To Whom It May Concern...

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 i...

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, w...

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 new...

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 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!!!

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.

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.

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 a...

Wired! offers us this article about playing games for money. Now, it's not a lot of money, but it's playing games for a living...

The task: 1) Update your company's winform application to resolve data entry issues and to implement image thumbnails so that images can be linked with data. Migrate from a jet based database system to and msde based system. Create a new install application that will create an MSDE instance and allow for networked communications at your customer's locations. Create auto-update feature that will allow for database updates as well as application modifications. 2) Add features to the web site your company hosts for it's 3rd party customers so that said 3rd parties can place more complex orders with multiple pricing models. Create an OrderProcessing database to accept these more complex orders. Allow the site to have the apperance of your customer's website so that their customers do notice a great difference in look and feel. 3) Enhance the web site your customers use for there various functions to also use the new OrderProcessing database (instead of Access/Jet), s...

Yea, I know, games aren't everything. But sometimes you just wanna have a little challenge to the cerebral cortex that involves non stressful, un-important stuff. In an effort to provide this for you, I have provided a couple of links to some online multiplayer games. Kigns of Chaos is a pretty good, text based, knights and swords kind of RPG. Ferion Is a little different. It's a space based, some graphical interfaces, and a lot of thought. I like it, cause you can take it at your own pace, if you have to leave it for a while, you'll be okay, or you can be in there more often if you'ld like. Take a look. If you use the links on my page I'll get points, so please do.

Why is this such a popular topic? Cause everybody makes exceptions. It's a polite way of saying you made a mistake, you didn't plan for something. It could be as basic as not validating data entry. It could be you never figured somebody would score 50million on your game... Whatever the case, here is another clear breakdown of exceptions and what they mean. I like it cause it mentions System.SystemException, which I hadn't looked into too much. Check out Eli Robillard's site here. Also from Eli's site, I saw this interesting post . It talks about the nefarious SQL Injection fear, mentioning 'Use Parameters' as well as Regex (Regular Expression) techniques to clense your code. I haven't used Regex yet, but after this article, I think I will. I also liked how he made a simple class to parse illegal characters from strings that may be entered manually. A link on his site also mentioned Request Validation , a feature in ASP.Net 1.1 that has been sa...

Gotta buy this! A DVD Rewinder

There are by some estimates more than a million weblogs. But most of them get no visibility in search engines. Only a few "A-List" blogs get into the top search engine results for a given topic, while the majority of blogs just don't get noticed. The reason is that the smaller blogs don't have enough links pointing to them. But this posting could solve that. Let's help the smaller blogs get more visibility! This posting is GoMeme 4.0 . It is part of an experiment to see if we can create a blog posting that helps 1000's of blogs get higher rankings in Google. So far we have tried 3 earlier variations. Our first test, GoMeme 1.0 , spread to nearly 740 blogs in 2.5 days. This new version 4.0 is shorter, simpler, and fits more easily into your blog. Why are we doing this? We want to help thousands of blogs get more visibility in Google and other search engines. How does it work? Just follow the instructions below to re-post this meme in your blog and add yo...

If you can't see Rotate Clockwise or Rotate Counter Clockwise when you right click on a thumbnail in Windows Explorer, try this: regsvr32 shimgvw I'm posting it here so that it will be out in the world for me and others to find.

Beware of YourGiftCards.com . I accepted an offer of a 'free' $50 dollar gift card for ordering and Entertainment book. The entertainment book cost $15 and has already saved us about $50. So, although I don't usually try these offers, I knew this was something I wanted to order, so why not try to get a free gift card. I ordered my book in April, and received it in less than 2 weeks. Now in August, 3 months later, I still don't have my gift card. In an e-mail I received 1 week ago today, they claim to have received all the necessary correspondence from me, yet still have not shipped my Gift Card. I have had to go through mumbled requirements, even mailing THEM a printed out form. Some offers out their are legit. But there are too many out there like this company.

UPDATE BELOW A post by Rory Blyth reminded me of the days of doors. He mentioned, and even posted a screen shot of, LoRD (Legend of the Red Dragon), an old BBS door. (Basically an online role playing game before the internet.) I found an interview with Seth A. Robinson (aka. Seth Able) . He created LoRD and a couple of other BBS doors. I then found his site . Looks like he's been a busy fella for only 28 years old. I am wondering if he's gotten into .Net (I know he's done some Pocket PC and DirectX stuff) and if so, could Rory and Carl talk with him and maybe do a show about game development? >> Here is the reply I got from Seth. Wow, he wrote me back! >> I’ve never used C#. I’ve only used VB on a view projects, I’m not great with it. C++ is my fave! Thanks, Seth A. Robinson www.rtsoft.com

Check out this Shark Tank Wedding .

This post will have a little for everybody, so I hope you all stay tuned. First of all, it looks like there is a column for new to .Net programmers that is also trying to focus on new programmers in general. This is great, and since I want to focus on that too, I'll be keeping a close tab on it. Here's the first article, Introducing The First Hit! . Here the author, F. Scott Barker takes a look at the all important choice of which language. I use VB, and there is some controversy about it, but don't worry. You may find yourself switching back and forth for a while, depending on your project and what tutorials are available for what you want. The nice thing is, with .Net, language is simply a difference in syntax. What will you feel comfortable with. Now, for those who've been in .Net for a while, I'm looking for your thoughts... ADO.Net. Do you use Typed DataSets, or non-typed? Do you bind a DataAdapter to a table and let fly with a CommandBuilder? O...

This is my current Shopping Cart table: Notice, it's a master/detail kind of list. One image, with multiple Print products. I would like to have a way to remove individual line items, instead of all items for the image. SQL wise it's easy. ASP.Net, not so. I have no idea how to get events from the detail grid. Any ideas? I would break out the line items into their own grid, but then I'd have no way to line the photo up. It would end up something like this: Photo Product Price 0001 75 - 4x8 Greeting Cards $99.99 0001 2 - 3x5 $24.00 I don't want/need the photo being listed over and over again.