General
In Google Reader this morning, I found an entry in the Programmable Web API feed for DabbleDB. DabbleDB is a "Web 2.0" application that combines "the best of group spreadsheets, custom databases, and intranet application into a new way to manage and share your information on the web." I'm usually pretty skeptical of anything with the "Web 2.0" moniker, however, I'm very interested in new and better ways to present, manage, and integrate data. In addition to providing a very compelling interface for building "applications" through the browser, DabbleDB also provides a Plugin API that allows you to create new "derived fields" by calling out to external HTTP-accessible applications (perhaps we could call these services?).
For a good overview of the functionality offered by DabbleDB checkout this "whirlwind demo", that won Best in Show at Under the Radar: Why Web 2.0 Matters". When you're done there you can find out more on the explore page.
While I don't think I could have built it nearly as well as the DabbleDB folks have, what they've built is very similar to what I had in mind for the "ideal" platform for building out our data extensibility platform. While our core schema is locked down, we do want our customers to be able to extend our application and their data to fit their specific needs. In order to do this, I'd really like to provide our clients with a nice UI for defining the structure of their "extension data" in a way that is as intuitive as what you can see in the DabbleDB videos. Dabble's own extensibility for "derived fields" is also of interest. They're allowing derived fields to be added to sets of data by linking to external services, which is very similar to some ideas we've had. The obvious difference is that they've actually built it. 
Anyway, this all reminds me of Alex's Data 2.0 idea. I wonder how much of it will show up in the next release of Base4.NET?
This wonderful game of blog tag has found it's way to me, thanks Sam! So here goes 5 things you most likely didn't know about me.
- In college, my worst grade received was in Music History. My only "C". The class was in a huge auditorium, and did an amazing job of putting one to sleep.
- I've had the pleasure of being called both a "dumb jock" and a "nerd". I was a typical "jock" in high school playing all three sports (Football, Basketball, Baseball) and I played running back in college at Bloomsburg University. Now that I'm a "software guy" I get the "geek" and "nerd" tag often from family and friends. A true distinction.
- I took more classes in college that used COBOL as the primary language, then any C based language (C, Java, C++). I assure you it wasn't by choice.
- I'm writing a book on LINQ with Fabrice. It's going to kick major ass!
- I'm married with 2 kids, and have one on the way. My wife and I have know each other (and pseudo dated) since I was in 6th grade. Somehow she manages to still love me after all these years, at least that's what she tells me A bonus thing that you might not know is that my son, Steven John Eichert Jr. (who is 3) has Down Syndrome. Those who have been reading my blog for a while might already know this since I've talked about going to the Buddy Walk and such in the past. It's not something I ever expected to be faced with, but it's been an amazing blessing and has affected my life in more positive ways then I could have ever imagined when I found out 3.5 years ago.
So that's it. Now I need to find 5 people who haven't already been tagged. Let's try...Darrell Norton, Dave Burke, Tim Haines, Eric White, and Fabrice.
I recently got an iPod Video and am looking for a good app that will convert misc video formats to the format required by my iPod video. Any suggestions? A google search turns up a ton, so I'm hoping somebody has had a good experience with one. I'd like to setup the software to monitor a folder, and when a file is dumped in the folder have it automatically converted and copied to my iPod. My only other requirement is that it handles all the major file formats that I'm likely to run into.
Apologies to anyone who has been seeing strange results in my RSS feed. The company that hosts my blog also hosts my old company website. It appears that something strange has been going on with the DNS which has resulted in my old company website showing up in place of my blog. This would also include my RSS feed. Sorry for the mixup, they’ve told me things are setup properly now so should everything should return to normal….hopefully.
- A big congratulations to Sam for his 100th New and Notable post. I’m sure he’ll make fun of me because only my mom reads my blog (shit, she doesn’t even read it does she!?!?!) and I don’t drive any traffic to his blog. Oh well, such is life.
- Alex has an interesting post on Understanding the future of data: Data 2.0
- It seems to be a good time to leave Microsoft, first Scoble and now Bill G (checkout his channel 9 video). I wonder if they’ll fall apart now?
- Project Glidepath – “Project Glidepath is designed to provide the knowledge you, as a MicroISV, need to be successful by providing step-by-step instructions for everything from how to get started with Windows Presentation Foundation to how to write and publish a press release. Please give Project Glidepath a test drive and let us know what you think.”
This pretty much ensures my next computer purchase will be quite
fruity.
Some good stuff from around the blog world that I wanted to share. Not interesting enough on their own but maybe as a group they’ll be worth something.
If only I didn’t have such a headache perhaps I could read some of them
After considering a couple evil alternatives Sam Gentile has decided to join the illustrious bloggers over on CodeBetter.com. Best of luck at your new home Sam.
Over the course of my software career I’ve worked hard to make myself a better developer. These 7 tips have helped me along my way. What tips would you offer aspiring software developers?
1. Read. Read. Read. Books are a great resource for gaining new knowledge, enhancing existing knowledge, and forcing yourself to grow into new areas. Although I’ve been lazy with my reading lately I think the books that I’ve read over the course of my career have greatly enhanced my ability to grow professionally.
2. Write lots of code. If you want to get better at something you need to practice. This applies to coding just as much as it does to anything else. As you work through problems you’ll learn new ways of doing things, realize how stupid you were in the past, and you’ll begin to see common problems and scenarios. Get coding!
3. If someone asks you a question that you don’t know the answer to find the answer. I’ve always made it a habit to find the answer to questions that colleagues have asked. If someone is asking you for the answer and you don’t know it there’s a decent chance it is worth knowing. Do a quick google search, or send yourself an email reminder to find the answer. Not only will your colleague appreciate you finding out the answer for them but you’ll also have gained some new knowledge that you won’t have to go searching for next time around.
4. Blog it up. Reading blogs as well as writing blogs can be very helpful to your career. By reading blogs you’ll keep a good handle on what’s going on in the tech world and be able to identify areas that you may need to increase your knowledge and skills. By writing a blog you’ll open yourself up to new opportunities. Obviously you need to be able to make the commitment to writing solid content but if you can make the commitment do it.
5. Remember that your job is to make the users of your software kick ass. It’s not to write some really snazzy class that uses all the latest language features, its about creating kick ass software.
6. Learn something new. Learning is one of the most important aspects to becoming a solid software developer. There is way too much out there to know it all. Make it a habit of learning something new. Whether it’s a new class, a new framework, or a completely new language. Just remember to continuously learn.
7. Read code. One of the things that I enjoy is checking out other people’s code. By examining how someone else solved a problem you often times learn new ways of doing things. I’ve checked out a lot of code and learned a lot of things from it. When someone posts a code sample, or open sources a project they’ve been working on crack open the code and take a look, chances are you’ll learn something new.
I've noticed that I rarely ready any posts in the blogs.msdn.com feed. There are a number of great bloggers syndicated in the feed but since I'm using Newsgator (both web edition and via my Omea Newsgator plugin) I only get the 25 most recent posts and often times miss out on the good stuff. I'm starting to think that I need to bite the bullet and add the individual bloggers whom I like. It's just that the blanket MSDN feed seems so necessary. All those Microsofties sitting in one aggregated feed. It's so tempting, so allustrious, and.....so lame. It's time to move on.
For Christmas my wife got me a Buffalo LinkStation Network drive. It won the Coolest Gift of the Year award which made my wife pretty happy. If your looking to buy yourself a Christmas present I’d definitely recommend it. It’s real easy to setup, plugs right into your network, has a print server, and is way cool, what more could you want.
Anyway, one of the reasons I wanted the LinkStation drive was so that my wife would be able to easily gain access to the photos and music that I have on one of my other drives from her Mac. Obviously a LinkStation isn’t required for this but it made for a good gift idea so just go with it.
I was hoping that I would be able to get iPhoto to “index” all my photos on the network drive so that from her Mac my wife could browse the photos on the network and then print or email them as needed. Well as far as I can tell iPhoto isn’t down with this type of setup. It wants the photos on a local drive which of course isn’t what I’m looking for. So to finally get to the point, does anyone have any recommendations for photo software? I want something that provides the following:
- Is cross platform (WinXP, Mac OS X)
- Allows photos to be grouped and organized
- Allows the photos to be tagged
- Makes it easy to print & email
- Rich client (unless the web UI is really slick and easy to get photos into)
- Doesn’t require my to take out a second mortgage
I’ve been using Picasa on my XP machines which is perfect except that it doesn’t have a Mac version. Any recommendations?
One of the things I like about having a blog is the ability to get feedback and comments from people in the community. When I had my blog over on dotnetjunkies.com I used to get a good number of comments from readers. Since moving my blog to my own host I’ve noticed that the amount of interaction and feedback I get has decreased. I’m not sure if its because I suck, or because the stuff that I’m posting on is less interesting, or if people just don’t have as much time as they used to for posting comments to blogs. I put up a quick survey that consists of 5 quick questions that will hopefully make this blog a better place.
1) What do you like?
2) What don’t you like?
3) What would you like more of?
4) What would you like less of?
5) Is there anything that would make you comment more?
If you have a quick minute I’d love some feedback!
Tonight I finally got around to upgrading the server that hosts this blog to .NET 2.0. Along with the update to 2.0 I rolled out a minor upgrade to the software that powers this wonderful blog. The upgrade consisted of some bug fixes as well as a couple new features. The most notable being search. The search feature is powered by DotLucene and is available via the Search box in the navigation of my site. You can link directly to search results by appending your search results to the http://steve.emxsoftware.com/search/ url. So you can search for all agile content by browsing to http://steve.emxsoftware.com/search/agile or perhaps TDD content is what your after?. Or something else?
I should note that I wrote the search components using DotLucene over the course of a few hours this past week so there are probably a number of bugs
I’m excited to see that there is a
community project for building useful MSBuild Tasks. We have a really nasty Nant script to do our builds due to the fact that the version of Nant that was available when we automated our build didn’t support the <
solution/> task for VS 2005. This results in a fragile build file which needs to be updated each time new references or new projects are added to our solution. I started to migrate us to MSBuild but was having some minor issues getting NUnit to work via the Exec task. Hopefully the
MSBuild Community Tasks Project will give me everything I need.