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I laughed out loud when I saw this. (Somebody needs to have a talk with these people.)

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Well I’m almost out of SPF 50 sunblock which means that we’ve been having a fun summer. If you think I’m joking about SPF 50, then you haven’t seen my beautiful white sheen; I have to stay looking young you know? (and prevent third degree burns).

Emily finally got around to putting up pictures from our Santa Barbara trip on her blog.

I’ve been busy with work lately as we’re preparing to release some code that I’ve been working on for the past four to six months.

We’ve been going to the pool almost every chance we get.

I’ve even made it to the theaters to see Transformers and The Bourne Ultimatum.

Consequently I’ve had almost no time to work on any personal projects, but… who cares when you’re having fun?

I recently had a situation at work where I had to do some deep debugging of JavaScript. As an ASP.NET developer, I rarely have to hand-write JavaScript now days and when I do it requires little more than some well-placed ‘alert’ calls to diagnose problems. However, this situation was different. We recently started using the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions in our company website. Initially I was excited to try some of the new features but alas my excitement quickly waned when I found that many of the supplied controls did not play well with our website. I should be clear that I’m referring specifically to the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, a community created set of control extenders that use the AJAX library. I’m only speaking from my own experience, but it quickly became apparent to me that the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit was only half-baked. I had popup controls popping up in the wrong places, watermark controls returning their watermark contents instead of their actual values, and the list goes on. By the time I realized it, it was too late and we had already promised some of the advanced features to our clients. My task today was to figure out why the CollapsiblePanel was no longer working after we moved our code into our test environment. I was going to have to debug some JavaScript… ugg!

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Don’t expect me to start reviewing products, but I think it’s only fair that when I find something I like that I give it a quick nod. We recently picked up a new Toshiba 9″ Portable DVD Player (model SD-P1900) from Best Buy for use on our Santa Barbara vacation. So far I quite enjoy it. When I was comparison shopping, I felt that the color representation and picture quality seemed superior to other models I saw that advertised higher resolution. I could best describe the picture quality on other models as “muddy” whereas this one was smooth and clear.

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It’s summer and that means vacation time. We just returned from Sequoia National Forest. You can find a couple pics on the family blog. We visited the world’s largest tree: General Sherman and the Crystal Cave.

I’ve been using Microsoft Virtual PC for years and love it, but there’s a new kid on the virtualization block that’s caught my eye; VirtualBox. To be fair, I haven’t tried the new Virtual PC 2007 just recently RTM‘d, but from what I’ve heard the new features aren’t all that revolutionary. I should also point out that I’ve never been a fan of VMWare, finding it a little bloated and (despite the marketing) doesn’t seem to perform as fast as other offerings. On the other hand, I’ve found VirtualBox to be easy to use, it has good support for guest OS’s (in our case Linux) and by my account, performs very well.

I’m not an avid Linux user (in fact, I’m quite a novice), but I occasionally get enough curiosity to try out a distribution. This time around, it was reading about PCLinuxOS 2007 that got me interested. I decided to give it a try using VirtualBox and much to my delight I had it up and running well in less than 30 minutes. If you’re also curious about Linux, trying it on a virtual machine is an easy way to get a little exposure. I thought my experience may be helpful to others, so here’s what I did to get it working:

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I almost wet myself when I saw some of the first behind-the-scenes footage of the new Indiana flick. I can’t believe we’re getting another Indiana Jones film. I can remember skipping school to see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Hopefully there will be more of the video diaries like this one highlighting the first day of shooting:

Official Indiana Jones Website

It takes time getting used to a new framework like WPF. The other day I was looking for system information similar to what the System.Windows.Forms.SystemInformation static class provided in Windows Forms. It took a little looking, but the equivalent WPF object is the System.Windows.SystemParameters class. It has all the same goodness that you would expect, like ScrollWidth and MenuBarHeight and some new things like IsTabletPC. I should also point out that there are similar classes for fonts and colors called System.Windows.SystemFonts and System.Windows.SystemColors respectively.

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Clutch is my new pet programming project (say that five times fast). It’s an IL level .NET debugger, or at least it will be when it’s finished. It’s the result of the research I’ve been doing in IL and why I’m looking for information about writing debugging tools. The screenshot above is really just for kicks. I thought it would be funny to post the first ever screenshot of the program so that when it’s up and running in a year or so I could look back and laugh. It’s very incomplete right now, but can at least start a new process and list the modules and namespaces that are loaded into memory. It’s not much, but doing even something as simple as that is a pretty big learning curve when you’re working with the Unmanaged API.

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Well, my wife has followed suit and started blogging. Her blog mainly consist of news about the entire family and I’ve added it to the blogroll if anyone is interested.

I’m going to make an effort to explain each entry in the blog roll as opposed to just arbitrarily placing links there. I sometimes wonder what rhyme or reason a person had for listing a particular link in their blogroll. Sometimes those links are completely off topic from what I expected.

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