Infinite Randomness

Golden Tee - Stats

dan@infrandom.com — Thu, 21 May 2009 19:51:33 GMT

Overview of my GT player stats.

I finally found it!!

dan@infrandom.com — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 03:15:39 GMT

My biggest disapointment in moving to Texas was finding out there was no Trader Joe's here. So having lived here 2 months and one day, I finally found the Whole Foods. I know that seems like a stupid thing. But I never did bother to look it up on the internet, I just went with a friend telling me "Westheimer and Kirby." Well many times I drove down Westheimer looking for it around Kriby, and yet I never was able to find it. I guess if it had been "Kirby near Westheimer" I might actually have driven down Kirby. So, perhaps there is some hope. Granted all of these stores (like BlockBuster) are no where remotly convient to downtown on my way home from work. Such is life...

Travels...

dan@infrandom.com — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 03:01:32 GMT

So there hasn't been a lot posted here lately. I attribute that to two things. 1. I was about to buy a digital camera because I like the concept of posting a picture with each of my blogs and that was keeping me from writing some entries. Well I finally accomplished that during one of my recent trips. This leads into the second reason, I've been traveling. Almost non-stop. For about 3 weeks I lived out of my suitcase from one city to another, only every being in my apartment in Houston for a night, enough time to do laundry and repack my bag.

It started with a trip to Bakersfield. I got to visit a well site and it was impressive to see how much work and planning goes into pulling that oil out of the ground.

From there I was able to spend some time back in the bay area before heading out the New Orleans for a training class. New Orleans. I spent a couple nights walking around the French Quarter and its a lot of the same thing. Bar, bar, T shirt shop, strip club, strip club, bar, bar and another bar. You pretty much repeat this pattern and toss in some resturants and there you have it. Its actually the one place I've found that's more humid than Houston as well. There was some interesting sites, but since I wasn't there for a party there was ony so much to do.

From New Orleans my next destination was on to Minneapolis, Minnesota. This was originally planned as a weekend trip to visit my home boy Eddie. It turns out there was a technical class being help there the week after so I got to spend a week and a half there. It was Eddie's 30th birthday so it was a good week to be there, more on this later...

The Resurrection of the blog.

dan@infrandom.com — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 04:11:13 GMT

So as I looked over my website this last weekend, I noticed two things. One Marwah's birthday just passed again and I have yet to find out what happened to her. The second thing was the realization that it had now been a year since my last blog entry. A lot has happened over the last 12 months and I really didn't capture too much of it.

So I hereby am reinstating the use of this blog. Since moving to TX I've had a few interesting stories to tell and I'll be posting them up soon. The first priority was an update to this website to make this blog more useable. One of the benefits of having laid dormate was that the DotNetNuke open source projects had progressed and this framework is much closer to that which I was looking for.

This is the place to check to see what it is that I've been up to... Stay tuned.

Happy Birthday Marwah...

dan@infrandom.com — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 16:00:00 GMT

Well last year, my emails all bounced back, my phone calls went to disconnected numbers. I'm not sure where you have gone to, but with no other way to contact you I'd figure I'd post the message here. Perhaps the internet will find its way to you...

I hope everything is going well, perhaps your trying to work a little less (doubtful). Wherever you might be I hope you have a wonderful and happy birthday!

Some more ride videos

dan@infrandom.com — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 07:00:00 GMT

In remembance of my bike...

And then there was one...

dan@infrandom.com — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 07:00:00 GMT

The sad day has finally come. Tonight I had to say good bye to a dear friend. My beloved and trustworthy friend and traveling companion. She was my second bike and for 4 years we travel near and far. Though ever climate from the desert to the snow, from scenica pacific ocean to the highest peaks of the Sierras.

Riding changed my life, in a time where I was "lost" I was able to find myself. All I needed was my bike and the open road. Many a miles were logged on solo journies to distance roads. But also a great many friends were made and many more miles were traveled in the company of friends. Those adventures were journies of epic porportion that will be remembered always. Good times.

The time has come to put my helmet away, to focus on matters financial to make right the descisions of my past. For this reason I sold my dear friend. It might very well be a couple years before I find another companion. But never will the memories of my F4i be replaced. Honors on the walls of my living room, I will always be reminded that on our travels through life. It's not only the destination we should focus on, but equally the roads that get us there should be cherrished. That we make the most of each day and take the time to open our eyes and view the beauties in the world around us. The most scenic places in our state arn't marked by a blue "Vista Point" sign, but rather on the roads less traveled. I have travelled those roads and in the words of Robert Frost, that has made all the difference.

TechEd 2006 Boston Recap

tech@infrandom.com — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 07:00:00 GMT

Statistic for my TechEd 2006 Trip

TechEd 2006 Boston: The Final Day

tech@infrandom.com — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 07:00:00 GMT

ClickOnce: Beyond The Basics

I went to this session to finally find out more information about ClickOnce, I had kept hearing about it at previous TechEds but never used it. A few weeks back I wanted to use it for a project but oddly enough didn’t find out very much information on it. I thought it was supposed to be integrated with Visual Studio. As it turns out it’s the “Publish” method in Visual Studio.

ClickOnce allows .NET applications to be deployed via a web browser. Application will be installed into the user’s local app directory (Document Settings\Local Settings) and once installed into a folder that is created, can’t access any files outside of its sandboxed directory.

Security access is controlled but the .NET Code Access Security. This is the security model that defines certain permissions based on the browsers internet zone. However, most useful application need to be given Full Trust to access resources.

Some of the requirements include needing to sign the assemblies (we already have a certificate for this), if group policy is set to allow full trust to application with our certificate we can pretty much avoid any tricky application security issues. Deploying applications via ClickOnce also builds in an ability to provide “web based update” capabilities. Checking for updates is supported in a variety of ways, and when one if found you can force the user to download it before they run the application. Another benefit is the application is cached/installed on a per user basis. So you can install it for one user on the machine.

Putting It Together: Moving Beyond the Basics of SQL Server 2005 Integration Services

This was probably one of the most beneficial sessions I attended while at TechEd, fitting that it’s my last session of TechEd. After leaving this session I think it would be a good idea to set aside a bit of time so that I can re-write the SSIS employee import from scratch. This will be especially important as we look to accommodating changes for the HRIS project. While I knew that package modularization would be good, I hadn’t quite seen how that would fit into our import. This session cleared that picture up and I can now see a much better implementation that would address the issues of the old DTS as well as the new ones we’ve uncovered with the first version. Being the first SSIS package, I knew that it would not be written optimally. I think HRIS would be a good opportunity to refactor and redesign the import, this would also be the same type of design we would use for the W50 import.

For anyone planning on doing SSIS, after you’ve started writing packages and understand SSIS programming this would be a good session to watch on the DVD. I would not however recommend watching it until AFTER you have already become familiar as this was pretty advanced SSIS information and would be way more confusing than beneficial. Experiencing the “quirks” of how the new Data Flow works is necessary for understanding the benefits of the design guidelines that were presented. This is where you need to throw out the old DTS mentality and adopt the SSIS data process.

Conclusion:

With that my TechEd blog series comes to an end. Overall this conference had some pluses and minus. Seems organization was down this year, planning didn’t seem as good. The food was defiantly a minus this year, lunch was editable at best most of the time a real disappointment from previous years. Traffic is Boston seems to be really bad at time, but by mid week drivers seemed to have figure it out, or they replaced the old ones, not really sure. They had some very “interesting” tactics that I can’t say I know for sure were quicker, they defiantly weren’t the shortest route, but I don’t remember sitting in mindless traffic either.

One of the pluses that really surprised me was the concert at Fenway. While the lines for food were very long, and there was way too much Budweiser and I never found the Coors I heard spoke of, the Train performance was off the hook. Fenway Franks were excellent as well, I guess this night there was no need for anything fancy. Most of the sessions were good although it seemed much lighter on the development offerings. I found myself going to more SharePoint sessions that I had planned for which made me miss out on some other stuff. SharePoint has come back for 2007 with a really strong product addressing MANY of the pain points of the version 2 product. I think it’s a serious option to consider for projects moving forward and I look forward to playing with the beta version.

TechEd 2006 Boston: Day 5

tech@infrandom.com — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 07:00:00 GMT

The penultimate day...

In case anyone has been wondering where all this stuff takes place...

Architecture Decisions: DataSets or Objects

“Objects rule, DataSets drool.”

-- Rockfor Lhotka, Magenic Technolgoies

This was a very interesting discussion on a subject that I’ve been dealing with on a regular basis now. As I’m starting to develop more and more projects using .NET 2.0 I’ve been starting to use strongly types DataSets. It turns out I’ve actually been using Data Transfer Objects or DTOs. But that’s not important to anyone reading this really.

So the session was presented by a strong adovactor of object oriented programming. DataSets are a structure created by Microsoft, and by using them your tieing yourself to what MS will and will not let you do. Which for some companies this might be acceptable. In our case it’s possible we can accept these limitations in turn we would gain faster development and less code writing.

His recommendation however is to use Business Objects. To create a data layer (not necessarily a data tier). He advocated removing ALL business logic form the UI and presentation layers. Business logic would include ALL calculations, manipulations, validation and authorization. By remove he’s not saying you can’t do validation on the client or for UI objects. But those pieces of code should exist in a DLL library. MS has changed their data object on avg every 2.7 years so by using a BO data layer you keep a consistent architecture that is not tied to a passing MS phase. There hasn’t been any major OOP changes for close to 12 years (when interfaces were formally introduced). The biggest plus for using BO is that implementing the IBindingList interface and the INofityProperyChanges interface would mean that your BO layer would already be compatible with the Windows Presentation Framework. Your BOs would bind to XAML based application without any (or little) modification. The downside is the ammout of code to implement a true OOP BO layer is much more significant. However it is a time tests approach with a clear upgrade path to .NET 3.0.

Visual Studio: Developing Local and Mobile Data Solutions with Visual Studio 2005

This was a very interesting session, its downside was being a level 200 it was more a talk and not so much of a how to. Mobile application are evolving and what starts off and a simple program for a single user soon becomes a multi-user distributed application. Once this happens more thought has to go into how the forms are crated to allow data to be accessed by multiple users.

Previously SQL Mobile filled this role but it was limited by liecencing restructions. SQL Express is more functional that most device application would need. The total foot print of the SQL Everywhere platform is less than 1.4MB. That’s right, it fits onto a floppy disk. The thought was to hand it out at TechEd on a floppy only they realized it would take most people more time to get data off a floppy (especially since most of us don’t have them anymore) than to just download it off the web.

SQL Everywhere gives only the functionally a standalone application needs. It runs in process so services don’t need to be installed onto the target machine. As such, there is also no support for stored process or other heavy database features since there is no advantage with the data store running in process with the application. This is the future of mobile device development database needs.

After this session I wanted to resolve an issued I’d always come across when it came to previous SQL Mobile attempts to create a simple smart device application. I ran through two of the Hands on labs for SQL Mobile (sadly there was no updates specific to SQL Everywhere and I would be unable to attend the syncing session for SQL Everywhere to SQL Server (have to catch my flight). I was able to resolve that my issue can now be solves with setting up a Publication for mobile devices. And I’m pretty sure Meena should be able to set that up now that she’s attended the Replication session.