Busy

Ok…I know it’s been awhile since I last posted something.  Two months to be exact. It amazes me how some people can blog everyday and I guess I do when I use Twitter but I’d rather post larger streams of thought than 140 characters.

A lot has happenend in the past two months. I’ve actually made the move down to Houston, Texas finally. It was a hectic move and so far we’re 1-2 on items that have made it down here from Chicago. The car showed up last Thursday and it showed up in one piece. Now we’re waiting for a couple hundred boxes of junk to show up at our doorstep. Supposedly they’ll be here on Tuesday but I’m still keeping my fingers crossed.

Moving is definitely up there as one of life’s most stressful changes. I think the other ones were marriage, birth, divorce, and death of course. I’ve moved across country one time but that was straight out of college when I didn’t have anything nor did I have a family, two kids, a car, and a mortgage.  I think I’m willing to make one more move in my life and after that I’d like to settle down in one spot and hunker down for the remainder of so called life.

Hyperconnectivity

Hyperconnected is definitely an understatement. I definitely fall into the category of people that are constantly on-line either on my laptop, my Blackberry, my XBOX 360. I often wonder how much of the information that I read is being absorbed. Through these devices I’m bombarded with e-mails, Twitters, chat requests, videos, music, etc… I agree with their statement that “…their lifestyle simply seems normal,” and to my friends on the outside I often wonder if it seems strange.

Ruby On Rails

Ruby On Rails

So recently I’ve started to go back and re-learn and play around with some of the basic design patterns as well as delve into some of the latest web application frameworks that are out there. “Ruby On Rails” is one that I’ve recently been playing around with that has some pretty cool features and a pretty active developer base from what I can see. Though there has been some news lately about scalability issues with Rails but from what I can see so far it does offer some impressive features to help speed up and make web development more efficient.

Keeping Me Busy

Keeping a blog is almost like a second job. It’s been awhile since I posted anything because life has been rather busy itself. I’m a new father as you can see by my Twitter two weeks ago :) Julian was born April 20, 2008 at 4:02pm. He’s slowly figuring out his daily schedule of eating, sleeping, and pooping and bringing us along for the ride.

.NET , PHP, or Java

As a sales engineer, I’m in a strange position where I need stay ahead of the latest technologies in order to know how to communicate how my product can fit into their technology stack. The majority of the code base at work relies on .NET and ASP but I often hear about a prospects or client using  PHP, Java, and other open source technologies in their environment. Constantly switching back and forth does present a challenge but in the end it’s what I have to do.

Fring

I’m in the camp of people that decided not to buy the iPhone and wait until they released the 3G version. Looking in from the outside at all the iPhone users though, I have to say that I’m amazed at the number of users that still love it even though it runs on a slow network and is locked into AT&T. This I think is largely attributed to hacking community that has sprung up around this one single device (in addition of course to it’s ease-of-use and aesthetics). One great example that was just released today is ‘Fring’ which is an app that allows you to chat on multiple platforms as well as make SIP calls. Of course you need to jailbreak the phone but what this apps offers will help drive the push toward helping open up the iPhone SDK hopefully.

AuthSub token has wrong scope

I was playing around with the Google Data API last night and I kept running into this error. The app I’m creating allows me to pull down a list of Google Calendars and then insert a new entry into the calendar that I select. Pulling the list was the easy part, adding a new entry was the tough part.

My problem was that I was declaring a ‘scope’ that was too limiting for any additional calls to the API. Instead of declaring the scope for ‘allcalendars’, I reduced the scope to the largest URI possible which is ‘http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds’

Be sure to read this this doc about using AuthSub with JavaScript before diving into the Google Data API http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/authsub-js.html

Google and Enterprise CRM

The post on Mashable and TechCrunch about the latest venture between Google and Salesforce does create a rather unique situation in the realm of CRM. Does this bring an even bigger player into the CRM space? One can argue that the CRM space that Salesforce resides in, software as a service (SaaS) differs greatly from the space that on-premise CRM solutions such as Oracle/Siebel, Consona CRM, Microsoft CRM. But observing the way that software in general is moving toward these days, SaaS and Cloud Computing are starting to slowly make a big impact. It’s hard to say right now if Google will acquire Salesforce in order to extend their reach into the enterprise space, but if they do, it’ll definitely make my work more interesting.

Why?

I couldn’t help myself. I’m so drawn to technology and the Internet that I just had to create my own blog with my own domain name. No more Blogspot, or MySpace, or MSN Spaces. I’m in control of the code now and I can post what ever I want. Photos, code snippets, musings on the CRM space. So check back occasionally or subscribe to my RSS feed. I’ll post about Technology, Work, Sports, and life as a Dad.

SSRS Switch Statement

=Switch(Fields!Orders.Value < 100,"Red", Fields!Orders.Value > 100, "Green")

The above statement is an example on how to use the ‘Switch’ statement in SQL Server Reporting Services. This example checks the ‘Orders’ value in a row and if the value is less than 100, displays “Red”. If the value is greater than 100, then display “Green”