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I’ve spent my professional career on several types of databases, from the basic Access database to Microsoft SQL.  My current job is my first interaction with Oracle, and I can say that it is a learning experience!

My first issue with Oracle had to do with installed references for .NET.  I had version 11g, and 10.1g installed… however I required 10.2 to be installed.    Now I will readily admit some full ignorance with some of this, but the bottom line is that I needed to uninstall 11g and 10.1.  After much stumbling around I finally got them uninstalled, but there were remnants left on the box that messed up any reinstallation.

After some searching I found a great web page that ran down the changes I needed to make on my system to start fresh.

[Referenced article in PDF form]

At my current employer, I am the round One interview.  I don’t negotiate or care about salary.  I just talk about .NET.  I have 20 standard questions I ask each and every person, then I throw in a few question specific to their resume. 

Now keep in mind these aren’t hard questions to answer.

What is the difference between session state and viewstate? 

What is the life cycle of an ASP.NET page? 

I don’t go into these interviews looking for a person to know every one of the answers, but there are a few that I consider critical.  I just want to measure their depth and breadth of knowledge of the .NET framework.  What I’ve come to realize is finding talent is hard.  So when I browsed to FoxNews.com and saw this article, I know exactly what they are talking about.  You’d think with unemployment hovering around 10% that talented people would be available.

Then when you do find somebody worth hiring, its not a done deal.  Due to the extremely tight market when you find a developer you want, you are battling with other companies.  Even meeting salary expectations isn’t enough, because of the market the employee can pick and choose which company they want to work for, with little risk of letting a good opportunity pass them by. 

Now just so this post isn’t one big rant I want to throw my thoughts out on a few aspects of this topic.

What does this mean for companies?

1. It means you need to be willing to pay top dollar.  This isn’t a market where you can negotiate down a persons salary.  If they say it is going to take 80K to get them on board, then you need to be prepared to pay 80K.

2. It means you better pay the employees you have.  I’m new to my job, and while money was far from the primary or only factor, it was a factor.  Companies need to pay the employees they don’t want to lose top dollar.  This, surprisingly, isn’t a market where a 5% raise guarantees an employee sticking around.

3. The cost of development has gone up.  The out-sourcing movement has had its affect on the market and there is no India to turn to to drive cost down.  Talented workers are expensive workers.

What can be done about it?

1. Training must be encouraged.  As the previous article stated in another way, you aren’t going to take the factory worker and plug them into these jobs.  People like me have been constantly learning for years to get to where we are.  They need to understand that just because they were a lead worker on their factory line, they will have to be the follower in their new line of work.

2. Government incentives.  I think this is a place where a focused tax benefit could come in handy.  Give companies a significant tax break for hiring entry level workers for these positions.  It cost money to train them and their newbie mistakes cost money.  Give companies a reason to hire relatively new people.

3. College for all.  Yep, the small government Republican just said that.  We need to find a way to get more people into college.  We can’t compete if we don’t have the skills to compete.

What does this mean for the worker?

1. Don’t be afraid to look around.  One of the big causes of the tight job market is that people are afraid to switch jobs.  I’ve never been one to play into this fear much.  I know that with some risk comes reward. 

2. Don’t be afraid to ask for more money.  Lets be real here when I say, they don’t have much of a choice in the matter.

3. Stay up to date on your skills.  This is why there is an allusion of age discrimination in the IT field.  People get comfortable in what they are doing and when technology moves on, they can’t find a job when they need one. 

With all of that being said, my employer is still looking to hire several .NET developers.  If you are interested contact me and let me know.  Going through me, does offer some incentive as I do get a referral bonus.  Not that I’d take it any easier on you in the phone interview, but it sure does make me like you more :-).

[Referenced article in PDF form]

I forget where I found this:

Ran across this post a while a go, figured I’d share.  It is 11 Tips for Visual Studio.  Take a moment and go over to Stephen Walther’s site for an explanation of them.  I really like number 1 and 4.  I already knew 6, 7, and 11.

Tip #1 – You don’t need to select a line to copy or delete it

Tip #2 – You can add a namespace automatically by pressing CTRL-.

Tip #3 – Never create properties by hand

Tip #4 – You can remove and sort unnecessary using statements

Tip #5 – Use CTRL-k+c to comment out code

Tip #6 – You can close all documents except the current one

Tip #7 – You can open a database by double-clicking the database file in App_Data

Tip #8 – You can copy a file or folder into a project by dragging and dropping

Tip #9 – Use CTRL-SPACE to perform statement completion

Tip #10 – Add new items by pressing CTRL-N or CTRL-SHIFT+A

Tip #11 – You don’t need to type file extensions when adding a file

For a while now there has been a program to tweak Windows XP.  It allows you to change a few hidden settings in the operating system. 

Now that I am on Vista, I went on to find the same program for Vista and found it.

So if you are on Windows, download the appropriate version and give it a once over.  It is lightweight and very powerful.

Ultimate Windows Tweaker for Vista

Tweak UI for XP (its along the right column)

Chris Blankenship has been on a crusade lately about abusive spiders.  I was interested in some of the fixes he was applying to it, but a few weeks ago I got an email from him about a solution he was developing, ‘GateKeeper’.  I reviewed the code and it all looked good, but he wasn’t ready yet to fully release it into the wild.

It finally got to that point and I installed it on my two DotNetBlogEngine.net blogs. So far I have been really impressed with it.  I’m really interested to see how it affects my overall traffic.  Right now I have four blocked user agents:

baiduspider, larbin, sogou, sosospider.  All of those came from Chris’s recommendation.  Then I immediately got a Slurp violation, though I am going to give them one more failure before I block them.  Chris also has MSN blocked.  A lot of my traffic comes from Live Search, so I’m a little scared to do that.

I did fall on one issue with the solution though.  When I installed it, I had it set to automatically block violators.  Unknown to Chris and I is that Google caches the robots.txt file!  So since they didn’t get my new robots.txt file, they were blocked!  So it is recommended to not turn on the automatic blocking for at least a few days.

Related post from Chris’s site:
The Continued Struggle With Spiders
To catch a spider…
Abusive Web Crawlers
Blocking Bad UserAgents and IP Addresses
The elusive Robots.txt file

So I have this domain name for a reason.  I'm a bit OCD in nature, and one of those quirks is that I want my task bar to not be cluttered.  Just the things I want to see right now.

So I went searching for an application that would minimize things to the system tray (you know that thing by the clock).

I found an application called TrayIt!  It works just as you would expect, you hold the shift key and hit the minimize and it goes to the system tray. 

Not much more to it than that.  I tried several minimizer programs, and this one is by far the best.

Well any geek can certainly relate to being the guy that people call when things go south on their computer.

A few years back I came across a post on LifeHacker that fits the bill perfectly. 

I could go on and on about how to do this, but the audience for this blog is fairly technical so I'm going to just link you to the article and let you figure it out.  If you need help, don't hesitate to ask.

How to Reverse VNC.

In case that page gets deleted, you can see my printout of that page here.

How do you help your relatives?

Though when researching this post, I found this alternative (and possibly better) fix.

If you own a domain you have heard of this company.  Domain Registry of America.  The story for me started about 9 months ago.  A client of mine was having issues with their .org of their domain name.  We got it registered and transferred.  Then I started looking for the history behind the .com address.  Found out that an office worker had received the spam like letter from Domain Registry of America and they paid their exorbitant $35 renewal fee.  So now Domain Registry of America was the registrar of record for their .com domain. 

I thought it wasn’t much of a big deal and we’d just initiate a transfer to GoDaddy.  Contacted Domain Registry of America only to find out they put a 120 day hold on any new domains.  You can’t transfer them within that 120 period.  Lets not forget that NO OTHER REPUTABLE company puts such a limit on domains.  So after many frustrating emails on the subject, I figured I’d just wait them out.

Now it came time to initiate a transfer from them to GoDaddy.  I went to GoDaddy and filled out the information to see that they had the technical contact email as privacy@droa.com.  So I logged back into Domain Registry of America’s admin page to verify (again) my contact information, only to see a not so noticeable check box to make this happen.  I turn that option off and reinitiate the transfer.

Comes down to where I need the “EPP Key” to transfer the domain.  So I call up their customer service and give them my domain.  The customer service rep then goes to ask me what my password is… IE THEY HAVE THE PASSWORDS NOT ONLY IN THE CLEAR BUT EASILY ACCESSED!!! So they then send me the code via email and their email was laughable:

The first issue here is that they don’t have a clue who my registrar is at this point, and it certainly isn’t Melbourne IT, LTD. D/B/A Internet Names Worldwide.  So their email is just a continuing of the scam.  I’m stunned that the government hasn’t stepped in to deal with this scam yet.

So the moral of the story?  Send an email now, yes NOW, to all of your clients warning them that if they get any mailings from any company (but ESPECIALLY DROA) to contact you for clarification.

I run two blogs, and if you've ever run a blog you know that one of the biggest headaches is using the built in HTML editor to make a post. 

In comes probably the best software Microsoft has ever released, Windows Live Writer.  gives you advanced controls so you can make a nice looking blog post with ease.  It works with many blog platforms, including the one this blog is built on (DotNetBlogEngine.Net).

I am actually posting this with their new version, Windows Live Writer 2009 – Release Candidate, but there is at least one issue with DotNetBlogEngine.net.  I have submitted the bug to both the WLW team and the DNBE team.  However their old version is perfectly functional, so when you visit the site go to the right side bar and download the stable version, or be ready to uninstall their current version in favor of their stable version. I know a lot of techies are weary of Microsoft Products, but trust me on this one... its an incredible piece of software and worth the risk.