Cave Markings 

I just got my confirmation that my presentation on integrating Visual Studio Team System and Visual FoxPro was accepted for the FoxForward conference in Atlanta.  I love sharing my enthusiasm about these tools.  This is going to be lots of fun!

Mark your calendars now:



++Alan

It is clear to me, that Russ Feingold and Jack Murtha are the true leaders of the Democratic Party.  All of the current so-called "leaders" should resign immediately.  I admire both these men for speaking their consciences in Washington where everyone else is busy reading poll results.

++Alan

[Update] I forgot Harry Reid.  He's got some backbone too.

I'm trying to sort this one out.  When the law of the land is inhumane, who's fault is it?  I believe the person that opened the valve on the poison gas at Auschwitz is a culpable as Adolph Hitler for the deaths of innocent people.  If a person igonres the humanity of another, it is that individuals fault, not their religion, or any other excuse they offer.  At least, that's what I think this morning.

++Alan

I’m a bit put out today.  I am exposed daily to information that offends me.  It may be news about my government breaking the law to violate my privacy.  It could be the obscene quarterly profits announcement of a Mega-Corp.  These things can annoy and sometimes even anger me. 

I’m not immune to being offended when someone criticizes my religion.  The Episcopal Church has received plenty of misleading, inaccurate and just plain bad press in the last two years.  Why does this matter?  I don’t attack someone’s embassy when they offend me.  I don’t assume that I have the one true perspective and anyone that disagrees with my way of seeing the world should die.

If you are Muslim and offended by these cartoons, I apologize.  I don’t generally seek to insult people.  If you are Muslim, and think I should die for posting them on my personal website, well then you can kiss my White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ass.

Cheers,

++Alan

[Update]  Follow these links for more info:

http://memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD108806

Rioting with well-planned spontaneity

We are all Danes now

My favorite so far, with high quality versions of the cartoons:
Mohammed Image Archive

http://www.sorrynorwaydenmark.com/

I did it.  I allowed myself to be assimilated, and I have no regrets.  Maybe it’s because I’m approaching forty.  Maybe my values have changed since college, or at least I hope they have.    Monday, January 9, 2006, after completing a six month stint as a contractor, I started as a full-time employee of a defense contractor.  We develop software specifically for the Department of Defense, and we do it very well. 

The company is DPRA Incorporated.  I work for the Defense Systems Group, or as a co-worker calls it “The Developer’s Paradise.”  DSG is run by a Senior VP who is also a software developer.  He can discuss with familiarity the ideas of Fredrick Brooks and Tom Demarco.  In fact, he told me that everyone has an office with a door because of Tom Demarco’s book Peopleware.

That’s right kids.  I have an office with a door!  I also work uninterrupted.  Other than our weekly team meeting, if I want anyone to know about my progress, I have to find them, and let them know. 

This doesn’t mean we are immune to the realities of software development.  Last fall I had to meet a deadline, and I assembled my project in a decidedly slap dash manner in order to fulfill the requirements of the contract.  What is unique is that after we met the deadline,  I had time to refactor my work into a more maintainable form before release.

Besides the creature comforts, my coworkers are smart, talented and professional.  This may sound like hyperbole, but I assure you that I work with some of the best people in the industry.  Last summer I went to TechEd and got a feel for the best and the brightest.  I’ve met the best of the best, and I work with some of them on a daily basis.

It used to be that the three companies I most wanted to work for were (in order of preference):  FogCreek, Microsoft & Wintellect, but not anymore.  I’m home, and I don’t have any intention of leaving.  If you’d like to join me, then keep your eyes open.  We hire regularly.

Tonight we held our VS2005 & SQL Server 2005 local launch event.  Microsoft provided some copies of the software to raffle off to the user group members, and Jason Bentley and I presented some features from the new products.

Jason showed some awesome new failover capabilities in SQL Server 2005, and I did a presentation on the new Windows Forms controls and deployment features under the heading of “Smart Client”, whatever that means.

We had a good turnout, and everyone seemed interested in the topics being presented.  I had a few gaffes in my presentation, but nothing I haven’t seen the professionals do.

The next meeting is two weeks from tonight, and I expect to see a good turnout then as well.  It looks like The East Tennessee .NET User’s Group is healthy and growing in 2006!

I spend my days looking at high resolution monitors; 1600x1200 at work and 1920x1200 at home.   One suggestion I read for using high resolutions, is to bump up the DPI Setting in display properties from 96 to 120dpi.  This seemed like a good idea until I tried it.

All the title bars become too large and some applications can't cope with non-standard dpi settings.  I see enough bad formatting on the web. I don't need it on my desktop too, so I changed the setting back.  Unfortunately the window captions were still the wrong size.  I fixed this by going to Display Properties -> Appearance -> Advanced and playing with the title bar settings until things appeared normal.

This would seem to end this chapter in my battle with Windows(tm) except that I earn my living using two Integrated Development Environments: Visual FoxPro and Visual Studio.  Both IDEs make use of sub-windows with half-height captions.  After my DPI Setting experiment, these captions were twice as tall as they should be with complementary giant, blocky icons. :-P

I have put up with this situation for months, until today.  Today I found my limit in tolerating ugly displays and set about correcting the issue.  Unfortuanately, Google did not provide me any leads.  I find it unlikely that nobody else has had this problem.  Given my state of mind, I perceviered.

I set  about searching the registry for vaious keywords.  I eventually found the WindowMetrics key under Users\.Default.  I exported that key, edited the path, and imported it into the equivalent key in the CurrentUser node.  After a quick logoff/logon to reload the registry, Bob's your uncle!

The attached file should serve to correct this situation for any other users with this affliciton.  Change the extention from .reg.txt to .reg, double-click, select OK, and you'll be golden.

++Alan

WindowMetrics.reg.txt (4.4 KB)