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Products I Use: Targus Notebook Cooling Mobile X Stand

Taking another item in my bag is the last thing I want to do.  I have to carefully manage the weight in my carry on bag so that I don’t need a fork lift to pick it up.  So when I start looking at another item I’ll have to carry I get cautious.  However, here’s the deal.  I’ve started getting some tingling in my hands as I work on my laptop.  I moved my watch from one wrist to the other, started putting paper notebooks in front of my computer to support my arms, and all sorts of other goofy ways to make the pain stop.

I had decided that I had to live with it and be careful when working on the laptop.  I then ran into the Targus Notebook Cooling Mobile X Notebook Stand.  I got it on a whim, thinking hey, what could it hurt but I’ve got to tell you it’s made my essential list.

It’s designed to tilt the notebook up to allow it to cool, however, the tilt is just enough to make it more comfortable for me to type.  By aligning the angle of the notebook so that my arms comfortably rest on the front of the computer while typing, it’s eliminated those times when I feel pain from typing on the keyboard.  Just the little bit of angle that it adds to the notebook is enough to remove the pressure from my wrist and aparently allow blood to continue flowing to my hands.

When I’m done it folds up into a ultra small size that I can slip into one of the outside pouches on my bag.  It’s about the size of a tabletop tripod and weighs less than 6 ounces.

I suppose it helps the computer stay cool too … but I don’t really care that much about that compared to being able to type without pain.

Products I Use: Valence N-Charge VNC-130

One of the things I enjoy most is talking with other authors, speakers, MVPs, and visionaries about the things they use.  Whether it’s software, hardware, or just a technique, I find that I generally enjoy knowing how they solved a problem.  This is the first in a series of posts designed to share some of the things that I’m using that everyone may not be aware of.

One of the problems I have is battery life.  I travel with a 17” widescreen notebook (currently a Dell Inspiron E1705) that sucks batteries dry in no time flat.  When I’m traveling by air I don’t always have the luxuary of a power port.  That means I have to figure out how to get enough power for those 6 hour flights to Redmond (and other places.)

The solution for me is a Valence N-Charge VNC-130.  It’s an external battery that supplies power to the notebook just like it was coming from the standard wall adapter — but it’s battery power.  So there are three key features of the N-Charge VNC-130 that I think are must have.  They are:

  1. Dimensions — The battery is flat.  It easily slides underneath the laptop I work on so that I don’t have to worry where I’m putting it.  Other external battery options are “bricks“ that need to have their own home.  The dimensions also make it easy to slide into my computer bag.
  2. No extra charger — Another great feature is that it doesn’t require a separate charger.  The charger I already carry for the notebook is enough to charge it.  There is a limitation, I can’t use the power supply from the computer to run the computer, charge the computer’s battery and charge the N-Charge at the same time.  I can, however, charge the N-Charge system while the internal battery is already charged, or I have the system turned off.
  3. Interchangible — The system uses interchangible cords that connect the battery to the laptop which means when I change laptops I can continue to use the battery — I just have to buy a different cord to connect to the laptop.  Sure it’s $30 for the new cord, but  it’s a $300 investment to get the battery in the first place — it’s a small price to pay.

OK, I left the best for last.  How long can I get on the battery?  Hours and hours.  Even if I’ve got my system in it’s most power hungry mode, I can run for almost 4 hours.  (the internal battery lasts a little over 2 hours at these settings.)  The net effect if I use even moderate power consumption (reducing the brightness of the screen, setting the processors for dynamic CPU speed, etc.) I get well more than the 5-6 hours I need for flights across the US.

This is one of those tools that I hesitated to buy but have decided that I love now that I have it.  If you have ever traveled and not had enough power to complete your work — it’s a valuable investment

How To: Testing Host Headers (overriding DNS name resolution)

It’s come up several times in the last few weeks that I’ve needed to test a web site that was using host headers (in one form or another) but the DNS entries didn’t point to the server yet.  So I’ve had to walk some folks through the process of setting up their computer test the server.

Host headers are used by many ISPs to allow your web site and hundreds of other web sites to share one IP address.  When your web browser issues a request for a web site it goes to a specific IP address and opens a socket.  It then sends a request for the page it wants and includes the host name of the server it’s trying to reach — rather than the IP address.  Web servers can use this information to direct your request to the right web site.  The problem comes in when you want to test a site before the DNS is setup to reach it.

The magic of working around the problem lies in the %WINDIR%\System32\drivers\wayetc\hosts file.  This file is checked before DNS and is a great way to temporarily override the resolution of a name to any ip address you want.

The file has an example in the ever useful localhost entry.  You can copy this format to add in the ip address and then host name of the server you want to reach that is doing host header direction to sites.  Once the entry is made and the file is saved the changes are immediate.  You can test this at the command line by issuing a ping command and seeing that the IP address for the server is the IP address you entered into the file.

Webcast: Connecting Conversations, Requirements, Construction, and Testing

Today I had the pleasure of delivering a presentation entitled: Connecting Conversations, Requirements, Construction, and Testing to the Indianapolis Quality Assurance Associations’ symposium.  During that talk I promised to make the slides and a web cast (link removed) version of the material available.

The presentation focuses on the need to connect conversations through requirements, design, construction, and testing.  Learning how to make sure that everyone knows what they need to know — and eliminating all of the disconnects beween the different parts of the process can make software development easier, and more fun.  Learn how to eliminate those awkward situations where development builds something, quality assurance says it fails, and development insists that it matches the requirements.  It can also help you identify gaps in the requirements document before they get out of hand.

As always, I’d love to get your feedback.  Send me an email (as comment spammers have made me turn off comments.)

Article: More Effective Requirements Gathering with Microsoft OneNote

The requirements gathering process is very difficult. Getting the information from the subject matter experts and packaging it into a coherent set of thoughts that the architect and developers can understand is among the hardest parts of developing software.

There’s been little help with this process over the past few decades as we’ve struggled with other tools, techniques, and technologies in the rest of the software development process. For most folks the technology of requirements gathering has remained a pen and a pad of paper. However time tested this may be it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of efficiency and the ability to completely capture what the subject matter expert is saying.

Microsoft’s OneNote tool may be the perfect replacement for the pen and paper. With its ability to create outlines, add flags, and highlight it’s like Microsoft Word, which some hard-core functional analysts have used to take notes, with a few enhancements. When you add in the ability to record audio and create screen clippings you now have a platform that can change the way that requirements are gathered.

More…

WebCast: Defining Your Own Software Development Methodology

A few weeks back I did an on-line web cast for Jupiter Media on “Defining Your Own Software Development Methodology”  If you missed the event and want to pickup the on demand version, it’s available at http://www.jupiterwebcasts.com/_archives/2006/webcast_09-19-06/index.html.

The web cast talks about what methodologies are, how they are made up, some common techniques you can use, and how your software development methodology may relate to others.

Webcast: Get Your SharePoint Project Started Right

SharePoint projects can be complicated animals.  Knowing how to make the project successful is more complicated that making a roll out of Microsoft Office successful and is more challenging than writing a small application.  I’ve been giving a presentation for the past year or so that discusses how to get your SharePoint project started off right (and a little bit of how to recover it if it goes astray).

I’ve packaged that presentation and am making it available as a webcast.  You can now see and hear the “Get Your SharePoint Project Started Right” presentation at the link provided (link removed).  I was able to compress the content down into an hour but I’ll warn you it goes fast.

If you want the matrix referenced in the web cast use the contact me link to send me an email and I’ll get you a copy of it for free.

As always I appreciate any feedback you can provide on the content and on the delivery mechanism.

Experience: User names with spaces + MOSS 2007 = Bad and other thoughts

I thought I’d post a quick entry this morning to share a few things that I learned about MOSS 2007 in the last few days.

1) Don’t use spaces in your user names.  While I can not say with absolute definitiveness that my issues with MOSS have been because of user names with spaces … I have a strong suspicion.

2) Log files for various operations can be found in the user’s temp folder (for the installation operations), under C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\LOGS (for most of the web stuff), and in the computers application and system logs.  There are a few things to note, check the computer’s event logs first.  The good stuff tends to show up there.  You may need to follow up with the logs in the 12 hive but at least you get a starting point.  You can use central administration to turn up the logs.  They get big quickly, but can definitely help you home in on problems.

3) If you’re trying to create an SSP and you don’t see a web application that you expect to see in the list, delete it — including the IIS site.  It’s possible that the IIS site wasn’t created correctly.  (This was the case for me recently.)

4) If you need to delete an SSP because it didn’t provision correctly you need to create another SSP first.  Delete on the context menu will only be enabled after there is another SSP for the web application to attach to.  Even doing a delete from the command line will fail until your web application has another SSP.

5) If you miss entering the load balanced address for a web application the first time through, you have to go to operations and alternate URLs, from application management you can’t change the URLs for the web application.

6) There’s still an unexplainable affinity to using host headers rather than IP addresses for provisioning sites.  Don’t even both trying to use IP addresses with B2TR.  When it provisions sites it will add the host headers in on the IIS site — even if you’ve already created it yourself.

Article: Convert tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge to ensure better application development

Anyone who’s ever developed an application from scratch knows that it’s difficult to fully understand the objective of the user or subject matter expert, when they describe the problem that the code is supposed to solve. It’s not a mystery that the requirements gathering process is a challenge. However, why it’s so difficult to get good requirements and what you can do about it are a mystery.

We review the objective of gathering requirements (or elicitation, if you prefer an agile moniker), what makes it difficult, and what you can do about it. To do that we need to examine: what tacit knowledge is, what explicit knowledge is, how to convert one to the other, and why you should care.

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/convert-tacit-knowledge-into-explicit-knowledge-to-ensure-better-application-development/

Article: Fiddler Can Make Debugging Easy

Building web applications is hard work. There are so many things that can go wrong, so many technologies to learn, and so many issues that remain undiscovered because everything is designed to allow things to continue to work even when they’re not quite right. All of our fault tolerant design begins to work against us.

Most people remain unaware of precisely how their web application is interacting with the web browsers that their clients have installed. If analytics are present on the site then the number of requests ending in a 404 status (File not found) may be logged but identifying precisely why the client was requesting a page in the first place may be difficult or impossible.

This is where Fiddler, a free tool, can simplify the process substantially. Fiddler is a transparent proxy that automatically adds itself to the WININET chain so that it can see every request being made. It logs those requests and the responses to allow you to see what is working and what isn’t working.

http://www.developer.com/lang/jscript/article.php/3631066

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