August 2006 Blog Posts
One of the things that plagues the contract IT worker is the worry over health insurance. I've been in situations many times when you're between companies/contracts and you get stuck footing a huge cobra insurance bill (I've had monthly premiums from cobra for the family at best $500 and at worst $1200). Now, there are several things I've always hated about health insurance, which I'm going to talk about first, then I'm going to talk about why I moved to the HSA plan (Thanks George Bush).Group RatesGroup rates are a good idea right? right? Well, if you're like some of...
Nothing is more dangerous than a programmer pushed into a DBA role who doesn't know crap about databases. Too often, you see consultancies, smaller organizations, and people in general trying to save a buck and not bring any DBA presence on board. Too often I see arrogant developers claim that "DBAs only get in the way" and "I'm not doing anything fancy, I don't need no stinking DBA". To me, this is the equivalent of someone saying "I'm building a house, and I know carpentry, so I'm not hiring a stinking plumber or electrician".Case in point, I'm taking a look...
I'm always interested in following salary data in the Information Technology market mostly because I depend on it for a living, so when the market is doing well, generally I'm doing well. However in this years ESJ salary survey I noticed a very interesting trend.
Oftentimes you see people in the community, mostly language zealots, slashdot kiddies, and sometimes my fellow bloggers lamenting something or other about Microsoft tools, development processes, and the state of the skills of IT workers in general. Many times you see people look down their noses at windows professionals, VB coders, etc claiming that the OSS/Linux/C++/Insert...
So it's been all over the news that a judge ruled that the nsa wiretapping program is illegal etc etc etc. I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not really going to go into the legal aspect, however, I got to thinking from a technology perspective, if I was asked to create an effective program to track terror communications over communication lines, how would I go about it?
First, we have to define the scope of the problem:
1. We don't know who the terrorists are.
2. We don't know when and where they are calling from.
3. There are tens of thousands of international communications...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/17/AR2006081701485.html
So the FBI failed a software project that ran $170 million. I for one am stunned at the total lack of competance in government and the greed/idiocy inherent in contract firms.
Tell you what FBI, I'm sure that we can work out an arrangement where you hire the staff of Codebetter.com plus a few key figures from the blogosphere, We'll put you together a working system and only charge you say... $85 million. =)
So I'm sitting on the toilet today, and the damn thing plugs again. You see, any time you use more than 2 wads of paper, the thing plugs. Now for those of you who aren't American, you need to understand that most new houses here have these "eco friendly" toilets that are supposedly better on water usage than the old solid gallon flush ones. Naturally, since these tend to plug with little provocation, you often end up using two, maybe even three (as was the case since I was plunging today) to do the job that a single flush should...
From the lead dev of NDoc:
I have decided to discontinue work on NDoc 2.0 and no longer participate in any open-source development work.
The development and release of NDoc 1.3 was a huge amount of work, and by all accounts widely appreciated. Unfortunately, despite the almost ubiquitous use of NDoc, there has been no support for the project from the .Net developer community either financially or by development contributions. Since 1.3 was released, there have been the grand total of eleven donations to the project. In fact, were it not for Oleg Tkachenko’s kind donation of a MS MVP MSDN...
I lurk around some of the joel and microsoft forums from time to time and every once in a while I pop up to the surface to answer some .net questions. I've been meaning for a while to compile some of the basic questions I see pop up frequently about master pages.
How can my page talk to my master page?
Couple ways to do this. Page.Master will give you a loose reference to whatever the master page is, and then you can use FindControl() to locate and manipulate whatever controls you need to. Personally, I do not like this method because FindControl is...