Channel 9 - Discussions by gmiley

Coffeehouse - need some help here

gmiley — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 15:51:06 GMT

You could always disable javascript.

Coffeehouse - Microsoft stub out cigarettes ?

gmiley — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 12:48:10 GMT

Personally I don't mind people smoking. My take on the situation is that hell, there are already enough pollutants in EVERYTHING else, wtf is a little tobacco smoke gonna due.

Among pesticides, fertilizers, steroids (in cattle), genetic engeneering in other livestock and produce, vehicle exhaust, solar radiation rising, stupid people breeding, drunk people driving, crackheads robbing, thug boys thugging, and hundreds of other things - I think I can handle a person relaxing with a cigarette in their mouth.

And the argument placed earlier about people legally loading themselves with a poison that is served at most any diner or pub and walking right to their car and speeding off to run some kid over is very relevant. I would rather see 100 people smoking cigarettes, hell even 100 people smoking a joint in one hand and a cigarette in the other and driving with their feet over seeing a drunk driver.

I think we are just breeding a world of whiners these days. Raised on T.V. and Ritalin.

And yes I currently smoke a cigarette or two. I started back up not too long ago after 3 years of not smoking. I will say that never durring those 3 years, or any other time I had quit, did I ever feel the need to tell someone their 'smoke was bothering me'. You don't like it? Then YOU move somewhere else. They have just as much of a right to be at that spot as you do. Hell, you could even ask politely if they would mind moving down a little more. But I will tell you now, if I had some random schmuck come cough on me because they were pissy about smoke, I'de jam the cigarette up their nose and tell em to enjoy as they smack at their face trying to get it out.

Coffeehouse - need some help here

gmiley — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 12:27:50 GMT

Well as far as the pop-ups go, you might want to contact a developer of one of those pop-up blocker programs and ask if you can offer it out to your customers.

For the spam, well it all depends upon your MX server. You'll want to install rules that look for and filter out messages based on regular expressions and/or other methods. You can write your own, but that would be re-inventing the wheel just do some looking around with google or somthing.

Coffeehouse - I am fragile

gmiley — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 19:09:34 GMT

I felt the same way when my neighbor got the Black Voltron Lion before I did. =/

I totally understand where you're coming from and I feel for you. Just remember to get back up on that horse buck-o and you too will one day get your Black Voltron Lion.

Coffeehouse - Teaching students about the "real world"

gmiley — Fri, 28 May 2004 12:40:54 GMT

department-specific messageboards on the company intranet is usually a good start. it allows everyone in the department to draw a line through someone elses project progression. Good project management software, you would need to research which would be best for your company. Intranet based Instant Messaging software is also very nice to have, though I would not reccommend using it for asking questions you want to be documented, use email for that and auto-archive your messages frequently. Not much worse than getting ok'ed on something without having it in writing then being questioned on it later...

Some companies like to use video-conferencing, though, I dunno - I've never been too fond of it, if I HAVE to talk to a bunch of people and cannot do it face to face, I would rather just use the phone instead of having people look at me eating a sammich. =p

Coffeehouse - Guess what this thread is all about

gmiley — Thu, 27 May 2004 02:55:20 GMT

Speaking of comparisons, I scanned an article today about problems with VB.Net diverging from the .Net framework to, supposedly, accomodate old VB programmers. It has to do with Stacks and Heaps. I forget what it was, I have the article at work, ill put more info up on here about it tomorrow.

Tech Off - Tough SQL Server XML Challenge

gmiley — Wed, 26 May 2004 11:36:36 GMT

It could get kinda chunky depending upon the filesize, but you could store the data as a string and

string.split("")

Or string.replace("" & vbCrLf, "")

That is, if you know it is coming from a windows machine. Otherwise, you would need to find out how they do their CRs or just ommit the & vbCrLf since when you read in the xml it doesnt care about white space.

Coffeehouse - Why people build things for free

gmiley — Fri, 21 May 2004 20:21:19 GMT

Very good post Holl, and I agree with you 100% on the reasons you have set forth.

Coffeehouse - Help needed - Visual Basic .NET

gmiley — Fri, 21 May 2004 20:08:18 GMT

I guess I should mention that it isn't good policy to do the above in-line like that, instead get the IndexOf value and check for <> -1 then remove.

Coffeehouse - Help needed - Visual Basic .NET

gmiley — Fri, 21 May 2004 20:05:03 GMT

Even simpler still:

I like using the .IndexOf() method.

Dim myItem As New ListViewItem("matchstring")

ListView1.Items.RemoveAt(ListView1.Items.IndexOf(myItem))

Coffeehouse - What is a Program Manager?

gmiley — Wed, 19 May 2004 14:03:08 GMT

Basically Program Managers coordinate and organize team(s) of other programmers. The PM might not be quite as technical as the programmers but usually has a business degree and a cs degree. They normally set up meetings and make final decisions regarding product development.

They are also the ones the other programmers go to when a major decision needs to be made or there is a conflict of what the client is telling them with what is on the spec sheet. Just as the title implies they are the managers of the project/programming team.

Coffeehouse - Route Planners

gmiley — Tue, 18 May 2004 17:22:04 GMT

I believe in the case of MapQuest, they used old fashioned elbow-greese and drove the routes themselves. They might have sold out their database to other mapping software companies.

Can anyone confirm this?

Coffeehouse - possible idea..

gmiley — Tue, 18 May 2004 15:43:26 GMT

Back on track, I have created a Wiki section here on C9 for these ideas. I have called it OpenProjects. This name is not meant to signify "Open Source" it is just meant to signify that these projects are open to the community for participation.

http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.OpenProjects

Hope you guys enjoy it.

Tech Off - Error Handling, use exceptions?

gmiley — Tue, 18 May 2004 14:31:04 GMT

I guess I should elaborate further on my post.
When you use the method I described above, all the error handling is done within the functions/subroutines in functions you can simply return Nothing or -1, or False, whathaveyou as long as you can decipher that in code at the return point and make adjustments in case it fails.

Basically everything, as I said, is handled at the point of exception and the process returns whatever it needs to based on they type of exception and the action you chose for it at design time (or, presumably possible at runtime). Once that error is handled you just need to make sure your program knows that the function did not perform correctly.

Tech Off - Error Handling, use exceptions?

gmiley — Tue, 18 May 2004 14:14:52 GMT

What I usually do is write a generic HandleErr() function or procedure. I pass to it:

ex As Exception,
ErrAction As myProject.customActions (As Integer)

The ErrAction is just basically 0-n for different actions I plan on taking, this just makes it easier to read, no other reason.

Similar to:
Ignore = 0
SilentWriteLog = 1
NotifyUser = 2
NotifyUserWriteLog = 3

More can be added as you see fit such as:

EmailSupport = 4
EmailSupportNotifyUser = 5
EmailSupportSilentWriteLog = 6
EmailSupportNotifyUserWriteLog = 7

Aboviously you could come up with better names, but these work.

Then in the HandleErr I will pass the Exception and the ErrAction and have more than likely a case statement to handle the different actions.

Most general errors I write out to a log file, if I need to notify the user that there was a problem I will use option 3 (NotifyUserWriteLog) and display a friend error message, while write the technical mumbo-jumbo to the logfile. If I need to do support for that user, and cannot deduce right away from their error report, I just request that they email me the appname.err file in their program directory. I look it over and figure out whats going on.

Also, what I sometimes do as well is, if the appname.err file doesnt exist yet, on creation I have the application write out environment information as a .err file header so I know what im working with if an error does show up.

Coffeehouse - possible idea..

gmiley — Tue, 18 May 2004 13:57:42 GMT

_{Prodev, youre not spoiling the stew, this is all point-counterpoint discussion. My idea, and I think a few others share it, is that these projects are right off the bat, before anything else, community projects. That, in and of itself, would cause problems
with money and ownership rights before (or worse, after) something has been started.

Just as you would rather not participate, at least from what I gathered, in a non-profit project, I would definately not participate in a for-profit community project as I have never seen a good outcome in that scenario.

I've done it before and have learned my lesson. I still think, regardless of this being a MS site, that the GLP (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html) /}_{LGPL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lgpl.html) is
the only fair way to go with something like this. It puts everyone on a level playing field as far as ownership and rights.

The thing about the LGPL is that it would allow someone to incorporate the projects we come up with into profitable software, while the GPL prevents that. Either way, the source will remain open to the public ot be viewed, modified, incorporated at will.}

Coffeehouse - possible idea..

gmiley — Tue, 18 May 2004 13:30:02 GMT

I like the chat idea, I know it had been mentioned before as something C9 needed. We should start making a project plan for it, i.e. starting off with the needs or parameters for it:

1) Web Based
2) Integrated Into C9
3) Runs over port 80 (avoid problems with firewalls)
4) Similar to 2, integrate user accounts for chat
5) RT list of users in chat
5) Remote chat buffer, i.e. stores the last 500 lines of chat text.

Maybe we should start a wiki section for "Open Projects" and create a "C9 Web-Chat" project?

If no one wants to do it, I'll jump in there and do it, just don't want to have 5 people in there doing the same thing. =)

Coffeehouse - possible idea..

gmiley — Mon, 17 May 2004 19:57:15 GMT

Another quick note. GPL doesnt mean companies cannot use the software, it just means they cannot sell it or incorporate it into a product they intend to sell.

By GPLing the projects of the contest it would ensure that anyone that wanted to use it could use it. Anyone that wanted to learn from its source would also be free to learn from it. If the end product is something extremely nice, by all means emulate it and make some cash by selling it, but I'de prefer to keep the originals in the public domain.

Coffeehouse - possible idea..

gmiley — Mon, 17 May 2004 19:53:39 GMT

I, personally, think there should be NO revenue produced from code we write. However, the LGPL does allow for people to use the software in their own projects and make money.

I just think that a community driven project/contest should not be about making money, it should be about learning and teaching as well as helping. Free/free products do that. If I am going to build an application for money making purposes I'd rather just write it myself then have a contest over it.

Instead, when writing a solution is the competition it should be an open sourced Free project. GPLing it ensures that it remains open and available for learning purposes. I really don't see why MS would have a problem with developers wanting to GPL THEIR project.

Coffeehouse - possible idea..

gmiley — Mon, 17 May 2004 17:23:47 GMT

Good idea jake, I like that. I also like the idea of competitions and "teams". I think that would be a lot of fun and a good learning experience.

To do this though, we would need a designated, unbiased team of professionals to judge who wins?

All restrictions must be known for each project: time limit, language, compiled project size/lines of code, etc...

A merger of the two ideas would be awsome. People submit ideas they can't afford to do, a contest is held to produce the application and the winners code is licensed under the GPL or LGPL, the LGPL is a little more flexable, but not sure how everyone would feel about it. Remember just because this is a MS site, it doesn't mean "no Free software". Besides I think a community project should be exactly that. If we, as a group, write an application, it should be free for all to use and learn from.

Coffeehouse - Why people build things for free

gmiley — Sat, 15 May 2004 16:26:56 GMT

surferdude wrote:

It has to be said:

So maybe we don't all have the $ backing like MS or even the ability to market our code to make a buck. But just maybe, just maybe we do something so different it changes everything.

So why is it every time I look at a 'new' Linux desktop it's a cheap copy of Windows 98?

ouch.

Do you mean Desktops and Window Managers, or actual applications?

The only similarity in desktops and window managers is that they both use a "windowing" environment. I'm sorry, but at this point that is pretty much the industry standard as well as being the most intuitive method to display data. There are 3D OS's/windowing environments being worked on which render the desktop into a 3 dimensional space for your applications and icons to exist in.

Now if you are referring to applications, don't think for one second that linux apps are just clones of windows apps. There are plenty of windows applications that were ported over from linux just as there is on linux from windows. That is going to happen regardless, since people see something they like or think would be good for their userbase so they emulate it in their applications.

Coffeehouse - Computer Science vs Math

gmiley — Fri, 14 May 2004 19:00:24 GMT

Do what I do, flip a coin. =)

Seriously, I am just now starting back at college and am contemplating, though have not decided, to go for CS with an English minor. What can I say, I am just fascinated with words and how they can have the power to take on so many different meanings and underlying meanings. But, as mentioned before, that is just me. You should honestly do what you feel would serve you best.

Coffeehouse - Longhorn Dream EULA

gmiley — Fri, 14 May 2004 18:55:27 GMT

Normally I wouldn't provide troll food but I'm in a posting mood. With that in mind, I would like to inform you that you are incorrect and all your base, are infact, belong to us.

Thank you, that is all.

Coffeehouse - Missed opportunity?

gmiley — Fri, 14 May 2004 18:49:10 GMT

lars wrote:

Have you noticed how it costs $900? Oh wait, it doesn't...

/Lars.

That brought a smile to my face. Thanks lars =)

Coffeehouse - Voice Print Login

gmiley — Fri, 14 May 2004 18:47:05 GMT

Take a look here: http://www.iosoftware.com/pages/Products/SecureSuite%20XS/index.asp

IIRC, this was a company MS either bought out or was looking at for their Biometric API. Either way they do have products specifically for Biometric security.

The problems with Biometrics is while it is a semi-secure, convenient way to manage account integrity, the "semi-" part of the semi-secure is what causes a problem. If somehow the network is comprimised the files could be swiped that contain the signatures for voice/fingerprint/etc, another security problem, I'm sure most of us have seen on movies, et al) is that voices can be recorded or digitally synthesized. It's just as insecure as a user typing weak passwords.

Combinations of Biometrics and strong passwords are your best bet if you wish to go that route.

Also combination of biometrics types, i.e. use both fingerprinting and voice pattern.

And a final alternative is to use Voiceprinting with password and the keychains that create new key pairs for authentication. Ill see if I can dig up a link on those. My friend implemented those for a large Gannette subsidary here in town.