29 Oct, 2006
Haven’t been posting much lately, I haven’t been feeling too morivated lately to much computer related stuff outside of work, so the blogging usually slides in sync with that.
I have been working on setting up a new server down in the basement however. Erin’s previous employer was getting rid of some computers so I had her grab me one. 1Ghz, 512 RAM, 10GB hard drive for free? I like that price 
Setting up a new machine is kind of a pain in the ass because you have to go download all the software you need to run all your stuff, its usually hard enough to simply remember what needs to be installed. Here’s my list of server software that I install, this list grows as I learn new things:
I would love to have all these on a DVD or something so I could streamline the process a bit, but the problem is that some of these change so quickly that it would be out of date by the next time I want to install them.
26 Oct, 2006
I’ve gotten numerous requests for some source code for the TabControl issue that I mentioned about a month ago, so here is the link:
BetterTabControl.zip
This is written in VB.NET but porting this to C# would be trivial, its not even 100 lines of code with comments.
Enjoy!
25 Oct, 2006
Heres a picture of the newest addition to the Magenic Minneapolis office:
Magenic has a yearly employee survey where you can offer suggestions about how to improve the company. On a whim, and at the suggestion of a colleague, I mentioned that it would be cool to get a ping pong table. A couple months went by and I had forgotten about the suggestion until our general manager, Matt, came by and told me to pick one up. So on Monday we went out over lunch and got this model from Dick’s Sporting Goods. It’s normally $500 but its on sale for $250, pretty good deal
While I had the camera in the office, I thought I would point out one of our coding horror stickers too, we’ve got several:
17 Oct, 2006
Erin and I just got back from vacation in San Diego last night, we were there for 5 days visiting my sister and her husband, and our friends who live near LA, it was a good time, pictures are up on flickr, thanks to Erin
While I was gone I noticed Sam had commented on my post about date and time support in Ruby and had written a great post explaining the differences between the different date/time objects that Ruby has, as well as some more details about the “magic fields” in RoR, it really cleared up the issues for me, thanks Sam!
11 Oct, 2006
Jason Bock has been organizing the Twin Cities Code Camp thats coming up November 11th, I would encourage any developers in the area to come and check it out.
If you look at the list of presentations, there’s some pretty interesting stuff that covers a wide range of topics and even goes outside the realm of .net (and even into Java, OMFG!)
It looks like Jake is going to be talking about working with .net and Ruby on Rails integration. That should be a good session, I know he’s excited to be working with RoR.
So take a look at the sessions and see what interests you, ya can’t go wrong with a free day of interesting speakers, see you there!
7 Oct, 2006
My latest post about my Skype phone being disconnected reminded me to post another Skype related post.
I get awful cell phone service in my house from Sprint. I can’t even have a conversation unless I go out on my front steps or out in the backyard, and in Minnesota winters thats not really doable. So, when people call me I typically answer and quickly tell them that I’ll call back and simply hang up, cause they probably didn’t hear me anyways. Some of my friends are used to this now, like Jake, he hears me squawk something and then waits for the callback.
I’ve seriously considered signing up for SkypeIn which is a service that Skype offers where you can assign a telephone number to your Skype account so that people can call you as if your Skype phone is a real phone. It costs about $6 bucks a month, which is a small fraction of our cell phone bill, so this is very enticing.
The problem is related to how my phone stopped working for a few days. If my phone is unreliable, people aren’t going to call it, they’ll just call my cell phone instead which defeats the whole purpose. If you buy a landline phone at Radio Shack and plug it in, that thing is reliable as hell, they never just stop working, so you can be confident when you give out your phone number that the phone will ring when they call.
I still might get it soon just because the cost barrier is so low theres not much to lose, then I just have the problem of getting people to call that number before my cell number, which will take some time I think.
6 Oct, 2006
I have the LinkSys CIT200 Skype phone that I got for Christmas last year. A couple days ago the display on the phone simply said “DISCONNECTED” and no amount of fiddling would get the thing back online. I tried reinstalling the drivers, resetting the phone, switching USB ports, restarting the computer, everything that I could think of.
Then just now, I tried to turn off the phone itself by holding down the “end” button and it shut off correctly. I turned it back on and Skype was back online, no problems, ugh. Just posting this here cause it seems that several people have this issue, so maybe this will help out somebody else down the line.
