Sickness Begins

Started to get sick. Happened once I sat down in the other room.

VS Studio Add-in: Unleash It

An interesting add-in for VS.NET: Unleash It. Main feature allows you to deploy your projects to an ftp-site. I had rolled my own several months ago but it was piecing together some old Novell code and some custom stuff. This seems a little cleaner.

Word/XML & Shuffling Petit-P

Most of the day was spent investigating Microsoft Word's ability to handle XML documents and how to protect them [XML Nodes] from being deleted by the user. There's some interesting stuff [t]here.

Some of the day shuffling Petit-P around to Canadian Tire and then a Church where he was going to meet a friend and then later to a 'party'.

DVD: Incredibles & Some Food and...

Petit-P, Abdol(sp) and Yanick came over for a couple hours from 5:30pm ->8:30pm. Petit-p did an accident on the carpet [see other entry for details]. A nice 'short' gathering.

Watched the DVD, "The Incredibles". Didn't finish it.

Problems to come

Petit-P came over and spilled some stuff on the carpet. What's the problem. Well after problems with Petit-P breaking my computer over a month ago, and this carpet being from his Mother. Will she believe that it was him? Probably not.

IT People

I believe that technology should be dead simply. Unfortunately the industry has a way of promoting complexity. It's always the cool thing to know every command-line switch for this or that. But I always think of my Parents and would they know to do this and/or how to do it? No. And the more importantly should they have to know. Computers must become an appliance.
I was recently talking to an "IT" person and he disagreed with this statement. He was very adament that if you don't want to learn everything about a computer then you shouldn't buy one. I totally disagree. Though you are always better off learning about the things you use: A) There's only so much time and B) Somethings you just don't want to know. Do I need to know everything about my TV to use it? No. Just turn it on. That's how simple a computer should be. Though it's a multipurpose device maybe one can configure it in such a way that it only does the specified tasks. "Lock" it down to only perform tasks x,y,z. Having explorered this recently this doesn't seem to be that easy with Windows either. More details to come.

CodeRush for Visual Studio

Installed CodeRush for Visual Studio today. I'll post how my opinion later.

New Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 CTPs

The latest CTP of Visual Studio (Feb Release) is now available.

StarWars III: Poster

The latest StarWars posters is now available. It's a flash back to the old style, whcih I like. It's still not as exciting as it use to be, but much better then more recent posters.

Outlook 2003 - Corrupted outcmd.dat file

Today when I started up Outlook 2003 I noticed my custom toolbars w/macros were gone. These are essential for me so I needed to fix them. After looking around the net and not finding anything I went about one by one removing files from the:

{boot drive}:\Documents and Settings\{local user}\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
I quickly hit upon the problem file, "outcmd.dat". Move this out restart Outlook everythings fine.

Suggestion: Microsoft please provide a method to backup EVERYTHING involved with Outlook including toolbar settings, account settings and email, etc.

Some interesting Outlook sites:
http://www.outlookcode.com/

***NOTE: I found after fixing the problem that Sue Mosher documented that sometimes that this file does become corrupted [thread from 2003].

REL126 & DVD: The Bourne Supremacy

Got back my REL126 mid-term. 75%.

Watched the DVD, "The Bourne Supremacy". Since I wasn't paying attention I'll have to watch it again.

CSC303 - MidTerm

Wrote the CSC303 MidTerm today. After last night's stomach problem writing the exam was a little hard. The exam certainly covered all the material.

Stomach problems

Periodically I get this massive stomach problem. It's more pain then you can ever believe. It feels like a balloon in your stomach that starts in the middle, moves to the front and then to your back. It's guaranteed pain for 4-5 hours. This time I tried to fight it with some medication. Ironically this would heed the pain but an uncomfortable'ness would be with me for 48+ hours.

RateMyProfessors.ca - Teacher Reviews and Ratings

Here's a cool concept: RateMyProfessors.ca - Teacher Reviews and Ratings

J# Installation Issues

Well today I learned that the Supplemental UI Library for Visual J# (aka: Swing) will not install if you have the NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package Beta 1 installed. However easy work-around. Uninstall the Beta FrameWork, install the UI Library and then re-install the FrameWork. It's working now :-)

General Information on the SUILFVJ.