Santomania : Personal

[OT] One step closer to geek movie heaven

Addys — Sun, 06 Mar 2005 11:06:00 GMT

The new trailer for Episode 3 is out - ~~http://www.aol.com/starwars/trailer/index.adp?type=lrg~~
<edit> as David Taylor so politely pointed out, that link points to the old trailer from Nov 2004. The new one air will air on March 10th. My mistake, sorry! </edit>

Will Lucas finally deliver the goods, or will this movie continue the loosing streak of Episodes 1 and 2? The trailer looks awesome, but so did the trailers for the previous movies. This time I'll play it safe and try to keep my expectations low. <yeah, right, who am I kidding>

This is going to be a great summer for Sci-Fi movie geeks - Ep3, HHG and the Doom3 movie, all within a few months of each other.

Random musings and an Infopath tip

Addys — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 05:39:00 GMT

Random musings... I have had too much sugar today and too little sleep last night, so my brain is a little fried. Consider yourself warned :)

My current gig is for a hospital. Every evening when I leave the parking lot, the automated toll machine remarks "thank you and please come again". Is that really the best farewell they could come up with? Who wants to be in a hospital to begin with?
A fortune cookie from lunch read "Your happy heart brings joy and peace where there is none". Those bastards must have been peeking at my job description. Ah, consultant humor ;)
TechBargains.com rocks - I picked up a pair of 250GB HDs for 70$ each. :)
While configuring the new drives (for RAID 1), the Dell administration tool 'spontaneously' decided to format my boot partition. Dell sucks, there goes my weekend :(

And not to be totally off-topic, an Infopath development tip... Using a web page to spawn an Infopath form is a simple yet powerful solution for integrating Infopath into your existing web systems. For example:

Private Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load

Dim RequestNum As String = Request("ID")

Dim FormXml as String = myBizObject.GetInfopathXML(RequestNum)

Response.ContentType = "application/ms-infopath.xml"

Response.Write(FormXml)

End Sub

Notice the "secret ingredient" - Since IE ignores the form PI which ties it to Infopath (presumably for security reasons), if the ContentType is not set correctly then the xml data will be displayed in the browser. Setting the ContentType to "application/ms-infopath.xml" ensures that IE will spawn Infopath.

One year and counting...

Addys — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 09:31:00 GMT

Hey, I just noticed that last week was exactly 12 months since I joined Microsoft.
Time really does fly when having fun!

Seattle is a Bloggers Mecca

Addys — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 10:39:00 GMT

Thanks to Walt Ritscher for letting me know about tonight's blogger meeting and giving me a ride there and back. The event itself was geeky beyond belief - when I got there two guys were sharing a OneNote document on their tablets over the wireless network while a third was showing off Firefox's ink gesture support which he helped develop. There were about 5 tablets around the tablets and multiple laptops as well. But the geekiness was infectuous and everyone there was extremely nice, so all in all it was a great experience. I finally met in the flesh some online personas such as Maurice Prather (of BlueDog fame), LazyCoder Scott Koon and of course Scoble. I also met a bunch of new folks - TDavid, Kristi Heim (from the Seattle Times), and Jay Fluegel who is a PM for the newly released MSN Spaces service.

The things that suprised me most was the number of people (between 30 - 40) and the composition of the group: hardcore geeks, students, women (a rare event at previous blogger dinners) and even a few whole families complete with infants. Seattle is truly a blogger mecca.

And thanks to the dude who gave out all the cool Japanese stuff. I didn't catch your name but the DVD rocks!

Update: The cool dude is Jake of http://www.8bitjoystick.com/ , and Anita Rowland has a list of all 36 attendees. Thanks again guys, I had a great time.

Update #2: Pics of the event are here. The last picture in the batch prominently features the back of my head :) link courtesy of Scoble.

Alphabet Soup, or: I'm joining the MCS COE APC AOS

Addys — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 11:42:00 GMT

I recently joined the Microsoft Consulting Services Center of Excellence, Application Platform Core Area of Specialization (or MCS COE APC AOS for short, or huh? for shorter). So, what is it? Lets drill down a bit:

Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS): This is the group inside Microsoft which works with customers to ensure that our technologies are successfully implemented. Or, to quote the marketing division: "Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) provide help directly from Microsoft through every stage of the technology planning, deployment, and support process". More here.

MCS Center of Excellence: A (relatively) small group inside MCS which provides deep technical expertise in selected technological areas. Outsiders don't hear much about the CoE since our role is mainly supporting MCS, but we are usually at the forefront of each new technology wave- partnering with the Redmond product teams, working with early adopters, figuring out best practices, etc.

Application Platform Core AOS: This Area of Specialization deals with .NET Enterprise Architecture engagements. Our mission is to accelerate the adoption of Microsoft products and technologies by assisting our customers, partners, and MCS practices in the design of Enterprise Applications and Architectures.

This sounds like a fun and rewarding opportunity, especially given all the cool new Microsoft technologies which are just around the corner. I'll let y'all know how it turns out J

Back at Redmond

Addys — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 10:01:00 GMT

I'm at the Microsoft campus for a week of training. God I love this place... I really need to visit more often.

I've got some old friends to catch up with, but I'm also hoping to meet some new ones. Are there any interesting blogger/geek/whatever dinners planned for this week?

The Infopath presentation to the .Net Architects User Group Rocked!

Addys — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 12:07:00 GMT

Last night was lots of fun.

I delivered a 2 hour InfoPath presentation to the Israeli .Net Architects user group. This was my first time in front of this particular UG, and they are a pretty sharp bunch who were very interactive with questions and comments throughout the presentation. There were about 50-60 people in all, which was a great turnout considering the topic; InfoPath isn't very well known in Israel.

My previous Infopath presentations and training sessions were usually developer oriented so I added quite a bit of new content for this session. The audience feedback shows that they really enjoyed it and especially liked the new materials. For whoever is interested, the TOC was as follows:

Introduction: (1 hour)
- Development, Part 1 (no code, just exploring the designer + connectivity capabilities)
- Development, Part 2 (breaking out VS.NET and playing with the OM)
- Deployment + XSN Internals
The Real World : Common Scenarios (1 hour)
- Add-Hoc Data Gathering - Walkthrough of a solution
- Improving an Existing Business Process - Walkthrough of a solution
- Line Of Business using InfoPath - Walkthrough of a solution

During the second hour we reviewed several common real-world scenarios, characterized the required investments and components involved in each solution, and got a feel for the user experience (and InfoPath's contribution to it). This was the best part of the presentation, and it would have been even better if I had an extra hour to go into more detail and answer the many questions which popped up during the walkthroughs. As it is, I hope that the architects got a good feel for the power and flexibility which an InfoPath/SharePoint/BizTalk solution provides.

I still need to clean up the slides before putting them up on the user group site. I'm flying back to New York tonight so I'll have 10 hours of 'quality time' with my laptop. Yay.

After the lecture we headed off to the blogger's dinner, which will be the topic of another post...

And since I am on vacation after all, here is the inevitable standard "random vacation picture":

My parents' cat "Happy"

.Net Deep Dive wrap-up

Addys — Fri, 26 Nov 2004 19:37:00 GMT

Yesterday's ".Net Deep Dive" day at Microsoft Israel was a huge success. Over 1600 developers came to the event to hear about advanced development topics such as Agile/TDD and Production Time Debugging. Both of Royo's lectures were packed, with people sitting on the floor after the 700 or so chairs were taken. I missed Jackie's lecture but I'm sure it was informative and fun - his lectures always are.

The knowledge and enthusiasm of the Israeli developer community never fails to amaze me. A little kid – who couldn't have been more than 10-12 years old - cornered Jackie in the "ask the experts" session to ask about the CLR's implementation of 64-bit value types on 32 bit hardware. And a little earlier in the session, Gadi mentioned that he had heard of an obscure registry key which was helpful when attaching NTSD to a running process. Someone from the audience stood up and recited the full name and path - from memory – and explained what it did.

This event really reminded me of how much fun I had as a speaker back in the days before joining MCS. Maybe my next position will provide more opportunities to participate in similar events. Giving the occasional user group presentation just doesn't give the same rush as a speaking to room with 500+ people...

Anyway, my vacation is coming to a close. On Sunday I'll be speaking at the .Net Architects user group followed by a Geek/Blogger Dinner, and then back to New York on Monday. Israel has been so much fun that I'm almost sorry to leave! J

Geek Dinner - 11.28 - Tel Aviv

Addys — Tue, 23 Nov 2004 17:41:00 GMT

Kudos to Royo for arranging another Geek Dinner for the Israeli community.

This time it is with an extra-special guest speaker - me!

Time: 11.28.04, 9:45pm
Location: The kosher El Gaucho Tel Aviv

see Royo's invitation for more info.

Sucked into a black hole...

Addys — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 01:25:00 GMT

I have been neglecting my blog lately due to an insane project I got sucked into... Compressing 12 man weeks of work into 4 calendar weeks is harder than it sounds. I managed it though, and yesterday I handed off the final deliverable to the customer (who BTW still can't believe I pulled it off). The project pushed the envelope (or at least my envelope) regarding Infopath, Sharepoint and Biztalk architecture, and left me with some great material for future blog posts. As an added bonus a few PMs from the Infopath PG visited the customer today to see the system, so I had the chance to get some inside info regarding O12 which of course I can't discuss :)

For now though I have only one thing on my mind : VACATION! Yep, in about an hour I'll already be on a plane to visit my family and friends in Israel, many of whom I haven't seen for 2 years. See y'all when I get back....

[OT] Get Brains?

Addys — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 22:02:00 GMT

I dare you not to smile:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York officials were red-faced on Friday after they discovered that clothing ads on city buses that appeared to promote reading suggested a love of books could be rewarded with oral sex.

The advertisements that ran on about 200 buses across the city in recent months carried posters displaying a suggestively posed woman in hot pants kneeling among a pile of books beside the snappy slogan "Read Books, Get Brain."

What unhip, unsuspecting local transportation officials did not know was that "get brain" is street slang for oral sex.

Signing off for a week or two

Addys — Mon, 30 Aug 2004 05:38:00 GMT

I'm moving apartments this week and will also be away on business (Toronto here I come...) so I won't be blogging for a while. Next BlogWave release will probably be around mid-September.

Known issues with v0.3:

- Drag-drop to create a new feed assigns 'TMP' as a title.
- Proxy support is spotty.
- Adapter related errors aren't handled very gracefully yet. This only affects people who are developing their own adapters but is still an annoyance.

If you know noticed something which isn't listed above- let me know!

Happy Birthday Roy!

Addys — Tue, 17 Aug 2004 17:13:00 GMT

Roy Osherove - Congratulations!

Some Spam, a Chainletter and a Blog walk into a bar....

Addys — Wed, 11 Aug 2004 20:24:00 GMT

I'll be the first to admit that Luke Hutteman rocks (SharpReader is my primary aggregator!) but this post is very disturbing. It basically encourages people to create a chain-letter of blog posts with the sole intent of improving the google-juice of the participants. This is wrong in so many ways that I don't know where to begin - it spams the readers, who will be forced to deal with worthless posts in their aggregators. It abuses the system and increases the chances that Google will downgrade blogs in the PageRank weighting mechanism (some people think this already happened). It goes against everything that is 'cool' about blogs.

In short, this meme can't die fast enough for me.

[OT] Macaque Monkey Goes Totally Bipedal

Addys — Fri, 23 Jul 2004 17:31:00 GMT

Via ./

“Add another bonus point for the Darwinians/evolutionists. A macaque at the Safari Park Zoo in Ramat Gan, Israel has recovered from a near-fatal illness in an unusual way: she has switched exclusively to walking on her hind legs. Given theories of human history that stress the effect of disease on events and changes, as in William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples, what if an illness was the cause of the shift to bipedal motion by our evolutionary ancestors, and rote imitation by offspring or another set of circumstances locked it in? No matter, this could be a fascinating study of the macaque's altered brain functions."

Coming up on next week's episode - The macaque catches a cold and starts a weblog, in which she talks about her idol David Hasselhoff the singer.