from the INETA website

Tsunami and our World Wide Community
INETA is a worldwide community and we are all heartbroken by the horror of the Tsunamis in the Indian Ocean. Please help support relief efforts in any way you can. Here is a link to a list of aid organizations compiled by CNN.

http://www.redcross.org

CNN's home page is reporting that the U.S. has now raised their support to $350million. Now that's more like it! That's for the long term. The problem is what to do for the immediate problem. The water purifying ships and other vessels that are arriving around the Indian Ocean and planes filled with supplies are helping. Sadly there are still so many places that this stuff can't get to - especially inland.

http://www.redcross.org

Since I can't use these (no place in Vermont open today), I can give them to the highest bidder (or just give them away). Since they are worth $125 each, I would like to give them in trade for $50+ donations to www.redcross.org for International Disaster Relief.

Sorry for the last minute. I just realized they expire today.

Darn - I just realized my test voucher for taking a cert test expires today. I figured I might as well go take that Web Services test cold. If I don't pass, well, no different than throwing the cert away and if I do pass, I have an MCAD. Unfortunately, I think both of the local ctechs where I can take the test are closed. Oh well.

http://www.redcross.org

from Anand M

I have been getting some comments from people trying to find information about friends in Chennai or India. I have started a new Blog called Tsunami India to help such people. If you want to know information about a friend, just mail me or post a comment in one of the blogs. If you know about someone being searched for, leave a comment in the appropriate post.

Do spread the news around, so that we can help people get in touch with friends and relatives.

http://www.redcross.org

The Aceh Aid Bucket Brigade that is coordinating relief efforts in Aceh is in need of a bunch of equipment (see specific list) and an I.T. person that can help them. Coming in by way of Singapore is the best bet.  Susi's post explains how this can be coordinated.

Who's got Apple connections??

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Susi Johnston shares reports from the people she is helping to coordinate in Aceh. She also reports a death toll from Sumatra that is [there is no word to fill this space].

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hooray!

Maybe it will start a "bidding" war among the rich corporations like it has with the rich nations! Wouldn't that be fabulous!

Maybe after this tragedy has passed, the goodwill will just continue everywhere. Wouldn't that be fabulous!

http://www.redcross.org

One very bright spot this past week was visiting with my own "nieces", actually the daughters of my cousin, Amy and Andrea. Their older brother has a fully outfitted Toshiba M200 - docking station and all, but they have never been allowed to touch it. So they were astonished that I let them use mine for hours and hours. Of course, they were thrilled with Math Practice and loved drawing, handwriting recognition and all of the coolness of it.

http://www.redcross.org

From Bali, Aceh Aid Bucket Brigade blog details the type of  skills that can be used on site:

Indonesian Language (essential)
Medical
Nursing
First Aid (wilderness/disaster first aid, not pre-hospital first aid, these people won't get to hospitals)
Rescue and Evacuation
Emergency Sanitation (as in refugee camps, devastated/recovering villages)
Water Purification / Clean Water Systems

Also, they can use some technical help too

We are encountering some "desk work" that take up time we could be using to get medical supplies on planes, get relief workers into the field, coordinate with NGOs, etc. Things that don't need to be done here. I mean work that could be "outsourced" to "virtual volunteers" (you?), such as updating our distribution list, and fixing it, making a database compiled from forms filled out by people applying as volunteers, maintaining specific lists, solving software problems by IM and email . . . .

We are doing lots of very important things here, that not many people in the world can do . . . in a language that most of you reading this will never need to learn to speak . . . so I think our time is crucial here on the ground in Indonesia . . .

http://www.redcross.org

Veer Ji Wangoo in New Delhi asks questions that are similar to my own:

As a SQl DBA what can I contribute?

http://www.redcross.org

Unless you have some special skills, the best thing we can do is send money to the organizations who know what to do and know how to do it. So that is good inspiration for me to keep working and send what $ I can. I am sending my money through the Red Cross, though there are many other aid organizations as well. It's a crappy feeling to realize that my skills aren't very useful when they could really count.

http://www.redcross.org

I have had no desire to blog lately because nothing seems relevant in the wake of what is going on in Asia.

However, finally, I saw something that definitely cheered me up. Steve Smith is back in the U.S.

http://www.redcross.org

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/12/27/more.emails/index.html

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I mentioned in a previous post that the Batch updating process was changed with the current (November) bits of Whidbey to overcome a limitation in SQL Server - which is that you cannot have more than 2100 parameters in one query.

In response to a discussion in the newsgroups (ADO.NET 2.0 Batch Update), below is a screenshot from SQL Profiler with the earlier bits when I had set UpdateBatchSize=3.

It bunched together 3 queries into one big query. With 15 parameters per query,  SQL Server was receiving 46 parameters.(the 45 parameters + the actual query string which was stuffed in to @P1).

In this case, I would be hitting the limit if I tried to send more than 140 rows.

In the new bits, if you watch the profiler, you will see one row being updated per query. So  ADO.NET is now sending a group of individual queries in each batch, rather than one big huge query. I have sent batches of 10,000 rows at a time.

Example from Beta 1 October CTP - no longer true for future releases of .NET 2.0

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Here is the blog of Sriram Krishnan who runs the Student Chapter of Chennai's .NET User Group. Sriram, no need to apologize for non-technical posts about what's going on in Chennai right now.

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He and his wife are okay as they were not on the beach in the morning.

http://weblogs.asp.net/pleloup/archive/2004/12/27/332577.aspx

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Has anyone been in contact with Anand? He lives in Chennai. There are so many .NET folks in Chennai.

update: Anand was fortunately visiting his parents and not in Chennai on Sunday morning. His home, quite near the beach, was spared from water damage.

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http://www.ndtv.com/homepage/default.asp

http://www.chennaionline.com/

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I now have friends all over the world through our INETA and blogging communities. Friends in places like Chennai, India which was hit hard by this mornings' earthquake and subsequent tidal waves.

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From CNN - Comair cancelled all of it's flights over Christmas. Why?

Comair's computer system that manages flight assignments crashed Friday night after it was overwhelmed by cancellations and delays caused by the winter storm that socked the Ohio Valley. The computer shutdown forced the airline to cancel all of its Saturday flights.

Ouch!

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Neil recieved his first copy a few weeks ago and shows us the flyer for the book here.

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Since Movable Type supports the blogger and metaweblog apis, has anyone tested BLInk! against an MT blog? I would love to know the results.

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Someday, I am going to own one of Daryl's phenomenal pastels. Until then, at least I can share them with others via my blog. Here is her website. For now I have some postcards and a pin!

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I'm finding that I am now trying to type in VB.NET syntax when doing work in some of my old VB6 apps. That area of my brain devoted to VB6 is diminishing as my .NET storage space is requiring more and more space. Or maybe it's just that as I get older, the whole hard drive is shrinking anyway.

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Got Speech? Developing Applications using Microsoft Speech Server and .NET

Wednesday, February 23, 2005 8:30 AM - 4:00 PM Microsoft New England District Office Waltham, MA

Registration is open!

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Thom Robbins announced the winners of the Will Code for Device contest and then posted individual blog posts describing each of the winning applications and screen shots of them.

If you browse to his list of blog posts for December you can see each of the winning apps.

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http://sqljunkies.com/WebLog/amachanic/archive/2004/12/23/5712.aspx

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Poor Robert has taken such a beating this week, but this really is funny!

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egad! I just downloaded November last week. It was 2.5 GB and took over 12 hours. The December bits are online now and are 3.2 GB.

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A number of people pointed these out before, but I was just looking at them (here) and could not help thinking that yes, it would have been a good therapeutic birthday present for my friend over here.

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This story was on NPR (MarketPlace) last night.

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My husband's idea of a dream garage. Insulated, heated, air conditioned, a lift, wide-screen t.v., video games, 500 Sq ft of storage space, sealed floors, 3 bays, lots of organized shelving. Oy vey! Can't even begin to imagine the cost.

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Oh good. Now I can take all of those caveats out of my Whidbey BCL presentation!

This is a big deal. Peter Drayton explains why and the impact of this on language developers in this blog post.

Good work, folks!

(of course, if you used Smalltalk..... as per James Robertson)

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I guess it would be fun to rewrite the VTdotNET application from scratch. That was my first ASP.NET applicaiton and learning playground,so I think it's only fitting. Heck. I can even have a user login now.

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degrees farenheit. Today I won't complain that I can't walk the dogs because of my crutches!

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Sahil asks a good question (something I meant to share...thanks for the reminder) about installing the November CTP bits on a machine that already has SQL Server 2005 (Beta 2) on it.

The latest install put SQL 2005 Express on my machine without asking me. I already had SQL 2005 Beta 2 (Oct. CTP) on there. All of my vs.net tests against the SQL Server database continued to function perfectly. However, I cannot open up a connection in the SQL Server Management Studio.It is looking for a method that no longer exists in the Windows.Forms namespace (cool to see that tie to managed code...). Hmm - a few more dialogs I try to open also have similar issues with the

So I'll probably get the December CTP of SQL Server to see. I'm sure it's working with something! I clearly missed a piece of information somewhere about that. And I can't quite answer your question, yet, Sahil. Sorry. 

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I'm happy to see Rachel was inspired to start a blog... just today in fact. Rachel is a long time developer who I believe was using .NET before it ever even RTM'd. She lives in PA and speaks frequently at DotNetValley user group. Subscribed!

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Here are some more changes upcoming for the November CTP that I found loading up a project from the October CTP bits:

retyping for Google, etc

System.Transactions.TransactionScope.Consistent is being replaced by Transaction.Scope.Complete

LoadOption.UpdateCurrentValues (used with DataSet/DataTable.Load(dbDataReader)) is changing to the very strange LoadOption.Upsert. Additionally, LoadOption.OverwriteRow is replaced by OverwriteChanges and PreserveCurrentValues is replaced by PreserveChanges.

Lastly, System.Windows.Forms.AutoScaleBaseSize is deprecated. This was automatically created by the Windows form designer as you began dropping controls onto the design surface.

eg:   Me.AutoScaleBaseSize = New System.Drawing.Size(5, 13)

Now, I see these two lines being created instead:

 Me.AutoScaleDimensions = New System.Drawing.SizeF(6.0!, 13.0!)
 Me.AutoScaleMode = System.Windows.Forms.AutoScaleMode.Font

All of this stuff will get helpfully pointed out by VS2005.

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Christy Seals, one of the army wives on ArmyAdvice.com listed some helpful info on baking goodies to send over to troops in Iraq and also pointed to the Nestle site which has modified some of their recipes to withstand the heat and the laws of Iraq.

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UpdateBatch has been dramatically changed with the current bits (41129) of VS2005. Here are the details on that.

Now that we can exceed the 2100 parameter limit I have been doing some experiments with a 10000 record query from a 104,000 record table and doing batch updates in big chunks. It will be important to tune your batch updates based on the system - location of sql server relative to the application, latency, etc etc. Here is what I hit today when working against a hardwired remote sql server 2000.

Interesting....

Modifying the new CommandTimeout property (from default of 10 to 60) on the DataAdapter's SelectCommand, fixed this problem. Then I had to change it again for a batch of 10,000. I just popped it up to 120 and that did the trick.

What's going on of course is that ado.net is building some big goo up front. Prior to this version, it built one big fat query to accomodate the entire batch. But that's where they quickly (very quickly) hit the 2100 parameter limit. Now watching profiler, it is getting run one update (one row) at a time. I wish I could watch what happens in between, but, really, that's okay! Can't geek out too much.

This is the kind of fun you can have on a beautiful winter day with a broken foot.

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A few days ago I noticed that GetDataReader had an obsolete stamp all over it in the online docs. Jackie Goldstein as well as Kawarjit Bedi (from the ADO.NET team) let me know it was just because the name was being changed. I found this warning in the latest bits (November CTP) to be much less alarming than the "obsolete" stamp!

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Hip Hip Hooray! Yippee yi yo ki yay!!

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This is local news - but for the curious, Champlain College is in downtown Burlington and is incredibly innovate, technical and leading edge. They have super facilities for technology and even a Masters program in IT. Here is a link to the press release on the new president. 

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http://www.citroen.co.uk/c4/

turn on your speakers and click on "See the Ad" on the bottom left

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I haven't been following this story, but noticed this on CNN's home page. Two students had taken the school to court saying that the school should wait until all of the current student body has graduated. Their case was rejected.  I graduated from Wells College in 1983.

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Congrats to Ken Levy and everyone involved with VFP!

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Microsoft watch asks "Would you trust Microsoft to backup your personal files?"

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Avonelle points out Joel Spolsky's comment in a discussion about being a one-man shop and Christopher Hawkin's response.

Although Joel's backup logic is bull, I do agree with his main "thesis" - that a consultant is not an entrepreneur. In 16 or so years I have been a consultant, I have never considered myself an entrepreneur or a start-up business, so I don't even care about qualifying that one.

However, he uses some dead-wrong points to back up that statement. Pure bull.

I am hardly the low man on the totem pole with my clients. I am a business partner - a trusted business partner. The owner of my largest client absolutely sees me that way. I have acquired such a good understanding of his business over the years that it is not uncommon for him to discuss other areas of his business (other than technology) with me and seek my opinion.

Perpetual Job hunting. My very first client came to me as a referral. I had a full time job then and was not even looking for contract work. Since then, almost all of my work has been word of mouth for all of these years. That does not mean that I "put the word out" that I was looking either. I'm talking about totally unsolicited. The only real caveat to this is that when I moved to Vermont, I needed a full time job in order to get a mortgage. At that time, I did have to actively look for a W-2 position.)

Back to work...

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Just an FYI - the latest bits on MSDN (for msdn universal subscribers) for VS2005 are 2.5 GB and are meant for a DVD. It is not broken up into CD sized chunks like the October CTP. I just upgraded my DSL service to download at 1000 Mbps (instead of 512) and the it still looks like it's going to be 10+ hours. Uggh.

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I am thrilled and proud of the fact that my friend Maryam has just become a U.S. citizen

HOORAY MARYAM!!

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(aha! just getting a new name: CreateDataReader. Thanks for the info Jackie and Kawarjit (from the AD0.Net team!)

whoa. I just noticed this in the online docs that come up through the msdn library with vs2005 (which points to this link)

The same holds true (as per the above set of docs) for DataTable.GetDataReader.

However, if you browse to a separate source of docs at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/library/0xbt1065.aspx there is no indication of it being obsolete.

It works just fine in the October CTP bits I am using. I'm confused.

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Brad Wilson pointed to a new article on www.DotNetDevs.com, which prompted me to go over to the site and see what else is there. What I saw thrilled me. A host of articles that are aimed at removing the bridge of fear that many people have of particular topics. "Reflection Demystified", "Understanding Isolated Storage", "Using Encryption in .NET" and more. The authors of these articles understand that "you can't know everything" and just because you don't understand a particular topic or concept, does not mean you need to be addressed as though you don't even know how to turn on a computer. Nor do they speak in tongues, taking a topic so deeply that there is no place for you to hook in so you can understand what the heck they are talking about. This site is looking like the chapters of the fantasy book I was dreaming of writing (but probably won't ever really write). Kudos to Brad Wilson and the other authors on the .NET Developers site.

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Sorry - I had to beat Mary Jo to the pun, err punch.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/dec04/12-16GIANTPR.asp

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My INETA Winter Warmup arrived today. Dave Totzke did some hell of a job getting vendors to contribute. Here is a list of all of the vendors who contributed stuff. But I wanted to say an extra thanks to Programmer's Paradise. They also made an incredible donation. They packaged and shipped the mailing. Not only was it packed like a pro, but think about the fact that this went to all of the user groups in North America. That's about 250 groups. That's 250 boxes to pack and 250 * ?? for shipping each box. At least $5/box right? This is a huge contribution. So thank you SO VERY MUCH to everyone at Programmer's Paradise!

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I got a monthly beer delivery for for Rich from www.hogshead.com a bunch of years ago and it is really awesome.

Groovy little micro breweries from around the country that you might never know of unless you travelled to where those beers are made. I'm getting this for a really fantastic client this year.

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Larry O'Brien points out that Office has been updated with improved ink recognition. I haven't played with it yet - I still don't use my tablet for this type of stuff. (she said, sitting in front of her big desktop, 19" monitor and typing away at the keyboard - but still using BLInk! to write the post...)

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Very cool!!! Short films do not have many venues outside of film festivals in the u.s. Amazon Theater is actually showing some right on their website! Granted there is some serious product placement going on. I don't know if the films are created with the goal of featuring items you can buy on Amazon, or if Amazon scours the films to find items that they sell. But there is a page that says “see something you liked in the movie? Buy it here“ Sheesh - but still....

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Why wait when Beth Massi has created a tool to do it now?? In fact, she did this in February!

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I wonder if this is what Jason's newscasts look like!

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INETA has added 8 new speakers to the North American Speaker Bureau!!

They are:

• Don Kiely
• Kathleen Dollard
• Joel Semeniuk
• Russ Nemhauser
• Stephen Forte
• Jim Duffy
• Phil Weber
• Craig Utley

.

If you want to be considered for the INETA Speaker Bureau please refer to this blog post by Committee Chair, Scott Bellware.

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