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6/6/2008 THIS BLOG HAS MOVED! robzyc.spaces.live.com > cantgrokwontgrok.blogspot.comSo, I was thinking last night, following on from me previous post, I am going to migrate to Blogger and cease posting to Live Spaces. If you are intelligent/crazy enough to be following my blog, then please update your RSS reader to: http://cantgrokwontgrok.blogspot.com.
I like the title better, definitely describes me a lot more accurately :D Hopefully this will give me the opportunity to get more feedback from [any] followers, as well as “do more” with the blog (polls etc). This will be both interesting for me as well as possibly enhance my learning, as well as others. We are all on a journey here. Also, as a note to Microsoft and the People on the Live Team: Just because I am leaving Spaces, it does mean I am leaving Live. I LOVE the other things happening with Live, and I really cannot stop praising Live Writer, Live SkyDrive and especially Live Mesh (as well as the other bits going on)! Keep up the great work, I really hope Spaces comes on enough to perhaps attract people wanting “more” back to it.
See you at “Can’t Grok, Won’t Grok”! Share: 6/5/2008 Thinking of Migrating from Live Spaces to BloggerSo, looks like I am again reviewing some of the services I use against others I could be. I have actually been contemplating leaving Live Spaces for a while. Sadly, I don’t think Spaces have moved enough in the right direction. I think I have remained is due to the excellent production on the rest of the Live Services teams (Writer, SkyDrive, Mesh etc.). However, none of these require this blog. Put simply, I dislike the following:
And I do like:
So, watch this space, I may be migrating, need to run a few more tests to see what Blogger can do for me, but so far looking positive. Share: 6/4/2008 Privacy Online – How Much Would a “I’ll Google You” Get About You?
Even though online privacy has been a subject that everyone has known about for a long time, I still cant help but feel that with the explosion in social networking, a lot of the basic principles seem to have been lost somewhere. By “principles” I mean:
Some of the ProblemsThere have been numerous issues with private information being found on the Internet about people ranging from silly pranks being pulled to people losing their money, jobs, or even their lives. People often only think about the former and never the consequences of the latter. It’s serious stuff. Some obvious examples:
As said before, a large part of this is due to the fact that social networking has exploded. With MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. There is literally MILLIONS of people posting huge amount of data about themselves on various servers around the world. I, like a lot of others think social networking is great. I am now back in touch with people from school, I never forget friends birthdays, its nice to see us all growing up and doing our things and being happy. What people fail to realise is that, left unchecked, ANYONE can see this, and this can be dangerous. Some SolutionsSo? What can we do to help get some sort of control over what the Internet can find out about ourselves? There are several things:
The Biggest Winner (IMO)I am all for rolling your sleeves up and having a go. So, check yourself out. The first place most searches start is Google. So, go to Google, type in your name, what comes up? Can you find information about yourself? Are you happy with it being there? If not, change it, go to the website, log in and check the privacy settings!
Vary your searches, name? Phone number? Email address? As soon as you can see where your information is being leaked from, you can fix it. Remember, Google also offers Google Alerts which is a great way to keep on top of it. I have several Google Alerts trawling the net for me to check for my personal information. As of yet, there is nothing on the Internet about me that I would either be unhappy about you knowing, or wouldn’t tell you myself. Exactly how it should be. Share: 6/3/2008 Great GTD Post on RememberTheMilk (Thanks to Doug Ireton)I have recently started trying to invest a little more time in GTD (Getting Things Done). Part of this investment has also meant me signing up to RememberTheMilk (RTM) which is a great, simple-yet-effective “ToDo” list site. Prior to reading this post from Doug Ireton (which RTM posted on their blog) I hadn’t really customised RTM a great deal. This was perhaps a mixture of me not really knowing what I am doing with GTD and lack of time to “play” (expect it was more the former). I found the article clear, concise and damn useful! I spent a good chunk of this morning getting all my work, personal and study items nicely organised within RTM. I feel I perhaps have a little way to go before getting the system refined to my taste, but it’s certainly a hell of a lot closer than it was!
It sounds silly but I feel much more confident in the system and can happily “forget” about items and concentrate on actually getting the things done I am supposed to be working on. I will continue to try and let you know how I get on with GTD and any other bits of productivity-boosting bits of information I come across. Links: Share: Its Been a While… Study, Exams, Thoughts and WoW
Hi All! Sorry its been so long since my last post, been crazy busy of late! Here’s a run down of the things that have been chewing up my time:
Good news is, the study and the work seems to be paying off! I passed the 70-316 exam with a score of 906 (700 was pass mark)! Making me a happy geek! I am now studying towards 70-315 which coincides nicely with my current work project(s). This is one of the main reasons I was pushing hard for 70-316 since I desperately wanted to get into Web. I believe thought and reflection is always good for the soul, so that always deserves some time :) World of Warcraft is addictive! But I have started to limit my time somewhat more on there! Expect more blog posts to follow. Good to be back on top of things :) Share: 5/6/2008 The Ultimate Pro-Vista Argument EVER!While the usual thoughts were flying around between us geek's on Twitter, Windows Vista came up. Basically the general theme was "we don't know why the haters hate it so much, we have no problems and enjoy working with it". I replied to a tweet from Jeff Atwood @ CodingHorror with this, which did make me chuckle to myself after sending:
Top that haters! :D Share: 5/2/2008 YouTube Upgrade Quality of VideosGot a Tweet from Loic Le Meur saying that YouTube have upgraded the quality of their videos/videio player. Great stuff, there is nothing worse than watching an awesome video of big squares flying around. Here are some screen shots from Loic's HQ video posted, in Low (on the left) and High (on the right) quality for comparison (click to enlarge):
Great improvement! You can switch to High Quality (where available) by clicking "View in High Quality" under the player. Links: Share: James Buck - Demonstrating the Power of the "Tweet"This story came through in the Twitter newsletter:
The CNN coverage can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/4b4hsg I know a lot of people still think Twitter is lame, and I guess there is a part of me that is yet to be convinced, but I think this is an awesome display of the power of short, sharp updates. I think the main part of my problem is that I don't have enough UK/EU contacts on my friends list. Most of my contacts are in the US, and due to obvious time zone differences, we often miss a lot of what each other have to say. So, if you're a UK/EU geek and you fancy another geek to bounce ideas etc. off, feel free to tweet me at http://twitter.com/robzyc. Links: Share: 5/1/2008 MSDN RampUp - Helping Developers on Older/Other Technologies to.. well "Ramp Up" to .NETThis came through on the MSDN Flash newsletter. Microsoft have launched a section on MSDN called "RampUp". Offering materials to help assist developers/aspiring developers that are used to working with VS 2003/2005 or VB6 to get up to speed on .NET 2.0. It also has a track/route for Java developers for those that are interested. Each route offers insights into fundamental areas of .NET 2.0, geared towards your previous knowledge, there is also access to free Microsoft E-Learning Courses, which is pretty cool. I will definitely look this over since I am studying for the (now outdated) MCAD certification, so there may be a few things I can learn in here to help with work. If there are any Java developers reading this that want to get all pissy and suggest that ".NET from Java would be ramping down lol ha :P" then don't, its a free offering from Microsoft, if you want it, take it, if not, shut up and keep developing your Java applications (as you may have noticed, I am a geek who gets real tired of geek fanaticism). I hope you find some of the content useful! Links: Share: 4/30/2008 Great Not-So-WTF-y Post on TDWTFI read "The Daily WTF" religiously. I love it, it provides both laughs and plenty of examples of how not to code. For a newbie like me, I find these sorts of real-world examples of crappy coding, it may not necessarily show me what to do, but if you are shown enough of what not to do, then you will tend to end up somewhere on or near the right trail. We have this as children all the time, we soon learn after being sent to our room enough times that colouring in the wall with crayons is not acceptable. I can now proudly say at age 23, I have shaken this habit as I know it is wrong, and you don't need to send me to my room. :) This morning however, it wasn't really a WTF post, but a good serious post on turnover in the IT industry, and I strongly recommend reading it. I have mentioned this to a couple of friends in the past, one thing I noticed while reading some of my favourite blog posters employment history (where available) I noticed a lot of them changed jobs frequently. Initially, I didn't know how to view this, but I came to the conclusion that its very easy for aspiring developers to become restless. 99.99% of the time, us geeks are consuming huge amounts of information, learning lots, and forever wanting to learn more, there just does not seem to be enough hours in the day. The problem with this, is that the rate of business change is far slower than that. Which simply means that with these energetic developers that are keen to "keep the pace up" they can quickly find themselves wanting more from "9-5". Is this a bad thing? I do not run a software house or manage a software team, but my thoughts would say that even staff turnover would be bad (sorry to lose a good member of the team, pain in the ass of recruiting) I would much rather have a highly motivated team, than a team that feels they are stagnating. This is not necessarily through fault of the business, but simply, the individual outgrowing the business. We always here it, but so few truly believe it. Embrace change! Links: Share: 4/29/2008 This Geek Becomes a "Real" Geek and Gets on "World of Warcraft" (WoW)I have finally done it. Some of the people who's blog I watch play World of Warcraft (Rob Conery springs to mind). I decided to give the study a bit of a break this weekend, and had nothing much else on. I got bored and watched a South Park episode, and it happened to be the one all about World of Warcraft ("Make Love, Not Warcraft"). And I thought "that game does look pretty cool" (being the geek I am, I do remember the good old days playing RPG's for ridiculous amounts of time). So I thought I would check it out :) Blizzard offer a 10-day free trial (with restrictions) after a night of sitting there for hours playing drinking beer I managed to max those out, so my account is currently being upgraded from Trial to Full :) <geek>My little n00b Hunter kicks ass :) He's like level 21 now, I have a pet cat thing in my "stable" called Leo and currently training a pet wolf called Fido. I was training in tailoring and enchanting, but that was kinda pissing me off because it was taking so long to skill up on the enchanting. So I dropped both those (with tailoring at 150!) and re-skilled in leatherworking and skinning. They compliment each other quite well, levelling up much more quickly (too quickly TBH - I am starting to need to skin animals above my level) and making more money from selling my awesome leather goods :) Now, I know you can only find me on my server, but I forgot what that is, and apparantly I have no way of finding out from my account page (which is kinda silly) so I will update this post once I home to say where you can find me :) What ever server I am on, I am currently tearing it up in "Ashenvale Forest" with "Astranarr" being my current home.</geek> On a side note, WoW is where the famous "Leeroy" came about from (if you have never seen it, WATCH IT!). Leading to things such as this Lolcat :) Links: Share: 4/28/2008 Vista Speech Recognition Macros CTP ReleasedThis has been sat in my Inbox for a while as I have yet to play with it, but I thought I should at least do my bit to spread the word, this could be an exciting bit of technology depending on how well it works! Microsoft released the Community Technology Preview (CTP) for Windows Speech Recognition Macros Tool (WSR Macros) on 23/04 (or 04/23 for across the pond!). You can download the CTP from here. I really like the Speech Recognition feature of Vista, contrary to popular belief, it does seem to work well, and I have a cheap crappy headset. I know Scott Hanselman uses speech recognition (mentioned here in his post on his new home) and he reports fantastic detection rates. With macros to perform multiple functions on key words/phrases, the possibilities are endless! Awesome! Note: This is obviously only for Windows Vista! Links: Share: Windows Live FolderShare 14.0.1331.0415 Released - Changes!? Hell if I Know!So, when signing on to my machine at home over the weekend, and of course my work machine this morning. FolderShare automatically loads and I get a little box pop up telling me that it is unable to sign in because I am running an old version, which needs to be updated. So I figure "cool" I will update, I know normally these sorts of releases are security-critical, to stem people logging in when a known issue is located. I thought we'll soon find out once its installed. I go ahead and install the new version (14.0.1331.0415) and wait for the release notes to pop up.. Nothing happens.. "Hmm that's odd" so I begin clicking around to see if I can find a document, web site, anything. And nothing. Zip. Nada. So I Google "foldershare 14.0.1331.0415 "release notes"" and I have a single hit. One single hit, which takes me to a blog of some dude called Blake Handler, his blog looks interesting so I also added it to Google Reader, great. The post Google found had a link to the FolderShare team's blog, which, incidentally I never had on Google Reader, because I had never been told about it. And the development teams very own blog was almost as useful as a Google search with no real results. Not Much From the Horses Mouth... Do you think releasing a new version with no actual release notes is acceptable? Links: Share: 4/22/2008 Finally The Truth About "using" and Dispose()The ProblemDuring the good chat with some fellow students last night, the top of whether or not "using" should be used over an explicit Dispose() method call when using objects like Graphics came up. Now, this one has been bugging me for some time, and I have never actually sat down to investigate it, so I thought I should. I have been told on several occasions that I should use "using", but when questioning why, I get no real answer that makes any sense. Seems like a classic "every knows the best practice but doesn't understand the practice or why its best" scenario! So, I made some very small code samples, one using "using" the other using Dispose(). Here are the samples FYI: "using" Code1: private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: {3: using (Graphics g = Graphics.FromHwnd(this.Handle)) 4: {5: MessageBox.Show("this is between the graphics instantiation and disposal"); 6: } 7: }Dispose() Code1: private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: {3: Graphics g = Graphics.FromHwnd(this.Handle); 4: MessageBox.Show("this is between the graphics instantiation and disposal"); 5: g.Dispose(); 6: }As you can see, nothing fancy! And here are the results (intermediate language - "IL") courtesy of ILDASM: "using" IL |
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