Tag: Technology Page 9 of 11

Head First Design Patterns

On July 8, 2005

Has anyone bought and read Head First Design Patterns (or as Gerry calls it, “The Hot Blonde Patterns Book”)? I’ve been slacking off on learning more about patterns, and have recently rekindled my interest. I have Refactoring to Patterns at home, and have started to read that one, but a few people have mentioned this one to me as well.

The problem is, though, that I have focus problems when … Ooh! Look at that bird! Oh, sorry. I have a hard time reading. I understand it just fine, but I often lose interest quickly (unless I’m getting paid for it). This book (image borrowed from Amazon), though, looks like it might actually be able to hold my interest. I read a sample chapter (linked from this page) — the whole chapter — so there might be hope.

I just need someone to verify this and to vouch for its content. Aside from being easy to read, is there enough information in the book to make it worth while? Any takers? Thanks.

Update: I should have mentioned that I have the GoF book, but for me it seems more like a reference than a tutorial.

I Am A Tech Reviewer

By Scott

On July 7, 2005

In Uncategorized

Well, it looks like I am officially a tech reviewer now. About a month ago, I mentioned that I had met a Sr. Editor from O’Reilly while in Orlando. Well, last week he e-mailed me to ask if I was interested in reviewing a new VB book that they’re putting together.

Of course, I said yes, so he sent me the book (actually, just a few chapters of it so far), and I read it. I finished reading it a few days ago, but wanted to review one chapter again, so I just sent it back to him today with my notes.

To top it off, apparently, I actually get paid for this stuff. I might have been willing to do it for free until he mentioned that. 🙂

Surprisingly, this whole process seems to be pretty informal. I got a bunch of Word docs (one for each chapter, appendix, etc.), and an 8 question survey. That was pretty much all I got. I made my notes using Word’s revision functionality and just sent back the updated files.

Hopefully I’ll get to see the rest of this book before it’s published. There are a couple chapters that sound interesting.

Upgraded to Community Server 1.1

By Scott

On July 2, 2005

In Uncategorized

So I just updgraded to the newest version of Community Server, which is 1.1. It was a pretty straightforward upgrade. That is, once I figured out the the first time I “upgraded” it today I was actually upgrading it to the same version that it already was. I had the new and old ZIP files side by side and extracted the wrong one.

That didn’t break anything, but I couldn’t figure out why nothing was different.

Anyway, I finally noticed the issue and extracted the correct ZIP. The site was down for a few minutes between the DB upgrade and the corresponding code upgrade, but I doubt anyone even noticed. 🙂

Anyway, everything should look pretty much the same. The upgrades seemed to affect the administration more than the public blog functionality. That said, if anything looks weird or doesn’t work right, please let me know. Thanks.

🙂

That’s My Name — Don’t Wear It Out

By Scott

On June 30, 2005

In Uncategorized

So Gerry posted about Sean’s posts about commercials, etc. Lot’s of interesting stuff there — you should read it (after you’re done reading my post, of course).

For me, the real interesting part was near the end where he’s talking about Cropper, which is a simple tool to help you take screen shots. (A very cool, simple tool I might add.) Gerry’s last line was:

The name at the top of the Cropper site is Brian Scott… Is this funny to anyone else in the industry???

As it turns out, the author of Cropper responded to a question of Gerry’s, and was also wondering what was so funny about his name. Gerry meant no offense to Brian Scott. That comment directed at me. For those that don’t know, my real name is Bryan Scott Isaacs.

I spoke with Gerry for about 5 minutes this morning and he mentioned this and we started thinking of all of the people in the industry that we either knew or knew of that were named Bryan/Brian, Scott or Isaacs. Gerry challenged me to come up with a list of all that I could think of, so here goes, with their number of Bryan/Brian Scott Isaacs (BSI) points.

Name	About	BSI points
Brian Scott	Cropper developer.	2
Brian Tinkler	Our fearless leader at the WI .NET Users Group.	1
Scott Hanselman	Funny-man. Geek. .NET Architect. Famous for his “Ultimate Developer and Power Tools” list.	1
Scott Guthrie	His nickname is ScottGu, but should be ScottGuru. He is in charge of ASP.NET and IIS7 at Microsoft.	1
Brian Nantz	Local (MKE) Indigo and .NET expert. Working on an Indigo book with *Scott* Seely, so 0.5 bonus points for that.	1.5
Scott Seely	Microsoft’s Indigo Team. Working on an Indigo book with *Brian* Nantz, so 0.5 bonus points for that.	1.5
Cory Isakson	.NET blogger. Although his name is close, it isn’t an exact match, so he only gets 0.75 points. 🙂 Hey, they’re my points. I can do whatever I want with them!	0.75
Scott Mitchell	4 Guys from Rolla founder/editor, author, blogger.	1
Scott Galloway	UK .NET blogger.	1
Scott Watermasysk	AKA, Scott Water. Creator of .Text blogging system. Now works for Telligent, working on Community Server (the software I use for my blog).	1
Scott McCulloch	DotNetNuke Core Team and module developer.	1
“The Other” Scott Isaacs	An author that works for MSN. I’ve posted about him before. I don’t know him personally, but we’ve traded e-mails and he mentioned me in his blog once.	2
Bryan Scott Isaacs	Yours truly…	3

I know there are undoubtedly hundreds, or even thousands, more geeks named Bryan, Scott or Isaacs (or some variation/combination). We have at least 6 or 8 Scotts in our WI .NET Users Group alone. If I’ve missed you, don’t take it personally. It’s not like I’m the “Keeper of the Scotts” or anything. I just thought it’d be interesting to list as many as I could come up with in a few minutes.

MSN’s Scott Isaacs and the Secret TechEd

By Scott

On June 7, 2005

In Uncategorized

Wow. So a lot of stuff has happened since last night.

For starters, when I was checking my blogs this morning, I saw that Scott Isaacs from Microsoft (a different Scott Isaacs) has mentioned me in his blog. I’m honored. (I wonder what the odds of him being at Tech·Ed are?) Apparently he does some of the same geeky things that I do: Googling yourself. I would say “MSNing yourself” but it doesn’t have the same ring to it. It’s funny that, while he outranks me in the Google results, I rank higher than him in the MSN results — and he works for MSN! 🙂

Anyway, thanks, Scott. I appreciate the link!

So, back to Tech·Ed…

I was told that Gerry and I needed to find the “developer party” and make sure we went to it. Ummm, OK. We had a couple leads of who to ask, but no one seemed to know what we were talking about. I ran into Jason Beres yesterday and was asking him about it and other things. He didn’t have any idea either (so he said). So, we had pretty much given up on that.

Later in the day, someone mentioned to us that there was some midwest region “something or other” happening that night and we should go. We just needed to find the organizer to let him know. Well, we couldn’t really find him either. As it turns out, though, we happened to bump into him right before the bus left to take the group over there, and he told us to come along.

We ended up going to some Nascar thing at Universal City Walk. They had a buffet, drinks and all of the arcade games were open and unlimited. It was pretty sweet.

So anyway, as we’re in the bus on the way over there, I happened to notice that Rob Howard was on the bus. So was James Avery. As it turns out the event was actually a Central region event, not just the Midwest.

I thought that was pretty cool. When we got to the Nascar place, we grabbed some food and ended up sitting at the same table as Rob Howard. I know he’s just a person, but I thought it was nice to be able to hang out with him and the others. I didn’t know until last night that Rob drives a Porsche and it costs him a few hundred bucks everytime he wants to change the oil. Poor guy.

Well, after the food I started walking around and meeting some of the other people and I started to notice some of the other people that were there. I saw Betsy Akoi, Angela Baxley (who works with Scott Guthrie at MS), Doug Seven (of dotnetjunkies), Jeff Julian, and others. By this time I was realizing that this wasn’t just a midwest, or even a central region party. This was a little bigger than that.

I also saw Jason Beres there.

Actually he saw me first. He came up to me and, with a big smile on his face, said, “I see you made it.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t realize I was making it until I got here.”

Then he smiled again and said, “Oh, yeah, you made it.”

I wasn’t sure to be pissed that he didn’t just tell me when I asked him earlier, or if I should feel honored that I ended up there in the first place.

I decided to go with the honored feeling.

So after lots of food, soda, water, video games, talking with Betsy Akoi about GDN Workspaces, talking with Angela Baxley about Visual Web Developer and about the low number of females in technology, Rob Howard about his Porsche and the time the fire alarms went off at his apartment (he ran out of the building with a computers under each arm — a true geek), and a host of other user group leaders, we finally caught the last bus back. We ended up getting to bed about 1 or 1:30.

But it was definitely worth it.

Women In Technology

By Scott

On June 6, 2005

In Uncategorized

Down here at Tech·Ed this year they are having a Women In Technology lunch one day. I think the reason that they are doing this is because they want to celebrate and encourage the number of women in our field. To be honest, there are hardly any in comparison to the number of men — at least from what I’ve seen over the last few years.

Well, today I had an epiphany and realized exactly why the numbers are so skewed.

I was sitting in a classroom waiting for a session to start. I was in the same row as a young woman. While the place was beginning to fill up, there were open seats all around. In our row, everyone pretty much was following the “leave a seat between each of us” rule that is common for large gatherings of people that don’t know each other. Well, an older man, probably 60-ish, came and sat down in the chair right next to this woman. Then he proceeded to talk to her for the next ten minutes until the session started.

Now, I should make a few points here. I am 100% in favor of being friendly, and trying to meet new people. However, when it is obvious that the person you are talking to is just giving you the shortest possible answers to each of your questions, then it’s time to stop.

Anyway, it’s my opinion that experiences like this can only hinder the advancement of women in tech. The fewer women there are, the more likely each is to be the “target” of some extra-friendly (creepy) guy.

Just a thought…

My iPod

By Scott

On June 3, 2005

In Uncategorized

I love my iPod. It’s an amazing thing. What I don’t love is having to run the system restore on my iPod every 5 weeks or so. I don’t understand why it happens or if I’m even doing anything to cause it, but periodically when I go to sync it, I get a message that some file is corrupt. (I’m sure a Google search would clear things up, but that’s too easy.)

So I try to run the latest iPod Update from Apple. There are two problems with this, though:

You can’t run the update if the iPod already has that version of software (what if I just want to fix something???).
Because of that, I have to completely erase the iPod by restoring it to factory settings, plug it into a wall outlet to “reset” itself, then copy my 2000+/- songs back to it.

What a pain!

I suppose it could be worse — I could carry 160+ cassette tapes around with me.

VMWare, Virtual PC and TechEd

By Scott

On June 3, 2005

In Uncategorized

So, I wanted to install VS 2005 Beta 2 so that I can play with it before (and at) Tech·Ed. Well rather than install it rught my laptop (in case of any potential conflict or crash or whatever) I decided to install it in a virtual machine. On my work laptop I installed VMWare Workstation and on my own laptop I installed Microsoft Virtual PC.

Both were incredibly slow. I mean painful. Granted each machine has only 512MB of RAM, but I can’t believe how slow it was. S. L. O. W.

Fortunately (in a sick sense), I had a problem with my work laptop and it will need to be re-imaged. So I removed VMWare and installed Beta 2 right on the base OS.

I got it all (VS, SQL, MSDN, Visio, VSS, etc.) installed just before I left the office today. I’m hoping to get in a couple hours of “play time” before the sessions start. If anyone else is using Beta 2 already, I’d appreciate any tips or warnings you might have.

Also, if you’re going to Tech·Ed, let me know. I’m staying at Westgate Lakes Resort & Spa.

IIS Util for XP Pro

By Scott

On May 25, 2005

In Uncategorized

Sometimes when developing web applications it is useful to have them live at the root of the web space instead of a virtual directory (which is the default for Visual Studio). This is not always the case these days, but when I was still doing a lot of classic ASP development, I would often need this. Since XP Pro only allows one web site (as opposed to Windows 2000/2003 Server, which allows multiples), I spent a lot of time loading IIS, going to the properties page, and changing the “Home Directory” for the web site.

Maybe it’s because my computer was crappy, or maybe there was too much other stuff in memory, or maybe it’s always this way, but IIS was slow to load, plus that seemed like a lot of clicks for something so simple. So, a long time ago I wrote a simple utility in VB6 (to help me deal with this. Then as I was learning .NET, I re-wrote it as a WinForms app (including the designer generated code, it’s all of 157 lines of VB.NET). In a nutshell, it lets you choose a new folder to be the webroot on your local machine. Additionally, it keeps a history of directories used (in a text file) so that you can easily switch back to another in the future.

For me, the main benefits were that it loads much quicker than the IIS console, and that there are not as many clicks needed, especially if you’re just switching back to a previously used web root. But it’s far from perfect, so here are a couple ideas for possible future improvement (if I ever work on it again):

Also copy virtual driectory and IIS application settings when changing web roots. Currently, only the web root itself is changed with this utility. All virtual directories are left unchanged. This may be good, or it may be bad, but there should be an option.
Build a more complete console, similar to IIS, based on something like Cassini. This could allow multiple web applications to be running at the same time, each at the root of their own web site. Of course, this will take away the simplicity that currently exists, so I don’t know how much I like this idea.
Possibly some integration with the HOSTS file. I’m not sure what I would want here, but it might make sense.

So anyway, take it for what it’s worth. Use it if you want. As always, use it at your own risk. Here is the ZIP download. Aside from this post, there are no docs of any kind — you’re on your own. If anyone is interested in source, I can supply that as well, or you can just use Reflector. It’s pretty basic, but if you want to make any improvements (my ideas or your own), I’d like to see the result.

I rarely use this anymore, but it came to mind again recently, so I thought I’d post it in case it might be of use to someone else.

Congratulations Dan Bartels

By Scott

On May 20, 2005

In Uncategorized

So I found out yesterday that someone I know is going to work for Telligent Systems, the company that makes Community Server, which is teh software that I use for this blog.

Congratulations to Dan Bartels, a fellow Milwaukee-area developer, on this new position.

Now that I know someone on the CS team, I’ll have to start sending in lots of feature suggestions and bugs…