Full length items that typically deal with career issues, product reviews or test drives of the latest Web 2.0 services. http://www.electronicrealitysolutions.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=1 Wed, 08 Sep 2010 12:13:43 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/images/M_images/ers_rss.png http://www.electronicrealitysolutions.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=1 Electronic Reality Solutions main news feed. http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/content/view/555/10/ Gloom and doom may be the rage these days as banks fail and icons of American industry fail but no dilemma so recent causes as much hand wringing as the proposition of peak oil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil). Since 1956 experts have called for a peak in oil production and an inevitable decline in output as the amount of proven reserves dwindle. Though there have been different interpretations and wildly different time lines nearly all theories agree on one thing: the price of petroleum-based products will increase to a point where it diminishes demand rather than causes an outright shortage. Growing up in the post 1970s gas crisis era I was aware of peak oil but never really thought about the prospect until a few years ago. My father in law turned me on to a book by Paul Roberts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Roberts_(author)) called The End of Oil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Oil). While I profoundly disagree with some of Roberts's assumptions I acknowledge that the prospect of costly petroleum will greatly change America, and the world, both socially and economically. Articles - The Bleeding Edge Sat, 20 Jun 2009 23:19:43 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/content/view/553/10/ 3rd party integrations require a lot of skill, finesse and diplomacy if they are going to be successful. I recently had the opportunity to spearhead the development effort at my company with a OEM lead provider integration. Depending on the development shop you may find yourself with either a very rigid process or a more loosely defined experience. In either situation communication is the key to success. If you find yourself in a loosely defined process like I did then you may have to deal with adjustments to your code as well as the providers. If the process is especially new you will likely uncover bugs or flaws in the process which need to be corrected. With this in mind it's far better to keep development iterative and to communicate and address issues in a timely manner. On the other hand if you find yourself in a very rigid design process you'll most likely be provided with a firm data spec which is relatively concrete as well as a series of test cases to qualify your integration. In this case you'll need to iron out any potential issues upfront and to fully complete your design before coding. In most cases you'll want to code to the test, but also analyze your own system for any potential bottlenecks or choke points which could create and issue during testing. In the end, regardless of which type of integration you use you'll want to include numerous methods of feedback to provide monitoring and quality of service assurance after deployment. I've found that it's often beneficial to enable debugging or verbose monitoring during the initial deployment as well as when unforeseen issues are encountered. Articles - .Net Development Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:12:30 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/content/view/552/10/ Inevitably a system administrator finds him or herself face to face with a worm at some point. My latest foray into the IT battlefront happened a few weeks ago with a rather nasty worm called Conficker. The worm is a sophisticated breed and proved a worthy, albeit frustrating, adversary. Our first contact was the detection of an RPC attack on port 445 (http://www.grc.com/port_445.htm) by Kaspersky's firewall solution. A system scan revealed that several machines with a Net-Worm.Win32.Kido (http://www.threatexpert.com/report.aspx?md5=1db5476c766555c9995b25d19f97b9bc) infection as identified by Kaspersky or Conficker (http://www.napera.com/blog/?p=360#more-360) as the worm is more widely known on the net. The initial infection vector was an un-patched system using the vulnerability published by Microsoft in late Oct, MS08-067 (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS08-067.mspx). The patch addressed an RPC hole which allows the worm to infect the system via File and Print sharing. Unfortunately most client firewalls are unable to block the RPC requests and in a matter of hours every vulnerable system becomes infected. Our initial response was to conduct an offline scan via Live CD on all machines and to apply the Microsoft patch. We also disabled file and print sharing along with several unused but now activated system services. Articles - General Sat, 17 Jan 2009 10:34:46 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/content/view/549/10/ Call it irrational exuberance, over hype or cheer leading, but don't call it a bubble. That's the take away lesson from the recent tech start up meltdown. While sites like ValleyWag delight in the misfortune of the latest gaggle of VC funded companies and spin events as the end of the world, the truth is that this has been nothing more than a simple boom / bust cycle for tech. Nearly a decade ago as Silicon Valley hype reached stratospheric levels many early pundits used words like "historic" and "new economy". Companies that were little more than a fancy website were raising immense amounts of capital with IPOs while communications companies laid thousands of miles of fiber optic cable. It was if the Internet commerce sector could not be stopped and millions of average Joes sunk their retirement funds into companies like Flooz and Pets.com. In the end many companies went bust others suffered with inventory or bandwidth they could not sell, and many others lost most of their nest egg as the stock market fell. Articles - Web 2.0 Review Wed, 03 Dec 2008 12:20:11 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/content/view/546/10/ I recently had a chance to review an enterprise level caching solution from the folks at Alachisoft called NCache. Our development team was in the market for a scalable solution to high database load which was sapping the life from our database server. NCache (http://www.alachisoft.com/ncache/index.html) is an in-memory cache which can be distributed among a cluster of servers to both improve reliability and performance of data intensive apps. Articles - .Net Development Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/content/view/545/10/ Weather Underground's latest feature presses the boundary Google Maps has been around for a while but I'm repeatedly amazed by the addition of features by both Google and third parties via the public API. I recently uncovered a new feature from the venerable meteorological site Weather Underground called the WunderMap (http://www.wunderground.com/wundermap/). WunderMap (http://www.wunderground.com/wundermap/) is a customized weather layer atop the already familiar Google maps engine. However unlike standard radar, the WunderMap (http://www.wunderground.com/wundermap/) displays real time data which includes current storm activity and trajectory. Articles - The Bleeding Edge Fri, 25 Jul 2008 22:14:39 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/content/view/519/10/ Sometimes changing jobs can bring unexpected changes Three months ago I found myself at a new job, a new company and in capacity different from what I was used to. The former startup company that I worked for faced hard economic times and as a result I found myself on the job market in December. Looking for a job is a scary proposition especially when you're not currently employed. You brace yourself for the worst and hope for the best. After a mere two weeks I had three interested companies and one solid offer to digest before the holidays. In a nutshell the offer that I eventually accepted was a bit of a departure for me personally and professionally. It was presented with an opportunity to grow into a position and to become the lead technical guy on a day to day basis. This role required me to be the "go to" person for more junior level developers, a position of leadership which while new to me in my career is something I've become comfortable through other life experiences. Articles - Career Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:38:51 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/content/view/482/10/ It stands to reason that there are more than a few characteristics that contribute to a good developer. Obviously you must have the desire to constantly learn and evolve, but you must also be willing to apply brand new technologies. You must also have a certain amount of faith that you'll be able to make any sort of solution work in the end. Many times we find ourselves beating our heads against a wall while trying to solve a problem, but it is only through persistence that we find success. Thankfully there are resources that help developers better utilize the tools that Microsoft has given us. One such tool is called patterns and practices (http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices ) and though it's been around for years I've only recently, that is over the past three years, delved into the lessons contained within. Articles - .Net Development Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:42:00 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/content/view/456/10/ Over the years I've experimented with many types of photo galleries through various dynamic content packages. Recently I made the decision to move most of my public photos to Flickr because of limited file storage space on my web server. Though I've always shared my pictures freely I never intended, or thought, of the social networking aspects of doing this. Turns out two of my photos have gained the attention of several organizations over the past few months. Shortly after my trip to Nashville I was contacted by an admin at Now Public (http://www.nowpublic.com/), a social news site. Turns out they were interested a shot I'd take on Johnny Cash's Country Music Hall of Fame display. The admin wanted to add my photo to a story on the site about Cash's home burning down. I gladly gave permission and even signed up for the site in return. A few weeks ago I had another inquiry about the Nashville pictures this time in regard to the photo of the Hermitage, home of Andrew Jackson (http://www.schmap.com/nashville/tours_tour3/#r=none&mapview=Map&tab=Text&p=18829&topleft=36.51791,-86.95885&bottomright=35.74261,-86.5757&i=18829_5.jpg). A representative from Schmap (http://www.schmap.com/) suggested my photo for an upcoming release of their online tourist guide. Again I gladly gave permission and a few weeks later received a second email informing me that my photo was chosen. I admit it's pretty cool to see your photos on another site, especially when they are kind enough to ask permission first. Typically I release my photos under Creative Commons so technically they need not ask. However I respect them for extending the courtesy and I am more than happy to plug their services for whatever it's worth. At any rate it's cool that a few quick tourist snapshots have created some buzz. I never thought that would be the case. Articles - Web 2.0 Review Wed, 19 Sep 2007 11:52:34 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/content/view/444/10/ As Do-It-Yourself projects go, hanging ceiling isn't exactly the first to the forefront. However if you like me sometimes you find yourself doing projects that you never really intended to do. That was the case for my new vinyl soffit ceiling. A few months ago we hired a contractor to build a screened porch addition for our house. We were limited bugetarily so I decided to dust off my old house painting gear and to tackle the job myself. For the most part the job went off without a hitch, though I did have to take a few days "vacation" to complete the project. In the end I was satisfied with my work but happy to be back in the office. Articles - How-To Tue, 14 Aug 2007 16:21:56 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/content/view/427/10/ I'm quick to admit that the number of podcasts I listen to have rapidly declined over the years. The few that have remained on my workstation have mostly concerned .Net development and technology in general. One that I've really enjoyed is Dot Net Rocks (http://www.dotnetrocks.com/) by Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin. This past week they interviewed the developer team for Microsoft Acropolis (http://windowsclient.net/acropolis), which was a great episode. From the site: Carl and Richard talk with members of the Microsoft Acropolis team at TechEd 2007. Acropolis is a software factory-ish toolset that allows business developers to develop quality line-of-business WPF applications with ease. Grab the episode here (http://perseus.franklins.net/dotnetrocks_0248_acropolis.mp3) Overall I think this Acropolis show a lot of promise although it's clearly in the early stages of development. If your interested in the latest .Net tech I'd strongly recommend checking out this episode as well as the many others offered by Dot Net Rocks. Articles - .Net Development Tue, 26 Jun 2007 16:55:12 +0100 http://electronicrealitysolutions.com/content/view/371/10/ I'll admit that it's been nearly two years since I was last on the job hunt trail but the experience is still very fresh in my mind. While I was fortunate enough to not repeat the rather unpleasant experience of very first job interview, there were still times when I wished the process were more straight forward and that people were more upfront. During my last job hunt I benefited from the reading a book and newsletter from a guy by the name of Nick Corcodilos. Entitled "Ask the Headhunter" the book and letter detail insider information about the hiring process and the inner workings of the human resources industry. Even though I am no longer looking for a job I still enjoy reading the letter from time to time. I often glean a bit of information which will either be helpful to me in a future search, as something I can pass along to many of my friends who are actively searching for work. Articles - Career Tue, 06 Feb 2007 09:24:59 +0100