I recently renounced my role as Database Administrator and accepted a new job as Chief Web Developer. I am really excited about the opportunity because I get to write ASP.NET MVC apps on a full time basis. Not too many people get to do what they love for a living so I consider myself fortunate. As a result of switching careers and companies, I had to turn in my Blackberry Bold. Since the new job does not require after hours support I finally had the opportunity to buy the phone that I wanted instead of the phone that the company provided for me. Since I was in the market for a new phone, I spent a fair amount of time researching the various plans and phones that were available. Initially I was thinking about picking up an iPhone but I discovered a few key factors which pushed me towards getting a Android instead: 1. If you want to develop apps for the iPhone you need a Mac OS. In my humble opinion this is bullshit. 2. The iPhone's operating system is completely closed. It is being ... [More]

Update 5/25/2010 - 4 weeks and counting and still no plug computer. Several emails to GlobalScale Technologies and still no response. Think twice before ordering your plug computer from GlobalScale. Perhaps try New IT instead. I have been doing a lot of work with Linux lately. For those of you who read my blog then you know that this is new territory for me. Most of my career has been spent on the Windows platform. Of course, over the years I have tried various Linux distributions just out of curiosity. However, a recent project at work will now require to support an application that runs entirely on Linux. In order to feel comfortable supporting a production Linux environment I want to make sure that my skills are sharp and up-to-date.  Most of my experience with Linux has been with a small fileserver that I have at home. About five years ago I bought a NSLU2 NAS device from Linksys. The NSLU2 was a small device that had two USB ports where you could attach external storage a... [More]

On twitter when you repeat someone's tweet they call it a re-tweet. When blogging I guess you would call it a re-blog? Anyway, I was reading my favorite blog this morning, Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen and I was ecstatic to see that they are upgrading the firmware on the Kindle 2. The new firmware will allow you to manually rotate the Kindle 2 screen, (previously a DX-only feature) as well as provide users with native PDF support. The Native PDF support is a huge feature for me. I tend to read a lot of tech books but I did not want to fork out the $500 dollars for a DX. For example, I always have the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 book handy because it is a great reference guide. Initially, I went through the trouble of converting it to Kindle format and quickly discovered that is was completely unreadable on the Kindle. Here is an example... Converted PDF on firmware 2.0.3 Same PDF viewed with the Native PDF Viewer   As if the native PDF support wasn't enough, they also ... [More]

For quite some time, I pondered getting a netbook. The small form factor and the immense battery life were very tempting to me. Not to mention that they are very affordable which would give me instant approval from the wife :-). The only thing that discouraged me was the small screen. As most developers know, screen real estate makes a big difference when it comes to development. 1024 x 768 is about as small as you want to go. When I saw some screenshots of an Eee PC running Visual Studio I quickly realized that it was not for me. After reading many reviews, I decided that I needed at least a 15" display. I also decided that a widescreen display would be preferred. I also immediately eliminated any laptop that did not have at least a 7,200 RPM hard drive. On almost any system you buy these days the disk will be the bottleneck. Lets face it, memory is cheap and processors have shifted to the multi-core architecture. The only thing that really has stayed the same is the traditional hard... [More]

I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to test drive NDepend (thanks to Patrick Smacchia). NDepend is a source code management tool that among other things, allows you to write ad-hoc queries against your code base. The queries allow you to easily find answers to almost any question you can possibly dream up about your code.   The product implements a SQL-Like language called CQL (Code Query Language) to query your source code. If you are familiar with T-SQL then the learning curve for using CQL is practically zero. Instead of boring you with the technical details, lets get to some examples. Naming Conventions - How many of my static fields violate company naming standards? SELECT FIELDS WHERE !NameLike '_%' AND IsStatic The query above checks for all fields where the name does not start with an underscore. Documentation - Which complex methods need more comments? (In my case, this was especially useful for checking up on the source code developed by our contract... [More]