In Valid Logic

Just wanted to tease everyone. This was sent from my Smartphone via email.
[Image was a little wide, think I need to modify it to do some scaling... click below to view]

Finally got my new Sigma 30mm f/1.4 last Wednesday and was playing around with it some more over the weekend.  First thing is it is quite a bit heavier than the kit lens, and with the lens hood on, it looks quite menacing, even for a 30mm prime.  However, it is a great lens!  Very sharp, excellent low light performance.  On Saturday, we went to this crab feed at my wife’s old church in Lodi and was taking a few shots there (before my battery inadvertently died, oops).  Most of the shots were a little blurry, since I had drank a couple of glasses of wine, but some of friends were like, “wow, you don’t need the flash at all?!?”  Nope, but even at 1/30–1/60 sec shutter speed, I wasn’t doing too well handheld.  Here are a couple of shots from over the weekend though.  First two are from the crab feed of my brother-in-law and father-in-law, and the third is my wife lounging on the couch on Sunday.

[photo:1345] [photo:1346] [photo:1347]

As I had posted about earlier in the week, I’d written a CSModule implementation of the Lightbox JS image overlay scripts for Community Server.  Scott had posted a binary with all of the modules entered into the little weekend competition on CommunityServer.org, but I thought I would go ahead and release it on its own, along with the source.  It includes both the standard Lightbox module (functions exactly the same as the original), and the Gallery specific module easily including a thumbnail of the image in the post.

[photo:1289]

Feel free to download it and check it out.  I will probably put more documentation on my site once I have the time (one more release to get done), but the zip includes setup instructions, and you can check out the doc online in our Developer Wiki.

Today, we posted the v2.0 Beta3 builds of the NNTP, FTP, and Security Modules add-ons.  For more, read the announcement.  There is not anything that new in the releases, but they have been updated to work with CS v2.0 Beta3 and use the new license file management, and the FTP and NNTP both have a couple of annoying bug fixes incorporated into them.

One of my new years resolutions has been to keep more up to date on managing my finances, since all too often I fall behind on entering transactions.  So far, I have been doing really well.  Since we are wanting to buy a house this summer and are starting to think more of the future, been looking into using the tracking software for more than just entering transactions, keeping track of balances, and having a basic budget.  The problem is that I keep going back and forth between whether to use Money or Quicken.  I already have Money 2005, but sometimes find it lacking, so I’m now looking at possibly switching to Quicken 2006, but not sure if it will suit all my needs either.

Quicken’s Pros: Detailed categories, such as breaking down “Auto” expenses to Fuel, Loans, Service, or Registration.  This is big for things like tracking yearly auto/home expenses.  Has nice detailed forms for paychecks with income/tax info.  Allows attachments for printed paycheck stubs and such.

Quicken’s Cons: Its budgeting system simply uses rough estimates, rather than being able to have line item budgeted expenses for each category.  It doesn’t look like you can reallocate your budget, ie, borrow amounts from the previous month or another category.  Say you eat at home more than dining out, so you can barrow from the dining out category for the grocery category and not go over budget at all.  Some of the reports are not very intuitive, especially when wanting to access additional information (ie, transactions for a category).  Sometimes, in the one line register, the little button toolbar for “enter, split, etc” covers the previous transaction amount, which I might want to look at.

Money’s Pros: It has the kind of detailed budgeting system where you can include individual bills.  It allows you to reallocate your budget around between categories or months.  Its reports feel a little more intuitive as you dive in to get additional information.  Its register is nicely laid out, easy to navigate.

Money’s Cons: Signing in to Passport to access your finances?  Why?  Doesn’t support a more detailed category system where you can have sub-categories, such as Automobile:Fuel.  You can create a category named “Automobile-Fuel” and set it as an Automobile Expense, but not sure if it is quite the same.

I think I am leaning towards sticking with Money, since seems to have a slightly more customisable interface (more in terms of layout and what not), the more logical register, and the budget system is big to me.  It may just take a little bit of work to get some things like the categories or the interface how I want them.

Today, Community Server v2.0 beta3 was released (see announcement).  Please check it out!  If all goes well with this release, we should be entering the release candidate phase soon!

Already had some people asking about some of the extensions I’ve written lately.  Those will be coming once I release the add-ons I manage, like the NNTP Server, FTP Server, and Security Modules.  The beta3 builds of those will be coming out tomorrow.  Then I can package up some of my own stuff.  The single blog/gallery URL mapping stuff may need a little bit more work, since I have noticed some tricky conditions where it will get a false positive, so I need to setup a better local test site and figure out what is going on.

Last week, my wife had to take some paperwork up to school, so while she was taking care of that, I decided to stroll around with my camera and take some pictures.

[photo:1242] [photo:1232] [photo:1229]

There are plenty of other pictures to check out.

Also should mention the above images are using another module I made for Community Server using the Lightbox scripts.  It uses a simple CSModule that changes any occurrance of [photo:1234] into showing a thumbnail of the image (1234 being its PostID), with a link to show a larger one in the Lightbox view, and it also has the picture’s subject as the caption and a link to view it in the gallery.  I won’t be posting it until after Community Server v2.0 beta3 is out, since it is now dependant upon it, and we also had a little CSModule competition over the weekend that I entered it in.

In response to my previous post about recommendations for MCAD programs, I’ve decided to hold off until the .NET 2.0 courses are out.  I’d talked to some places that offer courses, and they weren’t very certain when they were coming out or how the upgrade courses would be (3 days, one week, etc).  So, in the interest of saving time and money, I will wait until the 2.0 courses are out.

Also, I will probably just do the study-at-home programs.  I will likely do the “cram” ones, since even some of those are still 600 pages.  While I know it is better to know the framework than to know how to take the test, I don’t need to know everything for the tests, nor would I actually retain all of it.

I appreciate the comments that I could pass it cake, and I probably could, but I don’t want to assume I would and go in unprepared.  Sure, I probably have the experience, but I don’t always retain all the knowledge I get.  All the time, I have to look things up again.  In my opinion, the key to a good developer is not knowing everything off the top of their head, but to know how to quickly find things and apply them to their situation.  The framework documentation and Google are my best friends.  Unfortunately, I wouldn’t have those on the tests, so I’d need to brush up on the types of things the tests would ask about.

The other day, Rob and Donnie, our Accounts Manager, brought our attention to Lightbox, this nifty little script to add overlaying images to your site.  I thought it was pretty cool, so I just had to find a way to add it to Community Server.   And so, last night I came up with a little library that contains all the necessary components and a CSModule that detects when you use it and automatically load the necessary CSS and Javascript.  Click on the picture below to check it out.

I will package this up and post it once I get a chance.  Tomorrow, I am pretty booked up, so perhaps on Friday.

You may have noticed now that there have been a few changes to my site lately.  For one, I dropped my old layout and a number of the pages that it had.  I did this primarily because I’d like to stay more up-to-date with my CS builds, but it becomes difficult to do a new build and then integrate it into my site.  Additionally, the code for the old layout was pretty horrid.  I never dared to run it through any validators.

So now, I am using one of the support CS skins, which I’ve made a few subtle modifications to (only 1 skin file and some CSS overrides), which is cake for me to maintain.  Going to make a few more adjustments, since I’m not sure if I like some things like the header yet.  Additionally, I am working on adapting the PoisonIvy skin for the blogs for the Galleries.  It is mostly done, but still needs a little refining.

I’ve also moved my blog to the root.  It was kind of pointless having a separate landing page, since it was so out-dated and there are only really two parts of the site that had regular content… my blog and my gallery.  So now, that is all it is.  Anything else will probably be entered as an article or something, so CS maintains it.  I setup a redirector from /blog/, so any old blog links should still work just fine.  Still need to add a few static pages back someplace, such as the SiteUrls generator for CS v1.1.

At any rate, just trying to have a simpler site that I can easily keep up-to-date with the latest builds.