Summertime Coding: .NET or Ruby on Rails?
May 09, 2008

Now that the semester's over, I've got a decision ahead of me. I've two paths to go with my free time coding, Ruby on Rails and continuing with learning awesome new stuff that's incredibly useful and cool - or .NET and strengthening my professional coding to excel more at my current place of employment. Oh, what's a boy to do? You may have noticed that my Caturday page is down. I'm split in between redoing it in .NET or making it into a cool RESTful application through Ruby on Rails (lawl, how does .NET know REST? It doesn't.). I've now got two viable dev environments, so that's no longer limiting me... it's just a choice between personal growth and professional growth... oi.

I sat down yesterday to do some work on it in .NET, and was reminded of how much work it is to get an object saved into the database compared to Ruby on Rails. However, when I go back to work I'm impressed with how neat it is when all the groundwork is finally laid and everything works. Humungous upfront fixed cost for some neatness in the end (.NET) Vs. tiny upfront fixed cost for some neatness now (RoR).

I'm still not sure what I'll end up doing... the great Summer question.

Group Projects Are Fun
May 08, 2008

Group projects are so much fun. There always seems to be at least one group every semester where there's at least one person who doesn't pull their weight. Our MGMT 453 class has a paper worth around 50% of our grade due on Friday and two members still haven't contributed their final versions. Oi.

It's a good thing that I don't play GTAIV or anything, or I might get some terrible ideas about becoming Russian and eating hot dogs (Draz, who bakes their hot dogs? Really.) to regain my health. Oh well, this semester will soon be done with and I won't have to worry about this kind of pewp anymore (I'm assuming that Summer courses won't have this stuff built in). Hooray!

Finals, Developers and Houses - Oh My!
May 05, 2008

The past few weeks have been some of the busiest in my life - barring wedding time, I think that they have been the busiest times in my life. Finals are compounding and there's tons of group work to be done - on top of that I've started at a new job recently, and then ended up getting promoted over to the software development department! Hooray hooray! What else is new? Well, Emily and I are finally getting a house so I might be in one place for a little bit. We actually just got our offer accepted on a house in St. Cloud so we'll now be going through inspection processes and all sorts of other fun. Hooray, hooray. I just didn't want my blog to get too much dust in the corners. Later days!

Hooray! Music!
April 26, 2008

Alas, I never have time for anything anymore. I barely had time to get this mp3 exported, but I wanted to do a flash based mp3 player this time. Oh well, if I wait longer I'll find that I just let it fall by the wayside completely. So, today there is an actual update! I did a cover of Boys Like Girls' - Thunder last night, so here it is. Sorry that I couldnt do a decent post around this, lack of time sucks incredibly.

Windows Server 2008, Now with Network Capabilities!
April 16, 2008

I gave getting Windows Server 2008 setup another go over the weekend. After biting the bullet and actually scouring the Internet on my other machine which was hooked up to the Internet I was able to locate two happy little drivers for my NICs. I had to scavenge a CD-ROM drive for my now-Windows Server and buy a pack of CD-Rs to complete the process, but in the end I was left with a very nice machine. I have to say that the storage management is probably my favorite part of the new server as setting up a dynamic RAID array was a piece of cake. I was hoping for SAN functionality, but alas, Windows Server lacks this.

I'm now working on getting Virtual PC setup so that I can run all of my nice Linux services like mail, www and svn. I'm pretty psyched to get this whole setup completed so that my computing can settle down to normal.

Update - 2008-04-16

Huh. Windows Server 2008's firewall is kind of made of pewp. First off, Windows obviously adds eight million exceptions to the public interface but it doesn't even allow you to select multiple exceptions to make them only apply to the private interfaces. Nice. I love having my Active Directory published to the Internet. Secondly, it doesn't allow port forwarding. You can forward it at the public Internet level - but not internally. It's most unfortunate, because the only way to really test it is to go off site which also means that you have to update anything that depends on a specific domain whenever you're internal.

Suck. Oh well, it looks like I'm putting a real firewall in front of it to prevent this kind of BS from happening. It's most unfortunate that they didn't beef up the firewall much.

Windows Server 2008; That Was Fast
April 12, 2008

In honor of the giant snow storm that we got, I actually got a snowday from work. It was pretty nice, but I had to do something awesome with it to honor the awesomeness of getting a day off from work for snow. What was I going to do? Migrate my server from Linux to Windows Server 2008 of course! I know, too predictable... Anyway, I ended up spending the day migrating all of my files off the RAID array (which would have to be demolished for Windows) and onto various devices on my network with great glee. Somewhere around 1700 I finally got done and began the delicious installation. Surprisingly, it was a pretty fast install and only took about 20 unattended minutes.

After booting up the system I was pretty impressed with the general layout. The initial configuration tasks were pretty straight forward but something was missing. Something very important for server operating systems. Network interfaces. It's a curious thing, but Windows Server 2008 failed to pick up either of my two fairly common network cards (a Broadcom and a 3com) so... uh... I really couldn't do anything with it. To put this into perspective, OSX86 was able to pick up these two cards with no trouble at all.

So, final verdict? Windows Server needs to have the ability to do networking. I know, it's not that common - but some of us like to put our servers on a network. There's about 15 incredibly common chipsets out there that you should absolutely have support for - and there's really no excuse, considering that Linux does it and is open source. Anyway, I might revisit that disk at a later date with some drivers in hand but I'm just too annoyed with the lack of network support to bother right now.

Thank you.

Busy Weekend Was Busy
April 07, 2008

Wow, this was a busy weekend. I had a lot of fun, but I'm incredibly glad that it's over. What did I do? Let's see...

• Saturday I got up @ 0530 in order to get to Sartell by 0700. I ended up spending all day at the Twin Cities Code Camp learning all sorts of .NETie things. I actually got a lot out of the talk on Things Every .NET Developer should know, like turning on treating All Warnings as Errors in order to get more design advice out of the IDE. Good stuff. Sadly, I missed out on any prizes (Mike F. ended up getting a VB2008 book. Woohoo! </sarcasm>
• Saturday night I ended up spending working on some back-end stuff for this blog (images are now cachable by your browser) and playing some of the World of Warcrafts.
• Sunday was spent at work refactoring and extending some code to do things it wasn't designed for. I also got a chance to add in unit tests and even some front end UI tests through the exceedingly cool WatiN C# Unit Testing framework.
• Sunday night has ended up being spent on school work designing a training presentation for Internation Business Etiquette (oh lordy this thing's going to bomb).

Busy weekend is busy. How busy was your weekend?

Twin Cities Code Camp!
April 06, 2008

Code Camp today was fantastically fun. There were lots of great speakers and bonding with the software development team. Definite fun.