Specter Survives KCDC

KCDC 2016 just wrapped up another year with the best turnout ever. Many interesting sessions by some of the brightest local and national speakers were presented. By far, the best value for your training dollar. You should consider attending if you have never been.

Temperatures were the highest so far this year and the walk back to the Kauffman Center was long and hot. After a great three days of learning, I was ready to be done for the day. Once I was back at the garage, I realized I forgot where the car was. Anxiously, I looked up one level and down another, hoping to catch a glimpse of my car. Here I was, walking around in a stuffy garage when I just wanted to be home. Heading down yet another ramp I glanced up and spotted a bit of familiar silver gray. Peering between levels I was thrilled to see that yes, that was my car but now I had to walk all the way back up two more ramps. But wait, why not just climb over the two rails between the levels. How hard could it be?

Halfway over the rail I stopped and looked down. The gap was only about a foot but you could see level after level of concrete and steel that makes up the parking lot. That is when I heard it. A distinctive clunk, clunk, clunk of something falling. I glanced behind me to see that my computer bag had tipped over, spilling the contents. My heart sank when I realized my laptop was nowhere around and that sound was it banging off the rails as it fell between the parking levels.

I rushed to the car and quickly drove down, level by level, looking for my laptop. Finally at the bottom level I spotted it laying open, face down, on the concrete. As I picked it up I dreaded the sight of a shattered screen. Much to my surprise the screen was not broken. The computer booted up and everything worked. The case is now a bit beat up, the metal is pitted and scraped, but it works as good as new. I got to hand it to HP, that Specter is one tough computer.

Specter Survives KCDC

KCDC 2016 just wrapped up another year with the best turnout ever. Many interesting sessions by some of the brightest local and national speakers were presented. By far, the best value for your training dollar. You should consider attending if you have never been.

Temperatures were the highest so far this year and the walk back to the Kauffman Center was long and hot. After a great three days of learning, I was ready to be done for the day. Once I was back at the garage, I realized I forgot where the car was. Anxiously, I looked up one level and down another, hoping to catch a glimpse of my car. Here I was, walking around in a stuffy garage when I just wanted to be home. Heading down yet another ramp I glanced up and spotted a bit of familiar silver gray. Peering between levels I was thrilled to see that yes, that was my car but now I had to walk all the way back up two more ramps. But wait, why not just climb over the two rails between the levels. How hard could it be?

Halfway over the rail I stopped and looked down. The gap was only about a foot but you could see level after level of concrete and steel that makes up the parking lot. That is when I heard it. A distinctive clunk, clunk, clunk of something falling. I glanced behind me to see that my computer bag had tipped over, spilling the contents. My heart sank when I realized my laptop was nowhere around and that sound was it banging off the rails as it fell between the parking levels.

I rushed to the car and quickly drove down, level by level, looking for my laptop. Finally at the bottom level I spotted it laying open, face down, on the concrete. As I picked it up I dreaded the sight of a shattered screen. Much to my surprise the screen was not broken. The computer booted up and everything worked. The case is now a bit beat up, the metal is pitted and scraped, but it works as good as new. I got to hand it to HP, that Specter is one tough computer.

Been a Long Time

by Led Zeppelin

I have that song playing in my head as I write this. I've not been blogging much in the last, oh... five years.

I finally found an answer to my laptop display blues. I have a Lenova ThinkPad X1 Carbon for work and the HP Specter 360 is my everyday laptop for personal use, actually a year old now. It has a great display and there are many more choices now. The Microsoft Surface, Surface Book and the Mac Books, all have displays that go beyond the basic HD that previously drove me mad.

My new favorite is the display I have for my desktop. The Samsung UE590 is a 4K 28 inch LED monitor. I had to rearrange my desk to find room for it along with my dual 23 inch displays. I find the 3840 X 2160 resolution better suited for my use. I often have the screen split showing the code editor on the left and resulting web page on the right. Being able to see the editor and the browser side by side is fantastic. I'll make a few edits, save and refresh the page, all while staying on the same monitor. The additional lines of code displayed allows for much quicker editing. The full page display of the web page is fantastic. I use the other two monitors for throw off items. Email, twitter, etc. Whatever I'm not focusing on will be delegated to the secondary displays. 

If you get a chance I highly recommend picking up a 4K monitor. You will not regret the choice.

Laptop Resolution

What is with laptop resolution these days?

Most everything I see is expressed as 720p or 1080p. Are you kidding? I'm not buying a TV. I want to read text. When a manufacturer advertises a screen resolution I want to see it as 1366x768. Then I know what I'm getting. I know to say, Oh Hell No!

And why don't you see laptops with a display that is better than 1366x768? Is there a decent 15" laptop that displays better this crappy resolution and cost less than $1500 dollars? The price/performance ratio of computing continues to improve. You can buy so much more computing power for your dollar these days, it doesn't make sense why the display technology can't keep up.

The funny thing is that there is a huge segment of the population that just excepts this as reality.




Ok, enough of that rant.

How to Clean Up the Right-Click (Context) Menu in Windows

I try not to reblog everything Amit blogs but he has so many good blog entries. Here is another one on how you can cleanup your right click menu.

How to Clean Up the Right-Click (Context) Menu in Windows

MVVM Light

At Daemon Games we decide to try and use MVVM Light in our next project. We are planning on building a Silverlight client and hope that this framework will help us. Today I am starting the process of reviewing the framework to see how we can leverage it in our project.

A quick search of the net turns up the home on Codeplex. Click the download link and you get a 5MB zip file that contains the seven zip files shown below.

The documentation directs you to follow the installation instructions on the Gala Soft web site. Gala Soft has done a great job of documenting the prereq's and the installation steps. I won't repeat them here.

The installation is straight forward and the steps are well documented. As the directions for each supported environment are all listed on the same page, be sure you pay attention to which installation you are reading. Included with the installation directions is verification that you have done everything correctly. You will verify the installation by creating your first MVVM app and checking that the DLL references are present without warnings. As your reward you can run a nice little app that welcomes you to MVVM Light.

Included in the installation are templates for WP7, Silverlight and WPF. Following the installation directions and the verification you are directed to some supporting documentation.

I'm starting with Laurent Bungion's presentation at Mix 2010. It starts out a bit slow but I am happy to know that I will be doing "MVVM in a SLOOB with SLUT". I mean, who can say no to that. Being new to MVVM slow is what I need. Laurent's first example is a Silverlight application linking to a WCF service returning a customer list. The demonstration contrasts MVVM with a non MVVM app, concentrating on how to increase Blend-ability. Blend-ability being the ability to visualize data while working in Expression Blend. Later he moves on to Commands and Messaging. The pace is about right for me as I am just learning many of these principals. 

Tonight I am only able to get through about half the presentation. As soon as I can get back to this I will post more. So far so good. MVVM looks like it will provide much of what we need and will give us some real advantages moving forward. I am anxious to learn more.

The Carrying-Cost of Code: Taking Lean Seriously

A great article by Michael Feathers on the the cost of your code inventory. He has some great ideas that really get you thinking about your code.