Excellent Form Validation Plugin for jQuery: Vanadium

I stumbled across Vanadium while reading I believe Ajaxian's blog. Vanadium is an excellent client side form validator for the jQuery framework. Check it out.

http://vanadiumjs.com/

Here is some sample syntax. Say you wanted to verify that a user entered in at least four characters in a textbox.

<input class=":max_length;4" type="text">


Vanadium uses the class HTML attribute to set the validation rule. Many rules are supported.

Forget your iPod or MP3 Player? Fear Not, The Grooveshark is Here

I'm not sure about how they get away with this legally, but it sure is cool. Live mp3 streaming from Grooveshark.

http://www.grooveshark.com

I found some tunes on the shark that I couldn't find on Amazon. Pretty cool. Use and abuse before the site goes offline.

Windows 7: First Impressions

So far Windows 7 has been great. I installed Windows 7 ultimate on an older laptop that I would never attempt to install Vista on. The only immediate bummer was driver support. But that is when I found out something very cool about Windows 7. It supports drivers written for older versions of Windows! Way cool, especially if you are trying to resurrect older computers. Just right click the installer, set the compatibility mode, and install. I got the sound and video working with XP drivers. I am impressed.

I pretty much could care less about graphical UI (kinda Office 2007 ribbon-ish), but under the hood Windows 7 appears to run very fast even on older machines.

I'm digging my old computer with Windows 7. I've got a bunch of older 3D software programs that I'd like to try out on this laptop to see how they run. I will post results as they arise.

So far, if you can get Windows 7, I'd say install it.

FYI, the specs of my older laptop if interested.

* 3.2 Gig p4 w Hyper Threading
* 64 Meg ATI 9600 Video Card
* 1 Gig of Memory
* 80 Gig HD

So far the laptop seems very responsive with Windows 7. Good job Microsoft.

Open Source Non MS Tech

In looking at this word press theme-

http://www.inanis.net/blog/

I am blown away. With my experience with Word Press, you pretty much can add a theme and get it working in a few minutes. Not so with many MS tech open source projects out there. You will encounter some sort of obscure configuration detail that needs to be worked out, and waste time messing with arcana obscura to get things up and running.

Look what folks have done with "crappy" PHP and MySQL.


Makes me wonder.

Winamp Music Tip: Stream Those MP3's

When I code, I almost always have music or some sort of talk radio show streaming in the background. One thing that is bugging me is that I've noticed a lot of folks who offer podcast are starting to offer it in two formats, one a Flash web interface that streams, and the other a direct MP3 download.

That doesn't work for me. I've got so many web browser windows open I often times accidental close the one streaming music, and even if I am careful and don't I have to think about why the window is open and remember not to close it, which I don't like.

Downloading the whole MP3 sometimes isn't practical (i.e. a four hour show MP3).

So I remembered a solution to this problem from my audio editing days.

1) Copy the link to the actual download version of the MP3 file.
2) Open a text editor like notepad, paste the link, and save the file with an m3u extension, like "someradioshow.m3u".
3) Now click on the m3u file. If you have Winamp installed, it will begin to stream the mp3 file instead of download it. Cool huh?

Now we have our music app streaming, and web browser windows can open and close without hassle.

I Might Have To Get One Of These

Apple is coming out with a really cool little device the will be marketed as a console game platform, home computer, and home server rolled into one.

http://www.edge-online.com/news/apple-tablet-computer-to-double-as-a-game-console-analyst

I might have to get me one of these, and apparently, Bill Gates agrees (he was just a little early in agreement, perhaps).

http://gizmodo.com/5324866/vintage-bill-gates-predicts-tablets-to-be-the-most-popular-form-of-pc-sold-in-america

I might have to shift more time over to Unity 3D and Object-C development . I think Microsoft has made a few epic screw ups (Vista anyone?). One is they are listening to nerds as to what new features to offer rather then rank and file programmers. Coding on the MS stack is becoming too top heavy, maybe Unity 3D dev and Object-C will be a welcome breath of development fresh air, and a little competition will force MS to listen to everyone who uses their products rather than just enterprise developing geeks. No I'm not bitter!

Serious though, always remember there are no good guys. Apple sells crap hardware, so make sure you get those extended warranties. MS treats their development community well, but you pay a premium for their products that as time goes by, and open source stuff becomes better and better, I'm not sure is warranted. Linux is the only psuedo good guy out there, but since you can use many open source Linux apps on Mac's, might as well cough up a little extra cash for the Apple wow factor and mailine product (like Photoshop and 3D Packages) support.

Wake up MS, time to truely innovate, and innovate where the consumer can see the change, not the nerd army of developers behind the scenes. Bill understands, but he is taking more of a back seat now. Wow us Balmber, before MS becomes the next depreciated giant that rages on without knowing it is dead...

Tip: When/How Your Microsoft User Password

Not a major issue, but many of my work resources are some how tied to my domain authentication. So my password expired, so I changed it, but I didn't log off. Over the next several hours I noticed that I was loosing access to resources as my updated password propagaded through the network, but my local credentials hadn't been updated because I hadn't relogged yet. I had a lot of stuff open so I was trying to avoid a relog. I started off closing and reopening programs, but after a while it became such a hassle that I finally shut everything down and logged off/logged on back onto the domain. Problems solved, but I had to restart all my apps again.

So just a tip. Change your domain password at the end of the day, or change it and log off and log back on. If you are like me and have a ton of stuff open, the former is better then the later.

The Power of Twitter

We are becoming a society of self absorbed individuals. It is all about me is the mantra. Some of us pretend to resist this, ignoring things like bloggs, twitter, iPhones, etc.... Others like myself try to embrace the change, and end up getting sucked into the "its all about me" world just like everyone else, even though my intentions I pretend are honorable. "Look at my new blog post!" "Look at my facebook quiz, did you take it?!?" "I've got 100 followers now on Twitter!".

Well, for those of you who like to ignore this trend and the tools of self promotion, here is a cautionary tale of what can happen if you at least don't understand the new medium. The me generation has the tools to punish you if act like an @ss.

http://advanced-twitter-marketing.com/advanced-twitter-marketing/offline-businesses-beware-twitter-is-watching

Also as a side note, this article reveals how Google's search absolutely blows the competition away. I know M$ is trying hard to catch Google with Bing and Yahoo search, good luck :) The following quote is telling-

"All this - and Pete just posted the information THIS MORNING… Already a search for the headline, “Woman Sued for $50,000 Over a Tweet”, shows how viral this type of issue is: searching at Google shows 5,000 references to the article, searching at Yahoo! shows 6 results, and searching at Bing shows 34 results."

Source: (twitter) mparent77772

Old Man Grumblings

I guess I'm getting old, as far as programming goes. I see a lot of fads blowing through programming (apparently many geeks are actually more prone to fads then aren't, and this is interesting as you would thinks geeks with their alleged superior intellects would be immune), some of the fads are good, some of them OK, some of them not, but apparently ALL demand to be followed with absolute faith else your code is yukky and you suck (even though many programmers who didn't use all this stuff put men on the moon, designed planes like the SR-71, managed complex nuclear physics codes, yadda yadda yadda, just fine without all these extra layers of abstraction.

I digress.

I guess my point is summed up here.

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=25748

I might have blogged about this before, but I keep coming back to this, as it never gets old to me.

Not Digging Telerik

[Update] Someone from Telerik contacted me willing to help us out with our issue. That says a lot for Telerik and restores a good chunk of my faith in their controls and their support.

I like Telerik. They have produced some very cool controls to use with ASP.Net. Unfortunately the 2009 Q1 release broke all our controls at work. We normally inherit off of the Telerik controls and add some additional functionality. Whatever changes happened under the hood makes the Q1 + releases useless to us.

My job is to figure out a solution. So far no luck. Telerik says they don't support inheritance issues. Wish we would have known that earlier, or at least known to expect that existing working code will not be guaranteed to work in the future as is.

Sucks. Use this as a warning against becoming too dependant on 3rd party controls, as you can and will get burned.

70-536 Exam Prep

Ok, I hate getting certs. Did I say I hate it? Oh well, for those of you on the MCTS track for web development tacking the 70-536 exam, the following web page will be extrememly helpful.

http://en.csharp-online.net/MSDN_Reference_Guide_for_Exam_70-536

Also, the Microsoft training books for the exam, though useful, are riddle with errors. Just an FYI.

SQL Server Express And Abyss Web Server

Ok, I have an ancient (PIII 850 mhz machine with 1 gig of ram) that I'm using as a test server. I've got Windows XP Pro installed and I'm using the Abyss X1 Webserver instead of the throttled IIS 5 that comes with XP. I ran into one snag though, I couldn't get my ASP.Net app to talk to a SQL Server Express database when I pushed my ASP.Net project from my dev box to the test server. So I fooled around and got it working, probably in a very insecure way, but it will work fine for now. Here is what I did incase this will help anyone.

First, I moved the database from the app_data folder in the web project to somewhere else, probably not necessary but I thought it might help. I also attached to the database using sql server express studio and created a new login name that was different then the one I used on my dev box (did this both for global security users and then added the new user to the instance of the db...again may not be necessary).

From there I himmed and hawed until I came up with a connection string that works. Here it is roughly. Sql server express was installed in a named instance like this-

devbox\sqldev

So my connection string ended in my web.config file for my asp.net project ended up like this.

<add name="somename" connectionString="Data Source=.\sqldev;AttachDbFilename=D:\data\test.mdf;Initial Catalog=reports;User Id=someid;Password=somepassword;user instance=true;Integrated Security=SSPI" />

Hope that helps someone else at least get going.

Infocyde!!!

I love RSS (ATOM) feeds. I subscribe to numerous ones. I spend way to much time looking briefly through my feeds using Google Reader, staring feeds that I'd like to read later.

Well, I decided that all these stared links were pilling up, so I went about trying to unstar them, parsing the info and putting it into some useful state either in my brain or an Evernote notebook.

Well, it took pretty much a good chunk of the day, just to get through LAST MONTH's stared items. There is just no way I can process all the data, and as we have learned throughout history (using intelligence and wars as an example) data not processed is absolutely useless, and the time spent gathering it data that wasn't processed is essentially another definition of absolute waste.

So, I'm pondering going to a once a week RSS feed check, and really being selective about what gets stared, and hopefully processing data right then into info. I don't know if I can do this or not because I'm so addicted to real time info, but I really should, for a lot of reasons.

And I bet I'm not the only one out there who has a problem with this. So here are my rules.

1) Can I find this data relatively easily in the future? Yes->Ignore the data.
2) Am I at work? Yes->Star the data for later.
No->Process it (save/copy/bookmark) now.

That should cut down on the info glut. I'm trying to turn myself into a search engine, and that probably isn't helpful productivity wise.

We Lost An Interesting Person This Last Week

Amid all the celebrities dying the media over looked the death of a lesser known but important figure who died recently. On July 3rd, John A. Keel died. He wrote the Mothman Prophecies and many other books relating to the Fortean, my favorite being Operation Trojan Horse.

I was very much on the same page (or like to think so) with Keel's views about UFO's, Ghost, Faeries, etc... all really being the same phenomena, and that phenomena isn't extraterrestrial, but ultraterrestrial. Keel, though not a Christian, declared on several occasions that he wasn't really a "UFO-ologist", but a "demonologist" because he recognized the phenomena for what it really is. He, independent of a religion paradigm, came to the same conclusions I have and many others have about UFO's being something other and more complex then little green men from space or hicks out in the back woods who drank too much.

I admired Keel, as I admire anyone, who looks around the world and realizes (or really admits to themselves) that there is more then meets the eye as to what is going on in this fascinating realm we call existence. I admire his courage and the intellectual honesty to peer at the things that "don't make sense" if the world is exclusively a by product of random mutation.

Here is a pretty good article on Keel and his impact on the Fortean community.

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/keel-obit/

I hope that Keel's journey lead him ultimately to Jesus, and that now John A. Keel is in peace.

VS 2008 and PHP

Want a free version of Visual Studio 2008 that not only runs PHP, but also allows you to build win form applications using PHP?

Well then check the following link out-

http://www.php-compiler.net/doku.php?id=core%3aphp-in-vs2008

Have fun!

Microsoft BizSpark

I officially started a small start up company today. Microsoft has a great program called BizSpark. I don't want to give to much away, as it is a wide open program right now. But if you are a start up, or want to be, you should check it out.

Special thanks to AZ Groups and Scott Cate for helping me get started. Scott Cate rocks. And thanks to Microsoft for their willingness to help incubate start ups.

www.mykb.com

www.azgroups.com

www.microsoft.com/bizspark/

I still have and love my day job, so I will proudly serve my employer as long as my job holds out. So I'll only be a part timer at the new gig, but with two or three other developers also working part time, I think we will roll something out quickly. If anyone has some spare computers laying around, I'd love to take 'em off your hands.

And I've been praying about some direction, this opportunity just fell in my lap, so be sure that God answers prayers in Jesus's name. (I know, that makes me strange I guess, but it is true).

My HelloWorld LINQ Example

I know it is sad, but up until today I hadn't ever written a single LINQ query. So, for future prosterity, here is my hello world example.

 string[] s = { "test", "hello world", "mamma", "zack", "aaa","xxx" };
 // LINQ
 var subset = from z in s where z != "hello world"
    orderby  z descending select z;
 int i = 0;
 foreach (var l in subset)
 {
   Response.Write("Item " + i.ToString() + " = " + l + "<br />");
   i++;
 }

What is Hot Right Now In The Job Market

I went to http://www.dice.com/ today out of curiosity ran some keywords through nationwide to get a rough indicator of what technologies are really in demand right now. Here are some interesting results (last 30 days).

Java: 8052 jobs
.Net: 4927 jobs
PHP: 1454 jobs
ASP.Net: 2324 jobs
Flex: 796 jobs
Flash 1081 jobs
test driven development: 2295 jobs
MVC: 520 jobs
Silverlight: 262 jobs
Design Patterns: 1368 jobs
Agile: 2221 jobs
SQL Server: 7285 jobs
MySQL: 1479 jobs
c#: 4014 jobs
Visual Basic: 895 jobs
VB: 1964 jobs
Javascript: 3589 jobs
jQuery: 314 jobs
AJAX: 2011 jobs
Photoshop: 646 jobs
Ruby on Rails: 257 jobs
Python: 1023 jobs
Maya: 19 jobs
3D Max: 13 jobs
Unity 3D: 1 job



A few surprises, I expected to see a lot more Flex and Silverlight jobs. Apparently Java is far from dead, despite what many bloggers have espoused. SQL Server DBA's are in high demand as well. Python also looks pretty strong where Ruby on Rails still looks over hyped in the blogosphere compared to demand.

Great AJAX jQuery ASP.Net Article

Here is a link to a great article explaining various methods for getting data from the client to the server and back using AJAX, jQuery, and ASP.Net.

http://www.mikesdotnetting.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=104

Enabling GZip on IIS7

Here is an link to a blog post about how to get gunzip working on IIS7

http://cfsilence.com/blog/client/index.cfm/2009/6/10/Enabling-GZip-Encoding-On-IIS7