Arches National Park

A couple of days ago, we left Torrey and headed for Castle Valley, UT. Our purpose there was to visit Arches National Park, especially the famous Delicate Arch.

Once we got to the park, we found not just beautiful arches, but balancing rocks as well. Some of them looked as if they were placed on top of the massive stone columns by giants. Getting to Delicate Arch was a long, steep hike. It took almost an hour to walk the 1.1 miles. We got there before sunset (when it is supposed to be the most beautiful) to avoid going back downhill in the dark.

We stayed at yet another great bed & breakfast there, the Castle Valley Inn. In addition to a main house, it has a number of cabins, all set in an apple orchard. It also has a big hot tub, which proved perfect for stargazing. We met a French couple there who are currently living in northern Virginia.

The next morning, we got to sample the apples in fresh apple juice and as spiced apples on our pancakes. We also had a nice conversation with one of our innkeepers. They turned out to be very experienced travelers, with multiple trips to South America, Europe, and Africa under their belts.

Bryce Canyon

After breakfast at the Spotted Dog Cafe, we bid farewell to Springdale, Utah (and an excellent hotel, the Desert Pearl Inn) and headed to Bryce Canyon. The biggest difference between our two canyon experiences so far was elevation. At the highest point we could drive today, we were over 8900 feet up. We spent three or four hours there, driving to different overlooks and stopping to take photos. After the tough hike yesterday, my travel companions and I opted for a much shorter one.

From Bryce, we drove to Torrey, Utah. It was a beautiful and terrifying drive. Beautiful because of the sandstone cliffs and trees. Terrifying because of the substantial number of hairpin turns, the rocks, trees (or really long fall) awaiting any misjudgment, and my pedal-to-the-metal friend that I was attempting to keep in sight.

After surviving that drive, and checking in at Skyridge Inn Bed & Breakfast, we had dinner at the Diablo Cafe. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen “free range rattler” on a menu (and no, I didn’t eat any). What we did order was very good. The dessert was excellent.

Even better than good food and great dessert, was having a hot tub outside my room to relax in and look at the stars before bed.

Zion National Park

We spent most of the day inside Zion National Park (in Springdale, Utah). The centerpiece of it is a large canyon made mostly of sandstone. Even though we’re in the middle of the desert, there is a surprising amount of greenery (pine trees, cacti, etc). It turns out that the desert can be quite beautiful.

Hiking to the Emerald Pools was very tough (we took the steeper of the two routes by accident). It wasn’t just the rocks, but the fact that a lot of them were covered in this really fine sand. That made our footing rather treacherous, but we made to all the pools there were to see.

It’s a lot easier to see the stars at night out here–so different from home with all the lights and traffic noise. Springdale has narrow roads, and traffic is light enough now that you can hear crickets more often than cars passing by.

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Stack Overflow is Live

Stack Overflow is a great new programmer Q & A site from Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky.  I (and about 500 other developers) got a 5-week headstart on using it as part of the private beta test.  As good as googling for answers to development problems has been, Stack Overflow is a big improvement.  I’ve already gotten answers to questions that I was able to use in my own work.

If you write code for a living, I strongly encourage you to check out the site.  They support OpenID, so you can use your existing Yahoo! or Blogger (other other OpenID-compliant) identity to register with the site.  You can use it anonymously as well.

Now I'm Blogging for Work Too

In addition to the entries I post here, I’ve started blogging for my employer, along with some of my colleagues.  If you’re interested in blog posts more specific to agile software development, check out all the posts here.  My first post there begins a discussion of what enterprise applications can learn from games.

New Toy

Vacations and holidays are my primary excuses for buying new toys.  Since I’ve got a trip to the American southwest (at least the Utah and Arizona parts) coming up soon, I figured I’d buy a new lens to capture the landscapes and canyons I plan to see.  Since I don’t have any truly wide lenses, I settled on a Tokina 12-24mm for the Nikon D70s I shoot with.

I bought it used on clearance from Penn Camera, which probably saved me at least $100.  I’ve never shot anything as wide as 12mm (I think it’s technically 18mm because of the multiplier effect) before, so we’ll have to see how the vacation shots turn out.

Granting full permissions to all tables and views in a database

One of my assignments is to write a script that will grant CRUD (create, read, update, delete) permissions to a database role.  SQL Server Management Studio does a nice job of generating scripts for adding logins, roles, and adding users to roles, but isn’t terribly clever about granting permissions across types of database objects.  Some of the difficulty has to do with not having upgraded to SQL Server 2005 yet.  Thanks to some helpful people at Stackoverflow and a page I found through a Google search, I was able to put together a script that handles the permission-granting part a bit better.

Step 1 was to develop a query that generated all the commands for granting permissions.  Here’s the query I got from Stackoverflow that retrieved all the user tables and views:

SELECT *  FROM information_schema.tables  WHERE OBJECTPROPERTY(OBJECT_ID(table_name),‘IsMSShipped’) = 0

This query is especially useful because it filters out system tables and views that can appear if you query the sysobjects table.

Using a cursor to apply permissions to all the tables was something one of my colleagues first suggested.  I only found this implementation today, and adapted it for my purposes.  The change I made to the code in that implementation is in the select statement.  I populated the @tables variable this way:

SELECT ‘GRANT SELECT, REFERENCES, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE ON ' + TABLE_NAME + ' TO ' + @role FROM information_schema.tables WHERE OBJECTPROPERTY(OBJECT_ID(table_name),‘IsMSShipped’) = 0 

@role is declared earlier in my script as varchar(50).

I still need to grant execute permissions on the stored procedure.  I’ll need a different select query to accomplish that.

First Impressions of Google Chrome

I started using Google Chrome (hereafter referred to as just “Chrome”) yesterday to see how it compared with Firefox 3 (my current browser of choice).

So far, it does seem faster than Firefox.

I find the user interface to be clean and intuitive.  Particularly nice touches include:

  • The subtle "do you want to save this password" functionality (probably lifted directly from Firefox 3)
  • The default home page (most visited pages, recent bookmarks, recently closed tabs, etc)
  • Combination of location and search textboxes
The last of those changes is perhaps the most important one, because the current UI of both Firefox and IE keep page locationa and search separate.  While you can enter search terms into the location bar and get either search results or an actual page with both Firefox and IE, you wouldn't guess if from the interface.
As far as how pages look in Chrome, they look the way they should (at least on the sites I visit regularly).  Pages that don't render properly in Chrome don't render right in Firefox either.
One thing that seemed odd was how long it took for the bookmarks I imported from IE to show up in Chrome.  They didn't appear right after I was done installing, but later, after I'd done some browsing.
For now, I miss having plug-ins like FlashBlock in Chrome.  If I still feel that way after another week or two, I'll stick with Firefox.

Google Gives Us a Browser

Even though Google Chrome is open source, I wonder what will happen to Firefox (my current browser of choice).  Its extensions (like FlashBlock) and other ad-blocking capabilities make browsing the web a much more pleasurable experience.

If you want to try it out, grab a copy from here.

Reflector Update

When I originally posted about the purchase, Red Gate hadn’t added a product page to their site yet.  Today’s blog post from Richard Hundhausen includes it.  The product page also links to the free plug-ins available for Reflector.

smallestdotnet.com

Scott Hanselman came up with this site that tells you what version of .NET you’ve got and your shortest path to .NET 3.5.  I’ve tried it from a couple of different Windows machines (one virtual machine, one real) and it works pretty well.  When I browsed the site with my iPhone, it figured out I was running a Mac.

Especially useful is the JavaScript snippet he provides that lets you have that functionality on your own website.  I’ll definitely be passing this url around the office.

Red Gate Buys Reflector

I just came across the news this morning.  I used Reflector a lot when I was first learning .NET.  Lately, I’ve been using it with the Graph and DependencyStructureMatrix plug-ins to figure out where applications are too tightly coupled.  I’m glad it’s staying free to users.

Other People's E-mail

Lately, I’ve been getting e-mail at my Gmail account that are clearly intended for other people.  I thought “Scott” and “Lawrence” were fairly common names individually, but the number of people who believe that slawrence [at] gmail [dot] com belongs to them has grown to the point where it’s beginning to become inconvenient.

The e-mails that concern me the most are the ones that contain people’s travel information, passwords to certain websites, and cellphone bills.  Because they’re automatically e-mailed from these sites, I’m not sure what the best way is to contact these folks to have corrections made.

I welcome any suggestions readers (all 3 of you ;-)) might have on the best way to deal with this.

My iPhone Review

I picked up a white 16GB iPhone 3G on July 13.  After a month of use, I can add my 2 cents to the tons of reviews already out there.

Battery Life

I have to recharge the phone every two days, running with 3G and wi-fi off, except when I need them.  If I leave 3G on, I have to recharge the phone after a day.  From people I’ve talked to about other 3G phones, this amount of battery life is typical.

No Keyboard?  No Problem.

I’ve found that I can type with 2 thumbs reasonably quickly, even without the physical clicking of keys.  I can’t type as fast as I could on my old Nokia 6820, but it’s still usable.

The iPhone as a Phone

The only functionality obviously missing is support for MMS (picture mail).  It seems odd that phones AT&T gives away have a feature that the iPhone lacks, but that’s the situation.  While it isn’t a feature I want desperately to use (I barely used it on the Razr), having to surf to a website to receive MMS messages someone sent you is inconvenient.

I like everything else.  The recent call and voicemail features are particularly well-done.

The iPhone as a Web Browser

Browsing the web is where the iPhone really shines.  At this point, there’s no other device its size that enables you to surf the web so easily.  If you aren’t an AT&T wireless subscriber, this feature alone is probably one of the best reasons to buy an iPod touch.

While the iPhone doesn’t support Flash, I see this as a plus.  On my work and home machines, I use Firefox 3 with Flashblock enabled on virtually every site.  No worrying about ads, or video I don’t want, or the battery life penalty that would likely come with Flash support.

The iPhone as an iPod

Last week was the first time I used it much as an iPod (I was in Toronto).  As cool as the click wheel was on previous iPods, multi-touch crushes it.  I didn’t think navigating through a large music/video collection could get easier, but it is.  Watching videos on a screen that size isn’t bad at all.

E-mail on the iPhone

So far, I like this feature.  Occasionally, I’ll see a “This message has not been downloaded from the server” note, but that only happens with my Comcast e-mail account.

The Apps

I spent a lot of time playing JawBreaker when I was at Pearson International waiting for my flight home.  It’s an addictive little game.  Beyond that one, the apps I use most are NetNewsWire, Facebook, and Pandora.

Overall

I’m very pleased with it.  I’ve only gone traveling with it once so far (to Toronto for Agile 2008), and even though I had a laptop with me, I barely used it.  If I had it to do all over again, I would have left the laptop at home and simply synced the iPhone with my work e-mail.  It’s that capable and excellent a device.

An Alternative to NUnitForms

I first heard about Project White from someone at the Agile 2008 conference last week.  I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, I’m very curious to see how it compares.  Since it comes from Thoughtworks, I think it’s going to be good.  If it makes testing of modal forms and dialogs easier, I’m already sold.

If anyone out there has already been using Project White successfully, it would be great to hear from you.

More frustration with Alienware

Today I come into the office to work, and find that my machine blue-screened overnight. I figured it was Vista acting up (again), so I restarted. Once the machine is back up, I log in, only to discover that I have no network access.

This is only the latest in a continuing series of problems I’ve had with Alienware’s Area 51 machines. If it wasn’t locking up for no apparent reason, the performance of virtual machines (VMware or Virtual PC) was slow. One cause of at least some of the problems turned out to be incorrect voltage settings for the memory (though I’m not sure how they got out of the factory with that wrong).

We spent about an hour uninstalling and reinstalling drivers and rebooting to see if we could solve the problem ourselves. After those efforts failed, I spent 2 hours on the phone with Alienware (1/2 of which were wasted by their tech support person walking me through things I’d already tried). The one really new thing we tried (installing a new BIOS) didn’t solve the problem either. Alienware has concluded that the motherboard has gone bad and needs replacing. This is a stunningly bad result for a PC less than 2 months old.

Two thumbs down on Alienware and Vista. If you must run some version of Windows, you’d be better off doing it on a Mac.

If you’re wondering how I posted this without a machine with Internet access, the answer is, with my iPhone.

XML Schema Gotcha

This is probably old hat to XML experts, but it’s new to me–the default values of the minOccurs and maxOccurs attributes of <xs:element>…</xs:element> in XML schemas are both 1 (one).  I had a schema definition with minOccurs=“0” and no value for maxOccurs.  In order to get the behavior I assumed was the default, maxOccurs needed to be set to “unbounded”.

My VW Passat and the Check Engine Light

I took mine in for service this week for its regular 5000-mile service, and a check engine light that has been going on and off intermittently for the past month or so. When I got the car back, I found out that the reason for the check engine light coming on was the need for a software update.

This is the first time I can remember that I’ve had to take my car to the shop to get new software. I just wonder how long it will be before car companies can beam us software updates by satellite.

Writing the contents of a string to a text file

I should have assumed this existed, based on Ed Poore’s comment on this post, but here’s the actual command:

System.IO.File.WriteAllText
There are multiple overloads for it, but the most basic one is: File.WriteAllText(filePath,contentString).