My Work, Ideas, and Endeavors

WebTrends It seems there are flurries of activity at WebTrends again, at least in the local Portland news.  A new CEO, Alex Yoder, a 7 year veteran at WebTrends has stepped up.  Personally, and maybe I shouldn't yap this, I kind of dig the idea. ...

I've been extra active reading blog entries lately and have come upon a few that have really got me kind of wired. Software Development Dogmata - Good Practices Gone Bad The first one is this article by Daniel Pietraru (who I do not know) over on little...

Community Server is costly, elaborate, kind of cool, has a few skins, and blagh blagh blagh.  Out of all these things costly is a big problem.  Of course there is the free version etc., etc, but changing and modularity, ease of code readability,...

Ok, I don't really know the guy, except that we both are rather hard core proponents of treating programmers, at least the really good ones the way they deserve - LIKE ROCK STARS!! But Joel writes up some articles here and there and I find I agree with...

All of these shots are from my commute of Friday. Caught the #19 after getting off the #10.  I had decided Friday was going to start with some Stumptown, thus I jumped the #10 for the scenic route to downtown. At noon I headed downtown for some...

When I saw these bike corrals here, here, and here I was ridiculously stoked. Basically take away two parking spots that "might hold" two cars with maybe, best case scenario, 8-16 people.  Now we get in return a bike corral that almost always has...

So fix it.  Of course, one can have it set however they want, but I know many developers that hate being warned/told/suggested that all their explicit/implicit type declarations should be with var or vice versa. So here is what you do, hit up the...

This is somewhat silly, but I felt it important to figure out the travel and walking times to the Stumptown Coffee Shops in Portland from the new residence. 4525 SE Division (18 minutes,  13 of that walking) 3356 Belmont (35 minutes, 16 of that...

Maybe because I'm often entertained by the geekiest of things, I've started usage of the Smuggling Pattern named after a fellow software architect Matt Davis's terminology of smuggling data into and out of Excel.  It is something that I've lately...

So I live on 21st & Powell now.  I'm loving the area and am loving the options that are available to me to get to downtown.  The one thing I find absolutely stupid is that there is no 21st avenue bus service.  As I looked closer there...

John Lam is working on IronRuby at Microsoft.  This video over on InfoQ was rather interesting.  If you are curious which direction Ruby is going in the Microsoft world, this discussion gives some good insight and idea. Look, a railroad system...

But not always.  I've been studying China, India, and other up and coming country's economies.  The one thing, of all the threats from these countries, is the sprawl.  These countries have sought American life styles in so many ways, they...

...or in other words, what we could do with 4 billion if we didn't blow it on the stupid CRC catastrophe. Light rail is about $30-40 million per mile now (not sure why, freight railroads don't blow that much per mile). Streetcar is about $20 million per...

Ok, I've been studying the Columbia River Crossing.  I really hate the whole thing because the easy, simple solution are being completely ignored (service bridges ala Broadway or Steal Bridge like we Portlander's have downtown). The inherent problem...

A little post build event can help a lot when one has multiple assemblies that need to be utilized by an application.  Such as the entlib or composite library.  Just put the following script in the post build event and make sure to create a...

Oh...   My...   God...   WTF?   I'm sitting here on the floor of the new apartment, Joleen working on a large scale multi-page poster type thing that will adorn the wall and I'm digging through various social medium online.  The...

I experienced this bug while trying to create a setup project today. https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/Workaround.aspx?FeedbackID=317870 You'll choke laughing at the absurdity of this.  Microsoft - FIX NOW PLZ K THX BYE! One word,...

...don't take the car for coffee. I got up about 9:45am yesterday (Sunday) and wanted a Stumptown Soy Mocha.  I decided that I'd go get one, and to be the awesome guy I am, I figured I'd get one for Joleen too.  So after fiddling around for...

I often make entries about why Portland rocks and other cities in this country...   well simply put, they don't.  Yeah, maybe it is inflamatory, but it shouldn't be.  Saying Portland rocks is like saying clean air is good to breath...

If you haven't seen it, bounce over to Al's Blog and take a view.  Very weird, very campy, but it is rather hilarious. Another reasons to NOT make TriMet free, the hot chicks won't be riding anywhere the hoodlums and bums start riding the system...

What gives I ask?  Hello America, let's get with the program, somehow, someway.  We HAVE to get more involved, our country is about to run itself into the ditch on non-productivity. The Chinese have opened their first high speed line, 217mph,...

Just some semi-elegant stuff I've conjured up recently to get column names in Excel and do some other functional things.  I wrote this code in a true TDD fashion.  It still, for some reason, seems odd to me to write tests in VB, since it was...

Yesterday I biked it to work as I have been for weeks now.  Except today I rode the old trusty Streetcar & #35 into the office.  On the way home I hit up the #35 as always, but transferred downtown to the MAX to PGE Park.  From there...

Take the MAX shopping. Enjoy views like this while shopping. ...and go home in relaxation. ...sometimes I forget how simple it is to just relax, enjoy, and be in Portland.  It's really like no other city in the US - by a long shot!...

The mumbo jumbo of use case, requirements gathering, and all that are a necessary evil of software design.  We developers cannot unfortunately just haphazardly build our UIs and other such things.  It is necessary that in some way the user interface...