thoughts to blog

The USRSF

The Pentagon announced today the formation of a new 500 man elite fighting unit calledthe US REDNECK SPECIAL FORCES (USRSF).

These North and South Carolina, Kentucky, West [by God] Virginia, Mississippi,Missouri, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, TEXAS, Oklahoma and Tennessee boys will be droppedinto Iraq and have been given the following facts about terrorists:

• The season opened today.
• There is no limit.
• They taste just like chicken.
• They don't like beer, pickups, country music or Jesus.
• They are DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE for the death of Dale Earnhardt.

This mess in Iraq should be over in a week.

from ForgetFoo:
http://www.forgetfoo.com/?p=2&blogid=4056

the competition weentered a month ago, they finally got around to picking the winners... congrats goesto all those out there who competed. I personally think we did an awesome job for ourfirst day on rails...

here's our entry (Fanny Pack) ... live

Winners

1. Sheets – http://124.railsday.rufy.com/
2. Yubnub – http://75.railsday.rufy.com/ 
3. Fichbowl – http://65.railsday.rufy.com/ 

Runners Up

1. Rails Deli – http://27.railsday.rufy.com/ 
2. Whack a Poll – http://120.railsday.rufy.com/ 
3. Leet Haxor Ninja – http://73.railsday.rufy.com/ 

Congratulations to the winners and great job for everyone that participated!

So I know I'm not doing very well on this blogging thing... but Guild Wars is stillconsuming most of my personal time...

except for the last few weekends...

Mick and Adam came up... good times had by all there. Took them to my favorite hotspot (Glueks)... drank some good beer! Saw Batman Begins (freaking awesome movie), metsome girls at Epic, watched a Twins Game, and had a good time catching up.

This last weekend, my two girls came up (Jackie and Kim)! It was awesome to see them!Got Erik out TWICE! Good times! They even played Daisy Dukes at Majors... I haven't heardthat song in ages. Ate at Macaroni Grill, busted it up with Erik at Epic on Friday (metsome MORE girls), went out to Majors for a nice little gathering, and ate on the lake atMaynards on Sunday noon. I miss those two.. :: sigh ::

Other than that, just working hard and playing hard, you know how it is.

so the Raving Fans Committee sponsored a company event yesterday... I was thefacilitator of facilitation for the event....

If this isn't motivation.. I don't know what is...

I'm tired of listening to his crap... officiallyunsubscribed, hopefully some of you “I'm in love with Joel” people (:: cough:: Gaskell :: cough ::) will follow.

So they opened up registration for PDC 2005. :: sigh :: The company (who shall remainnameless) that I work for won't send me to PDC, so I thought about going there on myown...

Magically... I see a post on Channel 9 (which I have been a member since thebeginning)... about how you can “win” a chance to go to PDC.

I know that the company can't send everyone... and I know that decisions have to bemade (even if it was to only let >= Senior level developers :: shrugs :: ) ... but Istill want to go...

:: cue the smallest violin, playing the saddest, slowest, sappy song ::

Poor me... you must be asking yourself. Yes... poor me... I'm the quasi-developer whois young at heart and wants to experience something he has never done before... I shouldhave a chance, no?

All I have to do is put this pretty little button on my site and hope that they willsend me (at least the conference fee) to PDC (if I win). How freakin' sweet is that?

  < - click me!

[UPDATE] Thanks Raymond and Steve :) I'm smilingbecause I know that people still do read my blog... and RayDog.. you deserve to go forthe VSTO track!

That described my Saturday... What am I talking about? Rails Day

Heres the idea. You give developers the use of a language, in this case, Ruby and a platform Ruby on Rails. You then give them 24 hours to develop asolution. That's it.

John, Neil, and I had decided on entering the competition a while back, decided on anapplication, and thought about some feature sets.

Interestingly enough... we all develop .Net applications (using C#) for a living... whileNeil and I have ever written a line of Ruby before DAY OF COMPETITION while Johnexsposure was limited. We came up with something kickass in 18 hours (5am till midnight).It would be kickass to actually win... we'll have to wait till Wednesday or so to hearthe results. All I have to say, is developing an application with Ruby on Rails was fast, efficient, and very veryproductive. The amount of stuff we created in those 18 hours would take over a month witha few developers in any other language, honestly. It's concepts, languages, ideas, andmotivation that change the face of software development.

Here's howthe competition went down

Total groups: 121
Total qualifying groups: 60
Total programmers: 191
Total qualifying programmers: 120

Total hits to the web server: 167,753
Total subversion checkins: 3335
Total lines of code written (including code written by non-qualifying programmers, butnot including framework code): over 18,000!!!

Given that the initial distributed ruby (drb) code base was under 100 lines of Ruby,this Rails Day has produced quite an enormous base of open-source code to pickfrom.

Here's out entry: FannyPack

Here's our readme:

Fanny Pack is an online collaboration tool for friends and family to better communicate.One big problem with the current generation of communication tools is dealing with thedifferences between people you are corresponding with. If you'd like to post a messageabout how great your bachelor party was in Las Vegas, you have to worry about the groom'sbride seeing it as well. Fanny Pack addresses this by allowing you to create your ownnetwork of aquaintences and place them in groups as they relate to you. By creatingseparate groups for family and friends you can still wish your Mom happy birthday withoutletting all your friends know that you are still a mama's boy.

Fanny Pack also helps you reach out to your friends. From your main portal page you cantell if someone has a special event coming up. From there its a simple click to theirAmazon wishlist, and in under 5 minutes you can have your gift on the way...and it won'teven be a month late this year. User profiles and events are also location aware so youcan easily calculate what your cab ride will be back from the pub crawl (while you'restill sober).

--Fanny's Features--

• Invitation system to connect with other users
• Simple display of all aquaintence messages
• Ability to share event and calendar information
• Ties into user's Amazon wishlist for easier gift giving
• Notification of online contacts
• Profile searching
• Easily post messages to different groups of people

'Cause fanny means your arse over there... not yourminge

So I attended VSDevCon 2005with somepeople yesterday...

I attended the Visual Studio TeamSystems track.. which included a whole range of feature showings from systemdegisners, class designers, debugger visualizers, and much more.

All in all it was decent, sorry for the lack of a real review as most of it was washedaway in the happy hour we skipped the ending keynote for ;)

A few things that I saw that I really liked (which I already knew about but wanted tosee in action)...

Debugger visualizers - imagine having an image variable in your code be displayed asthe actual graphic when you're stepping through... or an HTML snippet actually hosted andparsed.
Testing framework - not as big of a deal (cause we already have NUnit) , but it'sintegrated better.. web tests are kinda fun, visual studio could be the next tool forDDOS attacks...
Class Designer - synchronized visualization of your class... pretty neato..
Code Snippets
Debugger enhancements
Runtime exceptions while debugging are better
Generics - not just for collections
Edit and Continue - mmmmmm

IW Kid (link above) posted some of the freebies that were recieved. I decided to takeadvantage of the temporary tatoo and branded my arm in Visual Studio 2005 flare. Plus Ihelped out some people at the conference when the presenters didn't have answers to theirquestions, I definitely get them my humble opinion :)