My new PDA/Phone

It is finally here!

Outline of William Johnstone's Books

This guy has written a lot of books.

Code Monkey Song!!!

This is worth two posts in one day! Be sure to hit the play button.

Patience

I really want this phone. In fact, I want it so bad, that I ordered it more than 3 weeks ago. Why am I ordering it instead of going down to the local Verizon store? Because I’m a business user. In fact, I manage 25 cell phones for my company. Verizon doesn’t want me to do that at the store, they want me to do that through their Business Center because I’ll get “better service”.

So, I wait…

 

What's your backlog?

First, you have to read “The Back-Logged Life”.

 

Then, you have to complete this survey. These are my numbers;

• Voice-mail messages at work: 5
• Voice-mail messages at home: 0 (does that mean I don’t have any friends?)
• Voice-mail messages on my cell: 2
• SMS messages on my cell: 0
• Hours of television on the TiVo: 0 (don’t have one!)
• E-mail messages at home: 8
• E-mail messages at work: 1121
• Items in my feed reader: 0 (I need to reconfigure it)
• Books on my nightstand: 2
• Pending projects at work: 12
• Pending projects at home: 12

Obviously, my big problem is email at work. I get about 100 per day and I never really catch up with them all. One thing I’ve started doing recently is not answering them right away. I’ve noticed that if I answer right away, then the recipient answers right away with another question, and it sort of becomes a bloated chat session. Of course, important customer emails have to get answered, but the rest of them, well…, I’ll get to them.

 

 

 

 

 

MSDTC Challenges

So we have this clustered SQL Server scenario with two servers running Microsoft Windows 2000 Enterprise and Microsoft SQL Server. Node A has the database running and Node B has DTC running. Every morning, at random times, the DTC stops working. When this happens, we have to restart both DTC and the database server. Try searching for that on google.

Are you a software developer? Are you looking for a job? Do you want to live in an area where there is very low crime and lots of old farmland to build your house on? Then I want you!

You must love to work. You must love software. You must love solving problems. You must be able to say "I did that!" with your chest thrown out proudly and your head held high. You must be willing to go to and see new places.

We're looking for software developers in the York, Pennsylvania area. Check out our posting here.

Recipient List in SmtpClient

Sometimes, which is more than frequently, I find huge holes in documentation for software products. I am no one to judge, since the documentation for my own software document has had its issues in the past, but when a product has an install based of hundreds of thousands, I would expect a little more.

 

Today’s exercise in futility is brought to you by Microsoft. I really do like Microsoft, but I like being sarcastic, too, so please forgive my negative vibes.

 

Anyway, the situation is this: I’m using System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient to send an email from an automated process whenever there is a machine failure on one of the big machines that my software interfaces with. SmtpClient is very cool. It is very powerful. With these three lines of code, I was shipping off emails to all my friends and family at a rather steady pace:

 

SmtpClient smtp = new SmtpClient(mymailserver, mymailserverport);

smtp.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential(myusername,

     mypassword);

smtp.Send("blah@blahblah.com", tothesepeople),

     mySubject, myError);

 

 

The problem was this: what do I use for a delimiter for the second parameter tothesepeople (the recipients) in the SmtpClient.Send function? You can find the documentation for that function here. Read it twice. It doesn’t say whether you should use a semi-colon, a space, or a bunch of carats. But have no fear, I figured it out rather quickly and I am here to provide you the answer, completely free of charge.

 

As is obvious to the most casual of observers, the answer is… ding, ding, ding, the COMMA! On a US keyboard, it is to the right of the M and below the <.

 

So rather than the standard format of Outlook, which is myfriend@hisdomain.com;myotherfriend@herdomain.com

 

You need to use:

myfriend@hisdomain.com,myotherfriend@herdomain.com

 

ThreadStateException in ComboBox AutoCompleteMode

So we received this error recently. We have a fairly complex multi-threaded FAT client application that uses some of the new functionality of the Visual Studio 2005 ComboBox, namely the AutoCompleteMode. The problem that we had occurred when we would load the ComboBox from a handler that was triggered from another form. (Picture form 1 loading form 2 through events.)

Interestingly enough, the ONLY control to have this error was the ComboBox, and the ONLY time it generated the error is when AutoCompleteMode was set to true.

The fix was simple enough:

Thread.CurrentThread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA);

We've been running about 5 days with that line of code added just before the AutoCompleteMode, and things have been working fine. I'm not sure what other side effects we'll see.

What bothers me the most is what little information I could find on this error. I found many posts all over where people were able to produce the error, but nowhere that the fix was spelled out. That's one of the few fixes that we had to find without support documentation.

Some people just don't get it...

http://entertainment.msn.com/tv/article.aspx?news=222507&GT1=7703

You gotta read that first. The reason there hasn't been a women president of the US, yet, is because they are trying to hard! The goal shouldn't be to "put a woman in the white house". The goal should be "to put the best person in the white house".

The less you try, the more natural it will occurr.

Where's my immigrant?

There's one thing that I don't understand about this immigrant day boycott: isn't it really only hurting the businesses that hire immigrants? Let's assume for a second that company A hires immigrants, has a good product, and good deliveries. Let's assume for the next second that company B does not hire immigrants, has a good product, and good deliveries. Now, today, company A has just ticked off all of its customers, while company B has made them happy! So don't the immigrants really lose?

Meat processing companies come to mind. There are some meat companies that do very well by hiring immigrants, especially ones without papers (I think some people call them illegial aliens). Other meat companies do not hire immigrants (or only legal ones). So today, those companies with a lot of immigrants would be at a distinct disadvantage.

Good luck to them anyway. I hope they get what they are looking for, as long as it isn't world domination!