A good friend of mine (as well as co-worker), Laura, has just went live with her new blog. If her other work is any indication, I'm sure we'll be seeing some real gems from her.

Advanced .NET Programming,
by Simon Robinson

This is a book I picked on clearance at the local Books-A-Million, being targeted at the 1.0 release of the Framework I was aware it was rather dated, though it was still a decent looking book (and it was cheap). The author doesn't jest when he uses the word advanced, this is an in-depth book.

While I tend to be forgiving of small typos in books, this book has an unforgivable number of errors. While much of the content is useful (and seems correct), there are enough editing issues to make me second-guess everything. With as many errors as I saw, I was almost wondering if was a test printing of the manuscript, though after some checking, that doesn't seem to be the case. This book had the potential to be one of my favorites due to the way the author explains topics, and the vast amount of hard to find information included. 

Yet, it leaves me disappointed.

I'd like to say that this is a book everyone should read, but due to countless editing errors, all this one is – is a 'could have' 

The price of storage has been steadily dropping over the last several years, and this is the latest example: A Complete Terabyte File Server For About $500 – Yep, you read that right, a custom 1TB file server, in the $500 range. While I'm not sure what I could do with that much storage (I remember saying that when I picked a 1.25GB drive over a 1.5GB, saying I'd never need it), but it'd be nice to have.

On the topic of cheap storage, I just purchased a 250GB SATA drive to replace my 80GB data drive that's almost full. With SATA drives under $100 for 250GB, I'm tempted to try my own version of his project.

I think I've set myself up for an interesting adventure, I've decided to shoot for the MCTS, also known as "Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist" – and I'll be taking the tests without a single guide book. Yep, you heard that right, no test study guide. Now, if I were you, I'd be asking "Why?!" – well, there are none. The tests required for the MCTS are so new, no books have been published on them.

I'll be working with one of my co-workers, Laura, on this, our plan is simple: Learn everything there is to know about VB.NET 2005. I think that should about cover anything on the test.

Seriously, we are going to start by studying "Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 2005: The Language," one of the recommend Microsoft references for the test. We may look at another book or two, but right now I think this is the only one we'll need. I'd like to get my hands on a copy of "MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit" – but that won't be available till July, and I'm hoping to have passed the tests by then (this is why).

Wish me luck, somehow I think I'll need it. 

This site now has a new home, on a Linux/Apache box where it should have been from the beginning. When I built this site, I put it on my Windows server with the idea I’m slowly move to an ASP.NET solution, away from WordPress. Well, after realizing what I was missing (i.e. .htaccess files) I decided to go ahead and move it to my Linux server. 

This will allow for some nice changes, here’s a couple:

• Better link structure. – The site now uses a cleaner, easier to understand link structure. Instead of seeing something like "p=25" – you’ll see  "2006/03/19/iso-17799/"
• Now using the non-www version of the domain exclusively. Normally I only use the www version of the domain, but Google has so for only indexed the non-www variant, so that’s what I’ll use.
• Easier to maintain & update. Due to some issues with FTP & the Windows server, tweaking things has been a pain. Now that I’m back on my trusty Linux box, it’ll be a lot easier to tweak things to get them just how they should be.

This change should also allow for more new features to be added as time goes on. I may start porting some of my old PHP tools to work with the WordPress structure and make those available again.

If you see anything wrong, please let me know. I think I covered everything in the move, but it’s possible I missed something, if so, please let me know.

I just completed doing something I said I never would, I switched from The Bat! to Outlook. While I’ll remain a big fan of The Bat! for its great features, using it at home, while using Outlook at work was just driving me up the wall. The two clients are about as opposite as two programs can be. The very concept behind how you use them, and how you organize you data is quite different.

Over the course of the last week, I’ve completed moving almost 20,000 emails into Outlook, then creating nearly 100 filters to organize it all again. This was a somewhat painful experience, but I can certainly appreciate some of the features (such as sorting) that Outlook 2003 offers.