Monday, November 27, 2006

You Never Know Who's Reading...

I found the following link to my blog today while checking out my referrer stats:

http://www.toledofreepress.com/?id=4326

Lisa Renee Ward, a prolific blogger about Toledo topics, picked up on AVIMH's 2-year anniversary announcement and included that fact in her "Blog It! Toledo" online column in the Toledo Free Press.

Sunday, November 12, 2006

OSU - Michigan Week

This is the week!  The annual rivalry between Ohio State and the University of Michigan will be played out on Saturday November 18.  It should be a very interesting game this year, with OSU being #1 in the standings, and Michigan #2 (both teams are undefeated this season). 

But, I have to be honest: that's about all of the sports facts that I know.

For me, this game represents bragging rights for the next year.  Not only among most of my co-workers, who actually live in Michigan by choice (yeah, what are they thinking?), but also between me and my wife, who has always been a Wolverine fan, despite living in the glorious land of scarlet and gray all of her life.

I have one particularly fond memory of OSU-Michigan week.  Back when I had a local office that was 7 miles from my house (instead of the current 80 miles), I also had control over the office infrastructure.  We had one particularly obnoxious U of M alumnus who was brave enough to drive down to Toledo on the Friday before the game.  We'll call this individual Erik, because that's his name.

Erik always makes it his mission to stir the pot, and this Friday was no exception.

We used ISA Server for the office firewall, which allowed me to set up all kinds of little rules.  One thing that I did was create a rule so that every so often, the firewall would refuse to load whatever internet web page that he was trying to get to, and instead take him to a locally hosted "error" page.  The particular page that I created was adorned with OSU-related stuff, and even played the OSU fight song.  Yes, my friend, we Buckeyes pwned him on that day.  DFWN

I've been lucky enough to have bragging rights for the past 2 years.  Let's make it 3 in a row!

Friday, November 10, 2006

CodeMash Registration is now Open!

There's been a few hiccups in getting the registration site live for CodeMash, but today, you are now able to register through the website!

CodeMash (www.codemash.org) is a fairly unique conference that will be held on January 18-19, 2007 at the Kalahari Lodge in Sandusky, OH.  It stands out from other conferences that I've attended because it is will be a cross-pollenation event, bringing together developers from many different technologies (Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, etc) into one common forum. 

It is also completely organized by the developer community, acting as a non-profit entity.  This means that your registration fees (which are extremely low for a conference like this) are being spent on the conference (i.e., your meals, etc), and not as a means of turning a profit.

We toured the venue last week, and I was totally blown away.  I had no idea that we had this high of quality of a conference facility in Northern Ohio outside of major metro areas.  Sandusky is halfway between Cleveland and Toledo, and is probably better known as the location of Cedar Point, one of the best amusement parks in the entire world.  Kalahari is also an indoor waterpark resort, so it will be an attractive destination in the middle of January.

If you're interested in attending this conference, then you will want to register soon.  Not only do you have to worry about being shut out (registration is capped at 500 attendees), but also there is a time limit for making room reservations at a great price ($88 a night, which includes admission to the waterpark).

https://www.codemash.org/register.aspx

(If this conference sounds interesting to you, even if you can't attend, then please help to spread the word through your blog, or by telling a friend, etc).

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Saturday, November 04, 2006

NetFX 3.0

Dustin Campbell and I were chatting the other day about the whole confusion behind the .NET Framework v3.0, and why they decided on that version number despite the fact that the core (i.e., the CLR) is remaining at v2.0.  He filled me in on a little nugget of information that I think, if entirely accurate [not that I doubt Dustin, but I doubt my ability to correctly remember everything that he said], should have been articulated by Microsoft in the first place to stop whiners like me from making such a big deal about the versioning.

It seems that all of the upcoming Orcas features that we've been calling "3.0" (LINQ, extension methods, yada yada yada) do not require anything new in the CLR.  The languages will have new compilers, but the new compiler will still generate v2.0 MSIL and metadata (i.e., they will generate CLR 2.0 assemblies). 

So, from that perspective, I can start to see why it's no longer important to tie the framework version number to the CLR version number.  It seems that the CLR is stable, and could effectively remain at the current version indefinitely without hindering the ability to add additional functionality to the languages (like LINQ and extension methods).

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Mac Ads

Never been a fan of Apple's new series of ads.  I mean, they're very well done (kudos to the agency that thought those up), it's just that I'm on the opposing team. 

Apparently, Rory doesn't like them either.

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