For personal reasons, almost 30 years ago I left school to enter the workforce. I decided late 2008 to go back to school and finish my degree. After the expected loss of credits for a transfer, from Temple University to University of Phoenix, I'm now about 75% done. The experience has been interesting.
Classes are time compressed, only 5 weeks each. Because I have a family and a full time job, I'm taking one at a time. Even so, I've written more papers in these classes than I ever wrote at Temple. My own papers are one thing, but the team papers give me heartburn since I can't completely control what goes into them. Not a big deal except that they make up 30% of our grade.
In any case, most of the class facilitators have been great. I had great ones for Accounting, Finance, and frankly most others. I've had a few (4, maybe) cases where I was less than 2 points from an A, and asked the facilitator if I could get any of my work reviewed to see if I could get those extra points. I figured it was worth a shot, and there were no extenuating circumstances to help make my case. I think that only one facilitator decided after a review of one paper that my interpretation was good, just not what he expected, and gave me another point, which gave me an A.
So while none are pushovers, they've all been open to discussion, which is as much as I should expect. Overall, good experience.
That is, until my last class. On the second week, the day I was due to hand in my personal assignment for the week, I was in an accident. An SUV creamed my little Ford Focus, and totaled it (estimated repair over $11K). I was pretty banged up, especially my left shoulder. I was scheduled for rotator cuff surgery for two weeks later, and getting hit against the door really made it worse. After dealing with the police, the EMT, the tow truck, and the Percocet and Flexeril for the pain, I crashed for the night and didn't get to upload my paper until the next day.
The instructor took 30% off for it being late, even after I supplied photos of the car, my arm (huge bruises), and offered to supply the police report number. I figured I'd be okay since that's 2.7 points, and I could lose up to 5 before jeopardizing an A grade. Well, that wasn't the case as we lost more points than I expected on our team paper in Week 5. I ended up with a 94.3. Yes, 7/10 of a point from an A. Of course I asked the instructor to review the issue with the accident and give me just the 0.7 points I needed for the A.
That got me a short response of "I have received your emails and review your work over the last five weeks. Your current grade will stand. If you would like to dispute your grade then please feel free to contact your academic advisor. I wish you much success in your professional and academic career." Brrrr….!
So I asked my academic advisor to file a dispute. If it wasn't that a pretty bad car accident was the cause, I wouldn't have. Without the grade reduction, I would have had a 97 for the class, so I'll argue that I was performing at the A level throughout the class. Why her purported "review" of my work didn't then warrant such a minor adjustment, I don't know. An A- drops my GPA, and this ticked me off. Now I have to wait and see what the school says about the grade dispute.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
I got this when I tried to install the source code on Windows Server 2008 R2, and this was an issue with EntLib 4.0 as well. The solution is the same now as it was then, but since I had a new OS install I didn't recreate the fix. I had to add a registry key:
DisableMSI REG_DWORD value 0
It goes here: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer
The description for this key is here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa368304(VS.85).aspx
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
This stuff drives me nuts. I'm all for hardening servers, and reducing security footprints, but I always want the option to allow me to get work done versus securing my system.
I use Windows Server 2008 R2 as my laptop OS for a number of reasons I don't need to review here. It's pimped out to work like Windows 7 for most things. But my DVD writer is crippled, and evidently it's on purpose:
http://blogs.technet.com/askcore/archive/2010/02/19/windows-server-2008-r2-no-recording-tab-for-cd-dvd-burner.aspx
I don't WANT to log in as the local administrator to burn a damned DVD. WTF isn't this configurable through the registry, or better yet, group policy?
There are no security settings that I should not have the option to enable or disable.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
So I downloaded the ISO from MSDN Subscriber downloads two days ago and installed it on three different computers. The first one is a Dell laptop that's running Windows 2008 R2 and had VS 2010 Beta 2 on it. I first uninstalled beta 2, which took a while and caused some wierd error with my network driver. At least, it was the only thing that I was running on the laptop, and it was after the uninstall made me reboot that I lost the driver.
I did a repair on the driver and got my network connection back, so I loaded the ISO using MagicISO Virtual CD/DVD Manager. I've used Daemon Tools in the past, but found this and really like it. I started a custom install and unchecked SQL Express as I already have SQL 2008 Developer installed on the box.
It ran along and after another reboot, finished fine. At the final screen of the install wizard, I elected to configure help and set my preference for local, and installed it all. I opened Visual Studio and checked it out, and am really pleased with the speed improvements. I added some of the available extensions as well, and I like the way that works. Eclipse has had an easy way to add extensions that wasn't in Visual Studio, so it's nice to see.
Okay, so I also have a Dell workstation running Windows 7 32-bit. It would run 64-bit except I have some peripherals that don't have 64-bit drivers. Again, I uninstalled beta 2, and this time had no network driver issues. Actually, I had no issues at all, the entire install ran cleanly. Sweet!
If I had hair, I would have lost it after my third installation. I thought this would be easiest - it's on the Acer laptop that I got from attending the PDC 2009 event, and is running Windows 7 64-bit. It's not a great box for development, regardless of the fact that Microsoft gave these to us so we would write multi-touch apps, since it only has a Celeron 1.4Mhz processor and a pretty small 11.3" screen, but I read that one of the improvements in the VS 2010 RC was better performance with sub-2MHz processors.
Again using MagicISO I started the install. Horrible. Half the bits didn't install, and the IDE was flaky starting up. So I uninstalled and tried again. More stuff didn't install again, but it was different. Another uninstall, and I also looked for leftover files and registry entries. So another install... isn't it a sign of insanity when you do the same thing multiple times and expect it to be different? Yet another bad install.
So I uninstalled again, and this time I copied the contents of the ISO onto the same external USB hard drive where the ISO is stored. Now I ran the install from disk, and it all installed just fine - extept the last page, which tells you how the install worked and lets you set up help, told me it couldn't be displayed. At least now the tools installed fine. I added a bunch of cool extensions and things are running fine. Now I just have to figure out how to get that help installed locally :).
I'll be playing with this machine a bit to see just how well it runs on slower processors.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
New CTP for Microsoft Codename "Dallas", catalog for Data. Data as services. Expose data sources through the cloud.
Dallas Service Explorer used to find and configure services, preview data, see in Atom format, invoke as RESTful service, pull into Excel into new PowerPivot add-in through Atom.
Uses Astoria (OData now). Demo used NASA data service. Showed creation of a service proxy that creates the data structure for you. Quick demo took about a minute to write a WPF app that called the service, bound to a data grid. Week UI for a WPF demo, but he showed something that UI designers built that we needed 3d glasses to see.
Monday, April 27, 2009
So I've not received a response, which is about what I figured would happen. I started looking for information, and found H.R. 1200 (House) : American Health Security Act of 2009.
I'm not a politician, lawyer, or minion of Evil, so I'm not sure about some of this. I didn't yet find a Senate version of this either, but from reading this bit I have a question:
SEC. 106. RELATIONSHIP TO EXISTING FEDERAL HEALTH PROGRAMS.
(a) Medicare, Medicaid and State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)-
(1) IN GENERAL- Notwithstanding any other provision of law, subject to paragraph (2)--
(A) no benefits shall be available under title XVIII of the Social Security Act for any item or service furnished after December 31, 2010;
(B) no individual is entitled to medical assistance under a State plan approved under title XIX of such Act for any item or service furnished after such date;
(C) no individual is entitled to medical assistance under an SCHIP plan under title XXI of such Act for any item or service furnished after such date; and
(D) no payment shall be made to a State under section 1903(a) or 2105(a) of such Act with respect to medical assistance or child health assistance for any item or service furnished after such date.
(2) TRANSITION- In the case of inpatient hospital services and extended care services during a continuous period of stay which began before January 1, 2011, and which had not ended as of such date, for which benefits are provided under title XVIII, under a State plan under title XIX, or a State child health plan under title XXI, of the Social Security Act, the Secretary of Health and Human Services and each State plan, respectively, shall provide for continuation of benefits under such title or plan until the end of the period of stay.
(b) Federal Employees Health Benefits Program- No benefits shall be made available under chapter 89 of title 5, United States Code, for any part of a coverage period occurring after December 31, 2010.
(c) CHAMPUS- No benefits shall be made available under sections 1079 and 1086 of title 10, United States Code, for items or services furnished after December 31, 2010.
(d) Treatment of Benefits for Veterans and Native Americans- Nothing in this Act shall affect the eligibility of veterans for the medical benefits and services provided under title 38, United States Code, or of Indians for the medical benefits and services provided by or through the Indian Health Service.
Does 2(b) above include the Senate, House, President, and other elected officials, or is just the drudge bureaucrat workers? Do the officials have yet another plan that isn't on this list? I've no idea what CHAMPUS or SCHIP are.
There's also a part in section 206 that makes me wonder:
(6) PRESCRIPTION DRUGS, BIOLOGICALS, INSULIN, MEDICAL FOODS-
(A) Outpatient prescription drugs and biologics, as specified by the Board consistent with section 615.
(B) Insulin.
(C) Medical foods (as defined in section 202(e)).
If Insulin is called out, why? There are plenty of non-insulin dependent diabetics who have expensive meds as well.
Anyway, I'll post again in a few weeks if I hear anything from my Senator.
Friday, April 17, 2009
After reading the April 13th newsletter from my state Senator, Bob Casey, I decided to send a reply. The following is the text of that message. The work week is almost over and I've yet to see a response.
Your April 13th newsletter stated that one of the issues you plan to work on is "the important work of reforming our health care system." I have some concerns about the "our" portion that might be coming.
"All Americans" is inclusive of all from the President down to those people who have made the committment to earn legal citizenship and everyone in between. My concern is that like in some socialist countries, such as the late USSR, the political elite will have a diffent set of benefits from those that are paying for it.
Right now the President, Senate, House members, et al have free and open access to places like Johns Hopkins for any health care issues. Will our government leaders do the ethically correct, and morally required thing? Will they change their elite health plan and follow the new "universal" health plan they devise for the rest of us?
I have to say right now that I won't believe it until I see it. I'm hoping that I'll be proven incorrect, and will be ecstatic to be able to say I was wrong.
What say you, Mr. Senator?
Our elected officials work for us, not the other way around. Why are they treated better than me and others that pay taxes?
Thursday, October 09, 2008
I'm fairly disappointed with the Republican party, being a somewhat moderate Republican. I'm even more dissapointed with the news media and the one-sided coverage they're providing. It seems that everything I might possibly want to know about the personal lives of McCain and Palin, and their families, has been covered in excruciating detail, but I can't find any real info about Obama.
I constantly see a link with McCain and Bush, regardless of how real that is, yet the Obama team yells foul whenever an association with criminals, radicals, extremists, and terrorists is brought up. I mean, he really hasn't done much in his half-term of Senator, so what else do we have to look at?
He's a helluva speaker, although shows a real anger when questioned about things he doesn't want to talk about. He doesn't seem to have any solid details about how he'll actually change anything, just that he'll change things. I don't even see any evidence that he understands basic macroeconomics. This whole Fanny/Freddie mess is being blamed on the Bush administration, which hurts McCain by party allegience, yet Bush was working with a solid Democratic House and Senate. Heck, I heard someone on a talk show say that Obama not only got a mortgage through Freddie, he got some kind of sweetened deal. Yah, we'll see change all right.
I can't actually see where he's got ANY qualifications for assuming the Presidency. Except for one year in the Senate, the mayor of my small town is just as qualified. :)
I liked Hilary a lot more. While she's still more of a socialist than I like (hey, I earn my money, I want to keep it and spend it myself!), she didn't scare me like Obama. I'm actually frightened about what will happen if he wins this election. Frightened for myself, my family, and my country.
Understand that if there was a more capable Democrat running, I think McCain would be in a lot more trouble. I'm finding that a lot more people are worried than I expected, and a lot more are wondering what Obama is really all about.
I'm not posting any more about this, but I had to vent a little about the crappy media coverage.
In case anyone doesn't understand, this is my personal opinion and doesn't reflect anything at all from my employer or this blog site.
Been a bit busy, including a job change that's had a lot of effect on me. I now work for SunGard Higher Education as a Lead Systems Architect, working on a new project using Microsoft tools and platforms. This has so far been all positive for me, and includes some really interesting work.
Also signed up for the PDC, so now I've got to see what (private) events I can get into ;).
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
The Philadelphia chapter of the International Association of Software Architects (IASA) is pleased to announce the IT Architect Regional Conference, the largest event in the Philadelphia area to address the pressing needs of IT architects today. There are over 15 seminars and two tracks separated by specialty: Enterprise and Software Architecture. Architects of all levels can take their skills to the next level.
Enterprise Architecture Track:
Learn efficient strategies for linking your enterprise strategy to implementation, create and articulate sound ROI, prioritize your objectives, inspire employees to share your vision, dive in to governance concepts, and enhance your agile strategies.
Software Architecture Track:
Increase alignment between architecture, business and development, troubleshoot your software architecture, assess architecture and software maturity, drive architecture evolution by effectively selecting next generation technology through a rigorous evaluation process, integrate with dynamic management processes, governance for the successful software architect, and enhance design with realistic software architecture toolsets.
Call for Presentations
If you are in or near the Philadelphia area and would like to speak at our upcoming conference, please download the Presenter Form.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
The primary hard drive in my Vista media center (Dell XPS 410) died a hard death, so I got a new drive and started rebuilding. Well, it turns out that my Vista DVD is pre-sp1, which means the SATA driver I needed wasn't there. I tried getting one from Dell downloads, but it didn't work. I got to the point in setup where it SAID it was copying files, but nothing happened - overnight.
Since I have only a small amount of time late at night for personal projects, after the second day my wife was ready to cut off body parts. Twin 2 year old boys, no TV... not a pretty picture.
So I decided that the TV/DVR wasn't going to be a hobby any more, and bought a TiVo HD unit from Best Buy. I called Verizon to see if I could replace my two STB's with cablecards, which would also give me the high def capability the Dell box lacked (you can do the cablecard/HD configuration with the XPS 420, not 410). I have to say, the Verizon rep (working in Pittsburgh), was GREAT. I don't remember every having a better customer experience. While we were talking, he was reviewing my account - I have phone, internet, and TV service. After reviewing options, he was able to give me the same service - except for swapping the two STB's with two cablecards (they didn't have multi-cards, so I needed two to record two channels at once) - for $178 instead of the $252 I've been paying. Then the bad news - it would be about 2.5 weeks before a technician would be able to come with the cards and install them. Great, those body parts were history.
So the next day just before noon, the rep calls me on my cell phone. He made some calls that morning and a technician was scheduled to come the next day. Sure enough, around 2pm the tech came and an hour or so later got the cablecards installed and TiVo was all set.
The only real issue with the TiVo is that it's only got a 250Gb drive, whereas I had 1.2Tb in my Vista box. The only "approved" way to expand it is to get a 500Gb external drive from WD, called the My DVR something-or-other, and plug it into the eSATA port. It's about $199, so is an option when I need the space.
All is not lost on the XPS 410 box. Once I have the time to get it up and running, I'm going to add a few Gb of RAM and turn it into a video editing machine. I have an HD, 60Gb video recorder and my little laptop doesn't do well editing the movies from it.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Mitch Ruebush, Don Urbanic, Brian Mitchell and I met a few months ago to initiate a local chapter of the IASA. and the time has now come to have our first meeting. Our chapter president, Mitch Ruebush, will be moderating the first meeting. Here are the particulars from his invitation e-mail:
You are invited to IASA - Philadelphia's first meeting on February 6th, 2008 at the Microsoft Malvern office. We have set up an official IASA Web site at http://www.iasahome.org/web/Philadelphia/home to provide more information on IASA and the Philly chapter. Please use this site to keep up with the Philadelphia IASA community.
Agenda:
Refreshments & Network
Introductions
What do you want from an architecture professional group?
How do you want to help?
Topic:
What is Architecture?
Join us for a moderated discussion on the practicality of what IT architecture is. We will discuss what is the meaning of IT architecture, roles and responsibilities, approaches to IT architecture, common architecture processes and artifacts and what should be in the architecture toolkit.
Moderator:
Mitch Ruebush is the Architecture Team Leader at ING DIRECT, fsb. He is responsible for defining and coordinating the architecture for the applications and infrastructure at ING DIRECT. He has written a number of books and articles on .NET and enjoys spending his time as a father of two great kids, a hobbyist film maker, playing piano and saxophone and trying to write a video game.
Date: Feb. 6th, 2008
Time: 6:00pm - 8:00pm
Location:
Microsoft Corporation
Great Valley Corporate Center
45 Liberty Blvd., Suite 210
Malvern, PA 19355
IASA (International Association of Software Architects) is the premier association focused on the IT architecture profession through education, advocacy, events, and the development of best practices.