Technology In The Gap

Yesterday at work a coworker who is working with some map APIs and census data found an interesting anomaly.  It turns out that if your GPS location is on the Tappan Zee Bridge you don’t have a zip code.  This is important if you’re trying to give physical address locations to GPS coordinates.

While he went off to figure out what he was going to do with this discovery, I went on my merry way, not thinking about it until later that night—while sleeping.

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What happens when you have a branch that you’re working in that has stuff in it that really doesn’t belong with the name.  I mean, naming is one of things that can be the most tricky.

Is renaming a branch hard?  Nope.

1. Fire up the repo-browser.
2. Right click on the branch you want to rename.
3. Specify the name you want it to have.
4. Specify a note for why you changed.

Bingo!

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One of the problems with managing and writing for multiple blogs in advance of the current date is that I can never really remember what I have written in advance of today, what needs more written and what I’m good with.

There are some neat plugins for managing a single blog.

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Every time you get a friend request—someone adds you to Facebook, you get a notification.

Now, wouldn’t it be nice to know when someone unfriends you?

One way is to follow the instructions at this post: Catch who removed you from Facebook…!

But for those of you that would prefer not to run a script, you can try a Grease Monkey Script and you should be good to go!

When I was 8, my dad tried to teach me what he did.  He was a “Computer Programmer” and did a lot of work in BASIC.

Needless to say, I didn’t grasp a lot, and I really didn’t understand all the GOTOs and line numbers, but I was able to take a program that he made and modify it, and a few short years later I built the voting program for my public high school’s Student Government Election.

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So, as my kids are nearing the 8 year old range, I have started to look around to see if there’s a way that I can introduce them to what I do that would be a little friendlier than throwing them into BASIC, and I found a neat tool from Microsoft.

Called “Small Basic”, Microsoft has created a friendly environment that kids can use basic instructions to make programs and games.  It uses the VB style coding and the .NET framework as a basis, and gives a panel that tells all about what commands you can use.

What I also like, as a dad, is that they’ve even include a curriculum with power point slides—6 Lessons, most of which are broken up into subparts.

I would see this as a great introduction to programming for kids and teens as well.  I think I’m going to try this with my kids—at least the oldest—and I’ll let you know my experience with it.

Want to try it?  Click on the image above to go to the Small Basic site.  It’s a free download, and away you go!

So, after quite a bit of fiddling with code, I’ve managed to implement the code that lets me use jQuery to move WebParts around.

There were two different hurdles I had to overcome to get this done.  The first was a weird behavior I found with MasterPages within my project, and the second was the fact that I didn’t know where this code was supposed to come back to on the server.

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My current task at work has me creating a series of pie charts that we can turn around and use as a dashboard to show the current KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to our customers.  Naturally, since we are using the ASP.NET framework for the UI portion, when I think of dashboards with multiple, configurable user controls, I think WebParts.

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Cryptic error messages—they are the bane of my existence.  I don’t know how much of my programming time has been taken up trying to trace down the meaning of an error message.

Now, I can’t say that I’m perfect.  The first project I worked on coming out of college had “Invalid Key” for just about every error message—without so much as a clue as to why the key pressed on the point of sale system was invalid.

Microsoft, however, has no excuse.  I mean, they have this whole complex exception system built into their development environments, but all they can tell me is “Value does not fall within the expected range,” and I’m left wondering:

• What is the value?
• What is the expected range?
• What control threw the exception?
• How do I fix it if I can’t even see it?

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It’s always tricky to get applications that you’ve written and built on your own pc to run on the target environment.  One of the big reasons is that during development any problem that you encounter you overcome, but that doesn’t mean the target solution will have the same environment, the same tools installed or have some kind of resource contention you weren’t planning for.

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I’m a novice at personas.  I mean, I’ve written some stories before—novels in High School that I’ve posted on a fiction site—but I don’t know that I’ve ever been really good with biographies.

Most of the time my biography consists of what my characters have done in my stories—and I know that they should have a good back story, but like any programmer that loves jumping into code rather than spending all his time trying to do the design work¹, I need work in this area.

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1. I mean, I know that I should do it, it’s just the case that I love coding! [↩]