IDEP FLASH UPDATE #15 - April 12th, 2005  
From : Yayasan IDEP & Yayasan Andaru Selaras
Re : Tragic sinking of the Endless Sun Vessel

The Cahaya Abadi (Endless Sun), a private relief boat delivering aid to Aceh and Nias has sunk off the coast of Nias on April 11 at 14.00 local time.
 
The 700-ton vessel had just finished offloading a cargo of rice and aid to the village of Afulu on the south coast of Nias, North Sumatra, Indonesia when it struck an uncharted reef in a heavy swell. The boat sunk within twenty minutes. Some of the Indonesian crew of 15 and 5 volunteers swam safely to shore and the others were picked up by fishing boats. All are safe.
  
The Cahaya Abadi had delivered some of the Yayasan IDEP aid and 87 tons of rice donated by the World Food Program to four isolated communities in Nias before the incident occurred.  It had just completed its fourth rice delivery when the accident occurred. The vessel was still fully loaded with food, household and reconstruction aid intended for Aceh when it sank 600 meters offshore.
  
The vessel, leased by Yayasan Andaru Selaras (a Jakarta based NGO) was carrying relief goods from Yayasan IDEP, the World Food Program, Project Concern International and other donors.
  
“We are grateful for the good news that no one on board was seriously injured,” says Petra Schneider, Executive Director of Yayasan IDEP a Bali based NGO.  “We are committed to continue our Aceh aid and recovery projects with the help of our generous donors, volunteers and staff.”
   
The many major earthquakes in the immediate area since December 26 have created an unstable seabed situation with uncharted, difficult to navigate coral reefs.
 
“Crew and volunteers were aware that they were entering a dangerous and volatile situation,” says Chris Gentry, founder of Yayasan Andaru Selaras.  “I want to thank those who have put their lives at risk for the people of Aceh and North Sumatra. Despite the trauma and hardship they have experienced their commitment has not waned. Aid delivery in this difficult time will continue”.
   
 The crew is being evacuated by World Food Program helicopters now. The vessel was a total loss.


  
Among the tons of relief cargo lost undersea were the following items intended for IDEP’s project in Sama Tiga (Aceh) and IDEP is trying very hard to quickly replace these goods as the people there were promised that these items were coming soon aboard The Endless Sun.  Last week, the vessel, en route to Sama Tiga, was re-routed to Nias to deliver rice to isolated coastal communities in need of food, after the March 28 earthquake.

Please help us replace these items for the villagers of Sama Tiga:

• 3,000 Kerosene stoves,$3 each, for a total of $9,000
• 800 “Aid Buckets” total $16,000
• 361 Household kits total $7850
• 340 Food kits total $7540
• 100 Fishing kits total $1224
• 1 trail bike (for delivering goods to villages without roads): $1,500
  

If you can help, please contribute today.

How to help IDEP replace these items…
  
By CREDIT CARD  - Via PayPal, an internet payment system which allows you to make payments from 45 countries  (not including Indonesia - if your credit card billing address is in Indonesia this will not work).  Go to www.idepfoundation.org/aceh_aid.html and follow the instructions there. (Tax deductible for US taxpayers.)
    
By CHECK (in US)  - Via Tides Foundation. Make check payable to “Aceh Aid / Tides Foundation” and mail to Byron Miranda, Accounting, Tides Foundation, P.O. Box 29903, San Francisco, CA 94129, USA. (Tax deductible for US taxpayers.)
       
By WIRE TRANSFER (the quickest way to get funds to IDEP)
Account Name : Yayasan IDEP
Account Number : 034.001229576.003
Bank : BNI (Bank Negara Indonesia), Cabang Ubud, Bali  
Bank Address : Jl. Raya Ubud, Bali - Indonesia  
SWIFT Code : BNINIDJA DPS
    
If you send a wire transfer please send an email to : donate@idepfoundation.org telling us your name, date of transfer, currency and amount, originating bank - as well as how you would like the donation listed if it is not the same as the name on the wire transfer receipt.
     
For additional information about donating to IDEP please contact donate@idepfoundation.org
We will be posting more information on our website soon. www.idepfoundation.org

http://www.AcehAid.org

(sorry, Mike, I just couldn't resist! really, I hope that cold gets better...)

Mike Gunderloy checks out Visual Studio Hacks. In case you don't know (that is, if you are living under a rock), Mike has written A LOT about Visual Studio, big fat granular books, etc,  and he says "So, you know - I got to about page 6 of this book before I learned something new."

Gotta love it

I gave away two copies of the book last night at the VTdotNET meeting and people were chomping at the bit to get their hands on it.

So James, when you decide you can retire a wealthy man from the sale of what I think is going to be a wildly successful book, can we still say "we knew you when..."?

http://www.AcehAid.org

Doug Reilly has started an interview series called database geeks every week.

This week he is featuring Terri Morton who is a frequent contributor on asp.net forums, an asp.net mvp and an aspinsider. Although that sounds pretty much all about ASP, Terri is a pro when it comes to database work in asp.net apps.

Here is the first interview!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Here's something a little different than the usual coding... Stephen Toub points to some job openings at MSDN Magazine. One is a developmental editor which is tasked to drive the content and quality of the magazine. Sound pretty cool!

http://www.AcehAid.org

http://www.AcehAid.org

I had to get a copy of one of my clients sql server db tables onto my local sql server. For some reason DTS was failing on a particular record and I couldn't identify the problem or the record or the error.

I finally gave up and went over to my whidbey box, set up an ADO.NET bulk copy and streamed the data from the remote sql server into the table on my local server.

(Without having to learn how to do a bulk copy in SQL Server)

What a great feeling!

http://www.AcehAid.org

I have a client with one last holdout FoxPro 2.6 application. It manages all of their incredibly complex billing and is a work of art and works beautifully and someday we will upgrade it, not to make it better, but just because we will have to. But for now, just accept that fact and move on.

The woman who does the invoicing noticed an odd inconsistency that did not affect billing but a payroll report that was missing one person's 3 hour stint for a particular day  - one of 3 rows that made up one guy's particular day.

That report is created by a union of two queries. The first picks up all the data, the second picks up any body who didn't have any hours that week (10 maybe 15 extra). I looked and looked at this then broke the queries into two. The record was there. Ran the queries with the union, the record was gone and the row count was off by one.

I have been fiddling with this all morning (it's a disease, what can I say?) and there is no rhyme or reason for it. So I just bagged the union and did two queries and appended the results to each other.

But, no complaints. We are all ecstatic that this 8 year old program (which gets tweaked here and there from time to time) still works on the new computers and is great. Thanks to all who are responsible for that!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Someone who sat in on my C# for VB programmers session at Code Camp emailed with a little problem. DataSet.Table("myTable") was throwing the error

Error: 'System.Data.DataSet.Tables' denotes a 'property' where a 'method' was expected

It is such a common mistake we VB people make in C# because those parens are just totally second nature to us! Even I had to think about it a minute before I saw the problem! It's

DataSet.Table[“myTable“]

The funny thing was seeing a C# programmer complaining that in VB, everything is parens and it makes it hard to tell if we are referring to a parameter or an element, making a method call or getting info out of an array/collection. Great perspective!

http://www.AcehAid.org

Richard Hale Shaw is in town so we thought it would be fun to do a geek dinner.

Date: Thursday April 8th
Time: 6:30 pm
Place: NECI Commons, 25 Church St. Burlington

Note that if there are too many of us to get a table quickly, we will just go elsewhere on Church Street or environs. So try not to be late!!

 

http://www.AcehAid.org

Hey Vermont.NETters....

Here is fellow user group member, Dave Burke, talking about our Monday speaker, Robert Hurlbut and pointing to his Dot Net Rocks show. Check it out!

http://www.AcehAid.org

I am likely one of many many people who are struggling with this decision.

PDC and the MVP Summit are 2 weeks apart, both on the west coast. This is really frustrating.

http://www.AcehAid.org

VTdotNetters -

Last call to register - Mini CodeCamp C# Special Edition with Richard Hale Shaw (@ Watham MA All day Saturday April 30th).

Done in the CodeCamp tradition and will benefit VB/C++ developers who want to get into .NET or C# programmers looking for an all-day refresher course.

(thanks SB for the copy/paste!)

p.s. Come to a geek dinner with Richard in Burlington on Thursday night (April 7). Watch this post for the location

http://www.AcehAid.org

Interesting news! By way of Roman Rehak

http://www.AcehAid.org

(yeah, I know it's been blogged by many people tonight - but this is awesome and I want to push it to my user group website!!)

Microsoft has just launched the VBRun dev center for VB6 developers

Here are the sections highlighted on the start page

Greatest Hits - highlighting some of hte best "black-belt" VB6 content from the MSDN site

VB Fusion - how to interop between VB6 and .NET

Stay the Path - how to leverage your VB6 expertise in VB.NET (I love this just from it's description!)

Check this stuff out!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

It's a tough choice - Pablo Casto (if you read my blog, then by now you should know that Pablo is the PM on the ADO.NET Team) explains...

http://www.AcehAid.org

Microsoft has put SQL Server 2005 on their virtual labs site. YOu can actually go play with it without having to find an extra computer to install it on!

http://msdn.demoservers.com/login.aspx?group=sql2005

http://www.AcehAid.org

Happy news from my friend Mario Cardinal in Montreal who has been awarded MVP for Solutions Architect. Mario came to VTdotNET in January to teach us about Enterprise Services Applications Blocks before they were even released. He had done so much research just based on the documentation with no code available. Mario has a French .NET talk show called BlaBladotNET. I have never listened to it of course because my french is pretty limited! Congrats Mario!

http://www.AcehAid.org

I saw Paschal's MVP post and the follow up conversation about it. I have been mulling this over and decided to comment on it as well. When I read the post I thought that Paschal was asking "what about Ireland?" and throwing caution to the wind regarding how he is perceived. To me, that matches up pretty well with his claim that he doesn't want to be an MVP. His message, as I read it, was "not even one MVP in all of Ireland? Hello?". And he said it even if it meant that, by making a stink about it, he looked, well, like a bit of a stinker.

I understand that message. I have been known to ping MVP leads about some people from Vermont that I wanted to make sure they were aware of. I was delighted to meet up with another Vermont geek at the MVP summit last year! And this is just a little state, not an entire country.

One of the issues for the MVP leads is that people need to get on their radar in order to be considered. Sometimes it takes someone else to make that happen. And even then, there are generally more qualified people than the numbers they are allowed to award to.

So, Paschal and I have different methods. I happen to know some of the leads so I can leverage those connections. He has his blog which definitely gets read, so that's the route he takes. How about use the blog a little further - like have a category: "People I think should be on the MVP radar" - or something like that.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Our next Vermont.NET meeting is Monday, April 11th. Robert Hurlbut is driving up from New Hampshire to teach us about Test Driven Development, Unit Testing and NUnit. I am really looking forward to this. I also managed to get a few copies of Dr. Neil Roodyn's Extreme.NET to give away at the meeting. Also, even though it's not exactly on topic, I can't help but raffle off copies of James Avery's new Visual Studio Hacks that arrived a few days back. Darn right I'm keeping a copy for myself. A quick look through left me really impressed. I will write about that later. We also have some swag from the last INETA mailing - Dundas Gauge for .NET.

So this will be a great meeting, very informative and excellent resources and tools to share. Thanks to O'Reilly, Addison Wesley, INETA, Dundas and Robert!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

stay tuned for details but mark your calendars.

Time: 6:30
Place: NECI Commons, 25 Church St. Burlington

Note that if there are too many of us to get a table quickly, we will just go elsewhere on Church Street or environs. So try not to be late!!

Richard Hale Shaw will be in town so we thought it would be fun to do a geek dinner on Thursday night.

I'll think up a place (probably downtown or maybe So. Burlington) where we don't need reservations, can walk in with a group of undetermined size and has something on the menu besides pizza.

(Please leave a comment if you plan to attend, thanks)

http://www.AcehAid.org