Posts

This is a break from my normal postings about technology, but I just needed to rant on this a little. Because as a programmer I understand that bad math happens, but this seems deliberate on AT&T’s part. Let me start out by explaining, I like many other Americans updated to the iPhone 5 on launch day. I found a lot of the expected fees, such as the “One Time Charge for Upgrade” fee of $36.00, which still baffles me because I have to essentially pay for the privileged to being locked in for another 2 years, but I digress. ...

You may or may not be aware but Adobe released a new font a couple of days ago. Who cares right, you are not a graphics designer, you sling code for a living. Well you should care about this font. Adobe has released a font that has been optimized for coding. And I am here to tell you it is a beautiful font. I have been a huge fan on Consolas ever since it was released by Microsoft. And I was excited to see a new alternative font from Adobe. And to make it even more interesting, Source Code Pro is open source font on GitHub and they are accepting pull requests for it. In other words, it can only get better from here. ...

In the Cassandra database there is a type known as TimeUUID. Which I have talked about a couple times on my blog and even created a pretty well received class for generating them. This type is typically used for log data, because it helps you create a unique value in the database that has an extractable timestamp. Because of how .NET creates DateTime.Now you rarely get a resolution smaller than a millisecond in the DateTime, even though DateTime supports a notion of a tick which is equivalent to 100 nanoseconds or 1/10,000 of a millisecond. As you can see there is plenty of room for more resolution, and this extra room not being used causes pain when you need a resolution smaller than milliseconds, which many high performance logging situations demand, so that all your log entries are put in order especially when you are receiving more than one in a millisecond time span. ...

Recently while working on an OData endpoint for a web service I am setting up I came across this error. I did a quick search on the web, but all that I came up with was a bunch of overly complicated solutions to fix this issue. So I thought I would write up a quick blog post and put an end to the insanity of this error and all the snake oil that seems to be on the web about it. ...

Last night I watched Act of Valor it was decent movie, but it wasn’t a great movie, some of the dialog seemed forced. But one part of the move really stuck out to me. At the end a poem by Native American Shawnee Chief, Tecumseh was read. I thought it was a great poem, and definitely words to live your life by. So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion;respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home. ...

Typically I don’t like making these self congratulatory posts, but the Microsoft MVP program is one that I respect a lot. The MVP’s I know are all top quality individuals and I am proud to be a part of this group for the next year.

Getting Started To get started you have to understand the basic terminology of the Cassandra database. Unlike relational databases (i.e. SQL Server, MySQL, etc) Cassandra is what is known as a Key/Value pair database. The Cassandra data model has 4 main concepts which are cluster, keyspace, column family and super column. A Cluster (also called as ring) is several servers (or nodes) functioning together to act as a single Cassandra database occurrence. A cluster will contain at least one node, and each cluster can contain many keyspaces. A Keyspace can contain many column families. A Column Family contains multiple columns referenced by a record keys. A Column contains a name, value, and a timestamp. The column name can be a static label (such as “name” or “email”) or it can be set to a wide range of values (ex. a date of a log entry). The actual columns that make up a row are can be determined by the client application or pre set in a more traditional method using CQL. To better understand what all this means lets do a naming remapping from relational databases to Cassandra. ...

Now this is actually useful information, not just a stream of useless numbers with no context or history to them.

I was very excited to see that after several months of work Phil and Paul finally released their much talked about GitHub client for Windows. It has a great Metro style, and is very fluid and functional. Here is an example of what my client looks like As you can see it is very clean, and there are no typical windows borders or title bar which is common for Metro styled apps. As I was exploring the app, I stumbled on the fact that if you are using PowerShell as your default shell. ...

After reading Scott Hansleman’s post about Console2 I decided to give it a try full time. Overall I have to say I am very impressed and have no intention on switching back. It really is an impressive application, so if you are interested in trying something different, go to Scott’s post and follow his directions on setting it up. As a long time mysysgit user for all my Git source control needs, I decided to find out if I could marry the two together to create a nice intersection between Console2 and msysgit’s Bash client. And after a bit of searching and stumbling on my own post about setting up the bash client in Visual Studio, I answered my own question on how to set it up for Console2. Here is what I cam up with: ...