I have two (2) Visual Studio 2005 Team System Beta 2 DVDs right now. I fetched it from Microsoft Philippines this afternooon to test it at my own risk. Quite outdated since there’s already a final version of VS 2005 but it’s the best way to get it free of charge for our thesis. That’s really annoying because the .NET 2.0 framework might conflict — of course there’s no guarantee that two conflicting versions will work in harmony specially when the former is “beta” and the latter is “final”. I actually don’t want to install Team System Beta 2 right now because having Visual Studio Express edition of Web Developer does the job… for now. I just want to use the load testing and profiling feature of Team System edition of Visual Studio for our beta testing phase. And one more thing — this beta release of Visual Studio 2005 is intended for evaluation only. It is time-sensitive and will cease functioning after May 1, 2006. We still have some time to play around with our codes, so hopefully we can use Team System beta 2 to test our web application before it expires.
We are writing the documentation for our thesis right now and I find it really convenient to share to-do list with my peers. Using shared to-do list can streamline our work much better than we do it traditionally (round-robin) because shared to-do list provide us preemptive approach. We could have used a project manager tool but Ta-da list provides a simple interface to manage our tasks — good enough for organizing small group of people and short term goals.
Ta-da makes it easy to…
- Keep track of all the little things you need to get done
- Make lists for other people (co-workers, friends, family)
- Share lists with the world (”My favorite movies of 2004″)
- Subscribe to your lists in RSS so you’re always on track
…and more!
Links:
Tadalist.com
And the lesson for today is — always have black and white to support your argument.
I don’t know if it was funny or just dumb. This afternoon, my groupmates in thesis and I were watching video tutorials for our web programming when one of the security officer in our school burst inside the room and took our IDs for a retraction that we didn’t commit: illegal use of Information Technology Research & Development (ITRD) room. And so we were bullied by the security guard because there’s no person in charge to verify our legitimate use of the room — it just so happened that all the students in charged of ITRD were all out for the meantime. There’s no other choice but to surrender our IDs. We were caught by surprise. The moment I handed him my ID, I starred at him badly…. that security guard is a pain in the ass! Argh! And I couldn’t stomach his face!
We didn’t have the chance to argue because we didn’t have the document that will support our claim. As we have reasoned out, we were all inside the ITRD room because we were left by the students in charge for a while. Besides we were supposedly allowed to use ITRD room as much as we can so long as we do project-related stuffs. Unfortunately, no one has a copy of that signed document.
I don’t know if the security guard just wanted to ruin our day…but he was very successful anyway. We all condemned him! Thanks to his initiative, we were all sent to the Office of Student Affairs. Luckily we got the support from the student council and our so-called “retraction” were dismissed by the Head of Security.
I just hope that we learned something very important here. Documents shouldn’t be taken for granted because there’s no such thing as verbal agreement between the authorities of our school and the security guards. They all follow the printed guidelines. There are some considerate security guards… but most of the times there are retarded security guards.
Diskettes never fail to amaze me. They are still used today ever since floppy disk technology was introduced in 1971. That’s 35 years of computer history and they still live on. The 3½-inches microfloppy diskette HD (high density) is probably one of the most popular floppy disk format and is the most expensive storage medium per megabyte today. A generic CD-R costs less than P10 while a floppy diskette normally costs around P25…. w00t!
And I always contemplate why diskettes endure to last for over three decades… Today, I realize it’s still useful.
Our Java laboratory is not linked in the internet which made it impossible for us, students and professors alike, to upload our exercises and laboratory files elsewhere. The expensive Sun Blade sparc 64-bit PCs do not even have a CD-writer. My classmates and I tried to plug our USB flash disks but no one has successfully mounted one. You see, our Java and Solaris laboratory is “prestigious” because only a number of students are priveleged to get hands on experience with one of the Sun Blades…. It’s just so pathetic that we can only use diskette to backup our laboratory files.
I thank Glenn for his almighty diskette, I managed to retrieve my laboratory files today that is very much needed for our test next week. 
Note for my thesis groupmates –
After hours of testing I finally got MyODBC to work…
*Phew* I think I’m just an idiot for not discovering this tool earlier. This article on how ODBC access MySQL in .NET made the concept clearer to me. I thought using MySQL in Visual Studio 2005 would require hand-coding the database connection. It’s easier than I thought because there’s a query builder in it, yet it’s still peculiar to me. I have to check the MyODBC manual on how to use it effectively since stored procedures and views were added to MySQL 5 already. I guess this is a good sign as we can concentrate more on the the application logic and spend less time building complex database query.
Here’s a small screenshot of my workspace doing the n00bish query in VS.NET 2005 from MySQL 5 database (a dummy wordpress database dump)
Here’s the output of my simple query…
Looks simple, right?
So what’s the big deal with MyODBC? Hint: it’s all about $$$. If we can use MySQL 5 instead of MS SQL Server 2005 then we can save a lot of money not only in the development but also in the deployment of the web application. Initially we wanted to use the L.A.M.P. (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) to power our web application — all open-source. Cool. However it’s very idealistic since we cannot possibly code the entire application with our current knowledge and skill level. Not Cool. The server that we are going to deploy is going to be a Windows Server 2003 (we have no choice!) so in line with Windows Server 2003, we might as well code in Visual Studio. In addition, if we are going to race with time then Visual Studio is the right tool for rapid development — not necessarily the best but it serves its purpose.
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