Adnan Masood's Weblog! عدنان مسعود

“Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, everyday, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.“
Christopher Morley
American writer and editor 1890-1957

So I decided to read a Guid everyday!

Rob Walling has posted an excellent article today “Using Technology to Fight Poverty” explaining his experiences of recent trip to Ghana. A must read for everyone who believes in “One does evil enough when one does nothing good.”

Mark Haddon's Curious incident of the dog in the night time is an excellent read (Thanks for the recommendation David!); I finished it couple of weeks ago and want to go back and re-read it. Its the story of autistic boy, Christopher John Francis Boone, which is not reinforcing the stereotype of the mathematically gifted social inadequate and this book isn't about Maths either IMHO. It's the magic of story telling, making a routine seen from a 15 year old's eyes, an extra ordinary journey. Amazon reviews will give one a good insight into it because I'd just say “you got to read it man!“.

Following are some maps of Christopher's mother's home where he tried to go on his own. I couldn't find the exact place (fictitious address?) but there is the street view from google maps.

 

Not much left to say about the following dialog box; leaving format specifier unpopulated. Where is the QA guy!

Nick calls it a digital leash but I love my new tech-toy; BlackBerry is a developer's dream come true. I can get app errors, process status and a whole lot of status when not around my machine. Also, I can surf slashdot while waiting in a queue at Fry's  or KrispyKreme (they won't give you a donut with drive-thru orders so don't try, well I did and it didn't work). While getting used to its QWERTY, I'm discovering that IP2Location shows that Research In Motion (RIM) OS assigns the IP for the device from Canada. Also, I got Litefeeds from David's handy suggestion BlackBerry forums, one stop place for BB. Reminds me of Scot Mitchell what he told us in SOCAL.NET summit about error emails being RSS'ed and him fixing the problem even before customer gets notified; now this is SDLC in action. Thanks Paul..thanks NEC...now I can be more proactive!

While back Lorry and I had a discussion about pH balance of tap water vs. bottled water. She thought that our fishes are having gill flukes due to acidity of water. Also, I shouldn't drink tap water since it has high concentration of ammonia and just general 'poop' in it. I doubted these allegations and we end up doing some tests. Bottled water turned out to be close to 7.0 however tap water was basic. I thought it was actually good because being alkaline would make it less reactant to pipes and lead. Following are the pictures of our tests. The ammonia level tests were either in-conclusive or just can’t remember what happened. 

  

 
  

 

Windows Communication Foundation (formerly code name "Indigo") Road Show was an interesting event for developers; a good combination of little marketing and more drilled in code for windows communication foundation. In the Orange Coast College Costa Mesa, this event was presented by Ami Vora and Piyam Shodjai. In connection to Don Box's Tour of Indigo Team it was a good learning event and the resources DVD had excellent material.

Got a signed copy of programming indigo by David Pallman

Me with David Pallman

Ami Vora explaining about the event DVD she made and getting started with Windows Communication Foundation.

Ami Vora, calling for some indigo action and feedback and as she puts it, no other team is as hungry for feedback as Indigo team.

Raffle, the best part of the event since I won a copy of programming indigo :)

Payam Shodjai's no-fluff presentation on indigo.

Payam Shodjai explaining the architecture.

Payam Shodjai explaining the layers and choices available to mix and match in indigo.

Payam Shodjai explaining the WSDL role in the indigo.

Antony Chhan: enjoying the Indigo Road Show.

On Thursday the 18th, I and Rob went to Rule the Web with ASP.NET 2.0, the MSDN event in Burbank. It was a 200 level event with Bernard Wong who is an excellent speaker. However I've just had enough of same presentation/contents over and over at several MSDN Events/Conferences and therefore I slept part of the time and later we browsed slashdot and our blogs on his Treo and my Blackberry. Swag was good, especially the event DVD and VPC for Visual studio team system.

Bernard Wong presenting the Masterpage in ASP.NET 2.0

Bernard Wong answering questions and presenting the skins.

Rob has a claim that his smile should be placed next to Mona Lisa in Louvre.

Demonstrating the classic night and day style sheet example.

It has been a while since Internet Explorer 7: Now in beta testing for developers . Finally this morning, Rob Walling sent me this (How to run IE7 on the same machine as IE6) and I got to run it locally. voila!

Antony showed me this code snippet couple of days ago. If you want to copy a directory to another location as datetime being filename the traditional batch way, following is the go to script.

@echo off
rem Extract date time to filename-compatible format

for /f "tokens=1-4 delims=/ " %%i, in ('echo %date%') do set filedate=%%l-%%k-%%j
for /f "tokens=1-3 delims=: " %%i, in ('time /t') do set filetime=%%i-%%j-%%k

for /f "tokens=1-4 delims=/ " %%i, in ('echo %date%') do set datevar=%%j-%%k-%%l
for /f "tokens=1-3 delims=: " %%i, in ('time /t') do set timevar=%%i:%%j:%%k

mkdir c:\%filedate%_%filetime%
xcopy c:\PNTDATA c:\%filedate%_%filetime% /E /C /H /R /Y /G /q