Tod1d's Thought Process

"Excellence is evident and so is mediocrity." - Me

Yeehaw! I received my free "coding horror" sticker in the mail today. Thank you Jeff Attwood!

I have always assumed that the "coding horror" picture was of terrified face in front of a computer screen. However, the more I look at the sticker, the more I think that it is a disembodied head falling through a trap door. Does anyone else see what I see?

Scott Hanselman is right about FinePrint. It is a slick little app. I have always preferred conserving paper when I can. FinePrint allows me to easily get duplex printing out of my little HP LaserJet 1000. Woohoo!

Someone recently sent me an article from the August 17th edition of Early to Rise which espoused the virtues of board meetings where everyone is told to come with 2 great ideas on increasing sales, profits, or productivity. The founder of the company credits the simple technique with sparking a $100 million dollar growth spurt in just 5 years.

Apparently this method of brainstorming also saves marriages and decreases the amount of smog that hangs over Phoenix, AZ. Check out this excerpt:

"And listen to this unexpected benefit: Before Boardroom started the system, the
number of divorces among employees was about average for a company of its size.
But in the eight years since then, there has not been a single divorce among
Boardroom's workforce of almost 100! Clearly, when people get in the habit of
coming up with ideas (rather than focusing on problems or results), it can
affect every aspect of their lives."

This may work well in board meetings, but I am not so sure about how well this translates to other department's meetings.

A software development team (project managers, software developers, QA guy, etc…) I worked with did something similar. Every Friday we had a “creative” meeting, where everyone had to bring a creative idea, or just do something creative (like play the guitar). Some of the ideas brought to the meeting were implemented, many were not. It worked well for about a year, but petered out towards the end of my tenure.

Eventually "creative" meetings turned into an excuse to have a 1 hour social event / bitch session. I attribute some of this to a sense of isolationism. Each developer worked on an independent project and new projects were slightly different takes on old projects. By the time “creative” Friday rolled around, I had implemented my creative idea and realized it wouldn’t be that beneficial to anyone else’s project.

This is the where code reviews came to the rescue. Each week the developers would meet to show off some of the code they created. It gave the person, demoing the application, a chance to share new methodologies, technologies, etc. with his peers. In addition, the demo gave his peers a chance to offer suggestions and creative criticism. I felt like code reviews had a great sense of purpose and, at the end, a greater sense of accomplishment.

I needed to generate random passwords for new user accounts in Community Server 2.0. I tried using the included User.Member.ResetPassword() function, but the password was too long:

uhb]6h=^mQ-OS

Oooooh...scary...

So I did a quick search on google for "C# random password" and at the top of the list was this excellent, flexible class that worked as advertised.

Now my passwords look like this:

9i?FY-2p

Thank you Obviex.

Now, if only Community Server allowed you to force password change on the user's next login. Good excuse to write a custom module, I suppose.

I am creating a component at work. One of the requirements is that the component be able to retrieve email from a POP3 server. I looked around at purchasing several components like DevMail, ANPOP POP3 Component, etc...

However, I finally landed on a free component called CSLMail v2.0. It was pretty easy to get up and running doing simple sending and receiving of email. I ran into issues when I tried to receive and delete multiple emails using the same connection. It got to the point where I simply connect, execute a command, then immediately disconnect. I have been testing our component with CSLMail for about a week, and so far, so good.

If you are in the need of a lightweight component for retrieving emails from a POP3 server, give it a try.