ugh, traffic

File this under ideas. This is one I have had for a few years. This came to me when I was living in the Dallas area, where traffic was a more apparent problem then here in rural Connecticut. I've been back in CT for a few years and still don't see this product, though I have seen some strides in the arena, just not in this direction

So what is it you ask? It's really more of a suite/service. Why can't my alarm go off 15 minutes earlier if there is a traffic jam? Why doesn't my computer know which way I should go to work today to avoid traffic, and give me an outlook reminder at work that the highway is backed up and my daughter is going on in the school play in 15 minutes across town (note, specifically for family, that daughter is FICTICIOUS...)

Traffic is a huge part of many peoples lives. Even in rural CT I find myself looking for more reliable ways to know what I'm going to see on the way home. Why don't we know what the traffic is all the time, just like the weather. I know some GPS packages are now taking traffic into consideration, but that's still reactive.

I want proactive traffic. The system knows where I live and work, so that part is easy. Link it to outlook and then get me to appointments on time. Link it to my mobile phone and tell me that I won't make it to Aunty Bertha's on time if I don't leave the mall right now.

Hey, I never said they would be good ideas. Just ideas.

Gimme my network back

It was Thursday night, and things were pretty normal. I was on the couch with the laptop doing this or that, and I was going to termserv into one of the boxes in my office. DNS error. Hmmm.. But I was just on that box a few minutes ago, and I'm on the internet on the laptop, so what gives. Oh hey, I'm on "linksys", not my wireless.

I'm guessing one of my neighbors just got a shiny new linksys, and as far as I can tell it's closer to my couch then my office is, since I can't even see my network anymore. No biggie. I knew my Netgear wireless was a bit weak, and I have a fresh new WRT54G waiting to be configured. I'll do that this weekend. Until then, thanks for the cable speeds.

Saturday, and it's time to get back my network. I break out the linksys, install the Sveasoft beta, and things are looking good. I boost up the signal a little bit and go find the laptop to connect to my new superpower wifi. Hmm.. Where's my network? NetStumbler tells me it's there, but still much weaker then my neighbors linksys. Maybe I need to move it around a bit. I bet if I balance it on this stack of boxes and books, right by the door, and don't walk by too fast I'll get a good connection. Yeah that's what I'm talking about, 10 minutes of good solid connection. Score one for me.

After using my neighbors linksys, and netstumbler, I was able to try a number of settings and placements. It's odd that I'm using their router, hoping to bring it to it's knees with my v83r1337 tech skills and super hackable router. Alas, my efforts fail. Their signal is just too powerful for me to keep a connection. Maybe one of these cool homemade antennas could help. With my superior craftsmanship (1), and quality supplies (2), I yield a an apparatus only fit for NASA. Although my slightly crumpled foil was only partially ripped, I still only saw a decline in my signal. Maybe I should purchase something.

Sunday, and it's time to get back my network. After browsing the Sunday ad's on said linksys network, I realize Compusa has a hawking technology antenna on sale for 5$ (after rebate), and they open early. Sweet. By 10:00 I was back with an iced coffee and my new network savior. By 10:30 I had seen a significant jump in signal strength, and was connected to my network again. By 11:00 I was ready to throw my coffee at my stack of routers, again connected to linksys. Maybe if I balance the antenna on some empty bottles and that shoe I could get a better signal. Yeah, its better, just not better enough. But wait, every time I move the antenna, my signal is fantastic. Maybe I could commission an intern from UConn for a study on wifi signals in the home, and adoption in suburban America. S/He could hold my antenna.

Now, and it's time to get back on my network. Oh who the hell am I kidding. I don't know exactly what I'm going to do yet, short of setting up a VPN, and hoping my neighbor never hears about wep. I am getting used to the cable speeds, though. Maybe I should use their router for outbound traffic, and my dsl for in.. Guess I should talk to them before doing that ;)

I guess it's on to the technical details. If anyone has any suggestions I'd love to hear them. My old router was on channel 10 and I always had good luck. They moved in on channel 6 and took over. Now when I try any of my routers on any channel but 6, I get a horribly low signal, or really high noise. When I am on 6, I can connect for about 20 minutes to an hour, then my card loses connection and moves over to the linksys network, where of course its rock solid. My signal to noise ratio is ranges from about 40-45, where linksys ranges between 55-60. I use an orinoco minipci card, which never really gave me any problems. I also use win2k3 to manage the connection, but tried to install some custom orinioco (now proxim) utils, but they didn't find my card.

Sit tight network, I'll be back soon.

(1) Craftsman? Heh. (2) An old box from a cordless phone, some aluminum foil, and scotch tape.

Dotnet rocks 100th!

Carl and the gang at .net rocks released their 100th show this week, so be sure to go grab it. Just finished listening to it on the way into work (It's a long show this week), and it's a fantastic show. It's a good mix of old clips, new material, and kind words from the community. I laughed, I cried, and now I can't get Rory's burning man song out of my head. (and people are looking at me funny)

Bittersweet news from this weeks show also. Due to scheduling conflicts, Rory won't be able to co-host anymore. Rory has contributed alot to the show, and it's been a fantastic ride (BTW, I was the monocle and unicycle guy :). On the other hand, Richard Campbell will be filling his shoes, and I'm sure he will help carry dot net rocks through at least the next 50 shows. Congrats Richard, and I know I will be listening.

Happy birthday Delphi!

Everything comes from (T)Object. Datasets. OO wrappers around win32.

No I'm not talking about .net. This is all delphi baby. Of course the dataset wasn't nearly the same thing, but there was the notion of an extra layer of abstraction in delphi. I still say delphi was a baby .net, and since alot of .net came from the magnificent Anders Hejlsberg, I'm sure some of the concepts carried over.

I started on delphi, and have always had fond memories of it. I haven't used it in many years now, but I still remember the days of forward declarations, var :=, and begin/end.

Noticed the birthday boy at Knowing .NET.

Channel9 in my pocket

The main reason I got an mp3 player was to listen to podcasts. When I saw the h320 could be upgraded to play videos, I was excited, but didn't see alot of uses. I played with it here and there, but really the video's have just sat there.

I was poking around the misticriver.net forums this weekend, and saw this post about converting wmv to divx, and just had to try it. I quickly snagged a channel9 video, and had it on my h320 in a matter of about 15 minutes. Very cool.

So now I've been grabbing all the back video's from channel9 I never got a chance to watch to throw them on the device. Then, I saw this post from Joe Stagner about downloading the msdn webcasts. Got another project, but just think of all the nerd goodness I'll have in my pocket after I get some of those.

With all this nerd goodness, though, I may have to start deleting music soon. So, if the device only has webcasts and podcasts, think its a tax deduction? ;)

Simpsons' Valentine

My wife and I are huge fans of the Simpsons. It's really more of an addiction. We have gotten particularly bad in the past year or so snarfing up all the Simpsons' memorabilia we can find. It's also amazing how any vendor that sells Simpsons' merchandise must use the same orange and red theme.

So, when I saw someone put together the old Simpsons' valentines in eps, I was siked. I couldn't blog about it until I actually gave her the card though :)

So yesterday morning I snuck out to staples, and got it printed on card stock. Thanks to the fine people at staples for helping me out with this, and providing razor blades, glue, etc. In and out in 30 minutes with my custom card.

Get your Simpsons' card here. Maybe too late for this year, but it'll still be a hit next year.

MSDN in Rocky Hill this week

Don't forget, there is an MSDN event this week in Rocky Hill. Sessions are :

WinForms : Produce, Extend, Enhance

ASP.Net : Fixing that last bug in your web app

Visual Studio Team System : A technical tour

I'm most looking forward to the Team System intro, but the forensics session on asp.net piqued my interest too. See ya there! Link

vslive audio content

Besides all the videos coming out of this years vslive, there is also a small section of audio interviews from the conference.

The problem is they don't allow downloads of the content. Damnit. Why not just publish mp3's so people could listen at their leisure?

Good thing the h320 records well. I'll snag these today and listen this week.

CT .net developers group happenings

Big things are happening in our little state.  As noted over on SBC DotNet Weblog, the CT .net developers group has launched a new site!  Check it out here. 

Even better then the new site, Feb 22nd Christopher Bowen, Senior Architect for Monster.com will be coming to speak on Agile Development with Visual Studio 2005.  Like there could be much of a better reason to brave the cold.

Jeff Albertson

aka : comic book guy

Moved old .text articles to new wiki

In an attempt to move towards my ideal personal publishing portal, I have setup a wiki and moved my articles from .text to a new site, CategoryArticles

In the past when I setup a wiki, I didn't put any thought into it, and installed flexwiki. This time, though, I took some time and did some research, and ended up going with Wikka Wiki. Of course this decision had to come just 1 day after I cleansed my system of mysql and activeperl from my abandoned MovableType blog. Oh well. After a couple more hours of struggling with PHP and MySql, the wiki was up and going.

I choose Wikka because I really liked how it works compared to flexwiki, plus it has built in FreeMind integration, which I just found phenomenally cool. Wikka itself was very easy to setup, and just as quick to get up to speed using it. I'm also a big fan of how it handles security per page, basically keeping a separate ACL for each page where you can specify who can see, edit, and comment on the page.

I think the future direction will be to publish more and more to the wiki, and probably have blog categories that correspond to wiki pages. For example, iceip will probably get a new category, and a new blog category (probably needs a re-write more then this :). The wiki will act as the homepage, with the category as the feed. I'll do the same for DotText2DasBlog, and anything coming up in the future. Seems like a very logical way to organize my online content.

Which brings me to the subject of tags. There will be a lot more coming out of me in the way of tags moving forward. I read this article about TagWebs, and I don't know what it is about that article, but it really got me thinking about tags. Expect to see this blog start exposing explicit technorati tags (since I don't think categories as tags is good enough), and maybe the wiki will expose some tags. Call me crazy, but after a few multi hour DeliciousTrips, I really see value in tags.

Why tranqy?

Over the years many people have asked me about my nickname, tranqy. The story is rather boring, but at least now I'll have an answer.

The story starts not too long after I got my first IBM pc. I had an amiga before that, but thats another story. I remember that packard bell 486sx33 very well. I was in high school, so I had alot of time on my hands, and a friend of mine (Mike with no blog) introduced me to the BBS world. So, I got hooked pretty quick, and started my online experiance as Turok. For those that don't know, before the video game, Turok was a comic book charachter. That being said, even amongst the BBS folk I got some ridicule for the nick.

Being the self concious person that I am, I went on the hunt for a new nick, and didn't take the task lightly. I mean, this is the identity I might just well have for years. I remember even getting the dictionary invovled for a bit. Finally, it came to me. The nick was cool, and I thought it was a good representation for me. I was happy. Tranquility.

Nice huh? It rolls off the tounge.

I ran with Tranquility for quite a while, but sooner or later my fingers got tired. After a few minutes of contemplation tranqy it became, and has been for.. pause for some math.. 11 years now. Some of my old friends still use it as a nick in person too.

Moral of the story, well, there isn't one.

Now hear this

I usually spend my lunch reading blogs. Today, as I was running through my bloglines, I saw a post from Brady Gaster, what have you heard?

I spent the rest of my lunch answering random questions, and trying to finish reading this, but will tonight. Not to be preachy, but, you should too.

Channel9 IRC channel

Rob Chartier points out there is a new irc channel dedicated to channel9, and even Scoble has stopped by so far. I used to use IRC a lot more when I was coding from home, but now have officially converted to a lurker. When I was just a wee coder, I found it to be an indispensable resource, despite it's sometimes seedy perception. In fact, Rob assisted me quite a bit. Thanks! :)

Rob also points to this thread on channel9, where he plugs a few other irc channels (#mscorlib, #ms.net, #asp.net, #asp) that I also idle in. Check 'em out if you get the chance.

O'reilly's safari

I'm always surprised when I meet a developer or IT professional that doesn't know this site exists, so I figured I would post it up here. O'reilly is one of my favorite publishers, and they also offer an online book service, safari. I have been using safari for a long time (with about a 4 month hiatus when I thought I didn't need it, but boy was I wrong), and continue to love the service. It's a pretty simple service. You pay $x a month for x number of books. Once you subscribe to a book, you have to keep it for 30 days, after that you can drop it at any time or replace it with another book. Although not every tech book is available, there is a huge selection, with some really high quality books. I've found safari a life saver when you need some specific information, but can't get to a book store. I've used it to save my ass a few times, and even now am using it to read up on some CSS and HTML, where I wouldn't buy a book on it since I do so little, but really need the content right now. Highly suggested.

Protecting idle software ideas

I think about technology a lot.  Some would probably argue that I do so too much, but I have a feeling this is a problem that is shared by most of the people in our industry.  Hell, if I didn't think about technology as much, this blog would be even more boring then it already is.

So of course if you think about technology alot, you have ideas.  Some good, some bad.  Throughout the years I've had my share of hairbrained ideas/apps that I thought would be the next big thing, that I forget about 2 days later.  I get very excited (inside) for a few hours, think, think, and think some more, and then get sidetracked which usually wipes out the idea.   This happens alot, like a few times a week.

Last spring I actually tried to help solve this issue by setting up an "idea" portal. I invited a few friends, and for about 2 weeks there was decent dialog about a few ideas.  But much like before, it died, rather quickly (and there are still viable ideas on there).

No matter how much I love the code, at the end of the day I code to make money, as we all do, and I think thats why in the past I have always tried to be secrative about ideas.  Of course my next idea is going to make me a million dollars.  Well, I still don't have my million dollars, but I do have a bunch of half baked ideas that never came to fruition, and probably never will. 

So I figure it might be time to blurt some of them out here to maybe start a dialog in the community.   Out of the hundreds, maybe one will spark a conversation.

Finally, the idea that prompted this post.

I see alot of value in a bliki.  I've posted about this before, and would still love to be running on a blog package that was more of a bliki.  As I continued to think about it, though, a personal bliki is nice for expanding on concepts to myself, but doesn't have the community feel of a wiki.  So the idea expanded a little.

My thoughts where to have a bliki, but that it's not really its own package.  This package could aggregate posts from a number of blogs, and then render the text as being wiki minded.  So take DotText2DasBlog for example.  Say there were other developers on the project, and each of the developers already has a blog.  We could of course setup a blog, and a wiki for the project, and everything would be happy go lucky.

Or, we could each setup a category on our own blog, and then tell the "aggregating blog" to syndicate all of the posts that each of us put in that category, thus giving us a unified view of all the blogs.  Then, when rendering the pages look for CamelCase words and render links for the wiki.  This would allow each of us to conitnue using our own blogs, and seamlessly post to the aggregated blog.  It's kinda like crossposting, but with a pull methodology.

That concludes the first idea.  Maybe I'll dig through the idea portal for another one later this week.

Blog rollover complete

Just finished up moving everything over to the new blog.  The old feed url should redirect now, but you will get some dupes.  The old url forwards to the new url, but all of the old permalinks will stay active at least for now.  Comments are now turned off on .text also. 

I took the shortest path from A to B to make this happen.  To handle the redirects I added an rss.aspx file to .text, and edited the default.aspx to include redirects, and removed the handlers for those two files from the web.config.  I couldn't find a backend way to turn off all the comments, without leaving them visible, so I just set the visibility of the comment submit button, and added some verbiage on the page linking to the new blog. 

The old blog will no longer get updates, but will be up for at least a little bit. 

If you find any issues with the new blog, please drop me a comment. 

Last night's CT .net sig

I went to my first .net sig last night.  Of course I was a little late, and left a little early.  Nothing like good first impressions  :)

Already a fan of Mark Miller, I had pretty high hopes for the talk.  Although I think he had good intentions of speaking to component based development, the whole crowd never let him talk about it.  Of course he had his share of tangent's too, but I think most of the presentation was consumed by the audience oohing and ahhing coderush, and for good reason.  To see what Mark could do with what seemed like almost no typing was amazing. 

Besides Coderush, Mark also spoke alot to context and UI design.  You could tell that he loves usability just by how excited he got talking about it, and some of the concepts he was throwing around were very good, and I will certainly be taking some of his suggestions into consideration next time I have to lay something out.  Man I wish I had his knack for usability.

I had tried to try coderush before, with no luck.  Come to find out, it was something that has since been identified and addressed.  So, last night I installed the coderush trial.  I'm siked.  I can't wait to play with it, and I have some ideas on how to extend it.  Oh, that was the other thing.  Mark was showing us how to extend DxCore which is the free core to CodeRush.  Although I didn't see the end product, it looked like extending coderush was a pretty simple task. 

Anyway, I've rambled on enough.  If your a local I hope to see you at the next SIG, hopefully I'll be a regular now.  If not, then go try coderush if you haven't yet.