By now you probably noticed several new photos that were posted from events occurring over the summer. If you haven’t checked that out yet, it may be found here. I haven’t yet had a chance to clean up the comment spam left by several other visitor, so if you wish to comment on any of the pictures there, please use this link to do so. This particular gallery is hosted from home, so please be forgiving if your connection is slow. Thing started off with a BANG, this summer with the first event being the Renaissance and Fantasy Fare in Gigharbor, Washington, next it was off to the Yamhill Valley Winery for wine tasting through Neighborhood House Association with offices in Multnomah Village of Portland, OR. About three weeks later after that we went waver runner ridding with my man Greg Martin, and also hiking  out by Snoqualmie-Pasqualmie (sorry for the pun) Falls for a short Jill hike to see the falls, the power generation station, and the great Lodge that is there at Snoqualmie. Great prices I hear for the loading… A few weeks later after that it was off to Friday Harbor in the San Juan Islands where Jill’s parent purchased a new vacation home, soon to be retirement home. We most especially enjoyed the the sunset just over Victoria Island on the other side of the channel. It was also a tremendous pleasure to Orcas out hunting for food in the channel on just the opposite side of the Island. Too bad I wasn’t able to get a good enough photo to be seen to place with the other photographs. The light house you can see there is the vantage point from where we saw the whales. The final and of course must relaxing time I was able to enjoy with just one day with Grandpa and I fishing at the inlet to the Salmon River. The fish you seen me holding there is a 27 pound fish I caught out by a part of the inlet our guide called “The Trojan’s Helmet” and that I’m barely able to lift becuase of it being so full of meat and salmon eggs. Yes, I just so happen to catch and eat a fall Chinook Salmon that was on her way up river lay her eggs in louse gravel to continue the population of the Chinook Salmon species, right up until the point she smelled the herring bate at the end of my fish hook. The fish that you see Grandpa holding is a 15 pound fish that our tour guide, Scilus, had hooked and Grandpa had reeled in.

This first week of October has been kind of depressing is I lost my first opportunity at full time with Microsoft since I am still a hard working software engineer. This second weekend may even get more depressing since taxes for the precious year is due by the end of this month, oh woopty-do, lucky me. Generally speaking about life as a human on Earth, we must balance the good with the bad, and hope someday to be in a place we never have to worry about loss, hurt and suffering again.

 

Instead of our typical stay at home Friday evening and watch Stargate Science Fiction, we spent a wonderful and relaxing evening at the horse races when we were unexpectedly invited by Jill’s work place American Engineering to come on down and enjoy the races at Emerald Downs Horse Race Track. I have to admit to you all that I did my best to understand how to read the statistics sheet for who is going to be the next winning horse, but I untimately conceided to my own inability and left all the betting up to Jill:

 

The first paragraph of Chapter Fourteen of “We Believe, A Survey of the Catholic Church” by Oscar Luke, speaks directly to my God-given spirit in regard to the time I have spent here in Washington since I was brought to Microsoft on April 17, 2006, just two days after I was baptized and my wife Jill Feyerherm confirmed into the Catholic Church on the evening of Saturday, April 15, 2006 at St. Cecilia Parish, Beaverton, OR:

“Actions speak louder than words,” Study of our faith is meaningful only if it motivates us to act in a manner consistent with the teaching of Jesus. “What good is it, my brothers and sisters in Christ, if someone says they have faith but do not have works? Can that faith save them? If a brother or sister has nothing to wear, and has no food for the day, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,’ but you do not give them the necessities of the body, what good is it? So also faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (The Gospel according to Saint James, Chapter 2: Verses 14 through 17)

Since we moved, most probably the simplest (and at the same time) the most difficult thing we have really needed to do was to find our local Saint Louise Parish of Bellevue, Washington and get involved over our heads with sharing, ministry, friends, and faith in God through Jesus Christ. One of our works is known by the Archdiocese of Seattle, presided over by his grace – Archbishop Alex J. Brunett, as an offering and a tithe of One Percent of everything we receive as income as a bare minimum to further the cause of the Archdiocese ministries and seminarian training. Another good work was handled last Sunday by my beautiful wife Jill when St. Louise Parish was promoting back-to-school supply stock up for all the children of the Parish not able to receive their own supplies. We helped out that day by giving away rulers, pencils, and calculators for the other children of the parish to use as they need them. Even so, I really find a much greater sense of peace if I can secretly and personally help someone for however the best way I can give to help that person out the most. This is critical, because is means I can perform the good work and be praying to God at the same time, and really know that he is listening.

The greatest benefit this is as a result of striving to continually give better works is it makes me feel very humble and greatful to be around such wonderful catholic friends that believe as I do, and especially more pleasing to God even though sometimes he understands that sometimes I slip-up and knock my hallow sideways. What is most important is that no matter what may happen, no matter what life may through at us, we always return to back to God with our needs. One of biggest mistakes we as a people of God could make is thinking that we can rely on our own strength to physically and emotionally handle any problem that life here on Earth will give to us. It is my understanding that my strength alone is absolutely finite, a grain of sand on the rolling beach, and God’s strength is the infinite number of other grains of sand combined. By this fact, especially Jesus Christ including and all the hosts of heaven, all the martyrs, all the saints, especially St. Albertus Magnus, St. John of God, St. Peter, St.Mary our most blessed virgin mother of God, St. Francsis of Asissi, St. Clair, St. James, St. Joseph, St. Cecilia, St. Louise, and also for the love of all our departed loved ones is why I choose to put God’s strength first before any ounce of my own for all time.

So I ask you, if you also believe, or would like to know more about what it is like to put God’s strength first, I implore you to please place a comment or email me at matthew@klump-pdx.com about your need, and I will be able to help you get started with some great resources that can help you to understand what it is like to place God’s strength first in our lives through Jesus Christ. I cannot begin summarise how everyone’s walk with God will be by putting his strength first before our own through faith and good works for other people, but I can say that the magnitude of the problems you may be feeling right now will seem insignificant in comparison to what God has in store for you and for all of us.

I thank you for reading about my thoughts this day, and God Bless You both Now and Forever, Ah men.

-Matthew

Hongwei (one of my new work partners) and myself might look goofy, but we had to grin and giggle while going throught the process to setup my work station. For such a large body company as this, it is understandable that the process for bringing onboard a new employee as myself might slow to a crawl.

I currently get to share office space with five people, but I have to admit that I have absolutely no complaints. Even being considered to work at a place as prestigious as Microsoft. It really is quite an honor.

This is probably the only time you’ll hear me rag on someone in this forum since I am leaving in a few months to go have some fun at Microsoft, so here it goes:

So I was happily moving along, doing my 2006 Code of Conduct Training when I found I could keep pressing the <<NEXT>> button on each presentation slide and BYPASS all of the required questions for credit. The next thing I know, I am writing an email to AskComplianceTraining@qwest.com about not testing their web application.

I have lived in Portland, Oregon for nearly twenty nine years now, and it seems that no matter what we decide to do with our lives that God always has the final say in who stays and who goes including circumstantial events in our lives that just so happen to appear out of no where. Yes sir, whether we like it or not, God is always there helping us to get out of jam ups along the road of life.

That just so happened to be true at this time in my life because I have applied for and have been accepted to work at Microsoft in Redmond, WA doing Windows CE mobile development testing. So naturally Rory Blyth’s discussion on Windows Mobile will be a huge benefit for what I’ll be assigned to do. God is leading me North out of Oregon in virtually the same way he lead the Hebrews out of Egypt and across the Red Sea, and he is not being subtle about this since we’re having to leave many family and friends behind.

As we embark on this fantastic journey down the road of life, we remember all the good times spent in and around all of Oregon from the cost, to the cascade mountains to the high deserts and lava caves. We will miss you Oregon, and also be right next door!

For anyone that has been using the Beta 2 and the new final release (Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition) version 8.0.50727.42 (RTM.050727–4200) using the Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0.50727, I am afraid that I may have some bad news for you and for the team that released this version at Microsoft.

The symptoms of the bug that my IDE was experiencing when I was using the Beta 2 version was exactly the same as what Scott Hanselman said here. This would now be the third complete manual uninstall and reinstall of the new final release (Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition) version 8.0.50727.42 (RTM.050727–4200) using the Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0.50727, and the usual started happening again:

The certain keyboard keys became non-functional such as the enter key. arrow keys, ctrl, alt, backspace, and shift keys ?!?!

NONE of the .NET Framework tool modules would load, or “the referenced assembly could not be loaded” ?!?!

The answer is some what trivial with ONLY 20/20 hind site vision after the source of the problem was identified. Your user setting file for Visual Studio 2005 some how corrupted itself during the installation or IDE loading process, and you must have the environment reset your user data file “again, which we all know should have been tracked and eliminated in the Beta 2 version.”

Quite certainly, the last time I checked we are all still human, including Microsoft, and we make mistakes. Even so, while the product was in Beta 2 version, I believe that knowledge of this problem existed way before the RTM date of the final release and SHOULD HAVE been taken care of. In stead we see this sort of thing propagating to the next version which sort of, kind of, just so happened to be a final release. I can already see the maintenance cost going though the roof…

Any who . . . to fix this nasty bug, close Visual Studio 2005, go to the root install folder for your version of Visual Studio 2005 and enter the following commands:

cd C:\<<install root folder>>\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\

devenv.exe /ResetUserData

or if provides yet another unexpected nicety use:

devenv.exe /?

command to uncover exactly what switch option will reset the user settings file and YOUR DONE!

To be quite honest, without reading a post like this to get the solution, you will probably think that your development environment is totally and utterly useless.

Hope this helps, now get back to work!

I “again” need to remind anyone who may choose to read this online diary that all of the opinions, views, and feeling expressed here are explicitly my OWN and DO NOT necessarily reflect ANY ONE ELSE’S including co-workers, family, friends, or casual relationships. I strongly encourage everyone who does read my personal thoughts to leave comments at the bottom by using this link.

I write this entry publicly because I understand how important words and experiences like this can make other people (such as yourself who are reading this feel very good inside).

I can tell you that when I experienced my first Christian mass that took place in the middle of the chaotic work week, which also happened to be on All Saints Day of Celebration, I was converted inside my heart from an only partial belief to a full-fledged believer of the Catholic Faith. This took place just as I happened to be at one of my low self-esteem moments with still trying to find work.

It has now been three days since I was converted to the way of Christ in my heart from November 1st, 2005. And on that third day, I felt it very important to make a personal reconciliation with Christ that I now share with whom ever is reading this to make my penance more public in nature, and personally more real for myself that I will never consciously give into temptation ever again, and thank Christ for all my Earthly Blessings.

I ask that Christ and God forgive my biological father Fredrick for the things he did in life, and to seriously look at his last act of selfless sacrifice before he gave up his spirit in death for the safety of a perfect stranger. I also ask that Christ and God forgive my Cousin, Mark Arthur Hanna, for unwisely letting an impaired friend do the driving before the accident. I ask that Christ and God bless all our dearly beloved that have passed into your heavenly kingdom and your care dear Lord.

I have not yet found exactly who my Patron Saint is, but I sincerely hope through prayer, meditation, research, and my name which so happens to be Matthew James, that I might discover who this is.

On April 16, 2006, I will receive my full confirmation into the Catholic Faith, yet I am already prepared to give up everything to follow Christ.

Thank you for everything, and to you for sharing in this prayer to Christ our Lord, ah men.

I understand that its been quite sometime since last I posted to my blog. But rest assured for anyone still subscribing or reading my blog entries for good reason.

The last time I posted to this blog, I was slammed by fraud requests from “ebay” and “paypal,” and I also happened to graduate again from college with my bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering from Oregon Tech. Since then I’ve been engaged in another almost full time job brushing up on my skills with more reading and studying along with trying to land my first full-time programming job. So far things are looking very up, but as I was brushing up on my SQL skills, I happened across a rather convoluted data model.

If you have programmed with MDX other wise commonly known as Multidimensional Expressions query language, you probably then known what I’m taking about. The particular model uses Members, Tuples, and Sets to define a cubic style form of a data structure that from what I can gather, posses no form of relationships when compared to the Relational Data Model. I have to ask anyone reading this that if you have been able to glean one single ounce of useful amount of information using this Data Model SELECT statement construct:

SELECT
   { [Measures].[Unit Sales], [Measures].[Store Sales] } ON AXIS(0),
   { [Time].[1997], [Time].[1998] } ON AXIS(1)
FROM Sales
WHERE ( [Store].[USA].[CA] )

I would very much like to hear your example, and how you were able to make it even REMOTELY useful?!?

Here is the core model for this rather convoluted data model:

Set Example:

Tuple Example:

If you get a message like this that landed in the trash folder of your email client DON’T JUST LEAVE IT THERE FORWARD IT TO THE PROPER AUTHORITIES TO SHUT THESE PEOPLE DOWN!

This particular piece of mail had an extremely suspicious header even though it was forwarded to my main address from my mklump@comcast.net account:

Received: from [63.240.76.44] by mx254a.mysite4now.com [66.102.133.254] with SmartMax MailMax for matthew@klump-pdx.com; Fri, 05 Aug 2005 11:07:05 -0700
Return-Path: <securitycenter@paypal.com>
X-SmartMax-AuthUser:
Received: from 201-0-91-38.dsl.telesp.net.br ([201.0.91.38])
          by sccrmxc20.comcast.net (sccrmxc20) with SMTP
          id <20050805175955s2000f9dgge>; Fri, 5 Aug 2005 18:00:16 +0000
X-Originating-IP: [201.0.91.38]
Received: from web33.nix.paypal.com (web87.nix.paypal.com [10.192.2.49]) by smtp-outbound.nix.paypal.com (Postfix) with SMTP id 659NB1CC814 for <mklafoll@comcast.net>; Fri, 05 Aug 2005 10:56:21 -0800

Obviously mklafoll@comcast.net is NO WHERE NEAR mklump@comcast.net…

Received: (qmail 84229 invoked by uid 92); Fri, 05 Aug 2005 10:56:21 -0800
Message-ID: 0585098601.85788@paypal.com
From: "Paypal Security" <securitycenter@paypal.com>
Reply-To: "Paypal Security" <securitycenter@paypal.com>
Subject: New Security Requirements
X-Email-Type-Id: PP%RND_DIGI%RND_DIGI%RND_DIGI
Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2005 10:56:21 -0800
X-MaxCode-Template: email-transaction-counterparty
X-XPT-XSL-Name: /en_US/transaction/seller/TransactionCounterparty.xsl
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
 boundary="--03566965836101187173"
X-NAS-Language: English
X-NAS-Bayes: #0: 4.39383E-066; #1: 1
X-NAS-Classification: 0
X-NAS-MessageID: 517
X-NAS-Validation: {5B5B9485-C143-4BF7-A92E-7AE728A34958}

 

Dear valued PayPal® member,

Due to recent fraudulent transactions, we have issued the following security requirements.

It has come to our attion that 98% of all fraudulent transactions are caused by members using stolen credit cards to purchase or sell non existant items. Thus we require our members to add a Debit/Check card to their billing records as part of our continuing commitment to protect your account and to reduce the instance of fraud on our website. Your Debit/Check card will only be used to identify you. If you could please take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience and renew your records you will not run into any future problems with the PayPal® service. However, failure to confirm your records will result in your account suspension.

We are requesting this information to verify and protect your identity. Federal regulations require all financial institutions to obtain, verify, and record identification from all persons opening new accounts or obtaining ongoing payment services. This is in order to prevent the use of the U.S. banking system in terrorist and other illegal activity. For these reasons, PayPal® will utilize services provided by various credit reporting agencies to verify the information you submit to us.

Once you have updated your account records your pending PayPal® account transactions will not be interrupted and will continue as normal.

To update your billing records please login to your account by clicking here. (DO NOT CLICK HERE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!!!) This web site with the following querry string http://paypal.signin2.com/cgi-bin/webscr.html?cmd=_login-run points to GOD ONLY KNOWS WHO’s home desktop pc just like a loaded pistol!

Thank you for your time,
PayPal® Billing Department.

---

Copyright © 1995-2005 PayPal Inc. All Rights Reserved. Designated trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners. Use of this Web site constitutes acceptance of the PayPal User Agreement and Privacy Policy.

I’m forwarding this belligerently obvious case of of fraud to the proper paypal authorities, and with any luck, we’ll never hear from these people at this particular domain again…

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 am Mr Do. I am sedentary by nature, enjoying passive entertainment, eating when the mood takes me, and playing with my food. I try to avoid conflict, but when I'm angered, I can be a devil - if you force me to fight, I will crush you. With apples. What Video Game Character Are You?

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.

<httpRuntime executionTimeout="180" maxRequestLength="262144" minFreeThreads="26" minLocalRequestFreeThreads="13" />

Notice how the minimum number of free local threads was also increased from 8 to 13 for solving all 26 directional possibilities of the puzzle (One thread cover one bi-directional possibility within the puzzle).

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.

I gotta tell you guys, I just can't think of a better person for this to happen to.

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.

You know you're a nerd when:

1. In order to get its attention, you have to turn them on.

2. It has a lot of data but is still clueless.

3. It is supposed to help you solve your problems, but half the time it IS the problem.

4. As soon as you commit to it, you realize that, if you had waited a little longer, you could have had a better model.

5. No one but you understands its internal logic.

6. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else accept you.

7. Even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.

8. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

 

Special Thanks to Tanja Markwart and Lunch Break Commics.

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.

I ran into a bit of an issue today regarding the MS SQL Sever 2000 NT Service not successfully starting (over and over) after I had change the Administrator account's password. This, of course, became abundantly clear after checking the system event log.

Some how, I don't know why yet without doing further research on msdn, this also changed the logon for the MSSQLSERVER service in the services administration snapin.

Of course this was immediately remedied by changing the service log on back to the local system account instead of the administrator's account. How it got that way, I still have no clue without more research. If any one reading this has any ideas as to what would cause this, please do leave a comment, or email --> matthew@klump-pdx.com. Thanks everyone!

This is in my response to the revolution started by Rory's post here. I know this is a little late reaction with senior project in progress, but here goes:

I'd have to say that the best damn book *ever* I've read, the one book that turned my life upside down, the one book that forced me to throw away the chains of emotional survitude to people that did not care, the one book that made me strive to climb to the highest levels of being the “nerdy engineer” I am today is: <<drum roll please>>

“You Can Become a Super Salesman!!” by Paul R Kenian

You guessed it folks, when I was handed this by the multi-level marketing freek show at Quixtar, it made more sense to have choice B) the life of a dedicated engineer, than choice A) their way, or any one else's (no reference to my current employer is being inferred in this post or any other for that matter).

No one at “the phone company” reads my blog of any kind, so I'll leave that blasted disclaimer off.

If any one reading this has a similar story to tell, please do! Blog it, email it, comment on it, but DO NOT keep it caged! Let the animal out every once and a while WITH OUT the disclaimer...

Today I solved a major snag that's bugged me for serveral weeks. Although it was cool being able to finally plug my cell phone to my pc for internet, that nothing compared to not having the correct info to set up rights for remote development.

Well after today, that has all changed. After reading some fairly important msdn articles here, I found the rather important fact that all remote developers must have accounts on the web server in question, and if it is a Windows box, everyone must be added to the VS_Developers local machine users group. If you've ever had a similar experience, would you please send me an email or post a comment? Thanks!

Last weekend we found a gorgious feline friend that we just had to rescue from the Sherwood Cat Adoption team. Her name is "Beta." Her name was inspired by the up and coming "beta" test phase for my Senior Project, The Puzzler - 3D Style.

Check it out, more pictures available at this location.

We had a great time on Halloween Night! My wife Jill went as “Arwen” of Rivendell, I went as “Aragon Son of Arathorn” complete with props, and friend Erindal with her young one Joya went as “The Good Fairly” and “The Princess To Be” respectively.

Calling all Hallow's Eve party throwers! If you're throwing a Halloween bash next year PLEASE EMAIL --> matthew@klump-pdx.com.

We had a great time at the Hillsboro Community Halloween Party, here's our gang (Art Mcgee was behind the camera at the time):

 

At this point I am discontinuing my project event logging on this sight for the sake of security. I will definitly continue to post for cool stuff going on like having dressed up like my favorite “Rings” character “Aragon Son of Arathorn,” and Jill going as “Arawin Daughter of Elrond.” Pics to be posted soon...

For today, I finished rewriting the introduction for Iteration 1 correctly. This explains what I hope to have done by next Tuesday's dead line. It seems as though my to-do list has quadrupled over night...

For those of you running WIN XP SP 2 and you are using FTP for your projects, make sure you follow these steps to keep from near tearing your hair out if you use internet explorer to access your FTP server:

Under the tools->internet options->advanced Tab:

1) Make sure that you have “Enable folder view for FTP sites” enabled/checked !

2) Make sure that you have “Use Passive FTP (for firewall and DSL modem compatibility)” unchecked/disabled !

If this saved you several hours of time and you're running win xp sp2, please comment here! I'd love to hear your comments of what has and has not worked for you with the SP 2.

For the design session, I flushed out some more details by creating a stratospheric view document that describes the over all actions and interactions going on in my project. This use case visio diagram further describes all the actors and systems external to my project that have a remote possibility (and within the scope/domian) of interacting with this project as well as use case situations going inside the system/project.

Today in the laboratory for senior project at OIT Portland, I had a fantastic experience with Jay Bockelman (See Picture of us Below) exploring and visually diagramming some high level modularized ideas for building "The Puzzler - 3D Style."

The digital record of our notes is available here for download (photo images). Use cases are just about complete and will be ready for inspection by the Due Date on Tuesday, October 19, 2004. Come back and visit for more details about this evolving project inspired by Scott Hanselman.

I can personally attest that Rory and Scott's presentation did not suck. Far from it! The best I got out of it was the new concept of the Provider Pattern for ASP.NET 2.0 Beta. During the swag competition, I was fortunate enough to get a copy of the ASP.NET 2.0 Beta guide book.

Of course after having gotten the book the first thing I did was to lookup “Provider Pattern” for the detailed info (I realize I could have done it online but this was so much more fun!).

Some other gold nuggets I found was the concept of a “Master Page“, and a complete chapter dedicated to just “Data Binding.“ Check out the new ASP.NET! I think you'll really like what you see.

 

Here in Portland, the market for Software Developers may still be sluggish, but most certainly not impossible. Back in August we had a very important seminar at PADNUG discussing the ins and outs of the business side of software dev.

At the time, someone brought up a very interesting question. So what is the going rate people should charge out for consulting here in Portland? Alot of us answered back by saying it has alot to do with what language skill is required for which ever project and the number of years experience with that language. To help with that point, an audience wide survey was done so folks could get an idea of what would generally be charged with a given language in Portland.

For anyone needing an idea of how this turned out, the spreadsheet results are available here. For folks needing a zipped version, that is available here. Much Thanks do to Rich and Howe for compiling this.

We just got back from London England Not long ago, and what a tremendous adventure it was! Our photograph collection is available for your inspection here. Have fun and don't forget to leave comments!

Yup, I was there when he won it at the PADNUG Business Side of Software Development Seminar...

Such luck, fantastic and congradulations!

I could see it now just as the plane pulls up into the London Airport:

An observer just happens to look upon our group disembarking a 747 just in from Seattle International Airport, “Sweet heart, who's that guy over there with the two quart tankard hanging from his belt, the fourteen megapixel camera around his neck, and the custom build Pocket PC on his other belt? I'll bet he's one of those traveling tourist nerds we've heard so much about!”

We any way, I hope we don't sick out (like a handful of soure thumbs) that much while we're in London, but I do hope to make a lasting on the people I meet of how much I love technology. Especially while being a tourist!

We'll be off this Saturday the 4th returning the 11th. Please take note every one, I hope to see all of you back to our site to comment on said photos that could very well be six megapixel or better! So visit now and often, and we'll see every one back here in the not so distant future.

For any one that has the time or the inclenation (without violating licensing) to try porting your group's own custom software package to your own hardware.

In the case of Owl Eval, that is exactly what I did! Over the last week I spent several says going through the process of porting the Owl Eval php/mysql web app running at the time on an Apache web server on top on Linux to my Windows box at home which is a Pentium 4 3.2Ghz 1Gig Ram running Windows XP Pro with IIS 5.1 web server with a PHP/MYSQL plugin.

I must say this was not a trivial matter! Fixing the broken link references form the old site was the most grueling espcially the documentation to say the least. But please check it out here, and tell me how well I ported things compared to the old site.

For our generation 9/11/2001 was truely an event no American will forget. This blog entry is dedicated to all the thoughts and events going on in our lives on that fateful day.

I implore any one reading this entry to reach back into your mind to that day. Where were you at the time, and what were you thinking when you first got the news?

For myself, I got a call from my wife about 7:45am exclaiming, “Quick, turn your radio to 820am!” The next thirty minutes completely stunned me. The rest of the that day was sent home from work, glued to the television...

Was Bush's reaction adequite? Did the 9/11 Comission correctly rule that this event had no one to blame other than Osama and Al-Qiada?

Scott Hanselman just got back from a vacation at Disneyland, CA and offers his perspective on visiting The Magic Kingdom. I must say I really got a kick out of it! Check it out here.

For the day or so, one of our computers at home was unable to use https or ftps secure server for a short while. As a result of googling on the subject, I've discovered that if you use internet explorer, there are exactly three critical settings that must be properly set to use SSL secure sockets through the internet explorer client browser:

Under the Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced Tab:

1. Use SSL 2.0
2. Use SSL 3.0
3. Use TSL 1.0

All must be checked. Time wasted trying to figure out why I couldn't fill out online orders, 34 minutes. I suppose I could've gone to Microsoft's Knowledge Base, although I didn't feel that becoming lost among the “man pages” unix style (but managable) support pages, settings tinkering seemed to be more on my side.

Hey there guys, as I'm sure you can well tell that Mateo's blog is finally up, running, and ready for your comments!

With senior project getting under way I have lots of questions so please visit often to my blog to help Mateo answer all kinds of questions regarding life, programming, .NET, and web services.

Extra kudos to Scott Hanselman, Rich Claussen, Jim Blizzard, Jay Bockelman, as well as all the OIT Staff for helping me to get this far with my programming career. With you all, none of this would be possible!

Thank you so much to you all, and please come visit often!