shawn's blog : GeekStuff

It's In The Trees

Shawn L. Morrissey — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 08:26:03 GMT

Oh goodie.

Time for a trim

Shawn L. Morrissey — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 17:51:00 GMT

Oh, it’s truly a blissful morning. Three 1–hr meetings cancelled within 5 minutes. With my OPML file becoming dangerously Scoblized, it’s time for a haircut.

First, save the old OPML file…
Have I read the blog entries (read, not just scanned) in the last two weeks? No? Buh-bye…
Has the blog been updated in the last month? No? Buh-bye…
Is the topic something I’m really interested in? No? Buh-bye…
Is the topic Indigo, development, GTD, management, or finance-related? Uh-oh…
is it a really smart person writing? OK…

So far, I’m down about 100 feeds. MAKE:Blog stays, “All Things Distributed” stays. 43 Folders? Absolutely…

Scoble mentioned NewzCrawler the other day. Cool tool. and I can’t figure out how to import an OPML into the thing. Bummer. Add/Remove Programs…

Great new MSPress title

Shawn L. Morrissey — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 20:24:00 GMT

One of the kind folks over in MSPress just dropped off an advance copy of, “Practical Guidelines and Best Practices for VB and C# Developers”, and I’m having a great time reading it… I’d highly recommend at least a perusal of this one.

My favorite section so far is chapter 19, covering exception handling. I’m one of those who typically assumes all is well until an exception is thrown, so this is great info for me. Other favorites are the sections on COM Interop for us old foagies who still look at the world through a QI interface, and the section on remoting…

Good stuff. Big thumbs up.

Cross-posting - A new trend?

Shawn L. Morrissey — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 21:48:00 GMT

A lot of us are now running both personal and corporate blogs. Stephen and I started discussing an idea to make this easier - server-side triggers that will post to another blog automatically. I can do this client-side right now - w.bloggar supports this, for instance, but not across servers, so I can post to two weblogs.asp.net accounts. I think it's still a bit too clunky to scale very well. I'm setting off to build something a bit more generalized - I'll assume I'll always post everything to one blog first (probably my personal blog). Then, depending on the category, the engine will cross-post to another blog account for me. The other approach may be to just continue doing this client-side, and exposing a UI with check-boxes for all accounts... Something to think about while tracking Santa this year... Issues - keeping categories in sync - where does the ping go - is there spam abuse exposed here - how do i track comments?

Hiring an Inbox Assistant

Shawn L. Morrissey — Thu, 25 Nov 2004 22:26:00 GMT

Nothing clarifies the need for help managing the ol' inbox like being out of the country for a week. My inbox got pretty out of control last week, which drove me to search for some help. Don't get me wrong - Outlook is great, and has some interesting tools built in, and with over 1000 pieces of unread email, I needed to look outside the box (no pun intended).

The first tool I found is a new one on the scene (as best I can tell). ClearContext Inbox Manager automatically prioritizes your inbox, color codes stuff based on priority, etc. I'm still getting used to not dealing with my inbox in a LIFO fashion, and this looks pretty interesting. It makes you think about dealing with critical email first. It also seems to do a better job that Outloot does of presenting email threads together. So far, I really like it - I was able to blow through and delete all the non-critical stuff in about 5 minutes, and could then focus on important emails for a good 2 hours solid.

The second tool I found is one I've been watching for a while, trying to fit it into my own quirky mental processes. FranklinCovey's PlanPlus is a godsend for someone like me. I get techie-ADD very, very quickly. If there's a shiny toy to be distracted by, count me in! Overall, I have found this Outlook add-in to be incredibly useful, and it is now a foundation of my planning system. I've been using David Allen's GTD plug-in for Outlook for quite some time now, and it felt like something was missing. PlanPlus provides a great anchor for me - it helps me figure out what to focus on (mission, goals), and then helps keep me focused on achieving those goals. Tasks map to projects map to goals map to roles map to mission. It's very, very simple to use. I wish there were a tighter integration between Outlook's task categories (which I use to connect tasks to projects) and PlanPlus's project list, and I'll keep asking for that,

Overall, I feel much more on top of things right now. I'm sure all that will change around the Whidbey beta time, with multiple deadlines and masses of content to publish, and at least right now, I'm feeling pretty good...

SkypeIn?

Shawn L. Morrissey — Mon, 22 Nov 2004 16:25:00 GMT

Skype really saved my hiney last week while I was in Copenhagen. It could always tunnel through whatever network I was hung off on, and the reception back to the States was pretty good. I'm absolutely sold.

Now I want "SkypeIn". No, it doesn't exist yet, and I still want it. I want to be able to forward any of my phone numbers to my Skype number, and have it ring on the PC where I have Skype running. That's a service I would pay for. I would love to have my office number forwarded to it, my cell forwarded to it, my distinctive ring number at home forwarded to it - the ultimate answering machine.

I know that Vonage offers this service, and Vonage sucks more than Dyson vacuums.

Bizarre issue with IRM and WindowBlinds

Shawn L. Morrissey — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 02:13:00 GMT

Yeah, I do have Mac envy. So I had WindowBlinds, DesktopX, ObjectDock, all fired up and running happily away. Then I tried to open an IRM'ed (Microsoft-speak for DRM) email. Nada. Wouldn't open. I fired up OWA, and I could get the email to open. Weird.

Futzed around, and finally (after swallowing what's left of my ego) called the helpdesk. They had me run a little app that checked the IRM stuff, and it said... "Conflicting application running. Please shut down... "WindowBlinds". WTF? How could WindowBlinds hork up rights management??? I know - it's probably one of those questions I *really* don't want the answer to...

Anyway, for all you folks running WindowMorphers, beware....

A real live rock star

Shawn L. Morrissey — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 05:28:00 GMT

It is so cool to see a real live rock star every now and then. I was headed to my last meeting of the evening, when a panicked Rory swung by, looking for an office to crash in. Luckily, I've got folks from my team slung out all over the green earth right now, so I was able to get Rory plugged back into the grid. The last time Rory stopped by, he wasn't working for the Firm yet, and I got Don Box to come over and give Rory a kiss for his birthday.

Thanks for stopping by, Rory!

Help w/ MCE 2k5

Shawn L. Morrissey — Mon, 08 Nov 2004 08:01:00 GMT

Now I've done it... I upgraded a prefectly working MCE 2k3 machine to MCE 2k5 (discs from MSDN Subscribers Download), and now I'm horked. Well, kinda horked...

I flattened/paved the box, and did a clean install. I updated my nVidia GeForce3 drivers to the 10/15/2004 drivers. I purchased the NVidia MPEG decoder. I tested this setup w/ WMP10, and DVD playback is fine.

When I start Media Center, it lets me choose "Live TV", then the little spinning arrow goes for a bit, and freezes. The TV screen is black, and there is audio coming from the proper tv station. I can change the channel, and the audio changes fine, and there is no video.

Same for DVD. I click on Play DVD... The UI still shows the scrolling menus, and is frozen. Once again, the audio is playing fine.

I'm sure I dorked up one of the various video drivers, and I can't tell which one needs to be fixed... Anyone have any ideas?

LapLust - HP zd8K

Shawn L. Morrissey — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 02:37:00 GMT

Updated now that I have one - see my review here.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1706540,00.asp

Check out this beast. Two tuner cards. Why anyone would call this a "laptop" is beyond me. System weight = 9.5 lbs. Could be a fantastic desktop replacement. 80GB drive, DVD burner (single-side, AFAIK). Runs WinXP Media Center 2k5. I really like the docking station setup (at least I like the picture).

This may be one to check out... I think I'll still want my Tablet for meetings, and I'd love to have this as the dev/storage box...

Home Storage

Shawn L. Morrissey — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 03:43:00 GMT

This could certainly be interesting... Charlie and I used to work together on OLE technologies in the olden days. Now he's over in BobMu's Storage group, exploring some of the issues I'm running into. Namely, how to keep your hands around hundreds of gig's of "stuff". I've got videos I've sucked into WMV files, photos that I keep in RAW format (5MB/pic), and one or two MP3 files.

He's promised to take us through some interesting explorations of data storage and management for families.

Subscribed...

Seeing Data - A really-should-have book

Shawn L. Morrissey — Tue, 07 Sep 2004 05:11:00 GMT

I just received a copy of “Seeing Data – Designing User Interfaces for Database Systems Using .NET” from the kind folks at Addison-Wesley. The simple explanation – it’s a book about how to create nice UI’s for database-driven Windows apps. Longer explanations – this is one of those books that covers topics that can be found a lot of other places, in a way that makes you slap your head and think – “this is exactly how this should be presented!” This is one of those unique books I’d recommend to anyone doing UI work against databases.

Ms. Riordan covers exactly the right list of topics for this specific type of application – Interface Design, .NET Graphic Objects (GDI+, etc.), Typography, Color, Images ADO.NET Data Binding – all the basics, (that’s pretty much part 1 of the book); part 2 covers the good Form Layout stuff and control management, then puts it all together in part 3 to discuss “Interacting with the User”.

Like I mentioned, you can probably find these topics covered elsewhere, and for someone who needs a really tight intro to writing efficient database-driven forms apps, this is the book to hand them. Very Highly recommended.

Managing a small library

Shawn L. Morrissey — Mon, 30 Aug 2004 20:36:00 GMT

Because of my role in MSDN, I have a LOT of books in my office. I also have a LOT of folks on my team who like to borrow my books. I'm looking for a application to help me manage this process - displaying what I have, displaying who has it, etc. I'd prefer it were written on top of ASP.NET. Does anyone have an application like that? If not, I'm going to write one, and my team is *really* nervous about that possibility... It would certainly be, "The Pointy-Haired Manager and the Keyboard Adventure - where the hell is the 'any' key".

Right now, I'm mocking things up using Sharepoint - it's an easy way to get a pretty decent UI on top of a database, and I can make schema changes without nuking the data underneath...

Read Discover Magazine this month

Shawn L. Morrissey — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 17:59:00 GMT

This month's Discover magazine focuses exclusively on Einstein - his biggest achievements, his biggest errors, and the impact of his thinking. If you're a theoretical physicist, this content will probably bore you. If you're a fan of the beauty of the theories of special and general relativity, you'll appreciate the treatment these topics receive in this mag. The authors of each article each hold a wonderful reverance for the man and his thinking.

As I was thinking about how radical Einstein's thinking was at the time, I got to thinking about our field of software engineering, and who, if anyone, is doing anything similar right now. I still see most work as evolutionary, rather than revolutionary - test-driven dev, extreme programming, etc. It's all good, and definately pushing us forward, and I still don't see something that makes us fundamentally change our thinking about software development. Has anyone out there see something revolutionary?

UPDATE: New device(s) for road-warrior wonks

Shawn L. Morrissey — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 17:48:00 GMT

UPDATE: You knew D-Link couldn't be far behind. I haven't found many detail, and the D-Link DWL-G730AP should be hitting the shelves soon. Here's a link I've found with some of the details - . Yes, it supports WPA. $100. Looks like there's gunna be a showdown....

SMC has released what could be a great little box for the road warrior - the snappily named, "EZ Connect™ g 2.4GHz 802.11g Wireless Traveler’s Kit (SMCWTK-G)". It can be an access point, Ethernet bridge, repeater, P2P bridge, or point-to-multipoint bridge. And it's only $99.

Finally - an alternative to Apple's AirPort Express that's cheaper than Apple. Get to your hotel room, plug the little bugger in to the in-house Ethernet, and you have a wireless network in your room. I wonder what this will to to reservations - will folks travelling together want to stay next door to each other so they can share a wireless network?

This device is also cool when you're not on the road. At the house, turn it into a repeater, so you can email from further away from your house.

Definately on the "wannabuy" list...