My wife and I had a wonderful week in Chicago we took the opportunity to visit the Field Museum and spent a wonderful couple of hours looking at stuffed animals (sounds bad but was actually very interesting).

Just before we leave we decide to get a bite to eat at the over priced cafeteria. We here shouts from the front of the line. "You want soup ... does anyone want soup?!"

At first we were not sure who was aggressively shout out this petition for potential customers, but knowing my wife's personal love of soup on cold days I knew we were heading toward a confrontation. We get a little closer to the front and we see the source of the voice himself as he jabs a finger in our direction and says "Soup, do YOU want soup!?".

My wife nods an affirmative towards the guy behind the counter and he quickly turns to me "You, what about you?". The place was deathly quiet, I shook my head scared that I may have somehow ruined it for my wife. I was just waiting to hear him shout "NO SOUP FOR YOU!".

What an excellent weekend!!

I had to jump on this one! After the recent discussions on FizzBuzz and how to measure the goods on a good programmer.

In my last job I interviewed what seemed like an unending stream of really bad people. What strikes me about our industry of software development is that we have no way of taking our important work with us and showing it to anybody. In fact most companies insist you sign away the rights to show any code you write. My wife on the other hand, who is a Graphic Designer, has a metric tonne of work in her portfolio. She can walk into an interview and immediately state "this is how good I am ... This is what I did for this marketing campaign ... and this was my time constraint". As developers we are required to somehow prove our competency within a few short hours by describing our understanding of some abstract concepts that we may or may not have used recently.

I have worked on a lot of great code in my life, along with some really talented developers, I have had those great ideas that appear as inspiration from the heavens (imagine the beam of light and heavenly music). Yet I find it difficult to describe how beautifully weighted and measured my code was to a potential employer without showing them. I am left with simply listing the projects I have worked on and hope they ask me an intelligent question that unleashes the true triumph of all my accomplishments.

Another problem is that a good developer, IMHO, is also just a good problem solver. I do not necessarily care that they do not remember the exact syntax of a command, or in the FizzBuzz example, whether they remembers how to use Modulus. My concern is what kind and variety of projects has worked on, does he know how to find answers and finally can he follow instructions well.

I think the problem is a two way street! Good developers need a good means to show they are good developers too.

"He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time." - Oscar Wilde

I love DOS, I know we live in a world of graphic card wielding PC's but sometime DOS just feels right. A few days ago I needed to search several 100 log files for a specific entry and was reminded by a fellow colleague about the FindStr dos command that can  search through multiple files using regular expressions.

You can find a list of metacharacters that findstr accepts and also a list of parameters in the XP Professional product documentation.

"Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way." - Booker T. Washington

This topic has been discussed actively at our company in relation to the potential effects on our customers. After receiving this email from Microsoft I thought I would post it for the good of the developer community:

Dear Valued Microsoft Customer,
In 2005, the United States government passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This act changes the start and end dates for Daylight Saving Time (DST) as of spring 2007. These changes may impact the way applications run. Microsoft is releasing an update for Windows through Microsoft Update that reflects these changes.
Developers who use the .NET Framework may find their applications affected if the application uses the time zone information for historical purposes or if they have derived custom classes from System.TimeZone to provide custom time zone information. The standard System.TimeZone class provides a managed wrapper for the underlying Windows Operating System time zone functions.
In addition, developers who use Visual C++ may find their applications affected if they use the CRT time functions, or the TZ environment variable. Microsoft is currently working on a fix for this issue and will post information about its availability on the Visual Studio Support page.
Most applications that use these affected classes will not need to be modified as this update will ensure that the correct data is provided seamlessly to the application. However, applications that use these classes or the underlying Windows API to perform historical time look-ups will need to be modified.
In most cases, developers who have extended the .NET Framework’s time zone support by creating custom time zone classes derived from System.TimeZone, or by direct access to the Win32 API, will not have to update their applications as long as the available updates to the operating system are applied. However, solutions that rely on private time zone data, or that retrieve system time zone information by accessing the registry directly, may need to be updated. Applications that deal with historical time zone data may also need to be updated.
Microsoft advises all developers who make use of time zone data to test their applications against this update to ensure that their applications function correctly.
For more detailed information and the latest updates please visit http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb264729.aspx, Preparing for daylight saving time changes in 2007, and KB928388: 2007 time zone update for Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Further Assistance
Microsoft values your business.  For more information visit http://www.microsoft.com/dst2007, or contact Microsoft for assistance.  A list of phone numbers is located at http://support.microsoft.com.  Microsoft Premier Customers may engage their Technical Account Manager directly.

IE7 has a reassuring color scheme dedicated to those users who just want a gentle safety reminder for the sites they visit. I have noted previously of web sites that spoof the real thing. This could be catastrophic for someone logging into, for example, PayPal. Even if the site were simply for your email, Imagine the havoc that could be unleashed if someone were to get your email password for just 12 hours. So all IE7 users should bear in mind the following security color schemes:

Red
The certificate is out of date, invalid, or has an error.

Yellow
The authenticity of the certificate or certification authority that issued it cannot be verified.

White
The certificate has normal validation. This means that communication between your browser and the web site is encrypted.

Green
The certificate uses extended validation. This means that communication between your browser and web site is encrypted and that the certification authority has confirmed the web site is owned or operated by a business that is legally organized under the jurisdiction shown in the certificate and on the Security Status bar (a nice extra step).

It should be noted that even if the connection between your computer and the web site is encrypted, it does not guarantee that the website itself is trustworthy. Any knuckle head can get a URL and pay for a secure certificate. Your privacy can still be in jeopardy if the web site owners are fraudulent or simply do not take the time to secure your information.

"We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits." - W. Somerset Maugham

I am addicted to the two monitor paradigm at work, I am not sure how I could live without it now. I am wondering how one monitor was ever enough when trying to navigate through RDP and code simultaneously. I use the IBM T43 (which has a fingerprint reader that I have not used) together with the T43 Port Replicator and a Samsung Monitor, I can say that I am living the life.

My manager passed on a link to UltraMon that makes the management of two screens a snap. Here are few of the features I cannot live without:

• Window management
Quickly move windows between monitors or maximize a window to the desktop using the additional window buttons added by UltraMon.

• Smart Taskbar
UltraMon adds an additional taskbar for each secondary monitor, and each taskbar only shows tasks from the monitor it is on. This makes managing lots of open applications much easier, and when activating an application, you'll know on which monitor it will appear.

• Desktop wallpaper
The UltraMon wallpaper manager adds the ability to use a different picture on each monitor, or stretch a single picture across the desktop.

• Use more than 10 monitors
UltraMon provides a custom Display Settings applet with support for configuring more than 10 monitors. You can quickly configure even large numbers of monitors using the included monitor arrangement tools.

"I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep going forward." - Charlotte Bronte