Microsoft Certification preparation

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I have decided that I will get Microsoft certified at some point this year.  I’ve just come to the decision that it won’t hurt me to have certification(s) under my belt.  Ideally, I am going to go for my MCSD, but I’ll start off and see how it goes…


This is an initial roadmap of where I plan to go:



I think that the first three exams should go pretty smoothly.  I should only need to brush up on a few areas that I’ve just briefly touched in the past.  The last two exams might be more difficult, but I have done those tasks in the past.  If anyone has any tips/study resources, I’m all ears… Otherwise, I just plan to study on my own using some (free) web resources. 

First days at e.magination

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This week been pretty busy for me so far; I started my new job with e.magination and have been trying to have a social life, also.  e.magination has done a great job so far with making me feel comfortable in my new surroundings.  The people who I work with are very outgoing and friendly, but on of the huge bonuses that I do enjoy is that I’m not sitting in a cube.  I sit in a large room that has a series of big wooden desks; it’s pretty hard to explain so I sort of “sketched” the layout below.   Each ‘o’ represent where a person sits.  There are two of these giant wooden desk structures in the open area where I work.  Anyway, it’s quite nice, since I can just pop my head up and talk to the people around me.  Also, a the people around me are not developers, so it’s somewhat easy to get into “normal“ conversations with them… I think I prefer this over being surrounded by developers.  If I ever need to speak with a fellow developer, they’re not far away…


 


My first day started out with introductions to various people around the company, and just getting setup with internal systems, etc.  I was taken to lunch by my boss, which was an added bonus.  The introductions, etc lasted about 2 hours after which I was presented with some tasks to accomplish.  I have since been working on those tasks and am somewhat surprised by how I “was thrown into“/“jumped into“ all of this work so soon.  Tuesday started off with a meeting with the company COO.  He basically went through a company overview and general business direction and ideas.  So before I keep going on and on, I’m going to get back to my third day.


 


 


Desk structure


——-|——-


     o | o


       |


       |


     o | o


——-|——-


     o | o


       |


       |


     o | o


——-|——-


     o | o


       |


       |


     o | o


——-|——-

Some recent dream activity

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I had a strange dream last night/this morning.  I feel as though the premise has been touched by other dreams in my past, but I can’t remember when, though.  Anyway, it started that I was coming out of something dark.  I was “driving/moving” along a VERY high highway.  I remember being able to look over the edge of the highway & see below.  There were hot air balloons or parachuters (not sure which) floating down towards an island.  The island was big with buildings & a fair, but I had quite a bird’s eye view, so I was able to see most of it.  At the time, I knew the name of the island, but it escapes me now.  I’m pretty sure that it was near New York, though, and I might have called it Ellis Island for some reason.


 


The next thing that I knew, I was in the fair.  I was walking around it with some people (again their identities escape me now) and I ended up in a couple of the carnie “rides/buildings.”  Unfortunately, that is about it, but if more comes to me, I’ll write about it.


 


Also, there was a little blurb of a dream that I had yesterday.  I was sitting in the passenger seat of my friends (Kyle?) car, while he was driving on a highway at night.  All of a sudden there was a person (face unrecognizable) standing in the middle of the road, but the driver did not swerve.  At that point, I remember grabbing the wheel of the car and trying unsuccessfully to turn out of the way.  It got pretty graphic at that point, as the car hit the person standing in the road, and their head popped off and hit the window by me.  At that point, I woke up somewhat confused…

Babble babble…

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Cameron brings up a question about if kids blog or not.  I was sort of thinking along these lines for a little while and I suppose I should write something down.  The difference is that I was thinking that when I was younger, I never saw myself keeping a journal or diary.  I guess that plan sort of fell by the wayside, but I think the biggest impact that made me go ahead with a blog is that I don’t have to physically write.  I’m far more comfortable as and a much quicker typist, than I am a writer.  That and the readability (I tend to write like a doctor most times) allows me go back and read over some of the articles from time to time.  Not to mention that Cut/Copy/Paste is so much cleaner than eraser marks or strike through.  I do, however, enjoy knowing that my current thoughts are written down, rather than just fading into the ever re-structuring of my persona.  It’ll make for excellent reading in 10-20 years, I imagine.

I find it somewhat strange that people tend to keep diaries private (locked even) while on the other hand, blogs are kept quite open.  I think that people have a sense of privacy with blogs due to getting lost in the sea of web pages.  Because bloggers don’t necessarily see their readers on a normal basis, if ever, I don’t think that they mind that their “audience” reads personal details.  The other subtle benefit of blogs is that the people who read the blog might have a better understanding of the writer’s personality/history than some of the writer’s better friends.  So if a blog reader ever meets a blogger, they would know what to expect.  I find it somewhat similar to a musician getting on stage for the first time.  The first few times are coupled with feelings of nervousness and self-consciousness, but it gets easier with each appearance.  After a while, it becomes fun.

This brings up some interesting situations if a blog “fan” meets the blog writer.  One is that the reader could bring up personal instances of that bloggers life, and just start probing into details about those situations right away.  It would strike me as somewhat weird to have pretty much a stranger asking me personal questions… Maybe this is similar to what celebs have to deal with.  The other situation is that you could cut through all of the BS associated with getting to know someone, and just get on with a typical conversation as if long time friends.

Observations while on the road

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I found a couple other things out last night.  The first one is that there are no self-serve gasoline stations in New Jersey.  It is all full-serve.  While that might not come as a shock to some, it did to me.  Others might wonder why I prefer self-serve and I do for two reasons.  The first is that I was much quicker at figuring out the complex pump (heh…push the button for the fuel grade.  Whew, that’s hard) and getting gas into my car, than the amount of time that it took for the attendant to come over.  By the time the attendant came over, my tank was full and I was ready to pay them.  The second reason that I like self-serve is that I don’t “top off” my tank.  I think it’s pointless… why would I risk having the little bit of gas that I can fit in my tank get gobbled up by the nozzle, when that amount of gas really wont matter when I make my next stop.

The other thing that I wanted to comment on has to do with geeks and soda.  I’m guessing that Microsoft has a deal with Coca Cola because they only served Coke products.  They had diet Coke, Coke, and Sprite.  No more, no less…  The thing that made me curious was how many people actually prefer those products over say… Mountain Dew or even water.  I was always under the assumption that geeks preferred Mt. Dew, but maybe I’m a bit biased… I do not like Coke and would not have grabbed a bottle last night had there been another free choice for a caffeine supply.  Personally, I’m a water man… if I must; I’ll have Mt. Dew or root beer if looking for some flavor.

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.