Stan's WWWeblog

I just noticed that there were some comments that I didn't publish. I get so many X-rated Spam type comments and what-not I guess they slipped through the cracks. I will start blogging more often also.

 Stan

No one has ever heard of Kano when I mention to them. I didn’t know what it was a few months ago, except for that guy with one eye in the original Mortal Kombat who would curl up into a ball and project himself at opponents. I stopped playing after MK II and never saw the movies so that’s all I know. I think he was a criminal who had beef with Sonya Blade and cut her head off in MKI and then that other guy Jax with the metal arms who would slam the ground and make an earthquake is now on a quest to kill Kano or something like that…Anyway, I’ve learned a lot about another type of Kano due to a development project I’ve been working for the Customer Focused Design (CFD) group headed by a guy named CJ which is a partner of the EEC where I work.

The name of the group is pretty self-explanatory. It’s more or less about everything associated with interacting with customers about software before it is released.  It is good to find out what they want and don’t want so that upon release, the code is more on point. Kano is a theory (by a Professor Kano) based upon this concept. There is a method for surveying potential future customers about features. There are 2 questions per feature, kind of a 1a and 1b and so on sort of thing. Responses will be a number 1-5, with each number representing a level of sat- or dissatisfaction. We then compare the numbers for each respondent in a grid where their reply to each questions A and B are related and a particular combination represents a certain value(A, I,M,O,Q,R)  in Kano theory. We then tabulate the totals, calculate percentages, and then put all the data into two equations; one for Satisfaction and one for Dissatisfaction. These two numbers represent Cartesian X, Y coordinates. We graph the values for all survey questions (at this point there is 1 value per survey question). Kano theory states that through the research, math, logic, science, etc , etc each quadrant represents a certain level of desire for the feature (see the chart at the above Kano link). Thus, where the points land on the graph determine whether a future is “a good look” or not. Next, I’ll describe the code I wrote to automate Kano (we call it Push-Button Kano).

 

Stan

I really like photography. I take pictures of (almost) everything. I plan to take a photography class somewhere over the summer to learn some more professional stuff. So what way to catch you up with my life over the last few months than to display some photos.

This is when I went to Vegas with my girlfriend and some of her fam/friends after they finished a big med school test. These kids know how to party!

This was a reunion for a course that I took taught by the President of USC, Steve Sample, and also Dr. Warren Bennis. I took the class junior year and ran into 60-70 year old President Sample on campus 2 years later during my second senior year and he said, "You're still here?". That made my day. You know how it is when someone important recognizes you. I also squeezed in a USC football game and family time.

This was NSBE's fall regional conference where I manned the MS career fair booth with some other guys. Computer Science majors have dropped off dramatically.

This was just going home for Lucy's B-day and the USC vs Cal football game. Then I went to Baton Rouge for Thanksgiving

 This and This and This are from the Holidays in SoCal. I went to Disneyland straight after landing at LAX. The second is hanging out w/ fam and friends. The third is a wedding in San Diego. A fun coupla weeks.

And as a bonus for actually reading this far along. Here are high school graduation day pictures. I'm only 25 years old but I did have to scan these prints. Digitals were not popular in '99. My classmates and I are trying to get a reunion together so the memory lane effect was worth it.

Enjoy and Let me know what you think,

Stan

 

He being me of course. Me being Stanley. Known as Stan to many. I really think my girlfriend is officially the only person who calls me Stanley. And my family calls me Timmy. That's been my name longer than anything because my dad's name is Stanley. But I have a middle name and he doesn't. So if I have a son will he be Stanley the Third, or Stanley Jr?  Hmmmmm My friends of over 10 years still laugh uncontrollably when they hear a family member call me Timmy. And recently a 10 year old cousin of mine was thoroughly shocked when he found out my name was actually Stanley, the same as his uncle who happens to be my father. And I'm sure anyone from work or college reading this is suprised that everyone at home calls me Timmy. Anyway...  I just got an internal e-mail of the monthly blog stats* and remembered that I actually had a blog at one point in time. I read a lot of blogs now so I figured why not get back to my own. I read a lot of Hip-Hop and Tech blogs. Oh yeah, and friend's blogs too, mostly all using RSS. I read the EEC's (where I work) internal blog for updates on visiting customer's and partner's testing. There is an external blog that hasn't been updated in a while. I read Windows Mobile (internal and external) because WiMo (that's what they call it) v6 is on the way and I need a new phone and want to know stuff about the OS. I still have this. I read ASP.NET, Office 2007, IE, google etc etc blogs.

Things have been cool since 9/06. I've hosted several customers/partners in our enterprise lab here and started work on a new dev project that I'll discuss later. Windows Vista and Office 2007 shipped. I actually helped! I won a Zune a few weeks ago! I've been to a few career fair events at a conference and on campus on behalf of MS and talked to students. The usual. I went to Louisiana for Thanksgiving, Los Angeles for X-mas/New Years. USC won the Rose Bowl and will make into March Madness! We had a windstorm with a crazy several day long power outage and snowstorm in Seattle. It's warming up though and the summer is beautiful here. I can't think of much else at the moment so have a good day and check back later.

 -Timmy

*Feb 2007 my blog was ranked #1409 of 4133 in total reads among msdn blogs with about 2,000 more web views than RSS views. In a crazy coincidence, my office neighbor who sits next door to me and I shared an office with for a total of about 2 years a while ago has 8(!) more reads than me. Neither of us have blogged in months.

    Out of the blue, I got a question from my blog yesterday about Termincal Server licensing reporting. I may as well dust off the old bloggers cap and attempt to spark some discussion.
    Paraphrased, the person who asked the question wants to find a way to create a report to show how many licenses they have purchased and issued, ultimately to create a chart. They say they have tried the command 'lsreport' but it's only helped a little. and they would like to know is it possible to do this with WMI scripting? Any other tools out there?
    Personally, first of all, I've never needed to report TS licenses before. Second, therefore I don't know of any tools other than lsreport, which I've never actually used in a real-world scenario before. Therefore, my first inclination would be to create my own tool if lsreport didn't provide what I was looking for. In about an hour of researching my intial feel is that lsreport should be able to be leveraged. The big question is what do you want your chart to look like and be used for?  
 Here http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/termserv/termserv/win32_tsissuedlicense.asp  I found the start of the WMI settings you may be looking for. 

Stan

Does anybody out there still read this blog? Just curious. I'm sorry. I had to stop blogging when it became too popular.

Stan

I'm hoping someone out there can shed some light on this for me...I've been using System.XmlDocument.Load(string filename) to open some Infopath docs and read some of the elements in there and get data that I need. The format of the string name is UNC and I've had no problems with this before. Now after upgrading to .NET Framework 2, I'm getting a 'System.IO.IOException: The network path was not found' error. Unfortunately I don't have physical access to the server but I'm pretty sure that nothing has change on that side of things. I'm able to open the files and browse the share where they are stored through Windows with no problem. Within my code I'm even able to use System.IO.File and System.IO.Directory to get the file names and access their properties, I just can't open them consistently with System.XmlDocument.Load (the problem comes and goes which it makes it even more annoying.) Anyone out there seen this before? I've tried sending streams instead of string file names and I'm still having trouble.

    My blog is hosted by msdn.com which is Microsoft Developers Network but my blog is very rarely about Dev work. However, I actually do sit down and code here and there. Mostly for internal projects at work. It's been a while since I wrote something non-work related.
    There was a time where msdn bloggers were given the opportunity to switch over to blogs.technet.com which is the general MS IT professional blog and since it made more sense if you weren't a developer. Ironically I was involved in a dev project at the time that I'm finishing up now so I was too busy to notice. (I think that is actually irony too. It bothers me when people use the word 'ironically' for things that don't really involve irony. 'Coincidentally' is usually better in most cases. (Also lots of us misuse the word 'randomly', saying that something 'randomly' happened when we caused it to happen.).) OK I just randomly (see what I mean) went off on a tangent but back to the topic at hand. My job title is not actually software developer but I do get to code which is cool because it gives me a chance to have a lil' fun outside of whatever the usual stuff is; not that what I do isn't fun. But I have a channce to do my own thing in code without the pressure of super-concrete deadlines, PM specs, testers, etc.
     I've been working with Visual Studio 2005 for the last few months and I'm glad that everyone else is finally able to use the cool features. This should be #1 on every kid's X-mas list right above X-box 360. I was impressed with VS 6.0 after having started my coding life in UNIX, and then I was impressed with 2003 after doing most of my coding in 6.0. VS 2005 does a great job at continuing those trends. There's the obvious stuff like enhanced ease-of-use and customization, etc. I will not scare my friends and family away from my blog by going into details. The real nerds know where to look for that stuff.
     The thing that sucks to me is now having to update code that was based on .Net Framework 1 since some APIs have been obsoleted. Its one of those things that is for the better but is just annoying to deal with. I guess that's just a part of life though. As soon as you get comfortable with something, things change and you are in a new situation that you have to get comfortable with. You may want to do yourself a favor and check here before you find out the hard way that something is screwed up.

    So I scored some tickets to the SC vs UW this weekend from a fellow Microsoftie who didn't want to go for some reason. The seats were pretty good but my boy and I had to switch to the SC visitor section at halftime so we could really enjoy the game. It was a very good time even though everyone knew who was going to win. Since that was already decided everyone could just drink, eat, converse, and wait for Bush to get the ball. The Huskies spent more time talking trash about their team than we did. Maybe they wanted to take away all the good jokes before we got a chance to tell them. Their was still PAC-10, West Coast love from both sides. You could tell they still love their guys even after yelling "You Suck!" and things like at them for missing tackles. The funny thing about going to SC home football games is that the young freshman, sophomore, even juniors have never actually seen the team lose. They don't know what its like to walk home shaking your head, wondering what the hell just happened, after a bad loss. They never watched the team struggle and gradually improve into a juggernaut. So sometimes people get a little out of hand, but this Saturday it was pretty laid back and the weather was perfect which is saying a lot for late-October Seattle. It was actually hot for a while.
    Also funny, I actually ran into UW QB Isaiah Stanback at a stand-up comedy show at the Paramount theatre after the game. I didn't have time to change so I was in my USC sweatshirt and cap. Of course I don't know him but he looked at my attire and quickly looked away as if he didn't see me. He also got bagged on for his dreadlocks by the host when he came in late after intermission but I don't want to get jumped by a pack of Huskies so I won't repeat it.

Stan

    It's been a crazy last week or so. 30 or 40 enterprise Microsoft Operations Manager users just arrived to get a look at v3 of the product. I'm sitting in a room with them right now as they are getting a presentation from the MOM product team about new features. They have plenty of questions/requests about the future and very interesting comments about the 2005 version. Everyone seems happy to be here and ready to work. They are from universities, banks, retailers, military units and they use MOM to monitor server health but there is a lot of desktop monitoring functionality on the way which will make the product even more interesting. For this week they will be running through usage scenarios on environments that we have built at the EEC to give suggestions about what is wack and what is cool.
    At the EEC we spent last week getting ready for them. It was a week of controlled chaos but overall it was fun. We successfully built 11 environments consisting of a total of 121 servers and 50 or so clients. OSes were Windows Server 03 SP1 and XP SP2. Other Software used was Exchange SP1, ISA, Indigo, SQL Server 05, .NET Framework 2.0, Virtual Server and PC and many other specialized tools. I came up with a plan, got suggestions from the team on how to network and streamline better and we got started. We used RIS to deploy OSes to servers and automated  DCPROMO and IP configuration. ADS was used for the clients. Some other processes were automated such as importing certificates and moving files but there were things which needed to be done manually like setting up Yukon to work with specialized apps that we need it to work with. 
    The plan had to be fluid to accommodate changes that popped up as we and MOM discovered changes that needed to be made. The challenge was finding the balance between everything: Modifying the plan to accommodate changes and being firm as to what it is too late change. Writing scripts to automate processes and doing things manually. Asking someone else to do something or just doing it yourself. I learned there is a thin line between everything and tightrope walking it is the key to keeping yourself, your team members, the product team, and the customers visiting to test the product happy. The interesting day will be Wednesday when we have to reimage the machines to get ready for a second round of customers arriving on Thursday after the Mon-Tues guys leave. Check back to see how everything goes.

    In other news, there has been an increasing amount of trash-talking going on about the Trojans since of course there are lots of graduates from everywhere here at MS. People are saying this and that, but I just humor them and talk my trash; all in good fun of course. People are not satisified unless we absolutely blow everyone out of the water in each game but they should be thanking us for making their games even worth watching. And Texas may be a pretty good team, but they have only one weapon. Virginia Teach may be a pretty good team but we beat them squarely and routinely. Need I continue. Anyway I'm excited that SC is coming to town this weekend to play UW. I've already got my tickets and I will be there in cardinal and gold. Plus there is a rally the night before which should be fun.

I was going through my blog and flog to give my memory a jog and through the fog I came across...splog (spam + blog). Yep in the ever-expanding web-log dictionary there is another term but its not something cool. Every now and then someone posts a random comment like "You have a cool site" and sometimes its obvious that its some kind of spam but sometimes I actually think it might be serious and let it pass. I even clicked on the link to check this persons page and it couldn't be found. That was a like a month ago. I clicked on the link again maybe yesterday and some guy has bought the URL www.mynicemailat.com claiming that he did so to screw the person who went around spamming thousands of peoples of blogs with these comments promoting that site which they probably would've eventually bought and used to do who-knows-what with. This is one area where people seem to actually be unhappy with google because of the amount of splog that you get at blogspot.com which I guess is the most popular blogging site. (I could insert an MSN Spaces commercial here but I won't, mainly because I haven't actually used it myself). I think the impression is that they aren't doing much to stop it mainly because the more activity there is, good or bad, they profit from it. Aside from being annoying from users, splog can be a serious problem for IT administrators because it compouonds the already crazy problem of e-mail spam, phishing, etc . At least there are some renegades out there doing what they can to combat this growing problem.
 
Relatively unrelated but I had an interesting exchange with someone over the National Society of Black Engineers here a while ago. I think I know who it is but they didn't mention it so I didn't mention it. Hello!

 

Stan

Another post for the day:

http://blogs.technet.com/eec/archive/2005/09/29/411749.aspx

 

So, my old phone has been on ebay for a while now but no one is bidding yet (wink, wink). Slightly disappointing but I always have a plan B so its cool. Sprint has it listed for 400-something and I want to let it go for 300 which I think is good deal but maybe people are being apprehensive and will buy at the last minute. One thing I do know is that I only use ebay like once, maybe twice, a year and it gets more annoying and complicated each time. It took me almost an hour just to put the phone up for sell.

As I was cleaning the phone memory and everything it occured to me that there were lot of photos on there that I completely forgot existed. Some of them are pretty cool because they are very random. I never thought of the phone as a camera but it was always around in those random situations. Most of the time I just saw something cool that I wanted to take a photo of so I just did it. Who knows what was happening other times. But one major difference between Seattle and L.A. is that there is so much beautiful natural scenery here, its always good to have a camera around even if the quality is not superb. That kind of adds to the naturalness and randomness of the scene sometimes. But I decided to post the pictures because a few different folks I know might want to see them and the days of emailing photos to people are done.

-Some of the pictures are of family
-Some of the pictures are of the one and only Lucy (http://marcena.blogspot.com)
-Some of the pictures are of stuff that I just thought looked cool like my family strolling in Long Beach, CA on a nice summer Sunday afternoon
-Some of the pictures involve me being pretty drunk standing outside of a bar named Casuelita's having a cigarette (i quit on labor day) in downtown seattle and looking up and noticing what seemed like a cool scene at the time
-Some of the pictures involved other people being drunk
-Some are those randmon cool shots that I happened to snap while cruising Seattle-
-this was supposed to be downtown seattle
-There's always the EEC crew and friends
-An EEC engineer feeding a duck that had a broken leg and couldn't get its own food
-Some of the pictures show the best of times
-Some show the worst of times
-Some show my best friend getting his mack on to a random old lady in a vegas quiznos about a month ago
-In some pictures I have no idea what was going on

-And of course some of the pictures can't be shown here for various reasons...haha

 

You can find me here today:  http://blogs.technet.com/eec/archive/2005/09/28/Stanley_.aspx. Well I'm at the EEC everyday but you know what I mean.

Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse...it may. The lovely city of Compton, CA where I grew up has been trailing behind New Orleans, LA as the #2 murder capital of the nation (second highest per-capita murder rate). Now that everyone and everything has pretty much been wiped out of the Crescent City, the Hub City may by default become the murder capital of the U.S. Some people, like the kids who are brainwashed by the gang culture and rap music that come out of the city, think this is cool. Some people, like their parents, are horrified. I guess I'm getting old because I think this is crazy. Hopefully, this new title will embarrass everyone so that they stop killing each other and start representing the positive aspects of "the CPT" as we like to call it. Yes, it's a pretty rough city but there are also plenty of good things about it. The people are determined like you have never seen. Athletics is very important here (I mean there). Most Pac-10 football and basketball teams are well stocked with Compton recruits. The city has had an indescribable effect on GLOBAL pop culture through the creation of what became known as "gangsta rap" in the late 80's -early 90's. Things were violent back then but then they calmed down for a while. But now apparently it's haywire again. Maybe Governor Schwarzenegger can do something....