As we got closer to the studio, he got quieter and I could see him looking at me in the mirror and thinking.  “What’s up bud?”  “Nothing Daddy.”  We drove a little further and I could see him thinking.  “Do you remember what tonight is Jarrod?”  “TaeKwon Do night.” “and…” “I get my hardcover Jack and Annie tonight!!!”  screams with the excitement that only a 5 yr old can summon.  The look on his face was just absolutely priceless.  The excitement in those eyes coupled with the coyish biting of his lip.  I wish I could have gotten a picture of it.

After class we did go to Borders and get his book.  He took his time choosing it carefully.  Going through each one that he didn’t have, looking at the covers and searching for the desired “Big” 2 page pictures.  Asking about each story line and weighing it against the pictures that he really likes.  There can’t be “too” many pictures though.  Too many, as I found out by offering other book series to him, doesn’t make it a real “Chapter Book” and therefore isn’t a big boy book.

He chose his book and we made our way to the front of the store.  On our way to the register he turns to me and asks, “Daddy can I still get a square tonight?”  Part of our Borders ritual is to stop at the front display and we each get to pick a square of chocolate and exchange a piece with each other.  “Of course Bud.”  We make our purchases and head out to the parking lot.

It is gorgeous outside with sun just starting to set.  He asks if we can go to the end of the parking lot where it overlooks the Rt 9 traffic and down into Worcester.  He offers me a piece of his chocolate and say its ok it yours.  He shakes his head and offers it again.  Looks into my eyes, nods and hands me the chocolate.  I could feel and see that his offering was very important to him and an important part of the ritual.  I gladly took and we walked to the fence and watched the sun, traffic, and life happen around us.

Jarrod, that quiet special bonding we shared last night capped an otherwise good day and made it a great day.  It was very important and special to both of us. 

Thanks bud.

The company a friend (George) works for was just sold.  His coworkers are upset about what’s going on.  He has taken a very different and commendable attitude.  He sees it as an opportunity.  The company has given them warning that things might change in the future.  It would be foolish to think that things won’t change. 

George feels this is his time to shine.  With others fretting, he’s updated his resume, started blogging, and learning some new techniques and skills.  His feeling is that either he will become a bigger asset to the company or he will already be more valuable as a job candidate. 

It is work, but George is already ahead of the curve with his attitude. 

We have a client that has very specific needs when it comes to reporting. Their report is very different than anyone else’s that is generated. It always is a cause for confusion, delay, and concern for consistency and accuracy. My management, like other management teams, doesn’t want to spend too much resources developing small “outside” projects. I don’t blame them, the list of projects for my team is long.

I talked to my boss and explained what was going on. I explained to her that the value of doing such a project long and short term was that it would speed up the process immensely and ensure that the report was generated exactly the same way every time. She liked the idea, but was concerned about the time taken away from other projects. I had her sold on it, but she was concerned about the time. This is when I pulled the switchero.

I had already done the research and had most of a working concept done. I just need the stamp of approval to finish and roll it out. I had just received it. She loved my initiative and the fact that it had not slowed down anything else, as I did it over a period of time when I need a break from other projects.

Essentially I had pushed a system by building it before asking permission. It was a risk, but I knew it had great advantages to the company and to the user who generates the reports.

Sometimes a calculated risk is worth the effort.

Today we had clouds in the morning that turned to rain and then snow and now it is sunny outside.

What have we done to mess up our climate so bad?

Technorati Tags: Development, Code reuse, coding, design, refactoring, copy and paste

I have seen/heard this before and can see why a developer might be tempted to do this: job security. Is it though? It is extremely short sighted and creates bad feelings on behalf of the customer. They paid all this money to have the application made and yet they do not have control over the application. It’s your ball of wax, you can use it but you need to come see me and pay me to get it.

They are valid cases to encrypt code, its a shrink wrapped application or you know that the users have a tendency to peek where they shouldn’t be. In either case, the customer who commissioned the project has the right to ask for the passkey, unless it was agreed upon that you owned the project and they were just buying it as a premade project.

Do yourself a favor as a consultant, think twice before encrypting that project.

Technorati Tags: Coding, Encryption, Consulting, Development

She’s an avid scrapbooker and she and her friends had all switched to GTalk and GMail.  She sent me an invitation to GMail and that is where we have been chatting.  After the first day, I went back to a logged chat with her.  I needed a web site link that she had sent me.  What a discovered was a little disturbing.

She is the only person that I have talked to on GTalk and the only email on Gmail that I have received is from her.  In both email and chats we naturally talked about scrapbooking.  It is her passion as is her son.  What discovered were the ads listed on the right side of the screen.  Ads that were superficially and narrowly targeted to scrapbooking. 

As I have posted about in the past, I understand the dilemma of what data to collect and how to use it.  After all, if I have to see ads I want to see those that would at least be of interest or use to me.  What was bothersome though is where the data came from.  I had created a brand new blank account for Gmail/GTalk.  I give Google credit as there were no survey’s or forms that requested personal data.  I now see why.  To get me target so tightly like that, they had to have scanned and indexed either or both my email and chat.  Remember I had only used this account for a day and only with my friend the scrapbooker.  Here is what Google says in their FAQ about saved chat logs

As with all major IM services, Google Talk will collect certain log information created in the course of a conversation. This information is for Google’s internal use only, to maintain statistics on usage and to improve our service and the user experience. We do not permanently store any personally-identifying information in the Google Talk logs.  Google Talk FAQ 

Google does mention targeted ads in their description of GMail

Are there ads in Gmail?

Yes, there are small, unobtrusive, and relevant text ads alongside your Gmail messages, similar to those on the side of Google search results pages. The matching of ads to content is a completely automated process performed by computers. No humans read your email to target the ads, and no email content or other personally identifiable information is ever provided to advertisers.

Again, to Google’s credit, they have at least documented this.  But just like the pay-per-post discussion does this make it right?  After the loss of data by AOL last year, do we know what is and is not being recorded here?  Its great that they might be of interest and relevance to me and that particular conversation, but at what cost?

Who ever owns the data is not what I am getting at. If it is data about me why can’t I use it the way I want to? Nick and Google Reader team, et al. In my news reader you are collecting data about me and data about others, why can’t this data be culled to do recommendations? I shop Amazon, specifically for this reason. I love finding out new books and products that are geared towards me and my interests. Why can’t blogs and websites be the same way?

Google is a great web search tool, but this is “Web 2.0″. We are beyond simple searches. Social web sites are nice, but can be skewed and played. What I want is simple statistical recommendations not just search. What blogs and sites are like those that I have interest in? Based upon what I am reading now, what other topics might be of interest? What are others like myself looking at? These are the things that would be useful and more in line with the digital lifestyle.

The data is there and has been for a long time. Let’s do something with it that enhances the users experience. The marketers have had their shot with it and they missed the boat hard. It’s the users turn now.

Technorati Tags: Google Reader, Feed Demon, Attention Data, User Experience, Web 2.0

ADO does a lot behind the scene. First it must be able to communicate with your database provider. To do this it has to translate all of your ADO commands into its SQL specific counter parts. There is no getting around this. But it is additional layer that needs to be accounted for. This isn’t the biggest hit in performance though. What is the foundation of how ADO works; Record sets.

Record sets are the result of your SQL command, the records that get returned. ADO returns all of the records you asked for in one big lump and loads it into memory. Memory is cheap and memory operations are fast, but the overhead of managing large amounts of data this way is costly. Operations such as sort, find, and filter can be huge if the data is as well. These commands and others are done on the client side and on the entire record set.

Transferring that large amount of data can be part of the overhead as well. Traditional client/server databases can handle this, but if you are using access which uses a file connection this can pull an application to its knees.

By default when you open up a generic ADO connection, it opens and returns the whole table. Depending upon the table this can be a long and resource intensive operation. The best way to handle these performance issues are to follow these simple steps to improve your performance.