JCooney.NET

»

»

I attended and spoke at CodeCamp Oz v3 over the week-end in Wagga Wagga (the city so nice they named it twice). This year was back at one of the large auditoriums at CSU. I enjoyed a number of the presentations including

• Glav & Damien’s ASP.NET AJAX talk (for those times I have to sully my hands with legacy presentation technology)
• Nick Randolph’s “taking it on the road” data synchronization talk for occasionally connected clients
• Corneliu and Andy Reay’s code injection attacks talk
• Dan Green’s “tips and tricks”
• Joel Pobar’s concurrency and parallelism
• Grant Holliday’s VSTS/TFS tools and extensibility talk

Part of CodeCamp which I really like is the “catching up with people that don’t know me well enough to hate me” aspect of things, and the interesting technical conversations that can ensue. As much as I like CodeCamp I wonder if a more “birds of a feather” style approach where a subject matter expert (say Glav/Damien for ASP.NET AJAX) leads a group discussion on a particular topic, and maybe shows some prepared stuff to get things started. Smaller sessions. Multiple tracks. less about “I’m an expert, listen to me for 50 minutes talk about this” and more “here’s some starting points, I have some demos of X, Y and Z. What would you like to know/discuss”?

I delivered a talk on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) which seemed to be well-received (even if some of the things I showed were passe for the VFP crowd). The slides are here [291 KB] and the demo project I showed in my talk (complete with Joel Pobar socialst star) is here [394 K].

Comments

CodeCamp OZ is this week-end and rather than practicing my presentation on WPF I thought I’d engage myself in something far more important - designing custom geek t-shirts. Here’s one I printed up to provide a nice visual metaphor comparing the user-experience of WPF applications with the user-experience of web (HTML, CSS, Javascript etc) applications. This shirt is pure flamebait. I’ll be lucky if “web” ninjas like Glav (who also happens to be a black belt in some dangerous martial art that crosses Karate with Judo and south-american break-dancing and has a scary sword collection) don’t beat the crap out of me. This may also be the first time flava flav has appeared on a geek t-shirt.
higher-res version

Comments

I’ve recently switched to using synergy to share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple machines. Previously I would log into my desktop machine (which had the biggest amount of screen real-estate) and then RDP into other machines as necessary. Now with synergy I can use a single keyboard and mouse. It was very easy to set up, and can be configured to auto-start when your computer launches or when you log in (altho I leave it on manual). I doubt very much that this is the only offering in this space, but since they keywords are so general it is hard to know what exactly is out there. Quite possibly there will be commercial applications out there with more features (please leave a comment if you know of any as I would be interested in doing a comparison), but synergy is free (GPL) and seems quite adequate. Bruce likes it too.

Comments

»

»

I received a sweet present from my wife at XMas - a Das Keyboard (2nd series). I’ve been using it on and off since then and thought I’d post my thoughts thus far:

Initial Experience - it is a NICE keyboard, with a fantastic action. I am a reasonable touch-typist and was able to use it fairly well from the get-go. Except for “special” characters I didn’t/don’t have any problems. The one problem I did have as I would occasionally look down at the keyboard for re-assurance and kind of freak out when there was nothing on the keys.

Office Usage - I mostly use it at work now. The noise is something I’m conscious of, since it is louder than a regular keyboard. Some co-workers get a bit weirded out by it. I leave a regular USB keyboard plugged in too in case a visitor wants to use that instead (and for other reasons - see below).

Glitches - based on current usage there seems to be two problems I’m having using the Das Keyboard. The first is when I try to do “ad-hoc“ typing when my hands have left the home position (such as one-handed typing with a mouse). It can be pretty hard to pick out sone keys in that situation. The other time I have issues is when filling in password text boxes. A combination of

•  password complexity rules
• frequent password change policies
• a desire on my part to have different passwords for every single system I have a login to
• fear, fear is the mind killer

means that typing passwords is…problematic. One failed attempt and doubt creeps in. Special characters seem especially problematic since they are relatively infrequently typed. Now I have a second regular keyboard close by to prevent embarassing “I can’t log in to the server because I can’t type that password correctly” type issues.

Overall - I feel like my typing is getting (even) better, and it is just a great keyboard to type on. As soon as I’ve nailed the layout of all the special characters there’ll be no looking back (or looking down at the keys).

Comments

Demi-god Jeff Atwood wrote a recent missive on the virtues of the RAR compression format. Although Jeff is 98.5% right with his analysis of WinRAR I think one thing was way off the mark. WinRAR and shell integration. On vista with UAC installed the latest non-beta version (3.62) stinks. Version 3.7 (currently in beta) will address some of these problems, but 3.62 is just IJDW. When I run one of the WinRAR options from the context menu that shows up when I right-click on a file they just don’t do anything (and I’m not the only one). Directly launching the WinRAR exe from the start menu always results in an elevation prompt.

Comments

I heard an amusing infrastructure story recently which I thought was on a par with “We’re 80% done - it almost links now”. Here goes: A long and difficult project is nearing go-live, and everyone is extremely busy. The smallest mis-step could be disasterous. Different teams own different parts of the “infrastructure” management. IT pro from team B walks over to infrastructure consultant from team A and says. “We’ve run out of backup tapes - would it be OK if we stopped the backups for a few days until we get some more? »