My charming and uber-tolerant wife has given me a beautiful baby girl, Selkie. This happened 21 months ago, but it's only now I find a spare 30 seconds to blog about it. LOL, though, because I was that guy who variously poked fun at my friends with children...

After five fine years, I'm leaving Microsoft. I couldn't have hoped for a better experience. I've learned more in five years than I did in four of medical school; deep technical sk1llz, consulting skills, how businesses operate, how to develop...

** WARNING: PERSONAL LIBERTARIAN POLITICS AHEAD ** Here goes--my first rabidly political post. Oh, goody! I'm drooling with glee. The recent hub-bub about lowering the drinking age in Wisconsin for military folks got me all hopped-up frothing and...

Does the following input into a web application text box strike appropriate fear into your heart? Nay, I should say, dost though poop thine pants gazing there-upon? ' or 1=1; '; use master; xp_cmdshell 'net user SomeUser SomeUsersPassword /add...

Please have a look at: http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/busybeebuilder http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/cryptoutility CryptoUtility : My friend J Sawyer and I published CryptoUtility as part of an article on high-security crypto in a real world...

Please have a gander at: http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/busybeebuilder http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/cryptoutility I've updated my two (currently) favorite pet projects. More on CryptoUtility in the next post...here's BusyBee: BusyBeeBuilder...

A good friend of mine--whose company I'm consulting for right now--emailed me this joke. Too funny...and kind of hit home :) Thanks for keeping me humble, Ryan! > A cowboy was herding his herd in a remote pasture when suddenly > a brand-new...

As I alluded in my last post, I've officially swallowed the Red Pill...at least this month. For the 3 developers who haven't seen the Matrix--the red pill pops you out of the Matrix into reality, the blue pill returns you to blissful ignorance and a life...

I love cars. It's the thing I'm most likely to spend stupid amounts of money on, and only the guiding hand of my frugal wife keeps me from mortgaging future college funds on a shiny 400HP...whatever. Too many 400HP cars around to count these days--topic...

Hassan writes: Wednesday, April 27, 2005 7:57 PM by Hassan Khawaja # re: Real-Time, Server Push, Pub/Sub Network Apps in .NET--Buellar? Buellar? I am dealing with a somewhat related issue, basically creating an AD employee search directory...

My best friend's boyfriend's cousin said she heard it passed out in the 31 flavors last night. Guess it's pretty bad. Yep this is awful. It has to be the most under-served, and one of the most desirable, features in enterprise applications...YET, there...

OK so I'm working on quite a fun project; it's a proof of concept for a near-real-time, pub-sub, server to client push type communicaton subsystem. Phew. Essentially it's a big fat wrapper around a few candidate technologies including SIP, a.k.a. our...

Wow! Lots of comments/emails from that last post. Seems others have been trolled on Live too. So there's a positive too: there are a host of decent, very nice people playing Halo 2 on Live. People who have the courtesy to say "good game" even after they...

DUDE! What is up with the troglodyte faction playing Halo 2 some nights? Recently me and three of my friends were verbally assaulted by two separate groups. One group kept referring to us as "n******" (rude slang for African-American). I was flattered...

Coming soon...

So I'm looking at the feedback on my and J's MSDN mag article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/04/11/CryptoUtility/default.aspx I noticed that there are many "9" ratings, and many "1" ratings. Love or hate, I guess. There are only a few text...

Backgrounder: please see http://blogs.msdn.com/methylamine/archive/2004/11/15/257864.aspx for my original adventures with ISA Server and XBox Live/Halo 2. Latest news: I have given up. Though it was working, the number of open ports required huge resources...

OK, I'm NOT a networking expert...after all I'm a developer, so I can spell TCP/IP and have some vague notion that it helps my applications do stuff like talk to other computers. But necessity is the mother of invention; and what greater necessity than...

I'm getting married this week, and I'm thrilled. Props out to Match.com where I met my awesome fiancee! It's so mainstream now to date online we don't even think about it. But I remember when there was a huge stigma to "computer dating", part of the same...

Ha! I just read a great essay: http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.pdf Funny, the author went to Rice too. He graduated the year I started, wish I'd known him.

Does your project rely on a number of externals--things in the GAC, COM+ packages, registry keys and the like? Do your unit tests need these? What tricks do you use to set up your environment for unit testing? I've resorted to a number of dirty tricks...

My friend J Sawyer and I are doing an article for November's MSDN...the title's not fixed but it's something like "Real-World Cryptography". J's a Developer Evangelist down here in Houston, and he's one of the finest developers I know. Nevermind that...

Wish me luck. I'm about to start a flame-war. At issue: VB tries too hard to "help" you--but sometimes gets in the way at the worst possible moments. In Evidence: I'm on a fairly complex project involving web services, COM+ ServicedComponents, heavy-duty...

First off, I wish C#Refactory were available for VB.NET!!! ARRGHH! I've become so enamored of C#Refactory (find it at http://www.xtreme-simplicity.net/ ). It's one of those tools you use for a week and realize it's already paid for itself, a slam-dunk...

First, please go to: http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/busybeebuilder There, you can download my favorite pet project the BusyBeeBuilder. The MSI installs the binaries, source, and docs. It's a clean install--and it uninstalls cleanly too. I'm a HUGE fan...