You know you’ve inadvertently spaced out if you’ve just now remembered to lookup the date for Nerd Dinner, and too little too late come to find out you snoozed! Sorry guys. I’ll have to make it double at Code Camp, and you bet your bunions I wouldn’t miss this event for the world!

While you guys are getting ready for presentations tonight here, I’ll checking my schedule for how I’ll navigate this incredible event this weekend. See you all at code camp!

Needless to say, we are far to spoiled in our house for our own good.

Being late again to work has got to worth something. Although, how may blasted hints does it take for the wife to unintelligibly and inaudibly utter the words that she want your entire breakfast, exclusively meant for just your diet, simply because she wants cookies and cream for breakfast?!

The answer is quite simple: Go get her some generic stuff for her own! And before you know it, you have you time back to read the news paper. And honey, don’t worry about it being public knowledge. No one else reads about this kind of stuff.

I think NOT! You know you’re in the line to get into hell if the sign above the door reads “DMV Express.” Due to the obvious fact that “DMV” and “Express” is a contradiction in terms, and is very similar to if not exactly the same as the relationship of “Government” and “Intelligence.”

The way it worked out is this, twice I felt kind enough to send in our new vehicles title and registration and twice the darn thing was returned due to check not arriving at the same time as the application or vice versa. So I have to admit that I took the plunge, at 1 pm when that darn place was at there busiest! From 1 to 3 pm I was gloriously subjected to full blunder that the magnitude of such a mistake could possibly render: Having to look at that blasted sign “DMV” and “Express,” in line, for over two hours with one person at the desk helping the people in line… Are we asleep back there? Or is every one STILL out to lunch?

In the humble opinion of this blogger, there is no single greater government bottle neck than the department of motor vehicles offices served up any how you like. If any one out there has ever had a similar experience, please do comment about it here! What were you able to do in line to pass the time?

The solum reminder / moral of this story is: Don't waste your time at any of the DMV offices, always insist on does business by mail, phone, fax, email, or http://www.oregon.gov/ODOT/DMV/. If you can get away with it, insist on setting up appointments for any of the driver / knowledge test without waiting in line (for example you just picked up number 465 while the last person called is number 6!! :( ).

It feels great to finally be back from our long June vacation back to the mid-west to spread the word about this monumental academic achievement. Oregon Tech truly has given me height for my level of skill with programming, and I know I can carry this with me like I mentioned in my commencement address “for the rest of my life,” as expected of me with the talents I’ve always had, and until now have been able to almost fully develop.

The two people I still owe a huge debt to for sticking with me through all the tough times with at home project dead lines, Jill my beautiful wife, and Jay Bockelman the Oregon Tech Portland, Software Engineering Program Director. I could not have asked for a better friend and mentor through over two years of a Mentor/Pier relationship as we walked through the whole software conception, design, development, and testing iteratively driven development process not once, but twice! Here are the two best photographs that captured these moments in time:

Of course none of the above exceptional moments in time would have been possible if it weren’t for the most software and logic puzzle project anyone may have conceived: The 3–Dimensional Hidden Word Puzzle Generator and Solver Ultimate Project: The Puzzler – 3D Style! Maybe some day, in a later version, this will also have the ultimate 3–Dimensional Hidden Word Cube Puzzle Displayer as well. In other words, actually use another 3D render technology some day such as OpenGL or FLASH! to make the cube more visible.

Here are my favorite senior project exposition photographs:

The entire endeavour took just slightly over a year to conceive the idea of, design from scratch, build, test, document, and release for the exposition. The binder itself is a little of a thousand five hundred (1,500) pages of original design notes, testing material, and documentation (all of which amounted to about two thirds (2/3) of the binder’s volume). The remaining third of the binder was code all done with .NET technologies.

For all of you who I did not name, and you most definitely know who you are, I thank you and appreciate you for helping to advance my software engineering career.

Upgrading Dasblog turned out to be more challenging than I had originally anticipated due to, once again, not precisely following the instructions as clearly defined by Scott Hanselman's and Brian O'mare's instructions (link soon to be posted) for the upgrade to version 1.7.

More precisely, I neglected to use the new web.config for version 1.7 that contains the code that implements the new features that come with 1.7 such as the referral spam blocker and the capatcha comment robot blocker. To me, these are the two most important new enhancements in version 1.7 dasblog. Low and behold, with the correct web.config written over the old one, all the features actually work.

I know I must have said this over again too many times for the people close to me in my life:

That designing, building, and fully testing The Puzzler - 3D Style Challenge has been the hardest, and most memorable temporary undertaking I've ever done in my entire life.

The entire project itself took the entire YEAR to conceive, define, design, layout, build, and fully tested with documented results from DAY ONE! Anyone who knows me understands who much time I had to put into this project on a regular and extremely predictive daily basis.

I'm very thankful to say that everything I defined and set out to do for this massive undertaking is completely finished and tested 100%. For the group of seniors I'm graduating with today for software engineering under Jay Bockelman, this was very unusual since only about half actually finished their projects they were working on in the time alloted.

And quite frankly, the "finishing with in the planned amount of time" should as IS the critical part for any professional software engineer in my humble opinion.

Well, that's a very good question that deserves a good answer as you all of course are wondering.

As I write this blog entry in digital ink, I shall attempt to relay what happened as best I can.

It all happened one fine afternoon when myself and my lovely wife Jill were planning our trip to see Star Wars: Episode III, Revenge of the Sith...  the date was Sunday, May 15th, 2005. By 8:30am the following Tuesday I'm getting the one phone call from my wrte, the likes of which none of us want to hear: "Matt, your Grand Mother Ruth just passed away." Well, needless to say we were on a plane the following morning (5:30 am) back to Illonois for the Memorial service and didn't get back until the following Sunday just in time to finish up and turning Senror project over at OIT.

I must admit that seeing the rest of the Feyerherm extended family was great. For the other Side of the family that was also visiting, I am very proud to be a Roman Catholic Church supporter and whorshiper. I'm also a head strong supporter of the Portland Police Department since several really good friends of mine work there. I enjoy aftershave I can smell while I'm driving, and I do not consider myself a racist, a bigot, a male shovenist, or bias towards color, religion, sex, or preference in any way shape or form, not to mention still very much enjoying to play the game of golf just for fun.

Needless to say, we had to miss plans for PADNUG, PND, both of our birthday celebrations on Friday the 20th and Sunday the 22nd, and going to see Revenge of the Sith that Saturday before we got back. Life still has that interesting way of catching off guard when you least expect it.

I can definitely expect to post again about my full experience with senior project up until now, my experience with recently upgrading thus wonderful dasblog engine, and graduation that is far too fast appoaching! Our photographs for this rather unexpected trip are viewable at our photo gallery site http://www.klump-pdx.com then click on the photo gallery.

This have really gotten interesting on the data base back end of the application. With the database being itself at a remote location, web services was the natural answer to the “How am I going to get my data over there?” question.

To no surprise of my own, the maximum size of a SOAP message that may be passed is 4 megs by default in the machine.config spec file for my .NET 1.1 framework I'm working with. Personally I don't see why any of this should change in 2.0 when folks (like myself can just override that specification in their own web.config specification file for what ever their application needs to do.)

Just for yucks, I'm increasing the default to 256 megs and seeing how much hang time I can get while passing the HUGE objects generated by the Puzzler's output.

Especially when you have your kids and in-laws around to hope you enjoy your Strawberry Shortcake with ...

For my senior project still in progress, "The Puzzler - 3D Style," .NET multi-threading has played a CRITICAL role in shaving off additional mintues that the Solution Algorithm is taking to come up with finished final results for a three dimentional puzzle of variable size. On the average, up to four mintues is being saved for a 25x25x25 randomly generated puzzle.

The power of .NET muti-threading support for algorithm enhancement, pass it it on!

foreach( Thread trailingThread in solutionThreads )
{
     trailingThread.IsBackgroundThread = true;
     trailingThread.Priority = ThreadPriority.AboveNormal;
     trailingThread.Start();
}

foreach( Thread trailingThread in solutionThreads )
     while( trailingThread.IsAlive );

I've really got to hand it to the people over at Acer Inc., They've truly out done them selves with their brand new, just recently released Acer Travelmate C303 Tablet PC, of which I can now say I'm finally the proud owner of.

For the Intel Centrino processor it's packing (not to mention a complete list of other compiled goodies that made this absolutely irresistable), this thing is POWERFULL when compared to some other tablet pc's I've been checking out over at Toshiba such as the Portégé or the Satellite.

Congradulations Rory and Aydika, the two of you truely are a match made in heaven, as the cliché goes!

I never met a heavy weight build script interpreter I didn't like. Quike frankly, that goes with out saying for NAnt. My first try at using NAnt with my senior project, “The Puzzler - 3D Style” whos current beta parts are listed here for anyone that care to inspect.

I was very surprised with just how quickly I was able to take off with using NAnt builder by just using my .sln and .proj files autogenerated by VS.NET 2003. This is a very simplified use of NAnt starting out, but just by looking at it, it's easy to tell just how complex such a build script with NAnt can get...

That batch file build.bat executes two lines:
NAnt.exe -l:build.log.txt clean build
start /B /I NOTEPAD.EXE build.log.txt

This then executes the build script xml document:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<project name="The Puzzler - 3D Style" default="build" basedir=".">
      <description>The Puzzler - 3D Style build files.</description>
      <property name="debug" value="true" overwrite="false" />
      <target name="clean" description="Removes all files outputed from the previous build on The Puzzler - 3D Style.">
            <delete failonerror="false" >
                  <fileset>
                        <include name="**\*.dll" if="true" /> <!-- Removes all generated assemblies -->
                        <include name="**\*.xml" if="true" /> <!-- Removes all documentation xml files -->
                  </fileset>
            </delete>
      </target>
      <target name="build" description="Complies my source code for The Puzzler - 3D Style from the original solution file generated by VS.NET 2003.">
            <solution verbose="true" configuration="debug" solutionfile="thepuzzler_3dstyle.sln">
                  <webmap>
                        <map url="http://localhost/thepuzzler_3dstyle/thepuzzler_3dstyle_localhost.csproj" path="C:\Documents and Settings\Nostro\VSWebCache\matthew.klump-pdx.com\thepuzzler_3dstyle\thepuzzler_3dstyle_localhost.csproj" />
                  </webmap>
            </solution>
            <solution verbose="true" configuration="release" solutionfile="thepuzzler_3dstyle.sln">
                  <webmap>
                        <map url="http://localhost/thepuzzler_3dstyle/thepuzzler_3dstyle_localhost.csproj" path="C:\Documents and Settings\Nostro\VSWebCache\matthew.klump-pdx.com\thepuzzler_3dstyle\thepuzzler_3dstyle_localhost.csproj" />
                  </webmap>
            </solution>
      </target>
</project>

The Roomba Robot vacuum cleaner by IRobot has saved us more time by taking care of the vacuuming chore than any of our other house hold investments time ten! Like the self-propelled dirt-magnet that it is, it took care of all three levels of our house in the same day... As a result it has more than paid for itself.

As long as the brushes and its sensor are kept clean and the battery charged, our Roomba should last indefinitely and quite frankly as a result, we're going to donate or $250 upright vacuum! If you would like to REALLY take to steps to simplify keeping your house clean, you'd go here to check out the Roomba by IRobot. I'm not trying to be a salesman folks, for the money, this device could really make life much more bearable for you.

I absolutely had to blog about this! As you all know, Scott Hanselman was recently published in the OIT Alumni's magazine. This is an outstanding story of Scott's life and career at Corillian Corp and can be read here. I must agree that the photography is quite remarkable! The artist's name is Laszlo Bencze, and his handy work can be look at on his website here.

Scott's thoughts about being an honored OIT alumni is posted here.

But that's not the point of this blog entry. Little did I know that for the last week I've been carrying around in my pocket an invitation to the 3rd Annual OIT Alumni Awards Banquet with guess who as the “Master of Ceremonies,” none other than himself in the flesh Scott Hanselman!

Needless to say that when I finally read this last line at the bottom of the invitation, I was litterally blow away, and logged on immediately to get this posted! I may be taking time away from my CST 415 Computer Networking final exam that I owe for Sean Hefty today, but this simply could not wait...

And Sean, if you reading this you can rest assured that all is in good hands with that exam. :)

Such an honor...!

For years and years, my Dad has been a strong advocate of the “Work Hard and Play Hard” ideology, and quite frankly I couldn't agree more with him on the subject. So, for an entire weekend about a week ago while mom was out of town in Palm Springs with her friends, it was just myself and my Dad, John Klump.

Neither he nor his business owns or maintains a website of any kind, which is perfectly okay when you own and operate an Insurance Agency as successful and influencial in Oregon as Anchor Insurance & Surety Inc is. The link I've posted is for a google search of his business name.

It had been what seems alomost over a year since it was just the two of us playing hard at Neskowin Oregon after such a long time of working hard. Here we are with that over-spunked pooch of their's GRETA looking to see what car or person to chase after next:

When you've been working really hard and you need to take a break from it all on a Friday night, it's a fact that pizza just isn't the same without spending it at Nona Emilia's Italian Restaurant consuming mass quantities of peperoni and cheese pizza with Rich Claussen! Check us out...

One of the people that have I've had the honor of taking seminar classes with, and instrumental in helping with the scope of The Puzzler - 3d Style senior project is Rich Claussen!

Rich along with Scott Hanselman, Jay Bockelman, and Sean hefty have all been instrumental in providing me with much needed critique/feed back about the senior project code and ASP.NET web-based UI useability. Without there observations and ideas, I would not have made it as far as I have with this 3D version of Scott's 2D puzzler final project every one gets to do at the end of his C# with .NET class.

Here's a shot of us taking in some much needed instruction at Patrick Cauldwell's Applied Web Services CST407 seminar:

We had some great discussions about photo editing those huge 14 mega pixel photographs that monster of a Kodak/Nikon DCS Pro 14n camera (that I own) has taken including some (some what intensive) discussion about the “Scott Hanselman method of photography.”

I will miss Jim Blizzard very much, we had some great times at Portland Nerd Dinner before you got the offer in Tampa Florida.

Apparently he doing quite alright according to his blog. Thanks for the good times Jim! We'll miss you...

One of the finer places in Portland to relax in Portland is most definitely the Portland Chinese Garden. Although we haven't made it a habit of going on a regular basis, but right around this time of year, the garden erupts with music, song, and dance. This year for Chinese New Year's, it is the New Year of the Rooster. The song and festivities most definitely reflected this! In this photo, both Jill and I are taking our time in Tao's Tea House at the Garden with afternoon Emperor's Gold Tea and Tarra Root Moon Cakes.

If the consortium of Nerds in Portland is endorsing a flick, its simply must worth while.

Calling all nerds, Calling all nerds!

You DO NOT have to be a Microsoft Developer to get the best out of being a nerd. Lets drive this caravan to more than 50 of us going to see The Hitchhiker's Guide on April 29th. Rich Claussen has the inside scoop. Don't miss it!

Hitch Hiking can take you many places...

Last Wednesday night, our gang (Jill my wife, Friend Erindale with her daughter Joya), had the distinct pleasure of hanging out with Heather Alexander for the night listening to some great Celtic Fiddle Tunes and Johny McEldoo drum beats at the Luck Labrador in Multnomah Village!

Having to deal with Senior Project on a near full-time basis was the perfect distraction for just a few short hours. Here is our portrait:

A good friend, and the best technical Ally, Scott Hansellman, was graciously generous to help he out of an IIS web app debloyment blowout.

The snag: Having two virtual directories point to the same physical directory on the webserver machine, and then changing the access rights for the aspnet_wp.exe script executer thinking would fix the problem.

The solution: Eliminating the duplicate vdir by checking the process model in mahcine.config, then execute aspnet_regiis.exe -i, and then iisreset.exe.

Extra cudos to Scott for helping to run these steps that resulted in getting The Puzzler - 3D Style back underway without the senior project schedule slipping.

Side comment about blog shares: I sort of like the idea of getting “blog credits” for linking out to places like blog shares to promote the idea of getting people to post more of their public lives online. I haven't gotten a whole lot of credits, but I'm sure that will increast in the coming years.