http://blogs.teztech.com Programming, Rock Climbing and Running Sat, 09 Apr 2011 21:35:52 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Linq is some of the coolest new stuff to happen to programming in a long time. The idea was tried in the past with things like "embedded SQL" for Cobol and Fortran, but I think this time, Microsoft finally got it right (or at least has things headed in the ... http://blogs.teztech.com/2011/04/09/linq-links I've been waiting on a phone like the Droid for years - an Internet connected miniature computer I can put in my pocket. I skipped Windows Mobile because it was lame: Poor resolution, poor open source application support, poor UI experience (poor Microsoft). I skipped Blackberry because the phones are ugly ... http://blogs.teztech.com/2010/01/01/moving-contacts-into-my-new-droid-phone Recently, a friend of mine asked me about hiring friends. I've read a lot of books about team management and I have a lot of hard won experience in this area. Posting this up in public may come back to haunt me, but I've decided to bumble on anyway and try to document some ... http://blogs.teztech.com/2009/12/12/hiring-your-friends I just spent a large part of the last week troubleshooting a GoogleBase data feed. Question: Data Feed says 8660 of 8660 items inserted, but no Items (Active, Published or Inactive) pjtpj Level 1 7/27/09 We have written a program that generates and uploads a tab delimited data feed file. This program was ... http://blogs.teztech.com/2009/08/01/googlebase-troubleshooing A couple of years ago, I needed a way to convert Microsoft Word documents to Pdf from a C# program. The application I was working on processed hundreds of documents and was run by the system scheduler every day at around 3am, so manual conversion was not an option. I ... http://blogs.teztech.com/2009/06/28/web-service-for-document-conversion-an-odyssey Wow, this has been a busy few months. In addition to the usual flood of small projects, since November, we've published these brand new sites: http://www.lotterygold.com/ This was an interesting and very large project that recently went live. The application we created for this site is general purpose and can support ... http://blogs.teztech.com/2009/03/26/new-year-new-projects-completed What is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE)? For sure "IDE" means different things to different programmers. Some probably think an integrated GUI form editor or WYSIWYG HTML editor is critical. Others may think that the most important parts of an IDE are the text editor and code browser. Others still ... http://blogs.teztech.com/2009/03/26/php-ides This is a question I get a lot. Notebook computers are extremely popular... everybody is tired of all the wires and space required by a traditional desktop computer. People are printing less and not everybody needs a big tower case that can hold the latest and greatest $500 video card! Kids ... http://blogs.teztech.com/2008/07/07/how-to-get-the-best-deal-on-a-notebook-computer-aka-laptop-computer Teztech is in the process of upgrading one of our customers from Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2007. Exchange Server 2007 requires a Windows 2003 or newer domain controller. This client happens to still have a Windows Server 2000 PDC, so we first have to upgrade the PDC. ... http://blogs.teztech.com/2008/06/05/debian-etch-samba-and-windows-server-2008-domain-controllers For web site designs, I like a simple, clean look. I also favor a flow (also called fluid or liquid) page layout with no big margins wasting space around the edges. These things make sense to me on a technical basis and I like the aesthetics and usability of these kinds ... http://blogs.teztech.com/2007/08/23/web-page-layouts-flow-fluidliquid-vs-fixed