December 2005 - Posts
That's right. We're outta here.
My wife and I will be driving and tramping/hiking our way around New Zealand for the next few weeks. Hopefully I will get a chance to post some photos throughout our journey.
Hope you all had a great Christmas and a good break.
One fact about a business of any kind is that it takes incredible amounts of work to build up reputation, and almost nothing to destroy it. Even hurting reputation just a little will shake customer confidence on which sales are based.
As mentioned earlier, I was nominated for an ACE. I was completely not expecting this and am very chuffed about it. Winning stuff is always nice, more so when it is an award.
Part of entering my details so Microsoft can send me the award included a little survey. No problem, I'll fill it out. I got a little disappointed with the professionalism that went into the survey though.
This is the second last question:
Simple testing of the application should have picked this up.
This is the last question:
Ok, this one is not helpful. I am being asked to sign up for something, but I won't know what it is until I sign up. Poor form.
Like all organisations, some things just slip through the cracks. Thankfully, these cracks are not the size of the Grand Canyon.
I got an email yesterday from the domain www.microsoft-ace.com. I have been nominated for an ACE (Award for Customer Excellence) for my contributions to the development of Visual Studio 2005.
As much as I like to think that people listen to what I say and that I had a huge impact on the VS product line, there just isn't that much justification for my head inflating to that size. Regardless, this completely came out of the blue, so much so that I didn't know whether it was an elaborate phishing scam or not.
I was skeptical about the email because I had never heard of Microsoft's ACE program, the website was asking for personal details and it has it's own domain name instead of being under www.microsoft.com, kind of like those domain names that look like http://www.ebaysecure.com/letmephishyou. The Microsoft ACE website looks quite genuine, but a quick Google search found other blogs where people had received the same email and didn't know if it was legit.
I flicked off an email to Quite Frankly A Champion and asked if it was for real. For real it was. He said I was an ACE.
I will accept Microsoft gifts gladly with open arms.
With a title like that, you should be thinking (quite rightly) that this is going to be that little snippet of your life that you will never get back.
Useless thought #1:
The email account at my work breached its limits yesterday. It turns out that I have a limit of 80Mb. When you have to send between 10-20Mb of documents and Visio files each day, there is a lot of email data even with religious deleting of what is no longer needed. How did I know that I was over my limit? That's right, an email. Isn't that a little bit silly? I'm not saying that I have a better solution, but I find it funny that when you are not allowed to (or they just don't want you to) send and receive any more emails, they notify you by email.
This brings a few other funny things to mind.
Useless thought #2:
Having computer manuals on CDs instead of being printed when your computer doesn't work.
Useless thought #3:
Yesterday I was at a meeting where an application monitoring software package was being talked up. Some great ideas, but it always sends shivers up my spine when alerts are sent by email. Does this scream spam to anyone else? Several years ago, I worked in a company that used emails for alerts. One night while everyone was blissfully asleep, one particular program was having issues..... in a loop. In the morning, it was discovered that the email server basically had a DOS attack due to the 90,000 emails sent to an email group of users. From memory, it took the admin two days to rebuild and clean up exchange. Not having learnt from the first experience, I recall the same thing happening later on down the track, although I think that figure was only a mere 75,000 emails.
Hey, it's Friday and I need some giggle in my life. :P
I don't think that I am very easy to please when it comes to products and customer service. It generally takes a lot for me to experience the 'wow' factor.
From a product point of view, the things that I like tend to be really complex (like computers) or look really cool (like a really sweet GUI design or website). I think that what this comes down to is that consumers are expecting more bang for their buck as technology has progressed. As for customer service, I think the 'wow' factor usually can't be found. This isn't always the case, but customer service is seriously flawed in today's commercial world.
Every now and then though, I really get a kick out of simple designs. Take this for example. What a fantastic, yet very simple idea. For me, I think this product is up there with the loop design on power cable plugs so you can loop your finger through the plug rather than pulling on the cord.
Waiting for the next 'wow'...
You must not be human, or at least not a geek human, if you are unaware of the supply problems that Microsoft and the thirsty gaming public is having regarding the new Xbox 360. If you read blogs, you couldn't have missed the billions of blog posts and news articles since November 22nd from desperate US gamers. Since then, I believe the 360 has been just released in Europe and (I think) Asia with the same supply concerns. Not surprisingly, the supply problems seem to be widespread.
This morning, I read yet another post that complains about these issues. Having read a few too many, I don't really care anymore.
For all the gamers complaining about supply, I think you should suck it up and get over it. So you might not get your new Xbox in the next couple of weeks. Heaven forbid, you might not even get it for Christmas. Perhaps, and surely life is not this cruel, you might not get it until late January or February. If you didn't notice, the sarcasm is dripping very rapidly.
How about all these complainers come and live in Australia. The scheduled release date in Australia is March 2nd. Did you get that? It's a cool three and a half months after the US release. Given that supply problems are expected here just the same as everywhere else, most people here probably won't get their new console until May or June.
Still feel like complaining?
I have been developing an RSS aggregator for a while now because I am not happy with any of the apps around. My little project has also meant that I get really good experience developing in VS2005 and SQL2005.
I made a change late last week that the timer used to check for pending feeds was set up to run at the end of a call that loads the user and feed information from the database. The change I made was to have that method run on a different thread so that the UI wasn't tied up waiting for the database that it may or may not be able to connect to. Today, I am noticing that my timer just isn't firing.
I was thinking that the only thing that has changed with regard to the timer is that it is now getting initialised and started from a thread that is not the GUI thread. Why should this matter? Perhaps I am showing a little bit of ignorance here, but it shouldn't matter.
Although the timer is getting fired from a WM_TIMER message on a window rather than a callback, I wouldn't consider the mechanism involved (the windows message queue) to be a UI thing. Even if the windows message queue is considered UI based (as far as threading issues go), the call to set up the timer is the SetTimer API under the hood. Why would this need to be done from the GUI thread?
So with my guesswork in place, I start writing a delegate and associated method. Hang on; there is no Invoke method or InvokeRequired property on the Timer. Now I am thinking that my timer not firing is not to do with it being set up on a non-GUI thread. My reasoning is that surely if the timer was required to be set on the GUI thread, the control would expose this method and property.
With nothing else working after some more playing around, I wrote the delegate and its associated method anyway. I am now calling Invoke and InvokeRequired on the form as a thread reference point. What do you know, now the timer fires?
So now I know that the timer needs to be started from the GUI thread. If I had read the MSDN documentation first, I probably would have come across this:
A Timer is used to raise an event at user-defined intervals. This Windows timer is designed for a single-threaded environment where UI threads are used to perform processing. It requires that the user code have a UI message pump available and always operate from the same thread, or marshal the call onto another thread.
You win some, you lose some.
On a side note, I find it interesting that if you try to do GUI updates from a non-GUI thread, an exception is now thrown under VS2005. A timer being set from a non-GUI thread doesn't have this behavior. It just doesn't do anything. Sneaky huh?
I am not normally a fan of reposting other people's posts. Unless it is something really good, it just adds to the clutter on the internet.
This one was worthy though.
The VSReady business launch was on yesterday. It was a great opportunity to get an overview of VS2005, SQL2005 and BizTalk2006 (hereby known as VSB) and catch up with some friends. Given that there were really only five hours to present the VSB goods, the Microsoft team and their supporting cast did a fantastic job.
Not everything was smooth sailing though. There were the occasional cases of computer + human = oops. Sometimes just the computer part of the equation is enough to produce problems without any additional help.
Honestly, I think that this is a good thing. There is nothing like getting a good chuckle from Murphy's Law as a perfectly scripted and prepared presentation hits the rare fan speed bump. Given that Murphy is hard to avoid, I have always been impressed with the way the Microsoft presenters have been able to smile sweetly, shrug the shoulders, laugh, and then plow on when things don't go perfectly. I think this comes down to the presenters being a very funny (in a good way) and extraverted bunch of people.
All in all, the presentations were great. I also enjoyed the opportunity to catch up with some old work mates (Geoff, Noonie), the Softies (Frank, Andy and Chuck) and other community members (seriously Athena, where's the blog!).
I wanted to have more of a chat with Frank, Andy and Chuck afterwards, but I had to race off to training (sorry fellas).
Last night I joined many other people at the VSReady community launch event in Canberra. It was great to catch up with Geoff, Noonie, Frank and several other community members. I also got to meet Eddie and some of the Microsoft crew. I was going to catch up with Darren as well, but he produced an amazing Houdini maneuver and eluded me.
No doubt Geoff will be happy today. There is a pen at today's business launch. It's a little bit for my liking, but does have a decent spin.