Archive for the 'Personal' category

01
Apr

Joining the LINQ to SQL team at Microsoft

By Damien Guard Categories: Microsoft and Personal Tags: .

I've been quiet on my blog lately largely because I have been preparing to change job and relocate half-way around the world to Vancouver in the beautiful province of British Columbia (where I spent my 2004 summer holiday).

In February I travelled out to Redmond for three days of interviews (one position grew to two, then three). Having read the Microsoft Jobs Blog I was prepared for long hard days but in reality the process was incredibly enjoyable and exciting.

So much so I wanted to find a desk and move in right then.

With some luck I also found myself at Hanselman's geek dinner which involved some great discussions and the chance to meet Scott himself, Brad Wilson and Nikhil Kothari who I knew from .NET on-line community as well as some 35 other developers from both within Microsoft and the outside world. It was one fun evening and my thanks go to Scott for kindly driving me back to my hotel in Redmond town centre.

Many white-boards and a few lunches later (including an unexpected one with Phil Haack, Nikhil and two more guys from ASP.NET team - I wish I could remember all the names of the people I met!) I found myself with the hard task of choosing a position.

I settled on a developer role within the LINQ to SQL team starting mid-May and am counting down the days...

[)amien

14 Comments
02
Jan

Year 2007 personal retrospective

By Damien Guard Categories: Personal Tags: .

What did you do in 2007 that you'd never done before?

I visited Microsoft's HQ in Redmond.

Did you keep your New Year's Resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I didn't make any.

What countries did you visit?

England and US.

What would you like to have in 2008 that you lacked in 2007?

The opportunity to work on some great products / solutions.

What was your biggest achievement of the year?

My blog has really taken off in 2007, traffic is way up, posts are way up and it's proving to be a useful reference for myself and others :)

What was your biggest failure?

Not shipping any major projects.

What was the best thing someone bought you?

I got so many great things for Christmas - a lovely new giant laptop bag, some great DVD's and books too!

Whose behaviour merited celebration?

My girlfriend Steph for being so understanding about how much time my hobbies take up.

Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

Nothing that strong in my life!

Where did most of your money go?

In the bank!

What song will always remind you of 2007?

I must confess I've not been paying any attention to the music industry for a while. I guess Radiohead's Rainbow will stick in my mind for 2007 not for what it sounds like (I didn't listen to it) but for the attention it got by putting it out direct for consumers to name their price.

Compared to this time last year, are you:

  • Happier or sadder? Same.
  • Thinner or fatter? Same.
  • Richer or poorer? Richer.

What do you wish you'd done more of?

Put up more samples on my blog, more adventure in life and more discussion and development of ideas.

What do you wish you'd done less of?

Less idle browsing of the net, less sleep ;-)

How do you plan to spend Christmas?

I spent it with my family including a 24-person lunch which my mother, sisters, step-sister and aunty managed to somehow co-ordinate to great effect.

What was your favourite TV program?

Takeshi's Castle although The Mighty Boosh was also great.

Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?

Who has time for that?

What was the best book you read?

Gateway by Frederik Pohl.

What was your greatest musical discovery?

I've been listening to Podcasts more than music.

What did you want and not get?

Career development but I've only myself to blame.

What was your favourite film of this year?

Hot Fuzz.

What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

Spent the evening with Steph and enjoyed a relaxing 33rd.

How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2007?

More Esprit less skater :D

What political issue stirred you the most?

National ID database in the UK. As if their fiasco with the child database wasn't evidence enough of this ticking time-bomb of an idea.

Who was the best new person you met?

I met some great people out in Redmond including Jonathan, Aaron & James.

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2007?

Opportunity might come knocking but it still needs chasing down.

Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

Bouncy bouncy, ooh such a good time
Bouncy bouncy, shoes all in a line
Bouncy bouncy, everybody somersault
Somersault, summertime, everybody sing along
Bouncy bouncy, ooh such a good time
Bouncy bouncy, white socks falling down
Bouncy bouncy, stilettos are a no-no
Bouncy bouncy, ooh, bouncy bouncy ooh
Every time I bounce, I feel I touch the sky!

-- The Bouncy Crimp, The Mighty Boosh

[)amien

4 Comments
04
Nov

MacBook Pro 17″ 2.6GHz ordered

By Damien Guard Categories: Apple, Guernsey and Personal Tags: , .

Since moving house I have been using my MacBook Pro 15" 2.0GHz at home, for contracting and even for the odd diagnostics and organisation in the office.

The last 20 months have been a bumpy ride with the logic board being replaced twice once for whining and the second time when the inner memory slot went dead. The battery has been recalled and the power supply cable started melting and the paint started flaking off the enclosure but thankfully Apple sorted out all these problems rather swiftly with advanced replacement parts and speedy repairs through local service centers iQ Guernsey and Guernsey Computers.

Every company has problems with products, especially first revisions, but how they deal with them is important and one of my logic board failures was a couple of months out of warranty but their customer services department authorised the replacement anyway. Such service counts for a lot in my book and so now I have outgrown my notebook another MacBook Pro will be it's replacement...

My paltry 100GB disk space got eaten up with an extensive music library and plenty of 10 megapixel RAW digital camera images. Subtract a 15GB Boot Camp and I was soon looking at external storage. Parallels and Visual Studio 2008 meant I needed to up from 2GB to 4GB of RAM and I found myself constantly missing my 24" Dell monitor. I also need to be able to test 64-bit applications now that I am developing Cocoa apps.

The Apple Store UK just added the 2.6GHz processor and 200GB 7200RPM drive options this week and although Guernsey is barred from The Apple Store UK local reseller iQ matches their ex-VAT prices on Pro gear so on Saturday I ordered my new dream machine complete with the high-resolution 1920x1200 anti-glare LCD (no glossy mirror for me thanks).

They also have friendly shop staff unlike Guernsey Computers (although Vernon in their service department is helpful if you can get to him). One thing I really can't stand though is Apple's pricing policy on RAM.

To upgrade from 2GB to 4GB they want £450 extra! Crucial UK will do a 4GB kit of the same spec for just £98. I'm not alone in this observation.

It's just insanely ludicrous.

[)amien

9 Comments
31
Oct

Recent activities and inactivities

By Damien Guard Categories: Personal Tags: , , , , , .

It has been a crazy couple of months between moving home, spending a week in Seattle and a couple of days in Holland for my real day job (the source of income!)

It was a little too close to my USA trip which has meant I've missed my niece trick-or-treating for the first time since I returned to Guernsey 3 years ago which leaves me a little sad. I guess I should be grateful for not being hit with jet-lag and the fact I'm surviving just fine on 5.5 hours of sleep a day which tonight is in a cubicle hotel...

As you can imagine the fun projects I get involved with in my own time have suffered somewhat although I've really tried to at least keep the blog posts flowing. Here's a quick update on things:

SubSonic

I've committed the final piece of my refactoring to make the coding languages abstracted. To add additional programming language support you can now just implement the ICodeLanguage interface and add knowledge of it to the CodeLanguageFactory class. The command line and web interface tools will all just magically work with a recompilation.

Rob Conery is now under the employ of Microsoft and will be aligning SubSonic with their MVC efforts. I hope this support of open-source projects is a trend Microsoft are keen to continue.

AnkhSVN

This great add-in for Visual Studio provides Subversion integration continues to face competition from the commercial VisualSVN front and I had an interesting discussion with Aaron Jensen about performance with large projects and some relating to moving.

I have some UI work checked-in to trunk and we are likely to move to a better model for integrating with the Solution Explorer to address these issues that would require we drop Visual Studio 2003 support which is looking quite likely. Various things are moving forward on this project so keep an eye on it!

Envy Code R

I've not touched Envy Code R since the PR6.1 release but to be honest this tends to be the way I work with it. Nothing for weeks then 15 hours over a weekend gets it to the next release. Unlike code I find it difficult to jump in and out whilst being productive and consistent. Perhaps when I've worked on a bunch I'll be able to but this is still my first scalable font.

The plan is to add all the essential box-drawing characters for code page 850, extend the # sign (should we slant this in the non-italic version?), increase the curves on { and } and adjust the comma to make it less like a slightly deformed dot. I'm open to suggestions as to whether the .,;: characters should in fact revert back to be square dots rather than round ones... again, leave comments if you have an opinion. I'm not sure whether I would extend this squaring back to the dots on ij! etc.

I'm hoping to get preview 7 out within the next couple of weeks and if that goes well then consider a more liberal licence to allow bundling etc. as I've had a couple of enquiries.

Silk Companion icons #1

Preview of some icons in Silk Companion #1My pack of addition Silk style icons has suffered as I find it impossible to draw on the move requiring instead a comfortable desk and a proper mouse to draw. As I no longer have a desk at home this means staying late in the office or throwing my lunchtimes at them.

The temptation is to just release the 352 icons as they currently are and produce another set at a later date. The alternative would mean a release some times over the next 1-3 weeks when the number finally reaches the proposed 500 mark.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions, leave a comment!

[)amien

2 Comments
12
Oct

Heading to Redmond

By Damien Guard Categories: Microsoft, Personal and Travel Tags: , .

I've been invited out to Microsoft HQ for a couple of days (October 22-23) which should be very interesting - more details on the what, why and how at a later date.

I will also be spending an extra day and a half in Seattle, perhaps taking in some of the sights of and maybe meeting up with a couple of on-line contacts for the first time.

Flights & hotel booked, now where I did put my passport...

The event was a Software Design Review for Microsoft's ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions including MVC. Twenty-four of us gave our thoughts, feelings and opinions to the teams on how we believe we would or could utilise various aspects.

[)amien

1 Comment
04
Sep

Notes on the move to WordPress

By Damien Guard Categories: Internet and Personal Tags: , .

The change to WordPress from Subtext went without major hitch. This was great considering I was tweaking the design and articles right up to going on holiday (I wouldn't do this in a professional environment but my blog is a sandpit for such dare-devil risk taking ;-)

Here are my notes on the experience.

Spam

Akismet is good but I prefer the invisible captcha that Subtext was using. I've gone from dealing with 1 rogue spam a month to 1-2 held for moderation a day.

View counts

The WordPress import format doesn't deal with view counts. I wrote a query against Subtext to list them, a query in MySQL to identify article numbers then manually executed

UPDATE post_meta SET meta_value = meta_value + 123 WHERE meta_key = 'views' AND article_id = 456

For every article replacing 123 with Subtext's view count and 456 with the WordPress article id. As my blog was previously on Blogger.com which doesn't provide view counts they are a year or so lower than reality.

Preserving links

I chose a custom permalink format of /blog/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname% which gives http://damieng.com/blog/2007/10/01/first-of-october for posts. This is similar to the old format of http://www.damieng.com/blog/2007/10/01/first-of-october.aspx but obviously has the file extension and www dropped. Apache's .htaccess file made redirecting the old links a breeze which was important to me as my blog suffered big drops in Technorati and Google when I last moved from Blogger.com to Subtext. The required lines to achieve this, redirect /blog/ and keep the RSS going were:

RedirectMatch permanent ^/blog/archive/(.*).aspx$ http://damieng.com/blog/$1
RedirectMatch permanent ^/blog/$ http://damieng.com/
RedirectMatch permanent ^/blog$ http://damieng.com/
RedirectMatch permanent ^/blog/rss.aspx http://damieng.com/feed
RedirectMatch permanent ^/blog/Rss.aspx http://damieng.com/feed

Editing

The default editor is fast and for the most part okay although it lacks the ability to change from the default paragraph tag to headings, preformatted blocks, blockquotes etc. It also very annoyingly tries to be helpful by turning carriage returns into new paragraphs which would be fine if it was clever enough to leave <pre> blocks well alone.

Steve suggested FCKeditor which is very slow at initialising on my machine and also tends to really mess up my HTML :(

Going forward

There are still a number of things I want to do including further deviating from the Redoable theme. Lightening up the look somewhat perhaps with some soft gradients and alternative typefaces will go a long-way. I'll also want to do a proper logo at some point as soon as I can decide what it should look like.

Being that WordPress is a higher visibility target Phrixus suggested hiding the wp-admin directory as an extra level of protection against automated vulnerability/brute-force attacks which I shall also try.

I need to speak to GrinGod about the download counting mechanism he mentioned too.

The original Blogger.com content from a year or two ago will be phased out/removed as it would appear it dilutes my page rank having almost-identical content elsewhere not to mention messing up traffic stats etc.

[)amien

2 Comments
22
Aug

Moving home

By Damien Guard Categories: Personal Tags: , .

I have been planning on moving my blog off my little Windows Shuttle PC at home onto a hosted service for some time and the latest flurry of activity followed by DSL line meltdown was enough to give me the nudge I needed to get the job done.

Rob Conery provided a useful .NET/Subsonic app to make the transition from Subtext about as painless as possible bar the obvious one of going with a PHP based solution when I know .NET is a better technology.

I simply felt the .NET blogging engines didn't give me what I want right now and yes, I know I should be contributing to them to get them where I want them but I'm just so busy on various projects that if I was coding a blog in the evenings I wouldn't be writing on it. Hopefully the great, and no doubt equally busy, guys behind those engines will forgive my little foray into WordPress for a while.

The non-blog parts of the web site (yes, there are some, with downloads, fonts, cursors, little tools and a mini-biography) will be integrated with the site shortly and the theme will probably gradually change to something more me. I also want to add a few extra things, the tag cloud and identicons for a start.

The title of this post also has a second meaning... yes, I've put an offer in on a house and will hopefully be taking possession in around 6 weeks providing nothing goes wrong.

Your invite to the house warming party will be in the post...

[)amien

1 Comment
21
Aug

Apology for the odd theme and sluggish speed

By Damien Guard Categories: Internet and Personal Tags: .

I've switched to a lightweight theme (300KB less per initial hit) whilst we are overloaded with requests from the excellent Daring Fireball regarding the font rendering philosophies post.

I've tried moving some images off site but it's just typical this happens the week before I move to proper hosting. My poor home DSL line is melting!

Update

Things have calmed down and through a combination of moving images off-site, switching theme and enabling gzip compression for .js and .css the site has survived despite being overloaded at times through lack of bandwidth (CPU and RAM were just fine)

I'll leave the theme as it is for now in case we get a second wave - the hits appear to come in waves as different time-zones hit different parts of their wake-up, get-to-work and get-home cycles.

The 60 day old post has now had 20,000 hits - about 19,500 of them within the last 24 hours. Slicing and dicing the stats in SQL reveal that my blog has been running for 977 days, consists of 263 blog posts averaging one post every 3.5 days. It has received 1239,51 hits in that time, a sixth of which were in the last 24 hours.

It's amazing for so many people to read something I have written but as analytics is already pointing out fame is fleeting.

Here's hoping a few of them decided to add me to their news reader :)

[)amien

3 Comments
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