A good guy to know...

Finally made some time to connect with a friend/colleague whom I get to see regularly (at BlueStripe Software BoD meetings) but rarely get to talk at length with. Justyn Kasierski is not only a good guy, he's got an interesting start-up in-flight and is overall one of the best connected guys in the start-up game in RTP.

Despite being in the start-up game locally for the past 12 years (minus 3 at Cisco, but I digress...), I don't have relationships with many of the key local players. Justyn's helping me fix that.

Building beautiful software...

So the process of creating great software products has always intrigued me. There's no singular "right" answer, as it varies upon your company, your team's skills, your culture, etc.

I just recently discovered Tyner Blain and have to say I'm impressed. This guy's a thinker...

Fixing a flat

I have a small beach cart I use for hauling stuff to/from the beach, usually beach chairs and such, but sometimes fishing gear. The cart was originally sold as a fishing cart and is built to carry more weight than the typical cart, thus the pneumatic tires.

Unfortunately, a tire went flat and got rolled around a bit, causing the tire to become unseated. After much time of messing with it, I turned to the web for help in getting the tire seated.

Ultimately, I stumbled upon this link at eHow: http://www.ehow.com/how_6648168_homemade-tire-bead-seating-tool.html, which worked swimmingly (and a little to my surprise).

However, I was saddened that I didn't have any lighter/starter fluid because this one appealed to me (greatly): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-9AxvoXFZ0&feature=related

SCOM is really starting to piss me off...

So, I've created a custom alert view in my Mgmt Pack. It relies on rules to determine what's populated in the view, and the rules apply to alerts that have been generated off of a custom Windows Event Log (which I've created).

Everything works fine...so long as you are on a machine where that Windows Event Log exists. If you are on another console, tough. The alerts will never load.

I thought it would be safe to assume that the rule I created earlier would comb the custom log (via the agent), populate alerts into the database, and then allow ALL consoles to view them. Silly me.

Emerald Isle / Bogue Banks Golf Courses

Today, with some friends, played the course at Country Club of the Crystal Coast. It's by far my favorite course in the Emerald Isle area...check it out if you're in the area:

http://www.crystalcoastcc.com/course_info.html

Powershell: Bringing Sexy Back

Stumbled across this neat little "Intro to Powershell" page and wanted to archive it for my (and now your) future reading pleasure...

Enjoy: http://mattiasgeniar.be/2009/02/27/powershell-windows-scripting-made-fun-again/

Nifty editor

I've been writing code recently and doing a lot of on-the-fly debugging, so manipulating both log files (output) and structured input files for testing. All have different formats so I'd been using an IDE and two bash windows to accommodate my needs.

Until a co-worker turned me on to Notepad++ (yes, I'm developing on Windows). This is a slick little download from SourceForge (Free as in Beer and Speech) and does just about everything I've ever wanted an editor to do but either a) it couldn't or b) I couldn't remember how to make vi do it.

Check it out: http://notepad-plus-plus.org/