Is The Future In How Much One Can Unlearn?

Couple of weeks ago (yeah I know, kinda slow in keeping up with my blogreading) over on the Creating Passionate Users blog there's talking about how nowadays it's impossible to just acquire the skills in using new techniques and be done with that. Combined with acquiring new knowledge goes the neccessity of removing old knowledge from your brain:

"Sometimes that means letting go of something that served you well for a long time. And that's the toughest thing"

Indeed, I don't really feel like loosing the VB6 like skills I've acquired over the years in favor of the .NET way of living. But it may be neccesarry. For me that does not mean I won't be coding in VB6 anymore, because in my company we have not made 'the switch' yet. But it does mean that I have to try and start new projects in .NET as far as possible for me. Even if it's small internal projects only used by a couple of other employees. However, I still find it difficult to really take the time for the plunge. Every day this resolution seems to be overhauled by reality. Wish me luck on my quest :)

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That Tasty Google Juice, Of Which We All Just Can't Get Enough

In an unsuccessful effort to keep up with my backlog of blogposts, found Brian Bailey talking about his dropping from the Google index some time ago. This happened after he changed his page header. He speculises on the fact that the Google spider is more likely to relate your blog to your name - and thusly, acquire more Google Juice - when you use your name in the title / name of the blog. This reminded me of the fact that my blog, which I only started a couple months ago, could also use a little bit more juice. So, first I checked my Blogger template, to see where my name would show up. It turned out that Blogger puts the Blog Title in the HTML TITLE element, which isn't too strange. Furthermore, at the end of every generated page is a "posted by Arjan Zuidhof". The only thing that I changed, and which couldn't hurt, is to include my whole name in the Contact Info on the right.

Well, seems I just need to post a bit more and wait some more time in order to climb the rankings :) The ways of Google are not just as mysterious as the Lord's ways, but they come close...

PS1 When you think of it, isn't it actually a bit strange how I find myself trying to improve my ranking and please Google by using some Google tricks (well, not actually tricks, comment spammers are the real Google tricksters). The best way to build a strong blog, of course is to just post more content, more opinion, be a presence on the net.

PS2 And one that I think of just now: guess I'm one of the very few people, and maybe the only one, ever Googling my own name. The rest of the world, in order to find my blog, will find it searching on some obscure keyword leading to it. They are the least interested in my name, but rather in solutions to problems offered in the content, or some other stuff they find interesting

Funny Link: On Becoming A Courier

And when you don't like coding anymore, you can always become a courier... :) read A Coder in Courierland on kuro5hin

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Go To TechEd2005: Just Do It

I'm not going there, unfortunately, but I was at TechEd Europe 2004 which was wonderful. Now in case you're wondering whether you should go, watch this very very funny promotion of TechEd 2005, starring Rory Blyth and Scott Hanselman...

I'm not pointing to videos very often, but you should watch this even if you're not planning to go there

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Friday Link: Tyranny of Email

The Tyranny of Email

Guidelines:

1. Turn off your email client, put your 'phone in "do not disturb".
2. Isolate yourself. Get good headphones. Warn colleagues when you're "in the zone", to minimize their interrupts.
3. Minimize meetings and schedule them to avoid three-hour windows.
4. Become self-aware about warping off and try to un-stuck yourself

I can totally agree with that, however sometimes it's just terribly difficult to stick to these guidelines. I find myself powering down Outlook every no and then for short periods, but my work brings with it an email-response-time that's just not too long. Still, we should use email the way it was invented for: a means to get someone's attention, but on terms of the receiving party. For other more immediate responses there's other means like personal contact and the phone ...
- boy did I just hear you scream on my mentioning the Greatest Disturber of All Knowledge Workers :)

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VS.NET Maddness

Just started (again, after about half a year) to continue trying to learn VB.NET and ASP.NET. We're still working VB6-only at work, and moving on to the .NET world always is sacrificed for the noble goal of Getting Things Done. Still, I think I should try to invest as much time as possible to stay up-to-date with new not-so-young-anymore-mature-and-soon-to-be-follow-up'd-by-a-new-version of the 2003 version of Visual Studio. Anyway, I cloned my testmachine to another one. Once I tried to debug my first simple ASP.NET application, the following not so straightforward error message popped up:

"Error while trying to run project: Unable to start debugging on the webserver"

Haven't seen that one before on my other test machine... Google offered more on the subject in a page with a good starting point: /Repair the installation of VS.NET

Well, seemed fair enough to try, but a bit general. Just like I always tell people to reboot their computers and find some technical problem suddenly gone :) And besides, repairing VS.NET really takes forever... anyway, 45 minutes later I found myself pressing 'I' for Ignore hundreds of times: definetely something wrong as it couldn't find anything on the CD anymore... so I cancelled the (re)installation. Of course I could have known that now my incomplete installation was rolled back completely, yielding a *totally* unusable installation. The only option was to completely start from scratch all over with the installation... maddness indeed, because this took me the two hours I could have invested into .NET programming today :(

The first file that couldn't be found was cpqstart.hxs. Of course I checked an it's not on the CD in the location the setup thinks. So why the error message? This is beyond me, and one of those frustrating things that seem inevitable once you try to get your feet dirty with some serious programming stuff. Of for that matter, computers in general..

ps: mmm, turned out I pressed reinstall i.s.o. 'repair'. Still, that should not lead to the abundance Ignore message I got.

Funny Friday Link

compare how Microsoft likes to see it's userbase of Visual Studio Express productline with this




one made by Michael Giagnocavo, in this blog entry.

Really, really funny. I wish I were just as good with Photoshop or whatever product he uses for this graphical magic :)

XMLHTTP Request On The Move

I'm using the XMLHTTPRequest object now for some weeks. At least, I'm busy understanding the way it works. And I have to say, once you have the feel for it, it really works very nice. Until now I've only built it in one or two pages in a hardcoded way. But I see a nice future for it inside our company. The thing you have to keep in mind though is that you don't start using it everywhere. The 'problem' - if you can mention it this way - is that most users are used to the inherent static way webpages work (like, first you have to click a button before some action is performed). Now suddenly you can could change all that. You can even save data entry actions the minute they're entered on a web page, according to this page with some Request guidelines. And hey, you don't even need ASP.NET for that, classic JavaScript inside HTML pages, and the XMLHTTPRequest object are sufficient.

More interesting stuff can be found here and here. The latter page proposes a new name for the system. The disadvantage is that when it get into common use, you'll have to filter out sites on our Dutch national football heroes from Amsterdam :)

Conclusion: for XMLHTTPRequest objects the motto is use them, but use them with care...