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As promised here are the slides from the Free .Net Tools presentation: Click
here for the Powerpoint file (right click and save will work too).
Give me a few days to mull over why yesterday’s presentation was terrible +
what I should have done differently then expect another post. Hopefully it
will help other junior speakers prepare for the same scenario.
Posted by Paul Lockwood as Other at 8:34 PM MST
This
post was to be titled Alabama Code Camp, but after yesterday’s success there are plans
in the pipeline for at least one more Code Camp in
. Who would have guessed the Code Camp idea would have become so successful? If you
have not attended one you work with .Net then you really should keep an eye on the
Code Camp master list.
Props to Virgina
College who permitted us to take over their classrooms for the day. Unfortunately
the building lacked any large rooms so when en-mass we were outside, still I hope
they allow us back next year:
Virginia
permitted
about 140 unknown geeks into their building - Thanks guys!
Everyone I
met was friendly and I very much enjoyed talking to these chaps at the pub club. From
the sounds of it I am pretty darn sure they will be attending next year
Even Mark
Dunn gave a presentation – can you believe these days are free too? I attended
one of Mark’s sessions both to hear his content, and to pick up steal tips
from a very experienced presenter. My own presentation was terrible (see the
next post) due to a projector issue flustering me beyond belief. You can see here
that Mark had a similar problem as me; the left of his screen is cropped –
evidently he knew exactly what to do and carried on presenting commenting on it only
once.
Is this a UN Food
Drop or Free Books?
Turns out is was
free books and games. Joe is
seen here enforcing the 30 seconds to choose rule
The End - A Microsoft employee doing some physical labor. Would you ever see a Sun/
Oracle or Apple employee do this? Microsoft hires some great people and appears
to filter out the elite snobs - I believe this is why we now hear much
less of the ‘M$ is evil’ talk from the Linux/ Java guys.
So personally?
Well my presentation really sucked. Aside from the Mobility Group kick-off presentation
last year when Lariam kicked in this was
my worst 60 minutes by a long way. It
was good experience to fail though as it is a lesson learned. I was flustered by the
projector cutting off large sections of my screen and kept blanking on details + mixed
up a few acronyms while trying to code in a tiny screen area making sure it could
also be seen on the overhead. On a very bright side it finally looks like Lariam has
worn off - a year ago a panic attack would have rapidly built up and I would
have wanted to escape the room asap (if you go to ever Africa think
very hard before taking Lariam to prevent Malaria - side effects of
drugs do hit some people and Lariam defines the term ‘living hell’).
The speakers were
the best I have seen at a Code Camp since
’s in Ft Lauderdale. Being a speaker it is always a toss up between hanging out
in the speakers lounge (good networking) or attending presentations (learning opp
+ I pick up presentation techniques). This time I saw as many presentation as possible
but still met lots of stars including Wally and David.
Talking of stars many of the developers I met really know their .Net - I wish
I had the memory to list all their names here. I look forward to meeting them again
next year.
There is so much
more I would love to write about the day, but very few people read long posts
so I will end now with a final thanks to Bruce
Thomas who put a lot of effort in to organizing and planning this day - our
conversion was cut short at the pub club, but I was hoping he would tell
me all about working in Japan which must be fascinating.
Posted by Paul Lockwood as Other at 8:24 PM MST
Due to paperwork issues the Gods blessed me with a two week vacation. What does a .Net workaholic do with two weeks off? A lot more than I show in these pics actually. Yeah it is all boring but I’ll bet 50% of you are thinking of doing similar jobs on your houses and may be interested:
Oh yes the other rooms and half bath total replacement are weekend projects during these colder months. I wonder why so many people loathe DIY?
The doors are new too! My Father + Uncle built them thankfully
The Wager Paint Crew sprayer just rocks - took about 4 mins for the whole shed per
coat
Suzanne showing me how to do the remaining 97 tiles :)
What a wreck
That trailer rules. It folds for storage and you can buy one here
900 sq/ft of wood - FYI this would fit in a small SUV
Weapons of choice - be careful, hands don’t grow back
Urgh! Is that my Family Room? It looks like a building site
A shop vac - that will come in handy
Getting started…
Hours pass… still getting started
Day 2 and i am barely 100 sq/ft in?!?!
Wish I were behind a VDU and Keyboard right about now
Day 3 - Will I finish today?
Ok that’s is until tomorrow! Suzanne helped today and it was about twice as fast, it is much less boring with two people
Day 4; Sunday before the new job starts - A final hour doing the stuff that I could not reach yesterday - phew!
Posted by Paul Lockwood as DIY at 6:31 PM MST
There are still spaces left for
The Agenda is interesting; there are an unbelievable NINE tracks:
http://www.alabamacodecamp.com/AlAgenda.aspx
You can sign up here:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032280737&Culture=en-US
If you fancy a ride there in a swanky BMW then just email and I’ll let you know my travel plans. Ok it is only a stripper 325i but I love the car, although it will be traded for a ‘99 Miata soon so I’ll be able to afford to race what I drive - the BMW had two warranty issues that followed my driving school so it has not hit the track again. The dealership is always great but I don’t want to abuse the warranty, I have already had a full set of new rotors and pads + the rear diff fixed which I know were all due to
my driving. Now should I NOS the Miata…. Yes I am a law abiding 35 year old UMIST grad with a white collar job; sometimes no one would guess :)
While I am talking cars here are two pictures of my humble steed in two different situations. The second one is ultra-cool and will be explained in a future post. In a post after I explain how to obtain a Realtor license and just how much cash it will save you when moving house (I said that I would do that how long ago?):
DIY on the house this week - good job I have a (folding) trailer
Plugging into ODB-II, who needs the dealership?
Posted by Paul Lockwood as Presentations at 5:50 PM MST
Boy am I late
blogging about this one. Well it was a great day with many great speakers, info on
who spoke about what is still up here: http://www.gcnug.org/Default.aspx?tabid=81
Everyone I met
was very friendly including these guys I had lunch with:
The food at
lunchtime was the best of any Code Camp so far, just look at the happy faces below
who hung around for seconds:
Finally I attended Doug’s Indigo presentation. He is below setting up and no
one owned up to taking this picture before he was ready:
It was great to meet several stars/ future stars at the Queen Anne Revenge. Some of
the people I enjoyed meeting are Frank
Lavigne (and wife), Lou
Vega
, Bill
Ryan
, Will
Morganweck
, Robin
Edwards
and the guy who made it all happen Chris
Williams
. I met loads more great people there and at the Code Camp so sorry to miss some
names, but my memory is terrible and I think everyone ran out of business cards by
10am - I know that I did!
So
how was it personally? Suzanne and I traveled to Charleston the evening before Code
Camp and
dined with the other speakers at the Queen Anne’s
Revenge. I spoke at 9am and we had to close the doors to the room nearly
ten minutes before starting due to having no more space! The presentation
went fantastically with pretty much zero nerves - see y’all, all it needs
is practice, if I can become a competent presenter then anyone can! Suzanne
and I left Charleston on Sunday morning arriving back in Atlanta in time for tea.
A perfect weekend :)
Posted by Paul Lockwood as Presentations at 5:21 PM MST
Episode nine
of Steve Gibson’s Security Now podcast covered
Rootkits - I thought I knew what a root kit is but was wrong. As always Steve’s podcast
starts out very basic, but the latter halves normally teach someone of my level a
few nuggets. This week is no exception, I learned that to be infected by rootkit technology
means your operating system has been compromised, and as yet AdAware and cannot help.
You can listen to the podcast or
Google for more information on Rootkits, but the most important point is that SysInternals
have the only tool that can help.
SysInternals
Root Kit Detectors will read your file system and registry without using
high level OS calls and compare the results to those when using OS calls. Any differences
indicate an OS call has been intercepted.
Get the free
tool here: http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/RootkitRevealer.html
Security Now is here: http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm
Posted by Paul Lockwood as Podcasts, Technology at 4:50 PM MST
By
now you may well have heard about the Robotic Fish that the BBC covered yesterday:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4313266.stm
This
was another occasion where I saw a friend of mine from University days have another
15 minutes of fame. The chap in the BBC photo is Rob Knight, he built the robots and
probably did a lot of the design work. Rob is one super intelligent guy but very modest
with it, his is a Cambridge Grad (with a first), ran one of the coolest robots on
the
’s Robot Wars etc etc.
So imagine how
I feel when his name is not mentioned in the BBC article! The only name mentioned
is Professor Hu – a brilliant mind and someone who I got along with very well, but
I know for a fact that Owen Holland is more than likely Rob’s supervisor and am 99.9%
certain will have initiated this project; his name is all over it, but was Owen mentioned
in the article? NO, and that is ridiculous. Well that’s the rant over; I just think
credit should go where credit is due. Rob and I should be meeting up over Xmas so
I’ll get the real dirt then – if we are not too busy crashing our snowboards into
trees or drinking too much French beer!
Here is a picture of the real heros who built the thing, Rob is
in the middle and I have not met the other two (PhD students?).
For more information
on the Robots please check out the following links, especially the videos:
Video of the
Fish:
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~jliua/tempdownload.htm
More pictures
of the Fish:
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~jliua/picgallery.htm
If you have
time please read a little information about Owen Holland; he is one of my favorite
academics, and makes a lot of time for all his students/ research assistants. A true
role model:
http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/staff/holland.htm
http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/staff/owen/
Posted by Paul Lockwood as Other at 8:17 AM MST
