Blog Now Has Two Homes

As you are probably aware, I am no longer blogging here. I now have two blogs:

1. Technical Blog: www.thecodinghumanist.com/blog/
2. Biblical Studies Blog: www.archaicchristianity.com/blog/

This Blog Has Moved...

With great haste, turn your rss feed readers to the new blog:

www.thecodinghumanist.com/blog/

Please be patient as I customize...

And if you don't use a feed reader, that's where my tech and general blogging will happen now. So look there. Biblical studies blogging at the Christonomy site, as stated before.

P.S. There will also be little technical tidbits on the main coding humanist site, www.thecodinghumanist.com, as well as on the blog. Book reviews and links, and possibly code samples and articles some day.

Now With 50% More Geek!

Yes, I know that all of you that actually know me think I can't get any more geeky, but that's just not true. Yesterday I passed the 70-536 exam, "Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 - Application Development Foundation". I r smart now.

Preparing and taking this was quite a bit different than taking my previous two certifications was, for two reasons. First, because the test is so new, there are no published study materials. No specialized certification books to help. But as it turns out, it didn't matter. Though, if you want to take the cert, I do recommend going here. It's just a bunch of links to the MSDN documentation on the topics of the test, but it should save you some time looking it up yourself. Second, no ADO.NET.

This last issue was one thing that made passing the other two much easier. One was the .NET 1.1 ASP.NET test, and the other was the 1.1 Windows Forms test. Close to 50% of both of those tests focused around ADO.NET, which is one of my stronger areas. That left only 50% to actually testing on the actual gui side of things as well as security, internationalization, COM interop, etc.

But, anyway, I passed. This means that I'm now...still an MCP. None of my three certs actually add up to anything, so I'll have to wait for one more test.

And, BTW, this test has been out for so little time that, as far as I know, there aren't even any brain dumps out there yet (I didn't look all that hard, though I bet some will be out pretty soon). I'm glad I can say that. It was just me, MSDN, and my coworker David (who also passed). Cheating is for losers!

We may take the ASP.NET test soon as well. No published materials for that either. But apparently it's doable anyway...

VS 2005, File Templates, Snippets

So I FINALLY got my own copy of Visual Studio 2005 Professional, and it was a good deal too (thanks to a friend). I got some free CTP drops a while back that I played with, and beta 2, but when the real thing came out I had to stick with the Express edition at home (it was pretty nice, actually). At work, however, I spend just about all day in VS 2005 Professional. Anyway, it's nice to have my own copy. And it even came with a pretty handy book.

One thing that I'm going to end up spending quite a bit of time on is customizing and extending VS. Doesn't that sound like fun? Today I spent time with file templates and snippets.

Ever want to edit the default file templates? Of course you do. I wanted to because I'm doing some 1.1 work using the 2.0 studio, so I had to write code that was backwards compatible. This means no generics. And, of course, what namespace shows up in the default class file template for C#? System.Collections.Generic. So I wanted to take that out.

You would think you would go to the "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC#" area. That's where snippets are. Nope. You might also think that you go to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\CSharp\1033". Nope, but you're warmer. You actually go to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplatesCache\CSharp\1033". You can change those files, and the changes should be applied next time you restart VS.

So, what about snippets? That's when you go to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC#\Snippets\1033\Visual C#". Snippets are Xml based files, but it is pretty easy to understand what is going on. Edit those files, restart visual studio, and presto!

The hotkey combo for snippets in VS is pretty awkward, Ctrl+K, Ctrl-X. I'm trying to think of something a little easier on the fingers, because I am trying to snippet things more and more.

BTW, if you haven't used snippets in VS 2005, take a look at them. They can be useful.

Significantly Stressful Times...

...lately. I have been so incredibly distracted. Back to making this my super-cool coding blog, now that I've made this split.

For those who haven't figured it out yet, I have split my blog. Biblical studies stuff goes here.

Can't...Move...Blog...

Anybody else having trouble having blogger ftp your entire blog to another host? I finally registered www.thecodinghumanist.com. I want to move my blog there. Blogger keeps erroring out every time I try to publish the site to the new server. It always stops somewhere in the process (sometimes as low as 1%; the highest I've gotten is in the 70% range). I find this very annoying.

The new site is up, but incomplete. It will be my tech-geek home. Maybe I can get this to work. I don't want to shell out more cash for sql server hosting so I can setup community server there or something like it...

Mmmm...Steak...

It has been a while since I've posted on this blog. Sorry. I've been busy solving world hunger and inventing a cure for poison ivy.

My dad gave me some steak seasoning this weekend called "Reo's". I'm a die-hard Texjoy fan, but I thought I would try it anyway. So today I decided to grill.

I stopped by the meat counter at Albertson's to look at the goods. The Ribeye's were $7.99 a pound. I always go to the counter now, because the cuts are always thicker there than they are on the shelf. And usually the same price. I was eyeing the ribeye's and they looked pretty good. The butcher guy, however, pointed me to the bone-in ribeyes. They were only $5.49 a pound. Cheaper steak! But the best thing about it was the size...



Big, isn't it? But it's kindof hard to tell without some measurements. So here goes.



That's right...over two inches thick. Now that's a steak! It was over two pounds in weight, which means I had a really big steak to eat. No problem there...

So I put a healthy amount of steak seasoning on the thing and let it sit out about an hour and a half so I could get it to room temperature.

I actually put it on the pit longer than I do most of my steaks. I probably had it on there about 5 minutes (I like my steaks extremely rare). Unfortunately, because it was so thick, the center was still too cool, so I put it back on a few minutes later to warm it up a bit more. Of course, it was still incredibly rare.

Overall it was a great steak. Very tender. Very juicy. Very fatty. The seasoning tasted great. I don't think I like it quite as much as I like Texjoy, but I need to have a side-by-side comparison sometime. Regardless, it's a great seasoning and I highly recommend it. Unfortunately, it's a little hard to get (fortunately, TexJoy is easy). According to my dad it's made in a metal building in Huntsville, and the label quality makes it clear that Reo's hasn't gotten much past the mom and pop production stage (or they have no money for marketing). But, despite its humble looks, its a great seasoning.

Did you notice how big that steak was?

Review of "The Last Word" by N. T. Wright

Posted a review of one of Wright's latest books, The Last Word, at the Christonomy site.

North Dallas .NET User Group Meeting Wed Night

If you're going to be there, let me know.

Oxyrhynchus Mini-Lexicon...I Wish

You know what the world needs? More love? Yes. Peace? Yes. It also needs a mini-lexicon for the Oxyrhynchus papyri. There is a lot of text there and I think it could be very useful. Just taking the first bit of POxy 58 as an example, you've got στρατηγοις and ἐπιστρατηγιας. Those are districts in Egypt. Great. A little more info (that really would be inappropriate to LSJ) might be nice. Or how about ἑπτα νομων. Sure, you can see the translations in the published volume and in the Loeb translation (yes, I happened along some that even Loeb had) that the words should be understood as referring to a region named something like "Heptanomis", but a little explanation would be useful.

I really think this would be cool. Expanding it to other papyri might be a good idea too.

I've got too much on my plate at the moment. Anybody want to do that for me? :)