Things went ok on the webcast today, although I did forget a couple of things that I wanted to show in the demo. I will make a post later tonight highlighting the content that I missed in the webcast for anyone who is interested to read through.
During the webcast I mentioned that I would be putting up links to the various resources used in the webcast, so here they are:
Disclaimer: The code provided is not supported or guaranteed in any way: use at your own risk. In fact, it is not entirely complete (being that the intent is to build it out into a full project) and so you will see at least one failing test because the method it tests is not even implemented.
Related Posts: Oops, I did it again...
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Monday, May 26, 2008
Webcast Dry Run
Well today was the dry run for my upcoming webcast. As I've mentioned before, this is a first for me, so it was interesting. Things went ok, but we had some audio issues which I need to resolve by Wednesday. I suspect Vista is the problem, which is nice and ironic.
The other things I learned by way of feedback as well as just things I noticed myself while speaking or listening to the recording afterwards:
Listening to the recording was interesting. I have always hated listening to my own voice, but I didn't sound quite as stupid as I thought I had, so that was positive. Of course, with the audio cutting out constantly perhaps the dumb portions were mercifully absent.
Finally, the one thing I really noticed was how I sort of 'went blank' as I spoke. I was in some kind of zombie trance, and the couple times that I tripped up because I wasn't following my notes properly left me totally dumbfounded for a few seconds. I think the audio issues hid this pretty well actually, but there were a couple times when I stared at my notes for like 5-10 seconds thinking "What the heck? Where was I? What am I doing next? OH NOES!". Hopefully this does not happen on Wednesday!
The other things I learned by way of feedback as well as just things I noticed myself while speaking or listening to the recording afterwards:
- I should explain that we won't be deep-diving into any specific areas.
- I forgot to have SQL Server Management Studio open.
- I didn't have server explorer connection set up (not sure why, I set it up yesterday. Guess VS forgot it, so I'll need to set it up right before the presentation on wednesday).
- I skipped around and didn't follow my notes properly! I need to make my notes easier to follow (NOT handwritten!).
- I forgot to explain the Lambda expressions properly.
- I need to expand the references section a bit.
- I should use tinyurl for long URL's.
- I set up bookmarks in Visual Studio, and then proceeded to not use them at all.
- I intended to use Full Screen view in Visual Studio but forgot. This resulted in lots of sideways scrolling because I had the Solution Explorer pinned. I didn't clue in on this AT ALL during the entire presentation.
Listening to the recording was interesting. I have always hated listening to my own voice, but I didn't sound quite as stupid as I thought I had, so that was positive. Of course, with the audio cutting out constantly perhaps the dumb portions were mercifully absent.
Finally, the one thing I really noticed was how I sort of 'went blank' as I spoke. I was in some kind of zombie trance, and the couple times that I tripped up because I wasn't following my notes properly left me totally dumbfounded for a few seconds. I think the audio issues hid this pretty well actually, but there were a couple times when I stared at my notes for like 5-10 seconds thinking "What the heck? Where was I? What am I doing next? OH NOES!". Hopefully this does not happen on Wednesday!
Monday, May 19, 2008
Well That Ended Quickly
The great Linux experiment of '08 is officially over. I will really miss the virtual workspaces and other nice features, but until there is a reliable Exchange mail client it just won't do the trick for me. Evolution is beyond buggy, and I can't have my email and calendering crashing constantly. Thunderbird/Lightning didn't seem any better. I couldn't get Outlook to work under Wine.
So I'm back to Windows, and I'm giving Vista a third spin. I'm going to try my darndest to keep the OS 'clean' and hopefully have something that performs reasonably well. Of course, on a fresh install with just Firefox running I'm currently using 675MB of RAM... ugh.
I'm still glad I tried, and I think I might try installing Kubuntu under Wubi and seeing how Kontact works, but I don't hold out much hope. Maybe someday I'll be able to switch back, but for now I'm stuck.
Boo.
So I'm back to Windows, and I'm giving Vista a third spin. I'm going to try my darndest to keep the OS 'clean' and hopefully have something that performs reasonably well. Of course, on a fresh install with just Firefox running I'm currently using 675MB of RAM... ugh.
I'm still glad I tried, and I think I might try installing Kubuntu under Wubi and seeing how Kontact works, but I don't hold out much hope. Maybe someday I'll be able to switch back, but for now I'm stuck.
Boo.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Made The Switch
As of last night I'm officially an Ubuntu user. Things have gone pretty well so far, although Evolution seems to have some kind of leak because towards the end of the day I noticed my system slowing down, and a quick check in the System Monitor showed Evolution using 780MB of RAM and 25% CPU! I watched the RAM usage slowly grow for a few megs, during which time Evolution did not appear to be doing anything. I re-started it and the memory usage dropped back to the normal 20MB or so and my system became snappy again. Definitely another impetus to find an alternative.
Now lets talk about some things I like. Performance is the first thing. Everything just seems faster. Perhaps it isn't fair because I don't have nearly the list of services running and I need to use XP VM's to do a lot of tasks, but for anything I do within Ubuntu itself I really feel like the speed is much faster. Apps load faster, things respond to my actions quicker, and the file system manager (Nautilus I think) seems quicker than Explorer.
The other big plus so far is the window management. I absolutely love the virtual workspaces, and using the keyboard shortcuts to switch between them is starting to feel natural. Moving between them is quick and seamless, and it just gives the feel that I 'have all of my stuff spread out on my desk'. That's the best analogy I can think of.
Finally, tonight I've been playing with the neat desktop effects. I tried the famous Cube but I couldn't get all the effects to work (not sure why) and I find the default Wall behaviour to be more natural and efficient anyways. The zoom feature is great, I should get some use out of that, and the Expose feature might be useful as well (if all those Mac zealots can be believed). Last but not least are the eye candy effects, like wobbly-windows and whatnot, which I assumed would hurt performance but don't seem to really have any effect at all (aside from being neat).
All in all the jury is still out on how functional this can be given my Microsoft-centric career, but I would not hesitate to use Ubuntu on a home PC. Not my Mom's home PC, mind you, because despite all the fervor around how user-friendly Ubuntu is, there is a LOOOONG way to go. I may be crazy, but I'm not THAT crazy.
Now lets talk about some things I like. Performance is the first thing. Everything just seems faster. Perhaps it isn't fair because I don't have nearly the list of services running and I need to use XP VM's to do a lot of tasks, but for anything I do within Ubuntu itself I really feel like the speed is much faster. Apps load faster, things respond to my actions quicker, and the file system manager (Nautilus I think) seems quicker than Explorer.
The other big plus so far is the window management. I absolutely love the virtual workspaces, and using the keyboard shortcuts to switch between them is starting to feel natural. Moving between them is quick and seamless, and it just gives the feel that I 'have all of my stuff spread out on my desk'. That's the best analogy I can think of.
Finally, tonight I've been playing with the neat desktop effects. I tried the famous Cube but I couldn't get all the effects to work (not sure why) and I find the default Wall behaviour to be more natural and efficient anyways. The zoom feature is great, I should get some use out of that, and the Expose feature might be useful as well (if all those Mac zealots can be believed). Last but not least are the eye candy effects, like wobbly-windows and whatnot, which I assumed would hurt performance but don't seem to really have any effect at all (aside from being neat).
All in all the jury is still out on how functional this can be given my Microsoft-centric career, but I would not hesitate to use Ubuntu on a home PC. Not my Mom's home PC, mind you, because despite all the fervor around how user-friendly Ubuntu is, there is a LOOOONG way to go. I may be crazy, but I'm not THAT crazy.
Webcast Update
Couple of things. First off, Steve did a great job with the first Webcast today, check out that link for all of his materials. For anyone who missed the live presentation, the recording should be available soon, I'll post a link when it's up.
Second off, the official launch of the webcast series has been put up on the Imaginet website, you can check it out here.
Last off, my own presentation is now only 2 weeks away, and that officially has me feeling nervous. Guess I better start prepping a bit eh?
Second off, the official launch of the webcast series has been put up on the Imaginet website, you can check it out here.
Last off, my own presentation is now only 2 weeks away, and that officially has me feeling nervous. Guess I better start prepping a bit eh?
Monday, May 12, 2008
Imaginet Webcasts Revealed
A couple weeks ago I mentioned that Imaginet would be presenting a weekly series of Webcasts (I called 'em Webinars back then), but I didn't know many of the details. Well, the details have been released.
Make sure to check out the first one, presented by Steve Porter, this Wednesday!
Make sure to check out the first one, presented by Steve Porter, this Wednesday!
Making The Switch Part 2
I didn't have time to do the full move to Ubuntu last night, but I did decide that I would try to work exclusively out of the Wubi installation today. Things went ok, although I did have to jump to Windows in order to view a Live Meeting with audio. This was kind of annoying because MS advertises that you can view Live Meetings via a Web Browser applet, but they neglect to mention that this doesn't include audio. But hey, who needs audio, right?
I guess I'll have to install Live Meeting into one of my VPC's, or make a Live Meeting Appliance or something. I expected to have to do this for actually presenting anyways, so not the end of the world, although it would be nice to be able to accept impromptu invites within the browser.
I also came across a pretty serious bug that I need to look into more; twice today I completely lost the ability to use my shift or caps lock keys. Yep, no capital letters, underscores, question marks, or exclamation marks. How can I _WORK_ without those?!
Anyways, I did a quick search and it appears to be related to VMWare, which kind of sucks considering how reliant I will be on virtual machines for much of my day to day activities. There is supposedly a command you can type into your terminal that will restore your proper keystokes, but whenever I brought up my terminal and started to type it would disappear (something not unique to me based on the comments I was reading relating to this bug). The only solution for me was to log out and log back in. Not good.
Again, I don't want to let this stop me from moving over, but it is a SERIOUS bug that will cause me to give up and go back to windows if I can't find a fix or work around in a reasonable amount of time. Maybe VirtualBox is the answer? I mean, if I'm going 'alternative', why stop at just the OS? Of course if I start dating men you'll know I've taken this too far.
I guess I'll have to install Live Meeting into one of my VPC's, or make a Live Meeting Appliance or something. I expected to have to do this for actually presenting anyways, so not the end of the world, although it would be nice to be able to accept impromptu invites within the browser.
I also came across a pretty serious bug that I need to look into more; twice today I completely lost the ability to use my shift or caps lock keys. Yep, no capital letters, underscores, question marks, or exclamation marks. How can I _WORK_ without those?!
Anyways, I did a quick search and it appears to be related to VMWare, which kind of sucks considering how reliant I will be on virtual machines for much of my day to day activities. There is supposedly a command you can type into your terminal that will restore your proper keystokes, but whenever I brought up my terminal and started to type it would disappear (something not unique to me based on the comments I was reading relating to this bug). The only solution for me was to log out and log back in. Not good.
Again, I don't want to let this stop me from moving over, but it is a SERIOUS bug that will cause me to give up and go back to windows if I can't find a fix or work around in a reasonable amount of time. Maybe VirtualBox is the answer? I mean, if I'm going 'alternative', why stop at just the OS? Of course if I start dating men you'll know I've taken this too far.
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