Industry and being labeled

I find it interesting, and sometimes even slightly annoying when sales people come in from vendors and immediately labeling my projects or constraints by the industry that we're in.

As in: "Well of course you will need feature X you are in the life sciences industry".

This type of statement makes sence of course if feature X is somehow related to the something industry specific. My annoyance comes in when feature X is version control, separation of duties, or support for a standard or specification such as WSRP or BPEL.

Of course I'm not talking about the odd comment but rather the vendor that relates everything I say to the industry. Regardless of the fact that I'm not talking about anything industry specific.

I do find it commical how some vendors sales people identify themselves first and foremost with the industry vertical they are responsible for, despite not knowing anything about the industry.

Sales guy: "Hi I'm Bob, I'm responsible for the health care and lifesciences customers in NY and NJ."

I always want to reply:
"Hi Bob, I'm Rob. I am an Associatte Director of a application development team. We don't care much for NY, and health care is taken care of my HMO. Life sciences? I'm not following. We do computer sciences around here if anything...."

Not supporting manufacturing or R&D means my team is abstracted from the true business. While we do handle the external facing sites and there is some specific rules around that we tend to be doing fairly straight forward development - not industry specific.

Happy New Year and all that

Welcome to 2007 :)

As the new year lays ahead we have just had a re-organization at work - it will be intresting to see what changes to how we operate.

Over December I spent alot of time playing World of Warcraft - I now have 3 level 60 characters. Next week the expansion comes out and the level cap is raised to level 70. I'm excited enough I may try to take a day or two off to play (try to get all three characters to 70).

I'm considering some new hardware purchases. I'm trying to determine if I can make a box beefy enough to run 2 copies of WoW simultaneously (dual-monitors). I'm thinking with the dual-core processors and higher end video cards this may well be doable (maybe gimp the graphics on one of the instances of WoW).

I'm waiting on the release of Vista - I'll post about what I've tried so far soon.

Service Orient architecture and the Enterprise Service Bus pattern is evolving. We are making some traction at work, and the industry is changing. As predicted the ESB as a product is forcing change in terminology as some of the things is the true ESB pattern are weak in the current products. I have reviewed the offerings from Microsoft, IBM, BEA, SAP, Tibco, WebMethods, Sonic, SoftwareAG, Amberpoint, and a few others in the past 4 months.

This year should be a maturation year at work. Last year between some small organizational changes, the implementation of a limit on contractor duration, meant the vast majority of my organization was new. This year should provide the opportunity to really hit stride and make some improvements in process and roles.

I'm definitely going to spend a bit more time this year integrating things like calendar (work calendar, my calendar, and Jess's calendar). As well as some email consolidation.

Other personal projects this year (aside from my normal technical continued improvement) will be further improvements on the house (pool table, stucco repair, fence, surround sound, landscaping, window coverings) - Jess will be very involved in these projects ;)

Additionally consideration for furthering formal education is underway.

watch google video's on your mobile device

I found this article and tried it. It works great! Some of the video's I tried are little dark on my i730 but thats ok.

ISO mounting tool that works in Vista

I know a couple people were looking for a tool to mount ISO images in windows Vista so I thought this would be worth posting as its rumored to work in Vista (I haven't tried it yet):

http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html

OpenAjax Alliance

I just stumbled upon http://www.openajax.org/, which sports an impressive list of companies participating (from Sun, to Google, to SAP).

It is a little concerning that Microsoft is missing from the list - Atlas is by far the most advanced Ajax framework I've seen to date.

It may be that all the players participating in OpenAjax are java oriented when it comes to the web, or it may be that Atlas is too .NET oriented and Microsoft prefers it that way. Either way - I'm concerned.

Vista RC1

I took the plunge and loaded up VISTA RC1 on my Sager 9860 this weekend.

It warned me upon checking compatibility that the sound card drivers were not compatible. I went ahead and let it do a fresh install - I love the way it backed up Program Files, Windows, and Documents and Settings folders.

The install was flawless - but there were a ton of unrecognized hardware devices afterwords. I installed a driver (XP version) or 3, until I got a BSOD. After rebooting I only have one unrecognized hardware device (which is my soundcard).

I'm now downloading Office 2007 - will go all out ;)

I did try World of Warcraft on Vista and it seems to work perfectly. One oddity though, I tried playing a video clip, but WMP wouldn't play it because the sound card was locked or unavailable (I'll take unavailable for $1000 Alex).

Hey Jesse - you were looking for this

PrintForm Component 1.0 - Directly Print a WinForm


A while back we had a requirement to print a WinForm (designed for a tablet PC no less), it had to print exactly like the display. We found a few options - but even got our MS evangalist involved. We have a solution already - but this might have been easier...