Jeffrey Vanneste

I had heard of the .NET Terrarium quite some time ago but I never really checked it out. Yesterday I decided to give it a try. This stuff is pretty neat. The point of this "game" is to code your own creature to interact in the terrarium. You can make a herbivore, carnivore or plant. You define how the creatures move, interact with other creatures, comunicate, reproduce, attack, defend and so much more. My first impression was there wasn't too much to do to creating your own creature. Sure you can get a really simple creature put together really quick but it must take a long time to get a creature coded that can survive.
Right now on my client Terrarium all I have are Naka herbivores and Mari carnivores. Apparently these 2 critters have taken over the whole terrarium because that's all I see. I checked the stats out on the page and naka and mari are cleaning house.

Some sample creatures/code to get you started
The most active Terrarium forum I could find
The official Terrarium website

Bloglines announced today Bloglines Webservices. This is a set of API that you can call from any application to your bloglines account. It looks like there are already a few programs that soon (or already do) support this new API. I imagine there will be some more sophisticated bloglines notifiers coming out soon. Excellent :)

Do you find that you don't use the Windows key on your keyboard? Ever? Well I was barely using it and I figured it sure would be nice to be able to use it for loading up some different applications. Enter WinKey.
This program will let you set up shortcuts/actions to perform when you press the windows key plus any other key. I have some set to open the control panel, service controller, administrator tools, calculator, visual studio, and a bunch more. It takes about 2.5MB of RAM so I don't feel to bad leaving it run all the time.

I finally got myself a LCD monitor for work. Yes, you read that right. I bought it myself for work. Previously I was using my 19" Samsung 900NF CRT for at work which has served me well for many years. 2 years ago I bought myself a 19" Samsung 191T LCD which I was intending to bring to work but after using it at home for a few days I couldn't part with it.
NCIX (the best place to buy computer stuff in Canada) had a sale on the Benq FP931 for $550CAD. I paid $1200CAD for my Samsung LCD so I figured this was a great deal. The Benq isn't quite as nice as my Samsung LCD. The quality of the text seems crisper on the Samsung and the Benq seems to look darker in the corners when you look at the center of the screen. All in all though this was a great purchase and I finally get to look at LCD's all the time.

I've tried out a couple of code generation/template tools. I ended up sticking with QuickCode .NET simply because it integrated into Visual Studio quite nice and didn't require any setup. QuickCode isn't free but has a trial if you want to give it a try.
I also tried Code Template which is quite similar to QuickCode but completely free. I just had more troubles with Code Template that I preferred QuickCode instead.
The third code template tool I found was Code Smith but for what I wanted from a template tool this was overkill.
I use QuickCode .NET mainly for just smaller code snippets. For example, I'll type "mb testing message" and then press ALT+q and it will turn this into "System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show("testing message");". So, if you just want smaller snippets give QuickCode a try.

I figure I had to make at least one post on Bloglines. After discovering RSS feeds quite some time ago I initially tried Sharp Reader. It was free and worked very well but it took a lot of memory. I tried Feed Demon but kept going back to Sharp Reader but probably since I was used to Sharp Reader instead.
Then I gave Newsgator a try which integrates itself into Outlook. What this let me do is when I sync'd my Pocket PC I could read all the posts offline. This was absolutly wonderful and I thought no reader could ever top Newsgator so I purchased it. Less than 2 weeks later someone brought to my attention Bloglines. What this let me do is no matter where I was, work or at home, I could read some feeds and not have to worry about having to mark all the feeds I read at work at home again. Bloglines lets you run a small notifier in your notification area (system tray). There is also notifiers for every OS especially through the use of the web notifier. So how do I read bloglines on my Pocket PC? Well right now if I know I'm going to have time to read feeds on the Pocket PC I just goto my bloglines page and then leave it open. Not the best of solutions but being able to have all the feeds I've read stored server-side is worth it. All of this for free. Wow.

With so many people falling in love with Firefox I'd just like to state that I'm not following that trend. If I wasn't using Windows I would use Firefox hands down but since I use Windows all day at work and at home it isn't going to happen. If I had to just use Internet Explorer with no add-ons then I would probably consider using Firefox as well. However, after I first discovered Netcaptor and was introduced to tabbed browsing there was no going back. Netcaptor also introduced me to the popup blocker which is absolutly wonderfal. The problem with Netcaptor is that it isn't free so I can't use it at work as well. Enter Maxthon (used to be known as MyIE2). This gem is the first thing I put on friend's computers when I help them get started. It's completely configurable, free and provides even more than Netcaptor.
The thing with Netcaptor and Maxthon is both just use IE to render their pages so everything that works in IE will work in both of these browsers. Maxthon gives you tabbed browsing with lots of options. You can have it open the new tab to the right of your current tab, to the left, activate the new tab, don't activate the new tab, open the new tab on middle click, and so much more configuration can be done just on how the tabs should act. The popup blocker is extended into an ad blocker instead. Instead of having those annoying blinking banners on a page you can Maxthon replace the ad with a short string like "An ad has been blocked here" or just leave the ad the same color as the background.
So if you haven't discovered tabbed browsing or you want to try using IE the way it should be then give Maxthon a try.

I'm so happy about the new bootstrapper in visual studio 2005. I just started reading the MSDN magazine October 2004 issue and it has an article on the new bootstrapper. I write most of the installation/deployment scripts that we use at work for the projects I work on. We originally started off using MSI files but I gave Nullsoft Scriptable Install System a try and was really impressed with how easy it was to use. I started using NSIS to release patches for the product I was working on and it worked very slick. When we refactored pretty much our entire product I had the opportunity to redo the installation packages that I had previously wrote.
The new bootstrapper makes it very easy to include prerequisites with the deployment of your application. You could make a CD with .NET 2.0, DirectX, Windows Media Player, and SQL Server. The article also mentions you can have it require any third party applications so it's not limited to just Microsoft ones. Anyways, if you deal with deploying products check out the article linked below.

Bootstrapper: Use the Visual Studio 2005 Bootstrapper to Kick-Start Your Installation -- MSDN Magazine, October 2004

It's really too bad there wasn't a nice coding standard like this written up when we started on C# at work. Looks pretty good from what I checked out, I think I'll start following these for my own projects.

Lance Hunt's C# Coding Standards v1.13

So I've been looking at replacing my current cell phone (an Audiovox 9100). I'm currently using Sasktel Mobility as my service provider mainly because my Dad works for Sasktel and it just seemed like the right thing to do at the time.
The main provider choice to choose from in Saskatoon are Sasktel Mobility, Rogers, Telus, and FIDO. Just a quick glance at the coverage they all provide and you can tell the only 2 serious choices can be either Sasktel or Rogers. Here is the Sasktel Coverage Map and the Rogers Coverage Map. Sasktel wins the coverage hands down. If your only going to use the cell in the major cities in Saskatchewan (and never leave) then the decision will be tougher. If you travel around Saskatchewan (lakes, relatives) then this decision will probably be a bit harder.

Rogers uses GSM phones while Sasktel uses CDMA phones. So what the hell does this mean to me? Well, from what I've determined most other places in the world use GSM. More places using GSM phones mean more phone options. More options and better prices. The phone I like now is the Sony Ericsson T637. It's really small, suppose to have great sound quality, built in camera (which I'll probably never use) and great little screen. This phone is GSM though so it won't work on the Sasktel network. If you look at the Sasktel support phones there really isn't all that much to choose from. I kind of like the way the Nokia 6225 looks but it's bigger and heavier than the Sony Ericsson T637.
Anyways, the next thing to look at is the different plans they offer. If I was just looking at keeping a single phone on the plan then Sasktel's unlimited evenings and weekends and 50 daytime minute plan looks pretty good but Sasktel doesn't have any unlimited evenings and weekends plans that you can add multiple phones on! Instead of going into detail here about all the plans I suggest you look at the Compare Cellular website as they have a nice tool to compare Rogers, Sasktel, FIDO and Telus all side by side.

Useful links that I found for cell phones in Saskatchewan:

• Sasktel Mobility (for finding the plans, coverage and some phones supported by Sasktel)
  
• Jump.ca (a reseller of Sasktel cell phones, you can find all the phones for Sasktel plus all the plans here)
  
• Rogers (all the plans and phones are listed here)
  
• Compare Cellular (a great place to compare the cell phone plans in Saskatchewan)
  
• Howard Forums (a great place to read everything you wanted to know about cell phones)
  
• Phone Scoop (for comparing phones to each other and user reviews)
  

Another great tool I've been using on the redesign of my site is ColorPic. After I found these tools I actually ended up finding an article for "5 Free Windows Web Design Apps You Can't Live Without!". I haven't tried the other tools mentioned there yet but I imagine they must be pretty decent since the first 2 (TopStyle and ColorPic) were both very useful.

I just discovered this tool when I was redesigning this page. I haven't done all that much with CSS files so Top Style helped out very much. They have a free version you can use called TopStyle Lite which is all that I tried out. I imagine if you are doing lots of work on webpages it would be worth your time to give TopStyle Pro a try.

Bradbury Software - TopStyle Pro CSS Editor / HTML Editor for Windows

It's about time that these movies came out on DVD. Lots of places today mentioning the changes that have been since the original version. The best list I could find is on The Digital Bits Review.

Joel On Software posted today about an article on work space quality. It's mainly just references to other articles and studies written about it but I found most of the links from the article quite interesting.

Article Link