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C/C++ Is Dead: Long Live C/C++!

Jayson Knight — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 01:33:17 GMT

Bjarne Stroustrup changed the programming world forever when he “invented” C++ (at the time, called C with classes). He did it purely to solve his problems with C, which were at the time was that C was a purely procedural language leading to spaghetti code that was very hard to maintain, difficult to extend, and only leant itself to systems programming. Little did he know that C++ would have a profound effect on the realm of computer science, and would eventually be the foundation of modern day IT as we know it, as well as being the foundation for the big two modern day programming languages: Java and C#. Not to mention the fact that C++ runs the code behind most of the world’s largest infrastructure: The phone system, the power grid, etc.

I learned the basics of C/C++ during my first round of computer science classes in the late 90’s (I’m showing my age by even admitting that) and thought to myself “there is nothing that C/C++ can’t accomplish when it comes to programming” which in most cases is correct. All modern day operating systems are programmed in C, and Windows is no exception. The entire underlying API’s are exposed via C function calls, with various C++ wrapper frameworks available (MFC, ATL, WTL, C++/CLI) available to simplify programming the underlying Win32 API, which is huge, enormously complicated, and arcane. The Win32 API has been around for almost 30 years and is very much showing its age, but Microsoft’s commitment (for the most part) to backwards compatibility has caused the Win32 API to become very bloated, hence the need for wrapper frameworks to simplify programming against the Windows platform.

When I learned C/C++, we were programming against SPARC mainframes, and UNIX systems. Stroustrup claims that C++ is portable, but the issue is that vendors can add their own extensions (such as Microsoft’s CLI extensions, which in my opinion cripple C++ on Windows to the point of almost being useless outside of the using the standard ANSI implementation frameworks), and that defeats the entire portability concept. Stroustrup has been very outspoken about vendors adding their own extensions, but I digress. My problem with C++ is that (by computing standards) it’s a dinosaur. The STL is a huge pain in the ass, and isn’t implemented correctly across platforms (again Microsoft, I’m looking squarely at you).

For a couple of months last year, I dove into C++/CLI hoping it would make me appreciate Microsoft’s implementation (I know the ANSI standard, but I program Windows for a living, so why not learn the MS “version”), and was horrified at what I found. Handles, references, de-references, pointers, everything is heap based (Java anyone?) for the most part, you can create both value based and ref based structs (defeats the purpose IMO, just make everything a class)…and what horrified me the most was Visual Studio 2010 does NOT support intellisense for C++/CLI projects! That all being said, Microsoft’s ANSI implementation of C++ is fairly spot on, aside from a few nitpicks.

I know there are C/C++ purists out there, and in the end most languages get compiled down to C/C++ before executing as byte code since the built in compilers for most OS’s can readily read in C/C++ and transform it into native code. And I guess that’s the point of this post, it’s this developer’s opinion that C/C++ has largely become an intermediary language. Computers are fast enough and have enough resources that we can use much higher level languages , and have faith in our compilers that they will emit the most effective and optimized “intermediate” language. As a systems programming language, C/C++ will never disappear, at least not for a while, but as a GPPL, at least within IT, it’s largely deprecated. OS vendors, and the big 4 software vendors (Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, Apple) will always need talented C/C++ developers, but in the IT space, C++ needs a fork stuck in her.

I was very disappointed in my C++/CLI endeavors because in the end, I was out to make myself a better developer. All that endeavor did is make me appreciate modern day programming frameworks even more, in my case, .Net/C#. Could I write programs that perform better in C++? Sure, but is it worth the extra effort? Nope. Not at all. Modern day frameworks like JRE and .Net have their drawbacks, and can be resource heavy at times, but in the end we need to produce code that runs, and works. Hardware resources are cheap enough that it outweighs the extra man-hours it takes to write better performing code. That’s not to say we shouldn’t follow correct coding paradigms, but in the end, time is money. Do you want to pay a developer an extra month’s salary to save half a gig of memory in their application, or shell out the couple hundred bucks for a DIMM of RAM?

My final point is that many consider C++ to be an object-oriented language. It’s this developer’s opinion that it is not. Understanding inheritance chains in C++ is a monumental task, and isn’t as fine grained as it is in more modern languages. Multiple inheritance leads to HUGE maintainability problems in C++ projects. Keeping up with source and header files is a nightmare, and the rules around copy constructors are maddening. And of course the blaringly obvious, keeping up with pointers and references. I know there are C++ frameworks to help alleviate manual memory management (smart pointers), but modern day frameworks do a much better job, at less cost in terms of man-hours tracking down memory leaks.

Java and C#/.Net are not the end all be all. There are times when a component needs to be written in C++ for the utmost performance, but as the years click by I see less and less of a need for these. All professional developers should understand C/C++ conceptually, since in most cases the underlying API is written in one of those languages, and I will say that honing my C++ skills for the Win32 API has made me a more thoughtful programmer. But in the end, C/C++ is dead outside of systems programming. I’m sure Stroustrup would disagree, but we’re not all as brilliant as he is.

New Year, New Chapter: Bring it On

Jayson Knight — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 23:51:08 GMT

Another year has passed, and I can safely say that 2011 ended up being one of the best, and the worst years on record. It ended with a good bang for sure, and the last week of December was amazing. I always start to wonder about resolutions though, and why people pick the end of the year to actually make them. I tend to make resolutions on a rolling basis, not stack them all up together to attempt in one fell swoop. Tackling a fistful of resolutions at once is a recipe for disaster in my opinion. I have professional resolutions that I intend to conquer, but really I just want 2012 to be a continuation of the last few months of 2011. I’m going to cycle more, going to play more tennis, learn a few new programming languages…all in all, no big changes. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it is my mantra.

I wish all of you the best in 2012. Life is a blessing, and if you don’t succeed in your resolutions, at least you have warm air in your lungs and blood flowing through your veins. My biggest “resolution” is just to not take life too seriously. It’s way too short to do so.

Will Email Ever Become Obsolete?

Jayson Knight — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 21:42:45 GMT

This post is, for the most part, purely hypothetical but in my opinion poses a very real question: Will email ever become obsolete? One of the most time consuming parts of my life as an independent IT consultant trying to drum up client leads and staying in touch with current contacts is the sheer amount of information I have to to aggregate from disparate sources, keep up with various social networks, develop my own brand, and share my own information. Something I’ve noticed is that I use email less and less these days; virtually all of my communication is done via social networking sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+), and most of the information I receive is via RSS feeds that I subscribe to, e.g. blogs, job search feeds, newsletter updates. Can email ever be replaced by all of the above? Perhaps not, but in my own life, email has become a 2nd rate citizen. And it’s already an antiquated communication medium because it’s one to one in nature, and does not spur conversations, at least not in a collaborative “real time” way.

Social networking is taking over the communication space. Almost all of my (non-telephone based) personal communication with family and close friends is done via instant messaging, text messaging, or video chat. No email required. These mediums are much more personal in nature, more interactive, and now that smartphones are ubiquitous, more accessible. Why email someone when you can send a short text, or just message them with one of the dozens of IM clients? Or (in the case of the iPhone) make a quick facetime call, or with Blackberries send a quick voice memo to someone? If I had to make a prediction, I’d say that POP3/IMAP/SMTP will be the next NNTP within 10 years: Still necessary, but undesirable as a means of communication.

That being said, I don’t ever see corporate email taking that much of a backseat, though internal social networking in large companies is growing very popular, what with Sharepoint infrastructures existing in virtually all organizations, which I embrace wholly (one of my main focuses as of late are large scale Sharepoint implementations) since this leads to a much more personalized communication experience. Corporations are more geographically dispersed than ever, and many knowledge workers are remotely based. Let’s face it, people like personalized communication: It’s why we post pictures to social networking sites, or why we start our own blogs, and just plain prefer personalized communication mediums. Email is so…well, blah and boring. And not personable at all.

And then there are the logistical and technical reasons why email should just go away, or something else should come along to replace it. The protocols (POP3/IMAP/SMTP) are ancient by internet standards…relics of the past that exist now only because they have to. At the very least, POP3 needs to just go away as it creates more problems then it actually solves. Try explaining to everyday internet users why POP3 is broken, e.g. why if you set up POP3 accounts on multiple computers or devices the end user will have missing messages on each device…anyone familiar with the POP3 protocol will know the answer immediately, and if you aren’t familiar with why this is, I will defer that conversation to the comments section should it need to be explained in more detail.

But I digress. Microsoft Outlook (and the various social connectors branded under Bing that integrate with Outlook) have done a decent job in making email more of a “discussion” based medium rather than a “fire and forget” medium; you can group email threads in conversation view and it’s more like a forum, and the social connectors make it a bit more personable, but it’s still a far cry from the conversation based medium that actual forums, or social networking websites provide. In this day and age of people owning more than one email capable device, email is broken and not optimal anymore. IMAP alleviates some of this, but it still requires some sort of technical knowledge on the end user’s part

Email spam. The scourge of the internet. According to the wiki on spam roughly 90% of all email sent on the internet is spam. This burdens the ISP’s most of all (or corporate email servers) and is the equivalent of an internet based DoS (denial of service) attack as the influx of spam to email servers is a HUGE burden…those processing cycles could better be spent elsewhere. When it comes to other communication mediums, spam is rare, and so long as you keep your social networks in check, non-existent. The only non-email based spam I receive are the occasional IM-bot, but those are few and far between.

I’ll end the post with RSS, or better yet, what RSS should have been. It’s a bit of a digression, but where RSS fits in my internet life is:

Almost all of my (used to be) email based newsletters, I get via RSS feeds.
I have virtually no bookmarks for active content (vs. static content), subscribed to updates via RSS. This includes forum posts, blog discussion, Facebook updates, etc. In the past, I’d get an email notification if something was updated/commented on/etc., now I just get updated RSS notifications. And…
Some sites support CommentRSS (including mine) which means you can reply to an RSS notification without having to visit the actual site.

Where RSS fails is that it’s not secure, can’t (realistically) be used for sites that require you to log in, and it’s still very much “email-like” in that it’s a push based mechanism of communication and is not interactive, e.g. multiple users contributing, and that information being aggregated in a place other than the actual site.

What the alternative to email is, I have no idea. I have to keep up with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Windows Live Messenger, and Skype…all disparate technologies and communication mediums. Aggregating and keeping track of the sheer amount of information is tough, but the interactiveness and personable side makes it worth it. Several companies have attempted to unify these (Trillian, Omea Reader (defunct, though at the time it did a great job of aggregating email, RSS feeds, and NNTP in a searchable format…they were definitely on to something), Microsoft (with their social connectors), TweetDeck, HootSuite (my preferred way of reading content from my favorite social networking sites), various newsreaders, and various RSS readers) but in the end, I’ve realized that finding what’s important to me and cataloging it into OneNote works just fine. More work on my end, but worth the extra effort. That being said, I am sure a better solution exists, something we can’t even picture right now…similar to how the internet changed our lives without even realizing how it could. I look forward to the next decade of internet innovation, and more specifically, how we communicate with one another.

Information Overload: The Amount of Disparate Technologies

Jayson Knight — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 21:29:21 GMT

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the state of the current software development world compared to how it was when I first turned professional over 10 years ago, and it’s a staggering difference to say the least. I cut my programming teeth on VB6, VC++, and classic ASP. CSS and HTML were still in their infancy (blink tag anyone?), and almost all corporate software was done using a 2 tier model, or thin client wrappers around legacy mainframe apps (COBOL/AS400 anyone?). I was lucky in some regards in that .Net came out during the first year of my professional career, so that I could learn it from the ground up. We’re on version 4.0 now, and the amount of class libraries that ship in the System.* and Microsoft.* namespaces has more than doubled since the early betas. Learning the entire 4.0 BCL from scratch would be daunting to say the least. During the early betas of .Net, there were plenty of times where I wondered what the hell I had gotten myself into.

Now enter the big bad web, which unless you swear up and down by C++/STL/ATL/COM (code dinosaur in other words) you absolutely must write applications for. A cursory list of the technologies we as web developers have to know intrinsically:

HTML (duh, and now with HTML5, the game has really changed)
CSS (CSS3 is also a game changer)
JavaScript
The DOM
jQuery
AJAX
JSON
REST/SOAP
MVC (not required, but very useful)
XML
XSLT
XSD/DTD
HTTP/TCP/IP
DNS/DHCP
Ad nauseam…(feel free to add to this list)

Combine the above with the fact that each of the big 4 browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera…yes I left Safari off this list because on the LAN it is very rarely used) have their own individual quirks as to how they implement the standards, and also how individual dynamic web languages generate code, and it gets pretty maddening. Don’t even get me started on the nastiest language of all, SQL (though data wrapping generation tools are getting quite sophisticated, specifically LINQ and the Entity Framework in .Net, as well as ActiveRecord in Ruby…it’s quite possible to write entire applications now without writing a single line of SQL, though all developers need to understand the underlying SQL that gets generated).

Then we get into the language/platform agnostic parts of software engineering. Learning new languages, performing object oriented analysis and design, reusing code, eliminating cross cutting concerns (dependency injection), configuring servers both physically and logically, database design (which thousands of books are devoted to), production debugging, unit testing, integration testing, functional testing. I could go on, and on, and on…the point is that it’s pretty overwhelming when you take a step back and look at all the different moving parts that make a useable application, well…useable. Sometimes I take for granted what I’ve learned after over a decade in this industry and have to remind myself that (while I’m still by far not an expert) I was once completely new. But I also wonder what it would be like to get into this industry now, given that the web has changed EVERYTHING about what we do for a living, and hell…how we live outside of our careers in general. Remember life before Facebook? Before Wi-Fi? Before smartphones? Before email?

When I was at Columbia University, I’d often walk by Rodin’s “The Thinker” and could feel exactly what it was created to represent: The struggle with dilemmas, and also the frustration of trying to understand and make sense of it all. In the end, what I think makes a software developer successful is the ability to adapt, not fight change, and the drive to constantly improve ourselves and learn new tools. The programming landscape is constantly evolving, and hell I fight it from time to time (e.g. I am a complete CSS idiot, and have been fighting that for a while now…mainly because it’s such a quirky spec and implemented very poorly across different browsers)…the biggest change in my entire career was basically forgetting VB6, learning C# and Java, and never looking back. I wonder what the next big change will be (by big, I mean something like The Web, or moving from different languages)? If I had to guess, it’s going to be something in the mobile space and how we access information there, and if I had a preference, it would be moving away from RDBMS systems and utilizing cloud solutions without having to worry about what the underlying persistence layer for data is, e.g. more platform agnosticism. As a developer, I just like to create without being bogged down with the underlying implementation details. I used to love the details, but just want to produce things that “just work” at this point. Frameworks are moving towards this more and more, and I welcome it. so here’s to hoping for more high level development tools that allow us to create more, and drive that next level of innovation.

Back to the Daily Grind

Jayson Knight — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 05:24:37 GMT

Time to fire this site back up after sporadic posting over the past couple of years. I’m back in Charlotte after my tenure in NYC, and am happy to be back home with my friends and family. I’ve also made my (re)debut into the IT realm after completing my studies at Columbia University. Coding for me is like riding a bike, and I feel as comfortable as ever sitting behind the wheel of Visual Studio, and I’m also ramping up on Sharepoint 2010 (it’s a different beast than MOSS 2007). Outside of Microsoft technologies, I’m in the process of learning Ruby, and in turn Ruby on Rails. So far I’m pretty impressed with Rails, and Ruby reminds me a lot of Smalltalk. One of the great things about Rails is that it forces MVC, and you can get a workable website up without writing a ton of code, and not much configuration (hence RoR’s motto of “Convention over Configuration.” I’m a strong advocate of stepping out your comfort zone, and in this case learning the RoR way of things will make me a better all around developer.

So here’s to round 2 of my IT career. .Net 4.0 has some great new features such as thread safe collections and parallelism, and continues to become a better all around framework for GPP. And finally, my pet project for the year is to learn F# and incorporate it into some of my existing projects (can you tell that I prefer functional programming languages?).

To All My NYC Friends: Sadly I’m Not Returning

Jayson Knight — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 20:09:56 GMT

To all my NYC friends, I've made the tough decision not to return. I don't know all of your email addresses, so I apologize for the blanket Blog/FB update. There's just been a series of events that are making it no longer an option for me. I will visit soon though after the dust from the holidays settles. You have all touched my life in ways that I will never forget. It was an amazing experience, but I realize now I was doing a lot of things for the wrong reasons, and I need to spend some time in Charlotte taking care of some stuff. I love all of you, and will be in touch soon. Hold down the fort for me, and don’t get into too much trouble in my absence!

Happy Seventh Blog Birthday To Me

Jayson Knight — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 22:07:52 GMT

Seven years ago, I started this blog as an experiment; little did I know that after all this time I’d still be doing this. I haven’t posted nearly as much as I’d like since I got out of the IT industry, but it’s amazing how much has changed both in my life and the internet in general after all these years. I wouldn’t have it any other way to be honest. Who knows what the next few years hold in store for me…I’m looking forward to the journey though.

Windows Live Writer Beta

Jayson Knight — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 04:45:48 GMT

It took me a couple of tries to get the new Windows Live beta package installed on my machine; the secret fix for me was to enable the Windows Firewall service (I disable it since I’m behind other firewalls), so if your install is failing, turn on the Firewall service. You can turn it off again after you’re done.

The previous version of Windows Live Writer hasn’t worked on any of my machines for quite some time now, so it’s nice that the new version actually works again. I might actually start keeping up with my blog again, although in a completely new mode of content since my tech days are long behind me (professionally at least). If you want to test drive the new Windows Live Essentials beta, you can download it from here. The new Windows Live Messenger is worth the download alone in my opinion. Much more polished, and you can plug it into social networks like Facebook, etc.

So let’s see if this new version actually works, and if it does look for more updates in this space. I have my blog linked to my FB notes, so this post should show up on my FB profile as well.

Matriculating Into Columbia University, Moving to New York

Jayson Knight — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 06:39:00 GMT

I have the proud distinction of being able to say that I have been accepted to Columbia University (yeah, that Columbia...the Ivy League one) and will be finishing up my degree there. I'm still in shock that it's actually happened, that I get to fulfill my lifelong dream of attending an Ivy League institution...and Columbia at that which is IMO the coolest of the Ivies, namely due to its location in Manhattan. I have busted my ass over the past year in my studies, and it's great to see this hard work paying off. So long as all the logistics fall into place, I will be moving to the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan in early January to begin classes. All of my credits transferred, so I'll be enrolling as a Junior. I'm excited and apprehensive at the same time, but I have no doubt that this was meant to be. I have a philosophy of believing that things happen for a reason, and the more effortlessly they happen, the more they were meant to happen.

And it would seem that I'm not the only one making a big move these days. My good friend Keyvan Nayyeri (Facebook profile) has also fulfilled a lifelong dream and is finally making it stateside to complete his Ph.D in Mathematics at the University of Texas: San Antonio. The internet sure does make the world seem awfully small sometimes, and the prospect of finally getting to meet this guy in real life is astounding. I'm so happy for him as I know he's wanted this for a long time now. I know he's going to do great, and I wish him the best of luck.

Any readers of this blog (if there are any left actually) located in and around the NYC area, please feel free to drop me a line. Next post will be from the Big Apple!

Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy Tomorrow; Bye Bye Gallbladder

Jayson Knight — Mon, 18 May 2009 19:51:52 GMT

Just a short blurb: I’m going in for a very routine procedure tomorrow to have my gallbladder removed. I’ve recently been diagnosed with Cholecystitis, and the pain over the past 2 weeks has been pretty bad at times. The surgery itself was scheduled over a week ago, so just waiting around for tomorrow to come has been the hard part. The procedure itself takes less than an hour, and carries virtually no risk of complications. The human body gets on just fine without a gallbladder…its only real purpose seems to be to get inflamed and cause the body lots of pain actually. Regardless, I’ll be fine. At this point I can’t remember what a pain free day feels like, so I’m very much looking forward to that feeling. Watch this space for more details.

Sidenote: The medical student in me wants them to tape the procedure so I can watch it later on. How wrong is that?

Another Semester Done, Summertime Is Here

Jayson Knight — Thu, 14 May 2009 04:02:54 GMT

Spring semester at UNCC has ended, and compared to previous semesters, this one was quite the crusher to say the least, even though it was only 15 credit hours. My GPA for the semester was a 3.53, so I’ll make Dean’s List again, but I was a bit disappointed by one particular B in my Chemistry lab…the TA said I was extremely close to an A, but that there would be no curve. My most surprising comeback story was Calculus I; bear in mind I haven’t had a college level math class in about a decade, so all of those skills had long disappeared. Combine that with the fact that about halfway through the semester our professor fell gravely ill, and we got a new professor that although very smart, hadn’t taught a low level math class in years so he was way above our heads. I found some fantastic online lecture notes and basically locked myself in a room for an entire weekend and taught myself everything I needed to know for the final exam. I went from a 67 on the first exam to a 92 on the final, good enough to get an A as my final grade.

One thing this semester taught me is that I no longer want to be a Chemistry major. My first round in school, before I discovered computer science, I was absolutely fascinated by Chemistry and had a natural knack for it. The knack is still there, but the interest…well, not so much. Of course my end goal is medical school so the major doesn’t matter per se, but I have to be interested in the work I’m doing. This round, my interests are much more towards the biological sciences. I have decided to change to either a B.S. Biology should I decide to stay at UNCC, or Biomedical Engineering should I decide to transfer to a school that offers an undergraduate degree in that area. I have also decided that UNC-Chapel Hill may not be an option for various reasons that I won’t go into…it’s mainly a matter of timing. As such, I’m going to apply to other schools in the region that offer a competitive BME program such as NC State and GA Tech for consideration of a Spring ‘10 transfer. A BME degree will be a fantastic fallback degree should my physician aspirations not work out (which of course I have complete confidence that they will, but there are so many places where pursuing an M.D. can abruptly end).

The end of this semester was complicated by some strange medical issues I’ve been having. I won’t get into a lengthy diatribe nor will I play armchair physician in this post about what’s going on, but it got severe enough last week that it warranted 2 physician visits, a smattering of chest x-rays, and a CT scan. The findings are leaning towards gallstones (which I suspected all along), but aside from that I’m a perfectly healthy 30 year old according to test results. I have a consultation with a general surgeon tomorrow morning to discuss a further course of action. I will say that I wouldn’t wish the amount of pain I’ve been experiencing on my worst enemy. My last 2 exams of the semester, I was basically writhing in pain throughout them feeling pretty close to death, and still managed to do well on both. Mind over matter I guess. It’s also safe to say that dye contrast CT scans are quite interesting…the barium sulfate shake given beforehand provides you with about 18 hours of severe cramps and diarrhea, and the IV injected contrast dye also has some interesting physiological properties…feels like your skin is on fire and like you’ve peed all over yourself. Highly recommended.

First summer session (aka 5 weeks of Organic Chemistry pain) starts in just over 2 weeks. I was planning on enjoying my break, but it looks like it’ll be consumed with physician visits until we get the pains resolved. It’s all good, I have faith in the system (even though it does move pretty slow). Watch this space for more updates.

One Month’s Worth of Sleepless Nights To Go Please

Jayson Knight — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 04:23:00 GMT

Spring semester at UNCC has gotten off to a roaring start; I can’t believe it’s already been 6 weeks. I had to do some schedule adjusting…trust me, my course load is not to be envied at 16 hours: General Chemistry 2 (with lab), General Biology 2 (with lab), Calculus, Japanese, and I’m TA’ing for a deductive logic professor. The labs are what absolutely kill me each week since they are three classroom hours + lab reports + quizzes, exams, and papers…all for one lousy credit hour. So far it’s a bit rougher than last semester, but definitely manageable.

The good news is that I have finally completed my application to UNC aka Carolina aka Chapel Hill. It’s a phenomenal school with one of the better Chemistry programs in the country. The bad news is that notification won’t be coming for at least a month, and I don’t do too well with suspense and waiting. Fingers are crossed, but this will be by far one of the biggest decisions I’ve ever made in my entire life. Chapel Hill is only 3 hours away from Charlotte, but my life is here: Friends, family, girlfriend…I mean it’s not the end of the world, but it’s still a heavy decision. Like I always say, I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it. Provided I get in, it would be the opportunity of a lifetime.

Sidenote: Condolences to those who didn’t survive the great Telligent Carnage of ‘09. Over the years before I got out of the software business, I got to know quite a few of you, and even before that, many of you were household names amongst .Net developers. My heart especially goes out to Rob Howard…I know just how passionate you are about software and your company, so I’m sure the decision was not an easy one. No doubt that even with what little sleep I’ll be getting over the next few weeks in anticipation of an acceptance letter, they are nothing compared to the sleepless nights you had before having to make this decision. I am truly sorry.

I'm Drowning in Paper, So I Bought a Tablet

Jayson Knight — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 05:45:02 GMT

So another semester has drawn to a close…this semester was my first full one; I did 17 hours and I can say one thing for certain: It’s a lot easier to focus at age 30 than it was at 18, and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Finals were pretty gruesome, but overall it was a successful semester, and I’ve loaded myself up with 18 hours for Spring. One thing I learned about myself is that at some point, I stopped being able to do consecutive nights of 4 hours of sleep…I paid dearly for it during finals week and it caught up with me at the end. Yet another thing drastically different than being 18.

I also learned that a decade of cube life spoiled me in some ways…I haven’t put pen to paper (e.g. taking notes) in many many years having always used a computer for all of my document generation needs. The problem wasn’t with the note taking itself, but rather being able to quickly find information I had written down for later studying. Over the past few months I had gone back and forth on whether to get a laptop, or get a tablet. Since I’m a chemistry major, a good portion of my notes include drawings, charts, and equations with lots of symbols involved…so a regular laptop was not going to be a feasible solution. The obvious choice was then a tablet, but to get a decent one is a sizable chunk of change. A friend of mine reminded me about the Dell outlet site, and since the Latitude XT is the tablet I was interested in (namely due to multi-touch capabilities), it became a matter of checking the outlet page on a daily basis waiting for the configuration I wanted. It took a couple months, but the one I wanted finally showed up yesterday. To say I got a great deal would be an understatement. Brand new, the configuration I got would have been around $3,500…I ordered mine for $1,500. The main component I was holding out for was an SSD, which apparently are really hard to come by on the outlet site. Regardless, it gets here on the 22nd, and I’m beyond stoked to be getting rid of all the paper notebooks I would have had to keep up with next semester.

So the question now becomes, do I stick with XP Tablet Edition, or do I use the free upgrade coupon it comes with to move to Vista Business? I’ve read reports on the web of Vista’s tablet capabilities being less than stellar, with many reviewers preferring XP for tablets. I personally love Vista, and would see going back to XP as a huge setback, but of course I want to use whatever works best. Any readers have experience with one or both?

Anywho, I’m all caught up on sleep, have a week of family obligations, and am off to Vail for a week right after Christmas for a well deserved vacation. I keep telling myself I’ll blog more, but school is keeping me fairly hemmed up. Perhaps I’ll make a better effort come next year. Have a wonderful holiday season everyone!

Vista Gigabit Performance Issues: Fixed

Jayson Knight — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 16:29:29 GMT

Like quite a few folks, I've been plagued by issues with Vista on a Gigabit LAN, namely seeing throughput that's a fraction of what it should be. I tried the fixes Scott Hanselman outlined in his excellent Vista Gigabit post to no avail. The Google gods must have been smiling on me yesterday because I found an article I had not seen before: Disable Vista network autotuning. In a nutshell, open an elevated command prompt and run the following:

netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable

I'm now seeing sustained throughput between Vista and other machines on my network in the neighborhood of 80-100 MB/s. From what I've read, none of these 'fixes' are needed when all machines are utilizing SMB 2.0, e.g. Vista <-> Windows 2008 or other Vista clients. Regardless, it's great to finally be able to utilize all of my LAN bandwidth after almost a year of frustration.

Obama Picks UNCC As His Last Stop Before Election

Jayson Knight — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 04:56:12 GMT

Barack Obama has chosen UNCC (University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the university I'm attending) as his last stop before the elections on Tuesday. It's pretty telling when a state that can only be described as historically very red is not only a democratic candidate's last stop, but is also seemingly going to go blue, exactly what kind of change people actually want.

We're honored to have you here on the eve of the elections.

eTrade Commercial: Mobile Trading Baby

Jayson Knight — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 04:23:54 GMT

I don't know why I find this commercial so hilarious, but I can't help but giggle out loud whenever I see it. Brilliant piece of marketing on the part of eTrade.

CS Tidbit #28: Creating Nested Navigation Bar Items

Jayson Knight — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 19:51:57 GMT

In my previous CS Tidbit, I outlined how to add an archive page to your blogs to free up some sidebar real estate while still giving readers access to our post history. Of course, now that we have this in place, how do we let our readers know where it is? In the past, adding links to one of the standard sidebar widgets meant manually adding entries to various skin files, and doing it in each theme on our site. There was also really no way to control security on the links either without adding some more customizations, ie if you had a link that you only wanted displayed to logged in users, or to owners of a particular section (Sharepoint calls this Security Trimming, I'm not sure what CS refers to it as).

Fortunately for us, CS now supports creating nested navigation bar items via the control panel, and also allows us to specify security attributes to control what audience gets to see these links. In this tidbit, I'll outline how to accomplish this. Our end result is going to look something like this:

This is just the standard navigation bar that you'd see in CS2008.5's Hawaii theme, along with 4 nested navigation bar items. To create these items, navigate to Control Panel and select Site Administration, and then head over to Site Theme. The url to this page will look something like http://<yourSite.com>/ControlPanel/Settings/ThemeConfiguration.aspx. In the theme configuration editor, select the Header tab and look for the section called Navigation Bar. You'll see a box similar to the one pictured here:

In this example, we'll add a link to the archive page we created in the previous CS Tidbit. Click the Add button, and then fill in information similar to the following:

Once you're done putting in the correct info, click save. You can then click and drag the newly created link to the section where you'd like it to be nested under. It's actually a pretty slick control. Once you have it where you want, click the save button in the lower right hand corner and navigate back to your site. The newly created nested navigation item should be displayed under the section you placed it in. All of this adds some nice navigational touches for your site visitors to be able to find stuff in an easier more consistent manner.

CS Tidbits #27: Add An Archive Page For Blogs

Jayson Knight — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:13:57 GMT

It's been a while since I've posted any CS Tidbits, but now that Community Server 2008.5 has been released, it's time to get back in gear and post some tips and tricks that I'm learning as I get to know this new release.

If you're like me and have been blogging for a non-trivial amount of time (over 5 years in my case), an archived list view of your posts starts to look a bit unwieldy. CS 2008.5 does ship with an archive widget to display in your blog's sidebar, however this will lead to a long page length, and doesn't look as tidy as it could if the archive list could live in its own page. Fortunately for us, adding a dedicated archive page is easy enough. First, create a blank .aspx page in your /themes/blogs/hawaii directory, and name it archive.aspx. Then just add the following markup to it:

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" EnableViewState="False" MasterPageFile="theme.Master" Inherits="CommunityServer.Blogs.Controls.CSBlogThemePage" %>  <asp:Content ContentPlaceHolderID="bbcr" runat="server">    <div class="CommonBreadCrumbArea"><div class="Common">        <CSBlog:WeblogData Property="Name" LinkTo="HomePage" runat="server" />        &raquo;        <CSBlog:WeblogData LinkTo="archive" runat="server" Text="Archive" />    </div></div></asp:Content>  <asp:Content ContentPlaceHolderID="tr" runat="server">    <CSControl:Title runat="server" IncludeSectionOrHubName="true" IncludeSiteName="true" EnableRendering="true" Tag="H1" CssClass="CommonTitle">        <ContentTemplate><CSBlog:WeblogData runat="server" Text="Archive" /></ContentTemplate>    </CSControl:Title></asp:Content>  <asp:Content ContentPlaceHolderID="bcr" runat="Server">      <div class="CommonContentBox">        <div class="CommonContentBoxContent">            <CSBlog:ArchiveDataItemList runat="server" />        </div>    </div></asp:Content>

That should be all you need to do as the URL for the page is already wired up correctly in your SiteUrls.config file by the following line:

<url name = "weblogarchive"  path="##blogdirectory##archive.aspx" pattern="##blogName##/archive.aspx"  physicalPath="##blogthemeDir##" vanity="{2}?App=${{app}}" page="archive.aspx" indexable="false" />

To view the newly created archive page, navigate to <yourSite>/blogs/<blogName>/archive.aspx. Of course you'll want to add a link to this somewhere on your blog. I'll cover how to create a nested navigation bar for blog links in a future CS Tidbit post.

JaysonKnight.com Upgraded To Community Server 2008.5

Jayson Knight — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Community Server 2008.5 was released recently. The half dozen or sites that I've upgraded over the weekend went without a hitch; the new Windows Client upgrader application is very easy to use...the toughest part is waiting for all of your site files to finish FTP'ing back up to your site. The only downside I've seen for CS 2008.5 is that it only ships with one theme, which is called Hawaii. I was initially underwhelmed by this theme, but after getting to know it a little better it's grown on me. Total time to get JK.com upgraded and customized was about 6 hours total, although I do have a few non-standard tweaks that I always have to re-implement for new CS releases.

I do plan on starting up my CS Tidbits post category again as well with some common tweaks, plus outlines of new features in CS 2008.5. I can say that my first reaction to this release is that performance has been improved quite a bit. Kudos to Telligent for a fantastic CS release!

One Semester Down, Six To Go

Jayson Knight — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 22:57:53 GMT

My career transformation is 1/7th complete, tack on 6 credit hours to my official transcript...unfortunately 6 hours is the max you can take during a summer session but it was certainly better than nothing. Classes went well, and I'm actually glad I decided to do a summer session since it allowed me to get back into the swing of things as well as get to know the UNCC campus. The real pain begins tomorrow when I start a 17 hour load for fall semester. I did not choose 17 hours by choice; in order for me to have the requisite 60 hours to enter UNC as a Junior next year I'll have to do 17 hours this semester and at least 16 next semester. The good news is that I'll get to take next summer off (or at least just do a light load in preparation for Chapel Hill).

Thankfully I also get to start taking classes in my major this semester as well. Even though I'm only 6 hours into it, I know in my heart of hearts I'm making the right decision. Some of my friends think I've lost my mind, but overall the reaction has been positive. I cannot remember the last time I was happier. I have been doing some web consulting on the side, and have launched a couple of new sites for some local businesses and artists, and will probably continue to to do so since it wasn't computers and coding that I left...just IT. But overall confidence is very high, and here's looking forward to a great fall semester.

So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish

Jayson Knight — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:38:48 GMT

I've been a software developer for almost 7 years now. To say I've had a good run at it would be an understatement (both financially and via life satisfaction)...I have no college degree, and learned most of my trade both on the job and in my spare time. Computers are one of the few fields where you can rise quickly through pure hard work and dedication without the requirement of a degree. With the proliferation of online communities and blogging, getting networked in to make even more of a name for yourself and over the years I've met some amazing people via blogging and communities. So why the title of this post?

I've decided to move on.

*pause for effect*

So what would possess someone with so much time and energy invested in his career to walk away from close to 6 figures a year, reasonable working hours, and a good working environment? The answer really isn't that simple actually and is the culmination of several different factors. And to be honest, I'm not exactly walking away from anything. Over the years, I've gained experience that can never be taken away, and computers will always be one of my main passions...there's no way I could have gotten to where I am today if they weren't. Everything I've learned will be easily transferable to my future endeavors. The short answer is that people change over time. What they want out of life changes, their goals and desires that they strive for. I've been in this business in some way shape or form since I was in my early twenties, and what I wanted out of life then is completely different than what I want now at age 30. Having a stable desk based job was great, but about 2 years ago I noticed myself getting restless, going in to work day after day, watching the months roll by...and unfortunately I started to grow discontent with both my career and the industry as a whole. Again, things change over time...what makes a person happy today may not necessarily make them happy 5 years from now.

So needless to say that after 2 years of more or less just going through the motions of the daily grind, I came to the incredibly hard decision that it's time for a change. Cube life just doesn't suit me anymore. Staring into a computer monitor for 9 hours a day has taken its toll, and after a lot of soul searching and talking to dozens (if not hundreds) of folks both in this business and otherwise the choice became pretty obvious: It was time to exit stage right more towards the top of my career rather than let my growing disinterest and restlessness start to jeopardize my future endeavors. So that's what I've done.

My relationship with my former employer has been severed and as of now I am out of the world of Corporate IT. I'm back in school fulltime working towards my B.A. Chemistry (which was my original major way back when I wanted to be a physician or a chemist, pre dotcom boom). I'll also be pursuing more of my creative interests as well, such as music and music production by taking classes related to those disciplines. I'm still young, and now is the time when there aren't other pressing obligations that would prohibit such a radical lifestyle change. The end goal as of now is either medical school, or post graduate work in Chemical Engineering. Outside of computers, chemistry and music were my biggest passions. The dotcom era steered me away from them...and while it was an amazing experience it is time to get back to my roots. That's not to say that I won't be doing any moonlighting...a complete severance might be too severe, but for now the main focus is school. If I bust my ass, I can have my B.A. in 2 years. I'll do a year here at the local university, and will then transfer to UNC to complete my B.A.

So how will this transition affect my blog, and any loyal readers I have left? That I don't know, but there will definitely be some changes in the direction of my writings. The lack of content over the past 2 years compared with previous time periods should be a pretty good indication of my growing discontent with the software industry. I'm sure I will still make technical posts from time to time as I still have several hobby projects I'm working on, but any content related to the business of software and Corporate IT will surely be few and far between, if at all. Seeing as school will be my number one priority, I'm sure content related to my Chemistry endeavors will begin once I start my major coursework. This will not become a student blog, but the focus from .Net and software development will surely change to more science and music. I realize I'll lose some readers in the process, but I also hope to start getting in touch with a new audience as well. Hell, maybe just stick around to keep tabs on my progress if you'd like. It promises to be an amazing journey, and knowing me, a very interesting one as well.

I will still be lurking around in areas such as Community Server, as well as reading most of your blogs in the little spare time I'll have going forward. I don't think I would have been half the developer that I was without having read your posts and gotten to know you over the past few years...I attribute much of my success to the circle of friends I've made through this blog and other communities. You guys know who you are, and you pushed me to be a better developer, and to give back whatever I could in the process. I'll be keeping up with you guys throughout this journey.

So that's it. Or is it? The only thing that is changing is my focus and where my efforts are directed. If I was able to accomplish what I did in the software industry, I have confidence in myself that my future endeavors should be equally as rewarding. I have had some amazing times in the software biz, and have learned more than I ever thought my tiny brain could handle. While cubicle life ultimately took its toll on me, I wouldn't trade any of it for anything else. Now at age 30 because of my years in the industry, I feel I'm better equipped for this new path than I ever could have been had I not pursued computers...I'll always be incredibly grateful for that.

School Starts on Monday

Jayson Knight — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 22:25:34 GMT

As of this coming Monday (7/7/2008) I am a college student once again. I am taking 6 hours worth of classes here at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2nd summer session.

I also have other huge news to write about, but everything isn't quite nailed down yet so I don't want to jump to any foregone conclusions only to perhaps have to retract them later on. More than likely, things are going to be taking a very new direction around here though. Stay tuned.

Western Digital VelociRaptor: How Fast Is Too Fast?

Jayson Knight — Sat, 31 May 2008 16:32:00 GMT

After several years of minimal upgrades, the highly acclaimed Western Digital Raptor has gotten a serious upgrade: Enter the WD VelociRaptor, which wasn't supposed to be released to the masses until mid June but is available now over at Newegg. I've been a subscriber to Jeff Atwood's line of thinking for a long time now...that hard drive speed is the single most important factor in the overall speed of a machine and therefore should not be skimped on. Buy the fastest drive you can afford as your main boot drive, and then just buy a larger/slower/cheaper drive to stuff all of your data in.

Regardless of what line of reasoning you subscribe to, there is simply no reason not to buy one of the new VelociRaptor drives if you can afford it. I got mine in the mail earlier this week and decided to run a simple benchmark using HD Tune on it versus my older SATA I 150 gigabyte Raptor. Most of the hardware sites are claiming about 35% better performance, however that's not what I'm seeing:

Old School Raptor (SATA I 150 gigs):

New School VelociRaptor (SATA II 300 gigs):

As should be pretty apparent, these numbers show a much better gain than 35%. I ran the tests several times to make sure I was hallucinating Of course real world usage is a completely different story, but the cold hard numbers don't lie...the new VelociRaptors are beating my older Raptor by more than 50% in each category. And yes, my machine definitely feels a lot faster now as well. Boot time is down by 15-20 seconds (well under a minute to desktop now), applications fly to life when double clicked, games load in about half the time. The most amazing thing about this drive is that they got all of this extra performance using 2.5" platters. The drive may look pretty beefy, but 70% of that surface area is actually just a heatsink with the drive itself situated in the middle. Of course it being so small means it's completely silent as well. I use sound dampening in my case (rubber grommets), but the older Raptor could reach aircraft carrier levels during I/O intensive operations.

Expensive? Yes. Bleeding edge? Certainly. The best upgrade for your machine for the money? Absolutely. If you've got 300 bucks laying around and want to see noticeable performance improvements in your machine, this is a no-brainer.

DrumSTRONG 2008: A Smashing Success -- Thank You Scott and Mason!

Jayson Knight — Tue, 06 May 2008 22:10:51 GMT

Three years ago, a friend of my family's teenage son was diagnosed with cancer, and was given fairly bleak chances of making it through the ordeal. It was a crushing blow to the family. For the full story, read the ESPN piece on Mason (he's the last story). Mason would go on to conquer the cancer inside his body, and has been cancer free for a couple of years now. Against all odds. And it was during this time that he reached out to one of my idols, Lance Armstrong...the 2 had a bit of dialogue during the ordeal, and would eventually meet in real life.

It was during one of his meetings with Lance that Mason came up with the idea for drumSTRONG, whose mission is simple: To beat the shit out of cancer, and raise awareness through drumming. Each year they've upped the ante just a little bit: The first year was 24 continuous hours of drumming, up to this year which was 26 straight hours. A secondary goal was to get into the Guinness World Record book for having the longest continuous group drumming event. I'm sure we succeeded on both fronts.

I personally committed to 10 hours of drumming over the 26 hour spread, and actually ended up doing more along the lines of 12 hours total. My hands are paying dearly this week, but that pain is outweighed by the pain that was lifted from me mentally during the event. I have posted several photos of the event in my photo gallery, and more photos/videos will be posted to the drumSTRONG site over the coming days.

I've been playing drums of some sort since I was barely walking, and have been doing formal hand percussion gatherings for almost 15 years. Unfortunately it is something I haven't made as much time for lately, but after this weekend I'm making it a personal goal to start rounding up some of the talent here in Charlotte for some formal jams. Given my background, this event was a no-brainer. In the end over 2,000 people showed up...there aren't any words that can describe what the event did for everyone who participated. It was without a doubt one of the most moving experiences of my life, and I cannot wait to do it for 27 hours next year. Thank you Mason for this amazing concept, and thank you Scott for having the tenacity to actually make it happen. You're both amazing people, and quite simply put the world needs more of you.

The image in this post is of me and my best friend 20 minutes before we hit the 26 hour mark. The skin was literally peeling off my hands at this point, but I felt no pain surprisingly. Actually in hindsight, it isn't surprising at all.

Keep. Drumming. Beat. Cancer.

Broke The Mountain Bike Out Of Storage

Jayson Knight — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 18:46:38 GMT

I used to mountain bike. A lot. For some inexplicable reason I stopped a few years ago when other priorities manifested themselves, but recently I decided to start up again. While I'm not horribly out of shape, I'm definitely not the rider I used to be...but I aim to change this soon as the legs start getting used to pedaling again. I never have been much of a weight lifting guy, but the muscle group I've gravitated towards working when I do lift has been legs, and that's also apparent by the sports I choose to do (cycling, skiing).

For any mountain bikers who read this blog, I ride a GT XCR 2000, although mine is similar to the one mentioned in that link in frame only; most of the parts have been upgraded to Shimano XT models, I have a minimalist style seat, and carbon stem/bars/seatpost...the bike tips the scales at about 27lbs and more upgrades for weight savings are planned. While it's an older bike, the system that GT invented, i-Drive (which stands for independent drive) is still hailed as an engineering marvel for full suspension bikes as it was one of the first designs to eliminate pedal bob and brake jacking without having to resort to unwieldy looking linkage systems which were heavy and complicated: The more moving parts a bike has, the higher the chance of failure on one of those parts. Overall it's a very fun bike to ride. See you guys on the trails!