Learning LINQ

Well last evening was the season opener of CMAP's "Hands On" group, a session designed to take an interesting IT Development topic and explore it as a group. Christopher Steen is heading up the effort and had located some exercises designed to acquaint us with LINQ, and we had a pretty good turnout down at TEK Systems by BWI airport.

LINQ, which stands for Language Integrated Query, is one of those technologies that at first you may tend to place on the "down the road" list since it requires the .NET 3.5 framework and (I believe) C# 3.0 at a minimum. And for a lot of developers we are just now getting that platform go ahead from our workplaces. However, after last evening's review I am definitely looking to take this off of my roundtuit list and adding it to the ASAP list! A big plus is the ease with which it allows you to work with your objects, lists, and XML documents in addition to database objects. It allows you to retrieve the data in many ways, readily applying filters and sorting. It simply is one of those technologies that comes along and you get a nerd high because it's so cool!

And if that were not enough there is also a great (free!) tool to help demonstrate LINQ examples. LINQPad by Joseph Albahari is a compact utility that allows you to explore (and execute) sample LINQ syntax against his sample database or one of your own choosing. And what better way to learn a new language syntax than by examples?

If the next Hands On meeting is anything like this it's not going to be long before it'll be SRO at these gatherings!

Dude! You're gettin' a Dud!

Ever wonder where the "Dell Dude" went? I suspect he's on the factory assembly line as evidenced by my sister & brother-in-law's recent experience with Dell.

Flashback to March of this year. My nephew orders a new Dell laptop for his mom and dad, knowing the convenience that a laptop and wireless connection can afford. I happened to be there when it arrived and so, being the family "tech" guy, offered to help get things up and running. One small problem though - it was dead as a doornail right out of the box.

Should'a taken that as a bad sign right there. But being the optimists and having a reasonably good experience in contacting them (not a lot of waiting or run around) the decision was made to ship it back for a replacement.

Fast-forward to October. The Dell goes dead again, refusing to boot up. Calls ensue and a local technician comes by to render a verdict that it's a goner - the motherboard is kaput. At this point my brother-in-law contacts Dell looking for a replacement - as in a new laptop. And considering it didn't quite go six months I think he's got a pretty strong argument - after all he's now faced with the aggravation of having lost whatever content was on the laptop plus being without one again for a period of time. However, Dell felt that things would be just fine with a refurbished laptop and proceeded to quote chapter and verse from their fine print.

You know, if you're thinking of buying a Dell as a holiday gift I'd suggest that instead of contacting the company simply go online to one of the "dented and scratched" retailers and pick one up there. At least that way you'll end up with a refurbished computer that you didn't pay full retail price for...

Cleaning the Studio

If you use Visual Studio you know the "Start" page has a listing of your most recently accessed projects/solutions. While it's not a major issue I find at times that I'd like to remove some of these items. For example, if I've been creating some scratch type projects to try out some ideas, or if I created a solution and added in several existing projects as part of the solution, then you end up with a ton of clutter making the MRU list a little less effective.

While it's possible to manipulate the registry to adjust what appears in the list, there is a sweet piece of free code by Bobby DeRosa that is an add-in to VS 2005/2008 that makes this a breeze. You get a "Clear Recent Projects" item from the File menu in VS, which provides a simple interface listing the MRU objects with checkboxes adjacent to them. You simply check the ones you want remove and click the Clear button and - viola! - your list now contains only what you want!

Some Sacrifices

So did you see the second debate last evening? Were you able to lip-synch the responses almost as well as being at a showing of Rocky Horror? But had less fun?

The questions were from the audience and Internet, and one in particular caught my attention. In essence it was along the lines of what sort of sacrifices do you think will be necessary from the American people given our current economic crisis. We got well scripted responses from both candidates, but I think there was a missed opportunity to really speak directly and honestly about some changes in behavior that we have to make. Like...

• You'll need to start saving and stop living on credit. That means working on getting comfortable with delayed gratification.
• You'll need to take education seriously. If you're a student you'll need to study; if you're a parent you'll need to be involved, not autopilot; and if you're a teacher you're going to need to be comfortable with competiton.
• You'll need to start being a wise consumer of health care services and taking care of yourself.
• If you don't speak English you need to learn
• And most of all, you have to start to demand more of your elected representatives - civility, statesmanship, and integrity

Silverlight Persistence

No, this post isn't about creating objects and saving their state. What I'm curious about is whether anyone else is tired of swatting down that ubiquitous MS pop-up letting you know that you can download Silverlight. I know, I know - if having to dismiss that little pop-up a couple of times a day is my worse problem then I've truly had a great day.

It's just that they're getting as annoying as Verizon FIOS sales pitches - every time I turn around I get this solicitation. Maybe I don't want it because I'm on my company laptop and it's against policy to download untested software (even from MicroSoft). Maybe my hard drive is already bloated with .NET versions 1, 1.1, 2.0, and 3.5 and I don't want to chew up the disk space. Whatever my rational please accept it - stop the "push" delivery method.

Com'on MS - if I want Silverlight I know where to download it!

Weight Watchers Alabama Style

Have you heard about this? The state of Alabama has decided that in 2010 all of its employees will have to pay an additional $600 per year towards their healthcare premiums. Well, actually, it's only their fat employees that will have to cough up the money. That's right - they'll apparently be having a good ol' fashion Weight Watchers style weigh in right there at the state office building to make sure your BMI is acceptable. Nothing like a little financial incentive coupled with public embarrassment to get folks to drop those pounds.

If you don't know me I'll say in the interest of full disclosure that I'm not svelte. I've battled weight all my life and have found my greatest successes at Weight Watchers. Yet it's not empathy for these state workers that angers me about this new policy but rather the clear path that we're going to head down under the pretense of controlling health care costs. Once again we're on a slippery slope here. How about $750 annually if you smoke (we can draw blood to check up on you)? Maybe a grand if you have to be treated for a venereal disease since that implies you have unprotected sex (we'll just throw up some curtains around that scale).

The intent of motivating people to adopt a healthy life style is laudable but misguided in this instance. You do not need (want) a government entity trying to enforce this. It seems to me that what we really need is to put the patient back in charge of their healthcare. Insurance has insulated patients from the need to be good consumers, and that is a bad thing. Rather than the government or business trying to formulate financial penalties for imprudent behavior it seems that somehow we have to return to patients being consumers and reaping the benefits (or detriments) of their decisions.

A Wet Mars

The NASA scientists working with the Phoenix lander have made a significant announcement today in confirming that ice is just under the surface at Mars' polar regions. The photo above shows a white area that is clearly changing over four days. Another section of the photo shows several pebbles disappearing - a sign interpreted as melting ice.

This is exciting for a couple of reasons. First is that it raises the prospects of finding life on Mars. Not the Hollywood LGM but something on a microscopic level seems more plausible now that we have found water (especially considering how quickly and pervasive it appears to be at the Phoenix touchdown site).

Second, it improves the odds of eventually having human explorers there. If water is present then an expedition team can use that as a resource (it is a big benefit not having to take water with you). It sparks the imagination of what humanity might achieve later in this century towards creating an outpost.

Of course it's a big question whether the U.S. will be spearheading any such effort. China at this point seems far more focused on accessing space and potentially controlling it, as well as having the financial resources to fund it. But no matter who arrives there one thing is for sure - this discovery will serve as a significant cornerstone on that day.

Be Careful What You Wish For

It's a pretty fair statement to say that I've had an above average familiarity with American healthcare. Worked my way through school as a pulmonary technician at a local hospital, 20+ years a dentist, abstracting hospital charts for HICFA, working for BC/BS of Maryland (CareFirst), helping to create electronic document management for another major mid-Atlantic insurer, and not least being married to Deb whose been a nurse for 20+ years. I'm no expert by any means but I certainly have some experience compared to the average person.

Like just about everyone else I'm quite concerned about our American healthcare system. It is indeed suffering, but the simplistic rhetoric that I'm hearing in this election year is even more troublesome. This is a complex problem that will require reform in many arenas if there is to be any hope in not only maintaining the best health care delivery system but also improving it. Rather than creating the mother of all blog posts I'm going to try to create a series of posts, each addressing some facet of the solution or potential pitfall.

My first comment is one of great caution allowing government, especially at a federal level, to assume the role of gatekeeper. History shows us that we should expect a system that is bureaucratic and authoritarian - two attributes you do not want when you're seeking medical treatment. Many folks rail that we are backwards because we do not have a system of National Healthcare such as England. Yet look at what we see being reported from across the pond - cancer patients threatened with treatment termination should they attempt to acquire an additional anti-cancer drug which they're willing to pay for on their own. It is a classic and expected outcome of a bureaucracy attempting to apply rules. We'd fare no better - and in fact, we already do similar enforcement in Medicare where a physician and patient may not engage in any private contract or else the doctor will be barred from participating in Medicare for two years as a penalty.

So, tenet #1: Keep the gatekeeper keys to your medical care out of the hands of the government

Adieu VJC

We've been waiting, hoping against hope that they'd change their minds, but now they've gone and done it. This week Villa Julie College became a university and with it abandoned their name in favor of the insipid "Stevenson University".

"We" is my family - which includes three VJC students/alumni - as well as lots of other students, alumni, and parents. We supported the institution obtaining university status, but this goofy idea that somehow the name was hurting them because it was feminine - what a bunch of nonsense! If ever there was a solution in search of a problem dreamt up by some high-priced consultants justifying their services, this is it! You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what attracts students to enroll at a college. Do you offer a degree in what interests me? Do you have a solid academic program that will enable me to succeed upon graduation or in my graduate studies? Are the facilities modern? And yes, how's the campus social life? The name of the place is pretty far down the list.

Villa Julie had steadily risen in recognition over the last decade, focusing on a solid education in a small setting with faculty that really cared about their students. The US News & World Report rankings had them 13th for Northern schools offering a baccalaureate. Other online ratings showed an above average opinion of the school. Reputation of graduates in the business community was also increasing thanks to the adherence to a mission statement embodied by their "design your career" motto. And they certainly did not have a problem attracting applicants.

But that's all history now. My diploma, my alumni vanity license plates, my alumni' decal, my VJC tumblers, etc., etc., - all are rendered quaint anachronisms thanks to president Manning. Time will tell just where the university is going in this rush to become something else. The only thing I can do is shake my head and wonder why the school was so uncomfortable in its own skin, while at the same time so many of us who attended it grew to love it and were immensely proud of it- feminine name and all.

Pay to Play

Last week I caught a story about Chicago Little League running afoul of Major League Baseball for using the team names/logos for their kids. The story implied that MLB would only allow them to use the copyrighted material with appropriate fees. At first this makes me angry - for crying out loud, these young boys (and girls) will grow up to fill those stands that help pay those obscene player salaries. How can you possibly be so greedy (and short-sighted) to do this?

But then I read a little bit more - specifically an article by Jim Litke. While it still seems pretty crass I have to admit that the real villain here is probably more the uniform supplier which is trying to skate by the licensing fees for using the MLB logos. You really can not blame the league for protecting their copyright, even if it is being used for a good cause. And as Litke points out in his article, the league does support youth baseball to the tune of 30 million dollars a year.

Despite that logical reasoning it still feels ugly in your gut - sorta like when Disney sues a day-care mom for having painted Mickey Mouse in the play room without paying royalties. Yeah, they're right - but it somehow seems awfully petty.

Ernistine's Revenge

If you're more of a baby boomer than a Gen XYZ you may remember the lady pictured here - "Ernestine the Operator" played by Lily Tomlin. Her short skits lampooning the monopolistic phone company of the 1970's were hilarious - in part because they resonated with viewers who had been frustrated getting decent customer service. With the breakup of ATT Ernestine got a pink slip as - theoretically - competition among the baby Bells would deliver an attitude adjustment towards customers if they had a choice.

But I'm beginning to think that Ernestine is alive and well at ATT/Cingular, and is just having a blast dissing all the cell phone customers. Case in point - about four months ago Deb's phone went on the fritz so she went in and picked out a new one. There was, as usual, a rebate that you could have if you extended the contract. And the representative actually cut out the barcode, filled out the form, and dropped it into an envelope for us to mail. So imagine our surprise in about four weeks when we get a note saying that they're sorry but no rebate because there was no barcode enclosed. How do you prove it was in there? Guess next time we need to photocopy it before sending it off.

Then the bills start coming. Aren't cell bills fun? It is positively painful to try to assess one for why your bill has jumped by $20, especially if you have 3 phones on the account like we do. After wading through comparisons I finally figured out that they had increased the "family plan" base rate - a facet of extending our contract that the saleswoman conveniently omitted. But then looking further there's also a "multi-media" charge for this new phone - again, a feature not asked for (Deb is not about to be sending & receiving pictures with her friends). So Monday I'll be at the ATT store dealing with the latest incarnation of Ernestine. I'd switch companies but somehow it always seems that right as we're near the end of the contract somebody's phone gives out - and besides, would it really be any better over at Verizon? Nahhh....

If That's True, Why Bother?

So I'm reading the Examiner today and see the story about the annual crack down on drivers not wearing seat belts. Knowing me you might assume that this blog will be a commentary on how a law that was sold to voters as a "you'll only get a ticket if you're stopped for some other infraction" has morphed into what it's become today - but you'd be wrong! No, what has my ire is the opening line of the article, "In Maryland, 52 percent of drivers killed at night last year failed to wear sear belts."

This is supposed to be a compelling statistic that makes the case for wearing a seat belt - that nearly just as many people wearing their seatbelt are killed as those who blithely disregard the law? Forgive me, but in the words of Dick Cheney, "So?"

Does anyone read these articles? I know we're not talking about an article for a peer reviewed journal but my rant today is that the article is really nothing but a press release and probably should have been paid for as advertising (wait - maybe it was....). The article then goes on to state that seat belts could have saved an estimated 180 lives, but then I'm wondering if we could also say that 170 lives could have been saved if people didn't wear them.

What's missing here of course is information on the percentage of people that routinely wear seatbelts. If the article had stated something along the lines of "while it's estimated that only 10% of drivers fail to buckle up they accounted for over half of the nighttime fatalities last year", then you have compelling statistics for buckling up. So while pouring resources into this enforcement campaign is not a great ROI in my opinion, what troubles me more is the lack of critical writing (which probably comes about from a lack of critical thinking).

For the record:

• I wear my seatbelt religiously
• I make all human passengers wear their seatbelt

The Real Climate Crisis

We went to see Ben Stein's movie Expelled over the weekend. The film is basically a documentary that explores how academic circles have reacted to the idea of Intelligent Design (ID). For those who are not familiar with it ID basically says that certain features of the universe and life are better explained by an intelligent agent than an undirected process. If you consider the ever unfolding complexity of cells and the second law of thermodynamics (things naturally become more chaotic in the absence of an external force) it certainly seems a rational hypothesis that something intelligent (God, Zeus, Martians) had a hand in setting up life.

It is natural and appropriate that educators and academia guard against bogus science that has a religious agenda. But Expelled exposes that scientists who desire to explore the validity of ID are meeting a firestorm of PC that is costing them credibility and in some cases their jobs. It seems that ID is being viewed as an attempt to bring Creationism into the classroom. While an instructor with a creationist agenda could possibly use ID to promote it, that should not be reason to brand anyone researching the topic as a religious zealot to be ostracized. In short, scientists should be able to explore the theory and publish their findings for peer review in an environment that is free of reprisal. That is the heart of science - making observations and determining how well a theory predicts them.

Of course ID is not the only arena that is suffering from this stifling of scientific discussion. Our current study of global climate changes is a critical point in case. Climate science, like cell biology, is an incredibly complex field in which our understanding is far from perfect.

If you get the chance I'd recommend that you see Expelled. We need to have an open academic climate where scientists can present their findings for review so that, through debate and review, we can hopefully arrive at the best decision. PC has no value in science.

Saturn Refined

For some time now, perhaps a decade or more, the Internet/PC revolution has been doing some amazing things for amateur astronomers like myself. One of the biggest advances has been in the ability to take a video image of a planet and then refine that into a picture of surprising quality. The rational is that the video is grabbing images at the rate of about 30 per second, so over the period of a couple of minutes you've taken thousands of images. Of these, some are taken during moments of split-second steady seeing, those sort of moments that the observer is trained to take a mental snapshot to record those fleeting details. From there running the images through a software program allows you to align the images and retain only the most clear, stacking them into a final result that certainly seems greater than the sum of its parts!

At this point I am pretty much a hack, having purchased a simple B&W surveillance camera and aligning it behind the eyepiece of my venerable 6" Criterion reflector telescope. What has been really motivating is the results (above) from the new release of the software RegiStax. I have not been out to take images in a couple of years, partly because the results were "OK" but hardly special, and partly because it does involve some effort to get everything out and set up. The image above (a single frame on the left, final result on the right) comes from an AVI I created back in November 2003 when Saturn's rings were pretty open (they're closing up now). I never even came close to approaching this sort of detail in any of my conventional (film) astrophotography off and on over thirty years. Not only is the result very pleasing - readily showing the rings' shadow play and the gap between the A ring and B ring - but to think that it's data that's five years old! How cool is that - simply keeping the data on CD or DVD disks will allow me later to tease out images, even when my days of lugging around telescope, video camera, and tracking mount are behind me.

OK, so now I am psyched - I've got to get my 10" scope on that tracking mount so I can get some more shots this summer!

Can't vote? Too bad...

February 12th 2008 - primary day here in Maryland and, forgotten in today's modern pc-obsessed world, the birthday of Abraham Lincoln. I did my homework in preparation - mainly changing my affiliation from independent so that I could participate since it's a closed primary. Left for work about 6:10 a.m. so that I could depart no later than 4 in the afternoon, more than enough time to get home and to my polling precinct.

When I went to the car it was an omen that there was ice on the door and windshield. The ground was fine but clearly the drive home might be tricky and long - what an understatement that would turn out to be. Traffic heading up Crain Highway came to a crawl just past Route 50 - and proceeded to inch up the road. An hour and fifteen minutes later I had gone about one mile, my car was beginning to overheat, and I was beginning to need a comfort stop. For the life of me I can not understand why people just don't "get it" when the weather's atrocious, nor why the police can't make more of an effort to move damaged vehicles off to the side to allow at least one lane to get by. If misery loves company then it was a love fest yesterday afternoon on northbound Rte 3.

Turned the car around and spent another 25 minutes retracing my route back to the office where I hung out until quarter to eight. After a pit stop for dinner I turned on WBAL to hear them talking about how the polls had been ordered to stay open until 9:30 p.m. rather than closing at the scheduled time. Traffic had thinned nicely and I was buoyed by the thought that I could probably easily make it back home by the new closing time, so I'd get to vote after all. As I'm making my way home, however, the calls start coming in from all over to the radio station from people who are being turned away from the polling places or not allowed in!

I get back to Towson and immediately go to the Towson Presbyterian Church where I vote. It's 9:10 p.m. as I pull in to the parking lot, and the place is dark and locked up tight as a drum. Nothing to do at that point except head home and email my protest to the election board. While I'm disappointed that I lost my opportunity to vote there are some elements here that really irritate me even more than the idiot drivers I contend with every commute:

1) I can empathize with the polling judges. It's got to be a job that you do out of civic devotion more than the cold cash you get, and the weather was pretty lousy. So after a long day I can understand not wanting to stick around. And if I had my guess it'd be that the board of elections didn't contact them to inform them of the judge's decision. Hell, I'll bet that the board really had no plan whatsoever to handle this scenario other than the OMG plan. But it was predictable that bad weather in February could occur and that extended hours might be mandated. So in this day of instant communication, what's the excuse? Furthermore, what’s the penalty for your malfeasance?

2) Even more amazing is that from what I could see on the local television this morning no one's talking about it. It clearly didn't happen just to me - there were multiple callers from around the state relating similar incidents last evening. And without exposing the problem it will certainly be repeated. Maryland, my Maryland - where the bureaucracy reigns supreme and unchallenged.

So primary day has come and gone and my voice went unheard except in the blogosphere. Guess I'll change back to independent and do an absentee ballot in the fall just to be safe.