I’ve been busy the past few months with my current contract.  In the day, I spend my time writing bug-fixes and working with other developers on their projects.  So I take my development time at home very seriously.

Here are a few things I’m working on at the moment:

1.  Nike+ — I’m writing a C# library which interfaces with the Nike+ API to deliver an object model based on the run details captured by my IPod Nano and Nike+ shoe gadget.  This work is nearly complete. I’m waiting to hear from Sourceforge on my application for a project space on this one.  I’ll post the code here if it doesn’t make the Sourceforge cut.

2.  Google Data API — I’ve been playing with the Google Calendar API.  There seems to be a few tools out there to sync Outlook calendars with Google Calendar, but I’ve had problems with all of them.  I am trying to look at building a VSTO plug-in that interfaces with Google Calendar on an event basis (you create a new item in Outlook and it automatically uploads to Google without a specific “Sync My Calendars” button).

3.  Linq — I’s got sta learn me some Linq. 

I generally have maybe two hours a day to do this stuff while in contract.  That situation may change soon, but for now, this is all I have time to look at.

I’ve been neglecting this site for a few months while working on my current contract.  I had plans to redesign the site but never found the time.

I started looking at some of the web templates available for free at Open Source Web Design (http://www.oswd.org) and found this Zen design you are looking at now.  It took me a few hours to convert the code into a Dasblog template. 

The actual template was designed by Node Thirty-Three Design.  Thanks guys.

The template is entirely CSS compliant and uses CSS positioning.  I’m still very much a and man wherever positioning is concerned.  I looked at the CSS2 specifications a few years ago, but quickly dismissed it because it was accepted widely enough.  Now it seems to work fine.  If  you have anything on the site that definitely looks wrong (like one section laying over another), please let me know–and let me know what browser you are using.

I started using Windows Vista back when the RTM was first released to the developer community.  This was the final release version of Vista and, while I resisted earlier Beta versions, I thought that using the final release would be relatively stable.  I installed it on a relatively new Dell Dimension 9150 box with 4Gb of Ram. 

I loved Vista at first, it was a little slower than XP and I had to really do some searching for drivers, but I was on the cutting edge.   I installed it on a laptop I was using for a contract at the time and impressed everyone with my cool new interface.

Eventually, my desktop PC got slower and slower. It performed terribly.  I spent hours looking at start-up processes and background processes that kept running.  I think I spent several days looking at the Windows search background indexing alone.  The laptop had all kinds of problems, too.  My desktop started taking 10-15 minutes to boot.  I spent hours on the web looking for solution.

My PC problems had the effect of causing me to hate computers in general.  It took so long to load Visual Studio.  I turned off all background instances of SQL Server and MySQL.  I even started to think about abandoning software development all together.  Too many sleepless nights started to cloud my judgment.  My PC was unusable, and I had 4Gb of RAM!  I had been using Vista for over a year.

I started using Ubuntu on my laptop.  My contract was over and all I wanted was to use the laptop to check email and surf.  I was amazed with how fast it was.  I was determined to become a Linux guy!  After nearly ten years as a VB and C# developer, I was going to go back to PHP. 

But Ubuntu didn’t help me like I thought it would.  I found the most simple things to have a huge learning curve involved.  Now, I could learn how to do things like set up dns entries for web testing, etc, but I was frustrated with having to learn a new thing for everything I wanted to do.  Also, if I stepped into another contract, I didn’t want to be that guy who keeps saying “I know how to do it on Linux, but Windows?  I don’t know.”   Besides, I still had to keep my Vista desktop intact to I still had all of my Outlook contacts, Excel (xlsx) files that didn’t open in OpenOffice, etc.

Then Visual Studio 2008 release candidate was released.  I really wanted to try it out.  So I set up a partition on the laptop and installed XP.  This was like a breath of fresh air.  All of my Windows apps worked like a dream.  Windows booted quickly.  All devices worked.  When I opened Outlook 2007, it just opened–it didn’t pop up two minutes later after I forgot I clicked on the shortcut.

All of the people I worked with who criticised me for installing Vista too early, who told me to wait for SP1–they were right.  In fact, I think SP1 might still be too early. 

I’m back on XP.  I’ll stay here for the next few years, I think.  There are no Vista-only apps out there that I know of.  If you are thinking about upgrading, even as late as January 2008, I would recommend sticking with XP.