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Easy taxes for Ontario Canada (Sunday, April 13, 2008)
I used this program to do my taxes (and my wife's). Once done using the program, it will give you a .tax file which you can use to file your taxes online. You simply upload the .tax file to the government's online site here.

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Solution Environment Variables for Visual Studio (Saturday, April 05, 2008)
I found a VS plug-in that allows you to define solution level build environment variables. This is something I've been wishing Visual Studio had built in for several years now. One of the reasons that it's so important is that you can easily define include directories for all of your projects while keeping them in sync. This is important when administering multiple build configurations.

Typically a simple project only has 2 configs (Debug, and Release) so the problem is not that apparent. But a production level product has at least (Release + Debug) * (x64 + x86 + ia64) = 6 configurations that you have to try and keep in sync. You can download the Solution Build Environment plug-in: here. Also it is important to patch Visual Studio because they have a bug in VS2005 SP1 where plug-ins don't work if you run via command line. You can download this fix here

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Why is math important? (Sunday, March 30, 2008)
A quota from Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of the C++ programming language:
"I think of math as a splendid way to learn to think straight. Exactly what math to learn and exactly where what kinds of math can be applied is secondary to me."

I've always said that about math, and I agree with it 100%.

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Microsoft-Yahoo (Sunday, February 03, 2008)
Everyone states that putting 2 companies together who are not leading will not take over the leader Google.

This is true, but only for search. Yahoo is a great company with a huge community that reaches much further than search. In many ways Yahoo beats Google, just not in search.

Most advertising money is spent on search. Even if Microsoft-Yahoo doesn't have the majority share of search, it doesn't matter. Aggregating both portals into the same advertising service, will simplify advertiser's management of their budget. It will also be a bigger market share, and so people will take more interest in advertising on Microsoft-Yahoo.

There exists a subset of users who advertise with Microsoft but not Yahoo. Likewise, there exists a subset of users who advertise with Yahoo, but not Microsoft. Putting Microsoft-Yahoo together will expand on both of these subsets of people, by broadening their advertising base.

It is a great move by Microsoft in my opinion. That is, just as long as they can properly integrate the parts of the company that should be integrated. For now, phase 1, this should only be the advertising portal.

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Windsor Social sucks (Thursday, August 23, 2007)
Windsor Social, and Canada Social are horrible.

What ever you do, do not submit your email to them. After several phone calls, they assured me that my email would be removed, but it never has.

They continue to send unwanted SPAM. Companies like this should be pelted with rocks.

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Married (Monday, August 06, 2007)
I got married yesterday to Shannon. Hurray :)

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Funny simpsons quote (Saturday, July 28, 2007)
Homer: "How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?"

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7 part interview with Steve and Bill (Sunday, June 03, 2007)
7 part interview with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates:
http://d5.allthingsd.com/20070530/video-steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-prologue/

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Parallels with MacBookPro (MBP) (Tuesday, May 29, 2007)
I have multiple Macs and PCs. I like to use the Macs more, but I do most of my development in windows. I tried using parallels at first, but it turned out to be slow for several apps.

I've been using parallels with my MBP for a few months now. My MBP had 2GB of RAM and is a 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. Parallels always made OS X slow, and running applications like Visual Studio was painfully slow.

I decided to replace one of my 1GB sticks of RAM with a 2GB stick of RAM to reach the maximum available 3GB of RAM in my MBP. Apprently if you try to use two 2GB sticks of RAM, then there could be memory address overlap and problems can arrive.

What did I find? The performance difference after installing the extra 1GB of RAM is amazing. Windows runs extremely fast in parallels, and there are no delays at all. I have parallels configured to use 16MB video and 1500MB of RAM. It runs better than my best PC. Before I had parallels configured to use 1GB of RAM.

I even keep parallels open during my normal work day while in OS X just for convinience's sake. This is something I wouldn't dream of doing with my old configuration.

In conclusion, if you're going to buy a MBP and you are going to use parallels. Make sure you select the 3GB RAM maximum. It makes all the difference in the world.

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Why do file copy dialogs suck so much? (Monday, May 28, 2007)
In all operating systems that I've seen the file copy dialog sucks. Why is this simple dialog that is used by everyone everyday so hard to come up with a good design?

Mac is better than all versions of windows, but it still isn't ideal. Windows fails to give you a do not replace apply to all option.

It would be nice to see a list of some sort detailing all of the status' of each file that was copied. It would be even nicer to be able to select this list and copy it into the clipboard.

The main problem with windows is if a single file fails to copy, the entire copy operation is aborted.

I could go on with several more points, but it just comes down to the developers lack of caring for the operating systems they develop.

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Apple hardware hype advantage (Wednesday, April 04, 2007)
Apple not licensing its OS to other hardware vendors, gives Apple a big advantage overall.

Anytime there is any type of hardware upgrade, Apple gets the credit (and traffic/hits/sales). When a new processor gets released by Intel (for example today's 8-core release), Microsoft will not get any new traffic from it; However, Apple will get millions of unique hits (once they release it) because of the hardware release.

The other good part, is that Apple can guarantee that anyone that has an Apple, has a good reliable, fast, non-sluggish experience. With Microsoft, they can't guarantee this since Windows runs on any PC hardware which is not sold by Microsoft.

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Windows vista annoyance (Wednesday, April 04, 2007)
Every version of windows allowed each application to stop the computer from entering sleep mode.

This is an important function and is required by several applications (for example backup software). This ability was removed in Windows Vista. I.e. Windows Vista (without manual tweaking of a group policy) does not allow an application to veto sleep mode.

This is just another reason why Windows Vista sucks.

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Why I don't like the Microsoft Internet Explorer team... (Wednesday, January 24, 2007)
It took Microsoft 5 years to finally release version 7 of IE.

Internet Explorer 7 has no original ideas and it is largely just copying Firefox and Opera's features. It is an improvement from version 6.0, but I'm largely disappointed overall.

You would think that a company like Microsoft would have support for emerging standards like SVG. SVG is the acronym for Scalable Vector Graphics. I remember reading the SVG recommendation which was created by the W3C almost 6 years ago. I knew that although browsers didn't have built in support for SVG, that eventually they would.

Today I see firefox and others with built in support. Microsoft decided that this extremely important technology should not be included.

Had IE7 included SVG support, the internet would be a different, better place. Microsoft has ruined that, and as usual they have shown us just how little they care bout web standards.

Does your browser support SVG?
If you can't see this than go get firefox here

Note that you can get SVG plug-ins from Corel Corporation and Adobe, but IE should have included built in support for it. Maybe adobe paid them off so that SVG wouldn't be a competitor to Flash and Microsoft's newer crappier similar product to flash.

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Writing good and easy to understand emails (Thursday, January 11, 2007)
The most important rule to writing great easy to understand emails, is simply that: Writing is not a linear process.

Read the email over, add to your email, spend time on your email, cut your email up into sections.

Replace words like "it" with the object that you are talking about. Your readers will probably have no clue what you're referring to in your email.

Reading is a linear process. Writing is not. It's really that simple.

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C++ inconsistency (Sunday, December 17, 2006)
You can't do forward declarations in C++ (with Microsoft's compiler anyway) across namespaces. I can't think of any reason why this wouldn't be available. And there's no way around it.

In my code I needed to use a forward declaration, otherwise a major restructuring would be needed. I tried and you can't make forward declarations across of namespaces :(. I had to change the names of the class I was using to be more unique and remove the namespace.

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A story of a 17 inch MacBook Pro (Monday, December 11, 2006)
I wanted a high performance laptop that could run both Mac OSX and Windows. I ordered the 17 inch MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz 2GB RAM Dual Core laptop. This post will discuss my experience with the performance of the laptop, my disassembly of the laptop, my experience with apple phone support, my visit to the apple store, my experience with replacement parts and my overall impressions of the MacBook Pro.

2 weeks ago I received my MacBook Pro directly from apple.com. I took it out of the great looking box and tried to turn it on, but there was no response. I figured the battery was dead, so i plugged the laptop to the wall and pressed the power button. Again no response, so I held down the power button, I noticed that the power button was loose.

Eventually I got the computer to turn on. After working for a couple hours I figured the battery would be charged enough. The power plug is magnetic so I really wanted to try popping it out as I've seen so many times in their commercials. Once I pulled the plug, the laptop turned off right away. I plugged it back in, turned it on again and watched it boot back into OSX. I checked the power management settings and everything was OK. At this point I figured I was doing something wrong.

Every MacBook Pro battery has a little button and 5 LEDs next to it. You press the button to see how charged your battery is. It's a very nice feature that allows you to see how much battery power you have before turning on your laptop. The next day, I noticed that my battery was fully charged. I again pulled the plug and realized that it turned off the computer. I figured I had a faulty battery and looked on the net for anyone with a similar problem. I found a couple forums that described the issue. From this forum I found the apple battery exchange program, but noticed that my serial number wasn't in their list of acceptable serial numbers for an exchange.

I called support and found the customer support rep to be very helpful. They had me try 5 or 6 different things and then they put me on hold as they called a manager. A couple minutes later the support tech was back and told me that I did indeed have a faulty battery. He asked me if I had purchased the Apple One Care when I purchased my laptop. I informed him that I did. He asked for my credit card number in case I didn't return the faulty battery after the replacement battery arrived. I happily provided it.

There are a couple important parts of the support call that I left out.

The Apple One Care didn't arrive at my house yet, and they didn't have a problem helping me.
The laptop wasn't in my name, my business partner ordered the laptop online.

They informed me that my battery would be at my house in 5-7 business days. I asked them if they could ship it express because I had a trip to San Francisco in a few days. He said that it was not possible for replacement parts even if I were to pay for the extra shipping cost. On the second business day my replacement battery arrived. I was very happy because it arrived within a couple days of my trip.

The replacement battery fixed my problem. But another problem started to occur. The loose power button that I mentioned at the start of this posting started to move around and it became harder and harder to turn on the laptop. I didn't have time to deal with it yet so I went on the trip to San Fra