I attended the Maryland and Pennsylvania Microsoft Developers User Group on July 22, 2008. It was at Stevenson University (formerly Villa Julie). It’s a beautiful campus located in the woods off of I-695! It was my first time going to a user group like that. It was okay probably going to try the Harrisburg Developers User Group and see how that goes. I’m more interested in talking about software development and programming techniques.

There was a speaker, Advanced IT student, who gave a rousing speak on Project Management Software. It was an okay intro to that Software, but seemed to miss a lot of what’s happening right now. He gave some examples, but none with software development. I think software development is a totally different ballpark then for example winery. I think Agile Development is really changing what software we use and how we use it. Mingle is probably the “best” for Agile Development. I’ve used Agile Track to have management on an Agile project.

There was a web seminar on some new features of Visual Studio 2008. I’m quite excited about some of the cool new features. The one feature I am most excited about is Javascript Debugging! Debugging Javascript is so annoying… to be able to step through Javascript will save so much time. The split screen mode in 2008 also looks very promising.

I also won the main door prize! I got a wireless keyboard and some software (Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008). Visual Studio and SQL Server are both developers version while Windows Server is a year free trial. I’m going to try them out and see what they are all about.

Out of Arstechnica today. It appears that Windows’ patch tuesday on August 14th brought Skype to a grinding halt. I don’t use the automatic updates at work, well things like this can happen, plus you always want control over what is updating on your computer(s).

“With so many machines restarting, Skype says the network was sunk into a vicious cycle of deprivation, wherein rebooting machines would attempt to log on to the Skype network, but so many machines were rebooting that the network was unable to meet demand. “

I’m glad they found the bug and hopefully came up with a solution for this in the future.

This comes down to an issue of trust. Do you trust Microsoft? No, I don’t. I’ve had updates break drivers before, FUBAR things, and so forth. In a perfect world you would want to install updates in a lab environment. Then you could have a little reassurance that it would run in the work environment.

We don’t live in a perfect world and things can be rolled back. I guess it all depends on the scale of your company. I couldn’t imagine rolling back everyone of our computers at work. That would be an entire day or more of work.

So I think Automatic Updates is good in theory, but in practice I think it is a very bad idea. IT is about control and you have to control your technology.

I remember when Service Pack 2 dropped for XP. Not a fun experience in the IT world. We now have planned days for the updates and to allow them to “ripen” for a bit.

PCMag.com announces the year(s) of the Linux desktop is finally here and I actually agree with them.

Have you used Vista? It is like a foreign alien or something and the stupid pop-up, “Windows needs your permission”. What is pretty funny, is yes, the Mac commercial with the security guy is an accurate depiction. Yes, Windows, I would like to install flipping Adobe Reader please leave me alone, that’s why I double-clicked on the damn file! Granted, using Linux to do system wide changes you’re going to get a similar pop-up asking for your root password; like going into synaptic. Basically Linux isn’t so needy, Windows you need to calm down.

“To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just have to work on it.” ~ Professor from Washington University.

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From arstechnica.com

According to the government’s best estimates, energy usage at data centers has doubled between 2000 and 2006, and it’s poised to double again by 2011.

That means our wonderful data centers will cost twice as much to run as they do today, which is a bad thing. I can definitely see our government leading us to greener pastures. Hopefully, Solid State Disks (SSD) will become more aggressively created and better power saving devices will come about.

Software will also play a crucial role in the deployment of future systems. Windows is a power hog in the essence that it needs beefier hardware requirements. And as just about everyone knows our nice friend Linux can run on much lower system requirements and give you the same or better performance.

Are we entering the age of solar powered server farms? I don’t think so, but that would be pretty sweet.

I have been way busy that past 15 or so days! Unbelievable. Believe it. At work we are doing a MPLS network rollover so that has been enjoyable. Also we are opening another branch, so I have been busy running network cables and such. Good times.

In the little free time I have gotten I’ve been listening to twit and diggnation; my favorite podcasts netcasts; I am definitely for changing podcast to netcast. I digress. Twit is really cool. I would really like to do a netcast one day with my views on technology and the world around us.

So here are some links on how to make your own PODCAST/NETCAST

A nice beginner tutorial
Cnet Guide In-depth
Podcast Alley podcasters
Little overview of podcasting

Audacity seems to be the program of choice for podcasting/netcasting in the Windows/Linux world. I have used this program before to record music off a PA system and it works really well. Open source is great. I will look into this more. Again I think a podcast/netcast would be a very fun thing to do.