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01 June 2004
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EDENBROOK & APRESS RULE!
I was just talking about my job at Edenbrook with Heather and also thinking about Apress, my publisher. I am so lucky! Like everyone I have friends that bitch about their jobs and complain that they are bored or unvalued, and so when I think about the organisations that support me it makes me realise just how incredibly lucky I am. This is a personal blog, not an Edenbrook or Apress sponsored one, but in this world of ours where there are so many Enrons and Worldcoms it's worth pointing out the little nuggets of gold that do exist.
First up Edenbrook. On a personal level, Edenbrook is fantastic. I have never ever worked for a company so supportive of it's staff. I needed a Tablet PC last year because of the amount of reading and editing I was doing on internal documents as well as to help out with my writing. I asked, and one was provided. When I mentioned last year, and this year that I thought Tech Ed would be valuable and something I'd like to attend, it was approved, almost instantly. When I mentioned just before I fell ill that wanted to certify for MCSE as well as MCSD.NET, again they approved and said they'd pay for the study books. When I fell ill Edenbrook supported me totally and that helped a great deal in my recovery. In fact, when Heather needed a major knee operation this year, Edenbrook's health insurance kicked in and sorted her out privately in super quick time, no questions asked.
On a professional level too, Edenbrook are spectactular. I can't mention all the work we do, or all the clients we have, but suffice to say we are at the leading edge. We developed an Enterprise Integration Solution for a client based around web-services which is now a standard Microsoft case study for proving the value of Web Services. We have clients spanning almost every sector from automative, through insurance and finance all the way up to global media. We work with best of breed Microsoft technology to deliver stunning results and make happy customers. I've never worked in an environment where there is so much potential to stretch and grow.
Next, Apress. I had some major personal problems a couple of years ago and in desperation asked Gary Cornell, one of the founders of Apress to help out. He did so, unquestioning, and has continued to offer me nothing but support and enthusiasm despite my life putting me in positions over the past year in particular where it has been absolutely impossible for me to repay the gesture with the delivery of a new book. In fact, when I told Apress of my illness they backed off and let me recover. I owe them a great deal and have just started writing again after about a year's break. Most other publishers would have thrown a fit at that. In addition, when I was writing the last book (ADO.NET From Novice to Professional) Apress allowed me a great deal of freedom and trusted my judgement to deliver a quality work. Wrox were more like a production line. In fact, I liken Wrox to Ford and Apress to Aston Martin. Apress are all about quality, whatever the cost. They are a fantastic publisher.
Two gems in a sea of crap. Edenbrook and Apress. I wish everyone could work for companies like these - the world would be a much happier place.
Sorry to ramble.
10:39:03 PM 
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It's good to be home!
Shortly before I fell ill back at the end of November, my Tablet PC screen started to play up. It began quite innocently at first; you'd just find that the pen would stop being recognised on certain areas of the screen, but it was easily fixed by squeezing the edges of the screen around the area in question. It seems that there was something of a known problem with the liquid coating underneath the glass of the screen on Toshiba Portege's. When I fell ill I avoided computers for quite some time, but after a couple of month's passed I couldn't resist any longer and grabbed my tablet PC for a quick web browse. The screen problem had got much worse, and started to exhibit some nasty flicking on the display which corrupted text and made the thing practically unusable. So, it went to the back of my desk and there it sat.
Today, it came back from repair with a shiny new screen. Now, compared to my own Thinkpad (the Tablet is actually owned by Edenbrook) the Toshiba is slow and underpowered. The screen is too small, it gets too hot when running in high power mode, has no built in CD or DVD drive and is all round a pretty weak notebook. But I love it to bits. I missed it when it was not working, and then away getting repaired, and I'm ecstatic it's back. I've filed my request to join the Tablet PC SDK beta to get early access to the next version, and I can't stop using it now. The form factor with TabletPC is everything. You really can ignore the small screen and low powered CPU when you have a device that is just so wonderfully natural and convenient to use. When you couple that with the fact that your average tablet feels like a feather compared to your average ordinary notebook, you have a pretty killer packge if you do a lot of travelling, or even just web surfing in your lap.
Something that did strike me as strange though is that I never imagined a computer could have a feeling, like a building. When I powered up the notebook in the office today and started moving my data across from the Thinkpad to the tablet the first thing I did was quickly check my mail with Outlook. What greeted me was eerie, an environment that in computer terms looked like the Marie Celeste. It was as if the dining room had been prepared for dinner just as everyone rushed off out to some big drama. My last email in my inbox was an email from Heather checking that I was ok, about 5 minutes before I left the office to spend 6 months at home. I had tasks that needed to be done by the end of the first week of December, winking at me from the task reminder dialog in red telling me they were late. My anti-virus app kicked in reminding me that it hadn't been updated since December 1st, and would I like to update it now. My password had expired and so naturally the domain controller had asked my Tablet to get me to change it. It was a spooky place. Still, a couple of new apps installed and a quick virtual dust up and the place feels like home again now.
It's fantastic to be back.
10:05:10 PM
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New month, new toys...
In a mad moment last night I decided that it was time to stretch out and try some new software toys. I needed to anyway in one case, since my Newsgator trial period was about to expire and, invaluable though Newsgator had proven to be, I felt the time had come to find a new RSS aggregator. After hearing many good things from friends and colleagues I plumped for RSSBandit, the free .NET based aggregator from MSDN columnist and Microsoftee Dare Obasanjo.
I did have some concerns in making the move, not least of which was the fact that Newsgator is just so painless to use. The one thing that I think Newsgator really had going for it was that it was fully integrated into Outlook. As soon as you ran Outlook newsgator popped in and downloaded the feed updates and added new messages in selected RSS feed folders within the standard Outlook view. However, while that's a great thing for my home PC and notebook, it's not really so cool for my work notebook. I just didn't want a whole bunch of RSS feeds cluttering up all the important mail I have to deal with at Edenbrook on a daily basis and really wanted to separate out the RSS stuff into it's own application. Ideally as well that would be an application that would give me a fairly painless way to move data between the three machines that I use on a daily basis; my work Tablet, my notebook, and my desktop PC.
RSS Bandit does everything I need. It has a great user interface, it's fast, it allows posting of comments to those blogs that support the appropriate commenting API, and it even lets me specify that the RSS feed data lives in a directory on a share that I regularly synchronize. What could be better. The other huge feature that I love is that RSS Bandit is open source. You can download the source code, pop it up into Visual Studio.NET and see how the great Dare and various other Microsoftees actually write code. If you want to you can change and manipulate the code, feeding any improvements and enhancements back into the project for the good of the community at large. Fantastic stuff. Great job Dare and your fellow volunteers. You can get RSS Bandit from http://www.rssbandit.org.
The new software toys didn't end there though. After my last blog post I got to thinking about Eudora and the features that I had seen in using it to help me migrate my data from my old Linux Evolution mail client into Outlook. The look of the application, it's speed and flexibility seemed irresistable, and so I reinstalled it and moved all my Outlook mail on myown notebook into Eudora.
The user interface is a fairly classic look for a mail client. Your folders (mailboxes in Eudora) sit in a pane on the left, while the list of messages and a preview area take up the bulk of the right hand side of the Eudora window. So far, it all seems great. Given the amount of mail I get, most of it unwanted, a decent spam filter and extreme flexibility in defining my own mail filters is vital. Eudora's support for both these two areas seems divine. I haven't had a chance to play with the spam filter yet, because I'm still using the "sponsored" version of the software and haven't paid for a real licence. The custom filter stuff though is fantastic. You can filter on practically any part of the mail, and even down to individual parts of headers of mails. Full conditional support is included along with full support for RegEx expressions. if you know regex then you'll already know what a powerful tool it can be when it comes to sorting wheat from chaff. The filter system can also be configured to automatically respond to specific types of email with pre-written email messages. This is a great feature for things like sharing your PGP keys and so on.
In use Eudora is also really fast. Really really fast. In fact, it's much much faster than Outlook when it comes to processing huge volumes of archived and current email. Couple that with the ability at installation time to specific a directory to use to store mail information in and you hae just a few of the ingrediants that have already made many tens of thousands of users around the globe swear that Eudora is the only email client they'll ever use. Just as with RSS Bandit, a huge win for me is the ability I now have to move my personal mail into it's mail client and move my mail files around between my three machines. (At some point I'll have to write a small utility to make this easier). Eudora is available at http://www.eudora.com. I still use Outlook on my tablet for syncing with Exchange at work, and of course I synchronize my treo with that. On my desktop pc and my own notebook though Eudora is the order of the day and Treo now syncs back to the Palm Desktop. My treo then is really acting as a mobile electronic information interchange between the three computers that at times appear to manage my life.
Finally, a few people had been singing the praises of Mozilla Firefox, the tabbed web browser based on Mozilla that automatically blocks pop-ups and other such annoyances, supports skinning and is really quite rapid. So I got that too. I haven't really had much chance to play with it yet, but from what I've seen it reminds me a lot of Safari on my Macs, and that's a great thing.
3:40:04 PM
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2004
Pete Wright.
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