Evolution or Creation or Intelligent Design...

Hmm... Things seem to be flaring up on this issue with the entrance of a new idea/view/theory, Intelligent Design. Take a look at Wired's article. Pretty interesting. It mentions several times 'materialist thought' or what could be termed 'fleshly thinking'. The last page is a statement by one of the proponents of Intelligent Design.

Also, PBS is airing a series called Origins. Again, gleaned from an article on Wired was this statement:

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York and host of Origins, describes the creation of the series as a kind of jigsaw puzzle.

"We now have the edge pieces and the corner pieces; we know what the color codings are, we know what the pattern looks like," he said. "There are still huge holes -- we don't know yet how you go from inanimate matter to a bacterium with a metabolism. But we do know what ingredients it requires, we do know the conditions that led to those ingredients and what happened to the planet after life emerged."

Huge holes do not an answer make.

Well, governments will someday turn on religions all-together... Some would consider it ironic that it's the bible itself that foretells this.

My Mad scientist comes out

Okay, maybe this is a bit nuts, but I think it'll kill 2 birds with one stone. I read this article on glaciers slipping into the ocean. Now, I'm sure it's the global warming issue speeding them up. But I got to thinking about how governments are planning to try to colonize mars.

The secret, they say, is having water there. Well, why not chop up these glaciers, load them into thermal containers and launch them into space. They can sit there, out in the giant freezer of space, and when you need 'em, bring 'em down to the Mars surface. Nasa has certainly shown that they can drop things out of the sky.

That way, you won't raise the ocean level, and you can get a nice cool drink of water on your next Martian holidy.

My two cents.

In programming news, I created a Windows service and it's working perfectly. It triggers a stored procedure which returns 2 tables and tags the data as being read, all in one transaction. These get packaged into a dataset, which is then written into a tab delimited file. This file is e-mailed to our customer so that they can see what orders were placed on their images.

I also realized that my error tracking web service has been performing quite well. It's simply a web service that takes an error message and some specifics and dumps it into my error tracking database. I have my web sites, windows service, and windows forms applications all dumping to it.

This has allowed me to better resolve issues, sometimes before the customer even knows what has happened.

Our windows form application that we provide to all our customers is in full swing now. Haven't had to do an update to it lately, but if so, I simply put the new version on our webserver. The application polls a web service at startup (if it has a net connection) and the webservice compares the running application version to the version stored on the server. If needed it passes back the files and the app is restarted. This is allowing me to update the app, the update utility itself, and the database (very rarely).

Another web service this app calls to checks for services we offer, allowing us to offer new services through the program without having to do an application update.

And of course it then sends jobs that are ready for processing to a 3rd web service which interacts with a web form for final order options, loading everything into our nice Order Processing database.

That's the 'so far' for me. It's been a haggard, yet productive, summer here. This fall I will INTENTLY be reshaping our project workflow, and hopefully learning nUnit and other testing procedures.

Keep the comments coming. I can post more information about how I accomplished these tasks for anyone who needs help.

1000 views and growing!!!

Okay, so I've gotten over 1000 views. That means people are reading me, but I'm not getting comments. Either I've said it all... or I'm boring. So I'm looking for content. What do you want to know, what can I put here. What would make my site a 'have to read'.

In the mean time, I'm going to continue to put up interesting articles I see that help people program.

I get the CodeProject newsletters. Often I'm not to interested... I just breeze through them. But I wanted to read these articles. Especially this one. I'm trying to do better with my patterns and practices.

I know my process is poor, and I'm hoping that through this fall and early winter, when we are supposed to have no new projects, I can revamp the way we do projects, from planning to tracking on up. I want to explore unit testing, and any other testing procedures that would fit our business.

Hopefully I'll gather some more terminology, so that when I go onto a newsgroup (which I also hope will be less) people will know what I'm trying to say.

PS. On the note of content, maybe I'll do some cartoons. Rory's are pretty good attention getters.

1000 views!!!

I made 1000 views! I guess some people are reading my blog! I have a question. What do you folks use to view my weblog?

I hate IIS sometimes

I have IIS5 on Win 2k. I want to access a page via HTTPS, but get a 404 error ('Resource not found' through ASP.Net)

ARGGG!!!

Questions, comments, criticisms...

K, so I haven't gotten a lot of action on my blog lately. What do you, the readers want? What do you look for in a weblog? I want to put code related stuff up, as well as what's going on in my life. Let me know, post comments to this post and tell me what I need to do to improve.

Even if I've offended you, the reader, let me know.

Clean Energy?

Could it be that the Nuclear reactors we now use were simply the quickest alternative? Sounds like the rule of 'Not just getting it done' could apply here. Check out this article on China's energy plans.

Where have all the bloggers gone?

I've noticed lately that many of the bloggers I look at, including those I link to, have slowed down in there posting. I myself haven't been posting that often. I guess it could be a sign that we're all busy. Or maybe our lives are so boring that we have nothing interesting to right.

But I can gripe. What's with STUPID ADVERTISING!!! Take the Sealy commercials we have now. Guy wakes up, 'Where am I', yadda yadda, he thinks he's in heaven... It was dumb enough when it wasted time on TV! (I only have 8 channels with my antennae.) But now they have it on the radio. And how many New Englanders actually like hearing Bob's voice!!! If you don't know Bob, be glad.

Why do advertisers think they will get my hard earned dollar by insulting my intelligence. You know, some channels have tried wide screen programming. That leaves blank space at the top and bottom of the picture. Doesn't bother me too much, even though I have a regular set. Why not put ads there? With NO SOUND!!! That way I can ignore them in peace.