A collection of various ramblings on technology, life in 
Sunday, February 29, 2004 Pictures from Melanie's surprise fourth 26 birthday party are now in the gallery. Check them out now before she has me pull out the embarrassing ones.
posted by Kirby | February 29 09:41 AM | comments (0)
Tuesday, February 24, 2004 Today I spent time comparing Logging frameworks. I looked at log4net and one developed internally by my employer. log4net is the clear winner. It is easier to setup and configure. And it has features to watch for configuration changes so you can change log settings without restarting your application. Sadly though I may be "forced" to use the Logging framework developed internally.
posted by Kirby | February 24 05:20 PM | comments (2)
Thursday, February 19, 2004 I finally got in some quality Xbox time last year thanks to Melanie. The awesome Tony Hawk's Underground (THUG) was the game of choice. That game is so addicting. I couldn't stop playing. I'm not far in the game but I have hit New Jersey, Manhattan, and Tampa. I'm really starting to get the hang of the controls which means better tricks and higher scores. But I need to continue playing it to maintain and improve my skills. Taking two months off between sessions is no way to finish a game. Maybe I can squeeze in another hour sometime tomorrow morning before work.
posted by Kirby | February 19 08:34 AM | comments (0)
Tuesday, February 17, 2004 I have been working on making an automated build environment for a customer project and I have to say NAnt simply rocks! I am able to do some many things with it should as touch redist files, send e-mails on success and failure events, and build different targets. Later I will try posting complete details on the continuous integration environment I have built using NAnt, NUnit, CVS, VMWare and more.
posted by Kirby | February 17 09:13 PM | comments (0)
Sunday, February 15, 2004 Finally some new pictures. Check out the new pix from Whistler in the WASTED 2004 folder. Enjoy. posted by Kirby | February 15 08:48 PM | comments (0)
Melanie's good friend Chris Hart has started a new travel site. Check it out.
Travel Journal.org - Experience, Advice & Tips for Cheap International Travel: "Advice on cheap international travel from a backpacker who has "seen it all" is here on Travel-Journal.org." posted by Kirby | February 15 08:29 PM | comments (1)
I stand corrected. I was able to find a desktop version of TurboTax but I didn't find it from the www.turbotax.com website. Instead I found it from the www.intuit.com website. Go figure.
Update: I decided to give TurboTax one more chance before going to a professional but not the web version. Instead I order my old, familiar friend, the desktop version. Hopefully the experience will be much better and I can get our taxes done.
posted by Kirby | February 15 05:44 PM | comments (0)
I have used TurboTax for a number of years to do my annual federal and state tax returns so this year should have been no different. But from the start I had a bad feeling about using TurboTax. First it seems Intuit only provides a web version of the product. Not that I have anything again doing my taxes on the web. It's just I prefer to use a desktop application.
As if filling my return on the web wasn't bad enough I struggled with various worksheets as Melanie and I are now filling as a married couple. What does one do when a question ask for information from the previous year's return? Do you add the total from the two returns? Anyway, combine this with the sell of some stocks last year that resulted in long term capital gains and losses and I started finding bugs in the online software. In all cases I found I had to completely delete records of information and re-enter the same information to get around bugs. An example of a bug was when I answered a question only to later learn that I answered the question incorrectly. When I returned to the question to answer it correctly it seemed the software ignored the new answer. Regardless of what I tried the software continued to ignore the corrected answer. So as a last resort I deleted the section of information and re-keyed it. A major plan but nothing compared to the final problem I had with TurboTax for the Web.
While completing my New York return I was asked to provide information from my New Jersey return. Note: I did some work in New Jersey over the summer which requires I complete two state returns. No problem I thought. I'll just stop work on my New York return and complete my New Jersey. To my surprise there was no way for me to create a second state return. I searched the online help and FAQ but found no answer. I tried an online chat with tech support but after waiting a very long time I gave up waiting for someone from Intuit to reply. I would have called support over the phone but noticed that a $19.95 charge applies. And I refuse to pay $19.95 to a company only to learn there is a limitation in their software or they designed a poor user interface.
In total frustration and after wasting lots of time trying to navigate the pains of TurboTax I decided I am better off paying a tax professional to complete my return. Yes it will cost more than the TurboTax software but at least I know it will be correct and it will not take up a full day of my time. And it's sad that I can't use TurboTax given that our taxes when compared to many others are not complex.
Looks like I am no longer a TurboTax user. Maybe it's time for me to look at Microsoft Money 2004 as well and dump Quicken.
posted by Kirby | February 15 05:11 PM | comments (5)
Thursday, February 12, 2004 I know I have said this before but this time I hope I really mean it. I plan to start making more technology related posting to this blog. And to start things off I will share my rambling on using a CMS verses building a web site by hand.
I am in the process of setting up a web site for a new software company. Originally I wanted to use DotNetNuke to manage the site. It's a great solution that has evolved since original releases of IBuySpy. However there are some database issues I have with DNN. Specifically the software company's hosting provider only provides a single database so multiple applications hosted under the one account must share the database. Unfortunately DNN and another application already hosted attempt to use the same table names. Now there are ways around the problem using tricks like assigning different owners to the tables,
etc. And from what I have heard DNN v2.0 will have table name prefixes and other enhancements to prevent the problem. But DNN v2.0 has not been released yet.
I have tried Rainbow. It's similar to DNN in that it originated from IBuySpy but it is different in that it is written in C#. DNN is written in VB.NET. Rainbow doesn't appear to be as well supported as DNN either. Good news is that Rainbow does not conflict with other applications hosted under the account. And it has support for skins. Unfortunately there are not a lot of skins available for Rainbow, and it took me a day to create my own skin. And I have been having problems with building a good menu system for pages that
appear off of a root page or tab.
I like the features these products offer but at the same time I'm not quite happy with the end result of the web site. In some cases these products are overkill for my needs. So the software developer in me keeps saying "Write your own." And I'm starting to listen. There are some definite
pros for writing my own web site or even creating my own CMS for that matter. But the biggest con is the lack of time I have right now. So I struggle with the debate as to whether or not I should use one of these fine products or write my own. If only I had a week of time to crank out a new web site with all the features I need. The ability to edit content online, the ability to define page layouts and support different module types, a built in blog engine, and maybe a blog engine that ties back to blogger.com (another time saver for me). I could drop the online editing features of the blog engine and the content and do something quickly with ASP.NET. But at the same time I like the ability to edit online for those rare cases when I am without my laptop.
The struggle continues. Feel free to post your opinions if you have one. posted by Kirby | February 12 04:22 PM | comments (2)
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