Category Archives: Uncategorized

ASP.Net roadshow review

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Last night, I went to the NYC presentation of the Asp.Net Roadshow event. Overall the presentation was worth seeing.  Not to mention the freebees… they gave out pizza, soda, and a bag of goodies.  The bag of goodies contained a bunch of cds and promotional wares from various companies.  But the more useful thing that they gave was the ASP.NET Coding Strategies with the Microsoft ASP.NET Team book. 

The first part (30 minutes) was a basic presentation describing the differences between classic asp and asp.net.  Rob went over a server controls, etc just generally.  This part was for those in the audience that have not switched/upgraded to asp.net.  He mentioned that there is a 30%-40% performance gain just by strong typing variables in scripts.  Also, he showed a graph for the number of page views per second… Asp.Net not only scaled almost linearly, it was about 3 times higher than classic asp.  The huge increase is mainly due to the code being compiled rather all script based.

The second part (30-45 minutes) was titled Tips and Tricks.  Basically Rob went through various things that you can accomplish with Asp.Net.  Some of the things that he demonstrated was generating dynamic images, file upload capabilities, displaying an interim page for long processes (Orbitz as an example), and a touch on a Sql injection example.

The third part was the food… it happened to be the part that I was looking forward to the most at this point.  The organization was horrible, but the amount of pizza was impressive.  They had enough pizza for each person to have 2-4 pieces.  They also provided all of the soda that you could enjoy.  Though, one thing struck me as sort of odd… I heard one lady ask if they had any bottled water and get no for a reply.  They only had soda.

The fourth part (30-45 minutes) was all about security.  A lot of this was general security information not related directly with asp.net.  He went through examples of Sql injection and cross-site script attacks.  Rob specifically brought up points on how Asp.Net is helping to reduce these types of attacks, but got the point across that it is up to the developer to be aware these things…

The fifth part was all about Whidbey.  Rob mentioned that he had been using Whidbey bits for his examples.  Having seen Vs.Net 7.0 and 7.1, I realized that he was using it, due to all of the intellisense and other visual happiness going on.  He showed off some of the wizards that will ship with Whidbey and I must say that they’ll be a nice addition to the tool.  Another main point is that it’ll be shipping with Cassini, a Web Server written in managed code.  The cool part of that feature is that developers will no longer need to have IIS installed to work on web projects.  Also, another really cool feature that’ll be a part of Asp.Net 2.0 is the addition of datastores to the outputcache.  This will dramatically reduce the amount of time for requests to databases.

Art and Fear

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I came across this post through a couple other linkers… Anyway, Kevin Kelly reviewed the book Art & Fear:Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking and posted an excerpt from it.  I thought it was worth distributing:

 “The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality,” however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

Ads in dreams?

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Last night/this morning, I had what I would depict as the closest thing I could have to an ad in dream world.  It was about a brand of self-help type books: 

There was a family sitting around a table (girl on the far end, boy underneath, and mother off to the right.  They were all going through books on all subjects (cooking books, etc) when all of a sudden they started hiding books under the table.  I’m not sure if they were trying to conceal the number of books or what, but basically the boy stashed some of the other books within the one that he was reading.  Anyway, at that point, the father figure walked in with some more books in shopping bags.  He said something along the lines of “Guess what I have…”  They all knew the brand of the book, and low and behold… what he took out of the bags were more books. 

I just hope that this isn’t foreshadowing the future.

Politics in non-corporate environments make the world a slower place

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I suppose I should have been aware of how SLOW things can move in the non-corporate world.  A while ago, I wrote about an idea that I had for school kids.  Since I’m lazy, I’ll just post the original email and the response that I just received.  Notice the over one month delay from the date of my original email?

Mr. Geurts,

Thank you for your explanation and clarification.  We continue to look for ways to not only deliver our curriculum, but to do so in a way that is effective and motivating to students.  Your suggestion is a delivery method we may consider at a later time.

During this academic year, the district will be conducting  a limited number of student e-mail pilot projects following a district approved application, documentation, and evaluation process.  Classroom teachers, like your mother, are eligible to participate in one of these pilot projects. Teachers interested in participating should contact their school’s Technology Coordinator to receive the application form.

I’ll copy the appropriate Curriculum and Technology Departments’ staff on my reply to you so that they will be informed about your proposal.

Thanks again for your clarification.

Jim Bowen

*******************************************************
James M. Bowen
District Library Media/Audiovisual Coordinator Green Bay Area Public Schools 200 South Broadway Green Bay, WI 54303
Telephone: (***) ***-*****
Fax: (***) ***-****
E-mail: ******@greenbay.k12.wi.us
*******************************************************

>>> "James Geurts" <jim@biacreations.com> 12/11/03 09:33PM >>>

Hi Mr. Bowen,

It appears as though my idea was mistranslated from my original description, to the description that you received from my Mom (Jane Geurts).  What I envision for the kids to use is a closed chat program.  I’ll explain what I mean about closed chat program further in the email.  They could use this program (along side the existing typing books, if necessary) as a way to speed up their typing.  It can be used for education, as they could each research a topic and then tell each person (via the chat software) about what they researched.  If helpful, you could even place those little dots over the keys, so that the students are somewhat forced to memorize key position.  By chatting, in my personal experience, you learn where the letters are for common words and build a memory of the key locations based on that.  Similar to the repetition illustrated in the learning to type books, the kids would get their repetition of letters by typing out words.

Since they would be chatting about a research topic, this would allow the students the opportunity to use unique words and, ultimately, utilize the lesser used keys.

If I’m correct, Preble High School and possibly other schools in the district offer Microsoft certification.  Because of this, students in those classes could write this chat software, possibly as an extra credit project.

The software is trivial to program and Microsoft offers related examples in some of their courseware.  Also, students focused more on security could audit the software, to make sure that it is secure.  This would give a useful "real world" experience to those students in the high school certification programs while at the same time, providing the district with free, useful software.

Now, to answer some of the concerns that you brought up:

I am currently not in a school district.  I recently graduated from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.  I am currently living in Maryland and am the president of a computer consulting firm.

To handle privacy concerns, the students developing the chat software could implement several security features:

  1.  The author(s) of the software could encrypt the traffic sent to and from each chat client. 

  2.  The author(s) of the software could implement a "master chat server" that the instructor would operate.  The instructor would then be sent all posts by the students and approve each post individually.  Only approved posts would then be displayed to all of the chat clients.

  3.  The author(s) of the software could implement an automatic text scan that would replace words not appropriate for school use with alternate words, or remove them outright.

Along with that, the chat software could be written to use a certain designated port number for communication.  The school network administrator would then block this port from accessing the outside network and block any incoming requests to that port.  That way, the traffic pertaining to this chat software would be confined to each lab individually.  This is what I mean by a closed chat program.

I have only touched on a few of the security options available, but this would alleviate some internal and any external threats to the students.

The amount of network traffic increase would not be of worry.  Since the network traffic from this chat software would be confined to the lab, there would be no apparent increase in network traffic on the WAN.  LANs, in general, are designed to handle higher amounts of network bandwidth than their WAN connection, so the amount of increased network traffic on the LAN would be minor and would probably not be noticeable.

If you have any other questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Thanks

James Geurts

Upgrade

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I upgraded the website to .Text version .95 tonight.  The upgrade was pretty painless and it has some really nice improvements including the support for categories from my Newsgator plug-in.  Due to demand, I’m going to add a feature to the plug-in to query the blog site(s) for categories at post time.  If you notice any problems with this website, please let me know.

In other news though, I had a pretty good break.  I managed to visit Detroit, Saginaw, Green Bay, Milwaukee, New York (Manhattan), and finished up in Baltimore.  Many stories to tell about that trip, but some I should probably leave to myself.  Somewhere in there, I made it to a kick ass bachelor party.  I want to thank my Bro for that!  One unfortunate thing that happened while I was gone was that the website went down for about 4 days.  This was due to the cable modem being reset and my server not grabbing the IP address correctly.  A quick reboot fixed all of that, though.

Glass blowing

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I’ve been interested in blowing some glass recently.  So, I set about finding how to tackle this (soon to be hobby?) task.  I came across The Washington Glass School first.  It wasn’t the easiest to find out about glass studios in the Baltimore/DC area, but I did come up with that one.  They offer affordable classes, but the commute would have sucked.  So, I emailed their generic site email for some more information.  They were kind enough to point me towards Corradetti Studio, here in Baltimore.  

I emailed Corradetti with some general questions on what it takes to get started with blowing glass.  They offer classes (workshops), also.  So, their class setup is based on about 4-5 people working with 2 instructors.  Basically, it is a two day course held on specific weekends.  They have a schedule of specific openings.  The prices were not very bad, at $350 per person.  This price includes all materials and tools, so you basically just need to show up.  The second point that I was curious about was that once I start getting the hang of what to do, are there open studios or walk-in type availabilities?  To cater to that type of visit, they offer renting the studio.  Their price is reasonable at $250 whole day / $125 half day.  You can also work with a private instructor for an additional $20/hour. 

So, it looks like blowing glass is not an impossible task, and it’s nice to know that it is offered without having to go to school for it.  If you do happen to go to Corradetti studios, it’d be cool to let them know that I helped you find their business 🙂

Update: I attended the 2 day weekend course.  If you’re interested you can see what went on for day 1 and day 2

Damn squirrel dreams…

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I found myself bashing a picture in my room last night, around 3am.  Apparently, I was dreaming that a squirrel was hanging out on the picture.  I guess I felt the need to take my pillow and hit the picture as hard as I could, a couple times.  Heh… they joys of acting out my dreams.  Anyway, I figured this should be mentioned as it might bring a smile to someone’s face.

Depressed again

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Weird… I’m feeling pretty depressed again.  It’s really weird how this seems to go in waves.  I’m going to keep writing about when I feel very depressed, to try to figure out a couple things.  One, if it has a cycle like, ahem, someone that I’m living is on.   Or if it has a specific day that it always seems to land on.  Currently, that day seems to be Sunday.  Anyway, I could somewhat notice that it was creeping into my life a little last night.  I went out with a couple friends and really didn’t feel like drinking.  So, I just people watched at the club that we were at.  I didn’t have a shitty time, but at the same time, I didn’t have a blast either.  I do have to admit that the place that we went ranks up there on decent places to go around here. 

So, back to the madness… I think part of the reason that I felt weird last night and somewhat today, is that I’ve been hanging around girls primarily.  It sounds like it is cool and all, but they’re fucking stupid sometimes.  Too often, I caught myself analyzing their behavior throughout the night.  All I have to say is fuck any girl who criticizes their “other” for looking at or acknowledging other girls in the room… Maybe it has just been the girls that I’ve been hanging out with, but they hit on other guys, wear clothes to specifically get notice, and try all sorts of shit just to get attention.  So apparently, attention is the universal weakness of a girl, I guess.  To then witness the fragility that is the girl’s state of mind, suck the girl into the role that they are trying to put on for that night.  I think that’s how some girls get “hurt” by one night stands, etc.  They don’t realize that it is all brought on by themselves and a guy is just a pawn playing the hand dealt.  Now don’t get me wrong, I know some guys are smooth as shit, and can talk girls into doing most anything, but I think that 9 times out of 10, girls are asking for what is coming.   I find it somewhat interesting, the lines at which girls draw… How they don’t acknowledge someone over here, but hang on this other person.  I won’t even get into their view on looks or “it’s not the looks that count, it’s what is underneath.”  Yeah… keep smoking that crack.  I think a combination of all of this has really made me sick of the bar scene and just VERY frustrated with the whole dating system… It would be so nice to be able to weed out all girls that play little games like that.  

So anyway, I’m going to say that the catalyst for my depression has been my recent analytic behavioral observations.  (heh, maybe I should’ve been a psych major)

As a side note, I have to admit that the girls have been really cool to hang out with… Once you take away all of those fucked up games.

School kids should chat

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I’m sure I’ve talked about this before, but I’ll bring it up in case I haven’t… I think that school kids should be chatting… at least for learning how to type.  What better way to find out where the keys are, and how to speed up your typing skills?  For me, when I was learning how to type, chatting was the thing that frustrated me the most.  I felt as though I was taking forever to answer the person that I was chatting with.  And it was more than the 2400 baud modem that I was using.  It’s surprising, but it wasn’t the modem that slowed me down.  It was my inability to just “know” where the keys were.  Well, after a year or so of random chatting, I found that I wasn’t frustrated anymore.  I could type by thinking the word, rather than thinking the letters that make up the word.  I just think that something like this is needed in the classroom area. 

I was telling my Mom about this, tonight.  I got her started to try to see if a local high school would write her a chat application.  Since the high school certifies kids as Microsoft certified, I think it would be a trivial project for a class/kid to do.  Then, she could get that kid to install it on her computer network at her grade school (she teaches 4th grade).  So, once the chat application is installed, she gives the kids a topic to talk about for the day.  They then could use the computers/resources in any way that they want, to Google about the topic or whatever.  So, then throughout her “typing” class, they would then silently tell each other about what they learned… asking questions amongst each other, etc.   I do think that the chat application should be limited to that room though, so that they can’t go out and get into internet chat in rooms, etc… That way, it would remain “safe” in the parents’ eyes.