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align=right hspace=12/>Yesterday my coworkers redecorated my office.  Pictures
in this blog entry are photos of their work.  Strangely enough, I found myself
quite appreciative of their act of vandalism.  :-)

Today is my 40^th birthday.  Like most other days,
I started by walking the dog and making a To-Do list.  However, today’s list
has a special item:

• Decide whether to have a mid-life crisis or not.

:-)

I’ll confess I am not entirely thrilled about being 40.  It
doesn’t seem that long ago that 40 seemed far away.  Now that it’s here, I
realize that it’s not what I expected.  I thought my life at 40 would be
different.

align=left hspace=12/>Many who know me would assert that I have nothing to
complain about.  And they would be correct.  My life has been filled with
blessings of all kinds, for which I am truly thankful.  I am a published
author.  Most would consider me financially successful.  I am in a career where
I enjoy my work.

But still…

As the old saying goes, nobody lies on their deathbed
wishing they had spent more time at the office.

Like most everybody else, when I was 30 I looked ahead ten
years and formed a picture in my mind.  My life today doesn’t match that
picture very well.  Examples:

• I thought by now I would be more solid in the quality of
  my relationships with my loved ones and in the practice of my faith.

• I thought by now I would be a better guitar player.
• There’s a messy pile in my study that has been there for
  ten years.  (Yes, we moved six years ago.  The heap moved too.)  I thought
  it would be cleaned up by now.

• I always assumed that by 40 I would have learned to
  exercise regularly and stop eating junk food.

(more…)

People want to be understood.  That’s why support groups are
so popular.

• The alcoholic wants to connect with somebody else who showed
  up drunk at a wedding and embarrassed the bride.

• The compulsive overeater wants to know that he’s not the
  only one who has stopped at the Dunkin Donuts drive-thru on the way home to
  eat a dozen before dinner.

• The out-of-control gambler wants to be in community with
  other people who have lost their car going “all in” with pocket sevens.

We all have problems, and we all want to know that we’re not
alone.

Wednesday evening I posted a comment on a friend’s blog.  Or rather, I tried
to post a comment.

Also see: My fair and biased opinion on the recent upgrade…

True to my tendencies, it was really far too wordy to be
called a comment.  I actually spent about half an hour wordsmithing a
multiple-paragraph response.

But when I hit the submit button to post it, Wordpress gave
me a generic error page.  Presumably something timed out while I was crafting
my reply.

And when I hit the Back button, my comment was gone.  :-(

*&%$#@!

My mind raced.  What are my options here?

Maybe I should just re-type the whole thing?  It was only
300 words or so.

Nah.  The text I wrote was perfect.  I probably won’t be
able to remember it just the way it was.

And why should I have to?  Firefox and Wordpress screwed
this up, not me!

(more…)

SD West is next week
and SourceGear has a whole bunch of stuff happening:

Fortress 1.1 and Vault 4.1

We like to use trade shows as a public debut of new
products.  Last week we
shipped
“dot one” releases
of Vault and Fortress.  SD West
will be our first opportunity to talk with customers in person about these new
versions. 

Interactions like these are a big part of what makes a trade
show trip worthwhile for us.  The business of software can be so impersonal. 
Software flows out our T1 line.  Money flows in.  I love trade shows because
they’re a place where customers are not just rows in a database.  People stop
by and tell us they love our product.  We thank them.  People come and tell us
we disappointed them.  We listen.

But mostly, people come and ask us what’s new.  We show
them.  And their reactions are some of the best product feedback we get.

Fortress 1.1 and Vault 4.1 have some cool new stuff.  Here’s
a shot of the new “tag cloud” feature in Fortress:

src="http://software.ericsink.com/entries/1738_image001.gif"/>

Come see us in booth 308 next week and we’ll show you.

T-Shirts and Comic Books

align=right hspace=12/>Continuing our Evil Mastermind theme, we
have arranged to have a comic book placed in the conference bag for every
attendee.

(more…)

Just a note to myself to do a braindump on all this Service Broker shiznit I have been playing with lately.

Potential discussion topics:

• MessageTypes, Contracts, Queues, and Services.
• Internal Activation, Routing, & External Activation
• Using the Sql Server ServiceBroker sample library.
• Implementation using SqlClr vs. TSQL
• Developing via messages instead of procedures…
• Compare & contrast Service Broker vs. Workflow Foundation vs. BizTalk
• The nifty Sql Service Broker Admin tool (3rd-party)
• Practical examples:

• Async “fire-and-forget” stored procedure invocation
• Query Notification for cache invalidation
• PubSub

I learned my lesson with Fable, so I’ll try desperately not to start a flame war of any sort here. Up front, I’m giving the game a definite thumbs up. If you are the kind of person that likes to flame, then leave now knowing that I’ve given your favorite thing my personal approval.

Let’s start with the good. The campaign and story is pretty nice. The cinematic effect is definitely there, something I don’t approve of in games most of the time. In this case the cinematics were rather short and they appear to have answered all of the questions from the first Halo, about what in the hell is actually going on in this universe. Don’t expect a major story though, in all there is about 30 minutes of video (maybe someone will time that eventually). It appears in most cases that the actual game engine was used to produce cinematic sequences. I’m a huge advocate of this process, since it generally reduces the size of the game even if it doesn’t allow for as much eye candy through complex, non real-time, shaders.

Playing from both sides of the story is another great feature even if the movement features are identical between the arbiter and the master chief. Of course you get to use all of the weapons no matter which side you are. A couple of the new weapons are even pretty nice and if you add dual wielding then you can really do some drastic damage. Getting used to the new weapons is a short process, but for the most part, just realize everything is going to take a good amount of shots in order to take down. Nearly every enemy has energy shields now, so making use of a good pairing of weapons is almost always required (for a good run-down of the weapons, head over to GameFAQs where someone has posted a huge review of all of the weapons, relative damage, recommended threat ranges, etc…)

DISCLAIMER:  The following post represents my personal opinions and thoughts, not that of my employer.

As a Telligent employee and weblogs.asp.net blogger, I hate the fact that the recent upgrade caused problems for the weblogs.asp.net community and that it has affected the perception of Telligent as its steward.   I wasnt one of the developers who worked on the project, but I couldnt help but feel a twinge of pain each time I read a post (often rightfully) slamming the team and company who delivered this upgrade.

Long before I joined Telligent, I was one of the more vocal bloggers about the mishandling of the weblogs.asp.net site.   The great irony is that most of my arguments at that time were about how rarely the site was updated to newer versions of.TEXT and CS.   Since that time, its hard to argue that it hasnt gotten much better.  Eventually I became satisfied and frequently impressed with the website changes as we finally were able to take advantage of Community Server’s outstanding features. 

This latest release really excited me because it was very timely (coming on the heals of CS 2007’s release) and had the potential to allow me to finally have the level of control I wanted over my blog’s presentation.

Even with the recent problems, especially the fact that I need to resubmit my javascript, I’m still excited about this release.   In fact, I truly was never all that disturbed by the problems as they were occurring

No matter how faithfully you try to follow your chosen project methodology (Scrum, Extreme Programming, Waterfall, CMMI, etc.) ultimately the strengths, weaknesses, successes, and failures you experience are determined by the habits, attitude, and style of the project manager and team members on the project. 

How is communication conducted? Meetings, hallway, bullpen, email, IM?

How do you react to change?  How well do you manage scope?

How much trust/distrust is there amongst team members?

How rigorously or adaptively do you apply your process to each project?

Do you micromanage or do you empower?

This is the crux of why so many people disagree with most definitions of exactly what Agile is.  This is why some people fail with one methodology while others succeed, and some unique individuals actually find great success with seemingly outdated methodologies like Waterfall.   Much like with any good pasta, its not the ingredients in the sauce, its the sauce-maker(s).

I guarantee you that even the most rigorous Agile shop will see great variance (good and bad) between projects merely due to the different personalities of the project managers who manage each project.  This is the human factor of software development that can never completely be erased.  Your best hope is to try to control, monitor, and compensate.

There are plenty of excellent books to help you define your rules-of-engagement, develop good habits, and provide checks-and-balances throughout your project.  However, ultimately experience is our best teacher for what habits, styles, and attitudes result in the most successful projects.  Of course, to complicate things further, these same success factors may change from project to project.

I havent been blogging much over the past several months.  The main reason is time, or the lack thereof.  Since I dont have time to write a “proper” blog post, I’m just going to start sharing some link love…

Here are a few interesting links I have spent time perusing today:

• Thirteen Simple Rules for Speeding Up Your Web Site  - a great checklist to review before releasing any public website into the wild.
• dhtmlxGrid - an open source (but commercial) editable DHTML grid with AJAX support.
• Edit Individual GridView Cells - an article on how to make clickable ASP.NET gridview cells to allow for a rich editi
  

  Also see: Dare Obasanjo on C# Anonymous Types

  Live Support Software: jbTop is Jabber/XMPP based Live Support Solution for your websites.
  ng experience.

John Baez and Mike Stay are working on a book chapter titled “Categories in Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: a Rosetta Stone.” They previously asked for some help with the logic section, and now they’re looking for help with the computation section:

But now I really need comments from anyone who likes categories and theoretical computer science!

In fact, the final ‘computation’ section of the paper is still very rough. It introduces combinators but doesn’t really explain them well yet… and perhaps worse, it doesn’t say anything about the lambda calculus!

I plan to fix some of these deficiencies in the next week. But, I figure it’s best to get comments and criticism now, while there’s still time to take it into account.

Also see: Mix08 Session Overview: Building Great AJAX Applications from Scratch Using ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008

This is already a great introductory paper, but the computation section is indeed quite rough. Obviously comments are welcome, but even if you don’t have anything to add, the first sections are sure to be enjoyable for many LtU readers. The paper does not assume any background in category theory, logic or physics and manages to be an excellent introduction to the surprising connections between these fields. If you have some background, it’s a very quick and fun read, and if you can offer feedback, so much the better!

Walking around Mix08 today I had a chance to help a few people with some install issues.  In some cases the installer was asking for VS 2008 media and in other cases it was refusing to install. 

Luckily, Bradley Bartz from the Visual Web Developer team was around to help folks.  He drilled into the cause of the issues he saw and wrote up a very nice blog post listing the common issues and solutions.

Installation Tips for Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studi