My daughter’s report card came home last week. The grading system is as follows:

• E: Exceeds expectations
• A: Achieving expectations
• P: Progressing towards expectations
• N: Needs support

There are also a couple of places for comments, which is what I’m usually most interested in.

Before I continue, there’s a very good chance my opinion is clouded by a certain “back in my day” attitude. That said, I have given this some thought, enough to start a discussion at least.

The confusion I have with this grading system is the word “expectations”. It sounds kind of benign but what’s missing is context. Is it the expectations at this current moment in time or is it year-end expectations? If it’s year-end expectations, then does she need help to bring her up to speed? Or do they continue to get taught the concept throughout the year? If they don’t, what’s the plan to bring her up to expectations?

All this boils down to a single question for me: Is there anything actionable I, as a parent, need to do?

This is something I posed to the teacher and she was very helpful. She explained the rationale behind the grades and clarified my questions. In the end, I left feeling like I was doing my job, which was basically to support hers.

(Side note: I’ve come to expect this level of professionalism of the teachers at my daughter’s school. Despite the somewhat new-age grading system, she has had some fantastic teachers through the years. The first month of each year is always a little anxious for me because I keep thinking her streak can’t continue. But I guess if Pixar can bat a thousand, so can a school.)

But still this system nags at me. If my kid is progressing toward expectations in a concept and yet, I don’t need to do anything different, then what meaning does the grade provide?

Worse yet: what if she’s still progressing toward expectations at the end of the year? What are my options at that point? I get the impression that this grading system wouldn’t identify the problem earlier in the year.

There’s another angle to this. If your child is a good student and is grasping the concepts and is basically on the right track, there’s a psychological hit you take seeing P’s on the report card. It gives the message that your child is not quite at the level he or she is supposed to be at. The counter-argument, of course, is that this is mid-term. There’s no reason to expect them to be at year-level expectations yet. But again, if they’re on track, what good does it do to tell me “she’s not there yet but we have high hopes”?

This psychological aspect also affects parents. For me personally, I have a good idea what kind of student my daughter is. I help her with her homework and know what she’s good at and what she struggles with. So all I really needed was to have a chat with her teacher to see if there were any problem areas and to see if I needed to do anything differently.

But I can imagine other parents putting undue emphasis on the “lower” P grade, and perhaps pressuring their children to work harder, even if they are already good students.

I suspect the grading process is a stressful one for teachers. Particularly for students whose parents are more apt to blame the teachers for their child’s poor grades. Maybe this system was in response to that. Or maybe the old, A, B, C, D, F system had some inherent problems on its own.

But I’m picturing a report card that has a bunch of As and Bs with one or two Cs. That, to me, is something I can do something about. It sends a clear message of where your child needs support. “At this exact point in time, your daughter is pretty good in all these subjects, but she could step up her efforts in comprehension.”

To re-iterate, this is mostly moot for me because I have a decent grasp on my daughter’s education and on how she’s achieving my own expectations. I just wonder if this grading system adds an unnecessary level of stress when a simple twenty minute conversation with the teacher would tell me what I need to know more than this report card.

Kyle the Graded

I’m going to pretend a whole bunch of you have asked where the Coding Hillbilly nom de plume comes from instead of just one or two.

For several years, my brother and I ran a website, the remnants of which can be seen here. (I’d recommend turning your speakers off before clicking that.) It debuted auspiciously almost ten years ago under the name The Hillbaley Ho Down and Extravaganza. My brother came up with the name as a play on our last name.

The website was an absolute blast to write and did its thing for a few years until it dawned on us that very few of our family, in fact, read. But during that time, I started the technical arm of the Ho Down and used the name of the parent site as the basis for this one. But the name Coding Hillbaley would make sense only to my family who, again, don’t read. So I chose a more mainstream version.

Next question. The avatar I use, seen at the left. This I also stole from my brother. My grandmother has this knick-knack thing she bought from who-knows-where (our money is on a Mexican border town but I shan’t elaborate). My brother took some photos of it, did some touch-ups, and voila!

The original photos of the item are below:

The nice part of the photo is how much it aligns with both the theme of my blog, my general attitude toward software development, and my family in general. Ya, he looks like a hick but damned if he ain’t having a good time. And look like he’s been into the dandelion wine.

Kyle the Ancestral

We’re in a bit of an odd place with our project now. We’re behind schedule, yet the development team has little to do. But we can’t call our tasks done because they haven’t been tested and approved. In short, we’ve hit the grey area of software development called “process”.

I’ll skip the lecture on bottlenecks because I didn’t do very well on the Operational Management course in university where I was first introduced to the concept formally. Instead, let’s focus on one of the factors that led to it.

The project I’m on now is an IT initiative. That is, it was the IT departments idea to create a bunch of applications to replace old ones. As such, the IT department is footing the bill, not the business. Yeah, I heard those some bells when I first discovered that, too.

Now, I’m not privy to the factors that led to this so it would be judgmental of me to comment on why the decision was made. What I can talk about is the effect of it.

In a typical scenario, when a feature comes up to be developed, there are inevitably choices to be made. Should we use a dropdown list, which is easy but cumbersome? Or a look-ahead textbox, which is easier to work with but harder to develop? If I’m the business and I’m not paying the bill, the choice seems pretty obvious to me. You go with the one that looks nicer.

That’s the obvious problem. There are more far-reaching ones. Because our client doesn’t have a financial stake, the project isn’t a high priority. They have their other regular day-to-day duties to attend to; coming up with functionality and test plans for us has to be fit in where it can. If it doesn’t fit in, well, then we can deal with problems in testing. What does it matter if we have to send it back to development because it doesn’t meet our needs?

This is not the fault of the client, mind you. This decision process I described is natural and, in fact, healthy. They have goals and expectations to meet. This project is actually an impediment to those goals. Every time I ask them to clarify something and they respond with “I’ll take a look when I get a chance”, I’m disappointed, but I can hardly blame them for it.

This has almost inevitably led us to our current situation, where we’ve been humming along with the development, but are not delivering value to our full capabilities.

So the moral of the story, I suppose, is to ensure the person you’re building for has a high enough stake in the project. Seems like obvious advice but it can easily be overlooked. Maybe you have some downtime and want to use the opportunity to train up your staff while still delivering something. Maybe you need to retire old applications because they are hindering an infrastructure upgrade. Maybe the bureaucracy is such that you *really* want to update the old apps but you’re meeting resistance from the rest of the organization. You may have noble intentions but don’t forget your own budget.

Kyle the Stakeholder

I struggle with a lot of things. No, no, it’s true. I’m not the infallible coder of the earth that my online persona may have you believe. There are things in this world that I have trouble with. Saran Wrap, for example. It is one of my life goals to be able to tear off a sheet of it without having it stick to itself, forcing me to fiddle with the edges until it’s a mangled ball of cellophane and I have to summon my nine-year-old daughter to tear off another sheet for me. I just don’t have the required food storage skillz. But I’m learning.

Another point of potential improvement is meeting preparation. In my current assignment, we’re test-driving scrum. I’ve worked in a scrum environment before but I came in partway through and the existing team was already long practiced at it and I was able to merge in pretty quickly. In this one, we’re all kind of getting a feel for it.

Part of the process involves meetings. The daily stand-up, of course, but also code reviews, retrospectives, demos, and planning sessions. And I don’t feel like I’m as productive as I should be in them.

The reason for this is that I’m used to meetings being interruptions in my work. The two-hour eye-wateringly detailed recap of the project plan. For these meetings, I’d work until the last possible moment before another conscriptee passed my desk and said, “you coming to the meeting?” at which point I’d lock my computer and saunter into the meeting, usually a few minutes late. And I wouldn’t be the last one in. These are mindless meetings. Ones where you don’t need to put in any thought before, during, or after. You’re there to grease the project manager’s wheels.

But the scrum meetings seem to demand more discipline from their attendees. They don't work as well if everyone walks in with a “switch-on” mentality. That is, they turn their attention to the meeting task as soon as they walk in the door.

Consider a retrospective meeting, where you discuss the good, the bad, and the physically unattractive of the most recent sprint. Very often, the question will come to me, “what was good/bad about the last sprint” and I’ll have to sit and think for a few minutes before coming up with some lame contribution just because I didn’t want to look like an idiot. (“Well, I really liked the colour palette we chose.”) Wouldn’t it have been easier if I did that thinking beforehand so I didn’t waste anyone’s time?

This is even more critical for code reviews and planning sessions. Almost anyone that has attended a code review has had everyone walk in, sit down, and the leader says, “So what do we want to look at today?” Ideas are thrown out, some code is plastered on the page, and everyone looks at it for a few seconds before tossing out ideas off the top of their head.

Ditto for planning sessions. “I’m thinking we should handle the admin screen to add customers?” “Hmmm…that might be a good idea…actually, no wait, we should do the invoice screen first, then we’ll have an idea of what data we need to capture.” “But if we do the invoice screen first, we’ll have to wire in the calculation engine.” And so on and so forth.

This is the type of discussion I think is worth *starting* over e-mail. I.e. An e-mail that says, “The planning session is on Monday, the features under consideration are: 1) admin screen for customers, 2) invoice screen, 3) easter egg page showing the after effects of the company Christmas party. Let me know your thoughts before the meeting.” Then, come Monday, everyone has (presumably) contributed to the discussion, some issues have been brought forth and we’ve got a head start.

For code reviews, it’s the same thing. A generic review where the class-at-hand is decided on the spot leads to developers wondering if they’ll have to end up spending the meeting defending their code. But if the code being reviewed was decided beforehand, he could take a look at it and maybe get a sense of the issues that maybe be brought up. And presumably, the issues that *are* brought up are more substantial than “shouldn’t you have an underscore at the beginning of your variable names, Sparky?”

I’m already doing this in some respect for the daily stand-up. It’s not very mentally demanding because you generally have a good idea what you did the day before and what you plan to do today, but I still go through the mental exercise before the meeting. But that’s because the expectation has been set that everyone should know what to say and get to the point. The same expectation usually isn’t held at the more involved meetings.

The latent English professor in me says that this is an awkward place to end the post but for the life of me, I can’t think of anything else to say. So…ummm…start the discussion before the meeting, I guess is the overall takeaway here.

Kyle the Prepared

I have a hate-hate relationship with Microsoft Money. Or rather, with it’s delivery mechanism. I’ve railed on this before more than once. You’d think I would have learned my lesson but here I am, once again, with a new computer that needs a new copy of Money 2008 installed and me without my installer…

One of the “problems” is that I upgraded from version 2006 to 2008 late last year. This was because Money 2006 stopped updating prices for my portfolio automatically and I figured it was because my 2-year dealie thing had expired. Alas, upgrading to version 2008 didn’t work and it was only through their support centre (which, I will freely admit, was extremely helpful) that I was able to get that feature working again.

Now 2009 brings the hillbilly a brand new desktop and the *only* application I’ve had any issues installing is Microsoft Money. Everything else, both paid and unpaid, went off without a hitch. ReSharper, SmartFTP, VisualSVN, FoxIt PDF Creator. Each of these (paid) products I was able to get up and running the same way:

• Download from their website
• Install
• Search my Inbox for a license key and enter it

(It should also be noted that every single one of these products is more expensive than Microsoft Money.)

But Microsoft Money has a download limit of 30-days. After that, you’re out of luck unless you purchased the extended download service, which gives you access for up to two years. During my attempts to fix this, the helpful folk at DigitalRiver.com said I could purchase said service after the fact but try as I might, I simply can’t figure out how, even with the instructions they sent. (I could e-mail them to ask but in my most recent reply, I was a little too sarcastic and told them I’d rather eat glass than buy it.)

Enter Quicken as the most viable replacement. Except that you can’t download a trial version. And for software that manages my money, I like to see what I’m getting first. The Twitterati has made a few alternative suggestions, like Yodlee and GnuCash but personal banking is a pain as it is in the Bahamas and I’d like to stick with software I’m reasonably familiar with. Plus, the automatic price updating seems to be a missing feature in both of those.

Note: it could be argued that this is all my fault. I read the terms and conditions and was fully aware of the 30-day download limit and shouldn’t have deleted the set up application. That’s very true. I have a habit of downloading to my desktop, then cleaning house on a regular basis and my memory for this sort of thing sucks. As it turns out, over the course of writing this post, I did end up finding the original download (which I had mistakenly filed under the Visual Studio 2005 Macros folder). So I no longer have anything to rant about. But the practice is still very much outdated and should be reworked so I’m going ahead anyway.

Kyle the Vented

<to the tune of The Beverly Hillbillies>

Come and listen to a story 'bout a blogger named Kyle
Didn't have much to say but he said it with some style
Day after day, he'd talk of TDD
AJAX and patterns and working remotely

Far, that is. Distant. Boondocks. 

Kyle blogged on and off for a little more'n a year
Then the CodeBetter folks said, "blog on over here!"
Said "we're big fans of your posts on hooch and 'shine"
So he packed up his feed and left his home behind.

Virtually, that is. Forsaken. But not forgotten.

Alas, it is the end of an era. The Coding Hillbilly has a new home (which explains the irony of the new skin). I've been called up to the majors over at www.CodeBetter.com. This place has been a nice little starter trailer but you can go only so long without indoor plumbing. Not sure what I'll do without dasBlog as my default blog-filler now.

The feed will (theoretically) stay the same for those of you who want to continue reading my ramblings without subscribing to the CodeBetter main feed. http://kyle.baley.org will continue to point here to minimize broken links but I've moved http://www.codinghillbilly.com to point to the new location (again, theoretically).

See y'all on the other side

Kyle the Promoted

It's just like skinning a raccoon, really. Ya outsource it.

Seriously, I do have some technical posts on the way. There's a reason I'm holding out on them. In the meantime, you're stuck with the philly-sophical side of the Coding Hillbilly.

So I recently went through a branding phase where I decided the hillbilly needed a more profeshunal look if he wuz to be taken seeryuslee. If you are viewing this post directly on my site (and I imagine exactly none of you are but that you'll be clicking the link to check it out shortly), you'll notice a brand spankin' (tee hee) new skin courtesy of the Design Goblin.

It was a bit of an odd decision to make and one that will seem all the more ironic hopefully sometime this week. On the one hand, I wanted something a little easier on the eyes than the "Sepia Gone Wild" theme of the last one. On the other hand, considering most people come at this with an RSS reader, who cares how it looks? (Side note: I'm not going to erase what I typed but now that I've said it, I shouldn't discount the power of the search engine.)

In implementing this theme, I did have to sell my soul a little and rely heavily on tables for layout. (Sorry, Justice.) But after looking at some of the things you have to do in CSS just to have two blocks of text on the same line, one aligned left and the other aligned right, I chose instead to go the tried-and-true route and make up some rationalization for it (which I'm still working on). And after taking that first step into the abyss, I pretty much abandoned all I know and love about CSS and even stopped using class names for the remainder of the theme.

So, such as it is, this is the new look of the Coding Hillbilly. In doing so, I've rendered more than a few posts on ASP.NET AJAX that much more confusing with their references to rounded corners and watermarks on the site. If I were an industrious person of the earth, I'd go back and add caveats...

Feel free to leave comments on the look if it's something you feel strongly about. Consider though that any negative feedback will result in some heavy editing of your name in the comment XML file.

Kyle the Reborn

One of the highlights of DevTeach last week was meeting Ayende for the first time, albeit fleetingly. But it was enough for Bil Simser and me to form a theory that bears consideration. And it's one that will probably put me at great personal risk should it be true but such is the sacrifice I'm willing to make for the community:

Ayende Rahien is an android

I know what you're thinking. Shock at first. Maybe a little indignation. But now your considering your own experience with him and there's a little nod of recognition, isn't there. A bit of "hmmm...that would explain it", yesno? How many times have you read about some coding prowess he's done and thought, "man, that guy ain't human"?

Let's consider the evidence:

• Seemingly codes more than is possible in a 24-hour day even assuming he doesn't sleep
• He doesn't sleep
• The code ranges from good to stellar (depending on how much power remains in his batteries)
• His low, monotone voice
• The way he pauses while he talks under the guise of "well, English is not my first language".
• Constantly asks for explanation of English colloquialisms (particularly during conversations with Scott Belware)
• 3000 posts in three years
• Goes by a pseudonym because of some super-secret military reason. (The name originates from a series called The Wheel of Time so I'm working on a corollary that he's from the future, too.)
• Finally, if you watch him closely, you'll notice he never blinks

So what do we, as a development community, do about this information? Nothing. He was clearly created for the purpose of good. Or rather, if Hollywood is as accurate as I believe it to be, he was created for evil, gained sentience, and decided to use his power to better mankind to make up for his past transgressions. Perhaps, under the command of his brilliant-but-demented creator, he was responsible for all the brackets in Lisp or something equally nefarious. Now that I think about it, this would explain APL.

The point is: he is here to help humankind and we should encourage him to continue about his business. But keep an eye on him in case his eyes start glowing red which, as Hollywood has again taught us, is the universal sign of an android gone bad.

Kyle the Theorist

Breaking form here by making someone else's link the sole topic of this post without adding anything other than kudos. But it's a really good link and it plays to my technical and musical leanings.

Props to Carl Franklin for a very impressive rendition of Home At Last (via Scott Hanselman). All four instruments *and* vocals (one can only assume he's doing backing vocals himself as well). Puts my own little flirtation with mixing from a few years ago, in the form of quotes from Glengarry Glen Ross intermingled with Pink Floyd's Money (sometimes very badly), into perspective. (Note: if you've seen the movie, you already know this but for those who haven't, that "flirtation" link is probably not safe for work. Carl's is.)

And yes, an e-mail has been sent to Carl to audition for Hillbilly Idol.

Kyle the Scouting

Tried to respond to Chinh Do's comment on a previous post this morning and lo! the Coding Hillbilly has been dubbed a social networking site by his employer. And Jayzus knows we don't want workers who network socially (unless it's for the United Way judging from the amount of ad space it gets on the company portal).

Interestingly, the sister-aunt site to this one is still deemed acceptable viewing.

Anyway, I'm glad my employer has shown me the error of my ways. I was almost unproductive there for a second.

And yes, this post was written during normal work hours.

Kyle the Spiteful

It's mind-boggling the amount of effort communication companies must put into their rate plans. I've resisted cell phones for that very reason alone. As soon as I see "if" or "provided that" or "after" or "before" my eyes glaze over and I get this unwavering urge to send the company some literature.

The main issue with the rate plans is that no matter which one I choose, I'll end up feeling stupid. Not only about whether I chose the right plan but also every time I would inevitably think, "I can't call X now because it'll be more expensive" or "I really should swap N for M in my top X list". And that's not even considering the idiocy I would feel for signing up for a contract. I've never signed a lease for three years. Not for an apartment and not for a car. So I'm sure as *%$@ not signing one for the right to get dirty looks when I forget to turn it off in a movie theatre.

This isn't just for cell phones. This little sidebar is being written from Lester B. Pearson airport in Toronto courtesy of www.boingo.com (the fact that that's not hyperlink is not an accident). In order for me to sign-up for their one day, $9.95 service, I needed to actually install something on my machine. Not even one of those idiotic ActiveX component that you have to keep open. This is a physical piece of software staring at me from the system tray. At the moment, it says I'm disconnected which I'm not. And yet, I couldn't get online without first installing it, then logging in.

And for completeness, they also lose points for their "lost password" mechanism. Namely, when I signed up, I had to provide not only a password but a four-digit PIN number in the event I forgot my password. My guess is that if you forgot your password, you would provide that PIN number and they'd send it to you via e-mail. Or maybe reset it. In any case, I would be embarrassed to even suggest you enter a four-digit PIN for *anything* in the 21st century. And you just know at least half the people signing up are using their bank PINs.

But it's hard to fault them completely for that kind of inanity. Like I said, I *did* sign up for it...

Kyle the Example

The subject for this post is pretty much the opposite of what I generally like to put here. It's a rant about a company's customer service. But this is the most readily accessible soapbox at my disposal and the only mechanism I know that will offer some small measure of retribution (thanks to Google) while still offering the possibility to entertain. So I'm going anyway. But I swear the technical content will blossom in the coming weeks.

I'm not an easily angered hillbilly (or Appalachian American, as we prefer to be called). I can withstand a certain level of incompetence in my dealings with service-oriented industries. I do, after all, live in the Bahamas. And have spent the last month in labour-challenged Calgary. But my recent dealings with Expedia have come to a head, the likes of which can only be solved by making it as public as possible in the hopes it gets Slashdotted to the point where I can't be ignored anymore.

The original saga starts here during a now-not-so-recent trip to Miami. To sum up, my paper tickets didn't arrive in time, I had to purchase new ones, Expedia said I'd get a refund, I went about my business.

It is now four months later and my goal has shifted from "get my money back" to "get someone at Expedia to acknowledge me". The last communication they have actively made to me was April 17 in an e-mail claiming the fax I sent to them was unclear. Subsequent faxes and e-mails (including scanned versions of the tickets) by me have gone unanswered.

All of my normal tactics have failed me. I tried being nice to the customer service agents to the point where I am now godfather to two of their children. When that started failing, I tried Justice's variation on the theme and greeted the next CSR with a seductive "what are you wearing?". The agent didn't respond well to that or the ensuing promises of debauchery which was just as well because he couldn't help me either.

Following that was a carefully worded e-mail to them outlining the situation, where they failed, and what I'd like to happen (i.e. "will you please just call me?"). That ruse in itself is fairly useless but I cc'd advocate@consumerreports.com, which historically, has given me good results, regardless of whether that e-mail address actually exists something I still haven't actually determined.

My current tactic is one I hadn't used in a while. I'm now stalking Expedia. I fax them copies of my tickets daily. I e-mail them just to tell them what I did that day. Y'know, the usual: I had Bran Flakes for breakfast, then I rode the bus to work, then I walked to the building where I work, then I took the elevator, give me my money or I'll find your building and lob Travelocity gnomes through the windows, then I went to my office...

I call them at all hours. Sometimes I go through the whole spiel with them and other times, I just breathe heavy when I get someone on the line. In the latter case, it's best to do it when you're talking to an agent but there's still some degree of satisfaction when the computer voice says, "I'm sorry. I didn't quite get that" while you're hyperventilating.

Alas, my most recent phone calls to them have broken my resolve and I have had to *shudder* raise my voice to the CSR at the other end, especially when he or she recites from the CSR manual verbatim: Your case has been escalated to the next level and someone from that department will be contacting you shortly.

It's an interesting progression from that point. I try explaining, fairly rationally at first, that my sole goal is for someone at Expedia to call me. At one point, I even asked the CSR to call me right back herself just to say hello so I could verify that someone at Expedia was capable of dialling a phone. The agent then assures me that someone will and I tell them that every assurance Expedia has made to me to date has been false, including the one where the tickets would be delivered on time in the first place (despite my protests that they wouldn't).

It is at this point that I have started to wander into tirade-territory which is generally a foreign world to me. And after doing it a couple of times, I wonder why people bother. Because there is a distinct shift in the agent's MO once you start. It's like they shut down completely and their vocabulary consists solely of "I understand, sir" until you are finished. You can almost hear the click when they switch into this mode. And when you're finished, not only can they still not help you, but they're also adding comments to your file like "Customer blew up like Michael Richards at a NAACP meeting. With absolutely no provocation."

Like I said, I can put up with a lot but my patience wears when an organization is showing not only a colossal level of incompetence, but an intense indifference to actually solving what is a fairly simple issue, especially over such a long period of time. I'm an easy guy to satisfy. All I really need is to know that you're taking my problem seriously. Even if it doesn't get resolved they way I want, if the person shows that they did their due diligence and their conclusion follows some logic, I have no qualms going back to them the next time.

Like most service indsutries, online travel companies are differentiated not so much by the service they offer, which is interchangeable, but by how they react when something goes wrong. And even in the case where that experience sucks, I'd like to think I'm objective enough to give it another try when I recognize that the issue could have been the fault of one particular individual.

But with Expedia, the problem appears to be ingrained into their process. Where my issue currently sits, I have no way of contacting the people who can help me. The front-line CSR's can't solve my problem nor can they put me in contact with the people who can.

What's worse, they continue to tell me things are going to happen that they can't personally verify. It started right after I made the reservation when I called them to express my...ummm...reservations that the tickets would arrive on time. I was assured they would. I called back two days before the trip and they again assured me the tickets would arrive the next day by mail, even though the next day was a national holiday in both the US and the Bahamas. Since then, they have all assured me someone would call back with an update.

The whole thing reeks of an inherent culture problem rather than one bad seed. Which isn't a good place to be, especially when air travel in particular is already so stressful. So I suppose Expedia will go on the very short list of companies I won't use, at least until I get some evidence to the contrary. And at this point, it will take more than a cheque for the tickets I had to re-purchase.

Kyle the Betrodden

Re: TestDriven.NET v. Microsoft

I have been following it and have nothing important to add that has not already been said. That is all.

Kyle the Neutral

P.S. I said the same thing when the Anna Nicole thing hit.

Someone tried to send me the following e-mail today:

Is there a quick (slick) way to force SSL on a website in IIS? I.e. if a user types in "http://www.mysite.com/mypage.aspx" we want IIS to automatically redirect to "http s://www.mysite.com/mypage.aspx"... I know you can do this through code in many ways, but wondering if there is some tricky way to do it in IIS.

Clearly, my friend is trying to infect the world with clandestine virii through his use of innocent IIS questions. But no matter! I have GoDaddy to protect me! So instead of his spite-filled spam actually making it to my Inbox, he received the following:

PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 12): 554 The message was rejected because it contains prohibited virus or spam content

I eventually did get the message thanks to the efforts of two others to whom the message had been sent, one of whom had the foresight to try my Gmail account which, like all things Google, worked.

Sure enough, I tried forwarding that same message to my normal, everyday e-mail account and received the same outright rejection (which is oddly reminiscent of the ones I got in high school).

Didn't take too long to figure out it was the URL that got flagged and flogged as "prohibited spam content".

So let that be a lesson to you all. There are evil people out there on the Internets. They may try to trick you with their pleas for help. But you must constantly be on the alert. Next thing you know, I'll be fielding questions on how to send money to Nigeria using LINQ.

Oh, the original question. Don't worry, it got answered in the same way I usually get mine answered. Send it out to a random group of developers from my address book plus James Kovacs. Chances are he's posted the solution already.

Kyle the Vigilant(e)

Against my better judgement, I bought a Sony TV in Miami and had it shipped to the Bahamas. It's a 46" Bravia that within its first week, started showing a 3" stripe along the right side of the screen. It was red when it should have been black, yellow when it should have been green, etc, etc and so on and so forth.

But that's not what I came to talk about.

At some point during my travels, Sony got it into its head that I live in Latin America. So much so that now whenever I try to navigate to www.sony.com, I'm redirected to www.sony-latin.com/corporate.

When I first tried to hit sony.com, it detected something from my browser (or more likely my IP address since my computer probably still thinks I'm in the US) and asked me if I wanted to go to sony.com or the Sony Bahamas regional site. I.E. sony-latin.com. I went with sony.com and had it remember my preference but that was duly ignored.

(For now, I'm ignoring the ludicrous idea that the Bahamas should be considered part of Latin America. I'm also ignoring the odyssey I've had to endure )

The main issue with the Sony Latin site is, as far as I can tell, there is no way to get back to sony.com. There is a link to Global Home, which takes you to sony.net (which has its own issues, like the fact that the Bahamas doesn't even exist in their list of countries) but nothing back to sony.com. At least nothing in English.

There are other problems with sony-latin.com. Firstly, the dropdown menus don't work in Firefox which essentially means you can't navigate anywhere from the homepage. (And even in IE, I'm getting javascript errors with the menu.) And clicking on the Puerto Rico e-mail link from this site gives a Public Area General Error! which is a new one to me. (Ya, I know what you're going to say. I have no idea why I would be directed to the Puerto Rico support site either.)

Salient points:

• Sony doesn't appear to be putting in even the minimum amount of effort required for sony-latin.com. The two errors I found are pretty glaring. After all, Firefox is on version 2.
• Sony does however appear to have put in some effort to try to direct non-US customers to the right place. The problem being, they've put in a lot of effort and it's worse than, say, Dell where at least you can switch to the US site if they've directed you to the wrong place.
• The Bahamas simply should not be considered part of Latin America. I don't speak Spanish (and in fact, many Bahamians are still working on English as their first language judging from the slogans from the recent political campaign). I could see the argument though considering the nearest US city is Miami.

For the sake of closure, I did manage to get to sony.com after clearing my cookies. Firefox took me to the page where I had to choose sony.com or sony-latin.com and I also chose to remember my preference. Then I closed my browser and went to sony.com again and was directed to sony-latin.com.

<sigh> ¿Cualquier persona desea comprar una televisión nueva?

The inevitable customer satisfaction survey came the next day. I was pretty fair I think, commending the CSR on her politeness and troubleshooting skills while making it clear I still have a problem. But I had to take the survey twice. The first time, I received the following when I submitted it:

Astute readers will recognize Firefox's open dialogue and that Firefox is trying to open an ASPX page as an external file type. I retook the survey in Internet Explorer and everything went through fine. Tried a third time in Firefox and got the same dialogue.

Not quite sure what's happening but you'd better believe I opened that page in VS2005. It is attached below. You'll notice it's a .NET 1.0 or 1.1 page and that there isn't any actual server-side code in it. No technical reason for it to be an ASPX page although I'd probably make it one myself in the chance server-side code needs to be added to it later.

Also note that the page that launched this, the actual survey, is a plain old ASP page. Not sure why Firefox isn't able to open the page while IE is. If I had to guess, it would be because ASPX pages aren't registered properly at Sony in IIS and IE is being forgiving. Actually that doesn't sound right now that I think about it.

Regardless, it seems Sony's survey site doesn't support my version of Firefox. But here is the URL for the survey (with the EventID stripped) if you want to play around with it yourself.

And Sony really should invest in a default page for http://www.survey.sony.com.

** UPDATE **

After taking a look at the original survey page's HTML, it might be a .NET page, evidenced by the fact that the submit button has runat="server" attached to it.

On the heels of Bil Simser's question, "What Gets You Up In the Morning?" (and I'm paraphrasing to tie in with this post), I'm wondering, "What Winds You Down At Night?" Do you hunker down with a good book? Toss on The Celtic Show and cuddle with Andy Donnelly? Do an inventory of your knife collection?

Recently, my evening wind-down has evolved into a semi-routine: sit out on the patio with a cup of tea and the missus while the young 'un frolics somewhere in the vicinity. Some days we'll watch TV in the background (usually HGTV or the Food network). We've gotten into the habit of reading before bed too, which is something I'm glad I've gotten back into, even if my current choice of book, Che, is taking me freakin' forever to finish (damn biographies and they're lack of skippable descriptions). And on nights where I don't feel so revolutionary, there are plenty of crossword puzzle books lying at arms length in any given room of my house.

Related question: What's your depressant of choice for getting to sleep at night? 'Cause you see, ever since undertaking my recent professional development rampage, my mind has been abuzz with new concepts and techniques at the end of the day. And when my mind latches on to an interesting puzzle, it's tough to drift off.

Usually this isn't such a bad thing. I do most of my best creative thinking at night. But the offspring has been off school the past two weeks and let's just say, it's thrown off my sleep patterns.

So lately, I've taken to a variation on counting sheep. Namely, I'll lie in bed with my eyes closed and start counting while picturing the numbers in my head. And my font of choice is whatever Windows XP uses to identify monitors in a multi-monitor environment. You know the one, the big 1 or 2 (or if you're Hanselman, 3 or 4) that appears when you click Identify. That's what goes through my head at night against an undistinguishable background as I go to sleep.

 Test-driven development, indeed.

I'm going to pretend you don't already know this but the Calgary Code Camp is a mere two weeks away and it looks like it will surpass last year's in every way except one. Namely, I won't be presenting or attending. Which is just as well. My taste in music hasn't improved any. (MAN, Norah Jones' new CD rocks, metaphorically speaking.)

Normally, a nine-hour plane ride with a three-hour layover in TO wouldn't be enough to keep me from a Bil Simser/John Bristowe tag-team and the one titled Meet the Monkey almost sealed the deal but a $10k shopping trip to Miami to furnish our new condo (which previously contained furniture that looked like Edith Head puked and that puke designed it) put a big kibosh on that little cross-continental jaunt.

So, dear reader(s), it is up to you to be my eyes and ears. I need you to get up close and personal with the presenters. I'm talking INTIMATE. I want to be able to smell the soy-based food products on James Kovacs' breath when you report back to me. I want to know what JP's stimulant of choice is before he goes on. I want to know if Tom Opgenorth can make it through his presentation without giggling whenever he says Mono.

The one with the best use of clandestine tactics gets a free tour of Anna Nicole's house.

Let's talk about my death for a minute 'cause I know a bunch of you have been thinking about it.

Scott Hanselman has an interesting post on a Family Backup Strategy. He mentions the importance of making sure your data is backed up which, of course, we all do. *cough*

Near the bottom, he alludes to something in passing: Does your spouse know where The Data is? This triggered something that's been brewing in the back of my mind for some time now: What happens if it's my turn to get hit by a bus tomorrow?

There is more to that than just telling people where my data is. That's the easy part. But what about the "other" IT support I do for various friends and family?

Here are a couple of examples from my own experience. I maintain seven domain names, some of which are personal, but at least four aren't. They are for my dad's company and another company for which I do IT work on the side. In the event of my untimely demise, how does someone log in to renew or change the domain info for these?

And what happens when the e-mail goes down for any of those domains?

Many years ago, I whipped up an ASP app for my dad's company (using AJAX before it was called AJAX even) that they can now not do without. They are on the phone to me faster than any notification system could be when that app goes down. Upon my death, someone will need to: a) find the app and the database, and b) decipher it. And let's just say I was a junior hillbilly back in 2000.

I do a lot of IT work for a small energy consulting firm (as in the president and his direct report, aka Mrs. Hillbilly). Over the years, I've done many little tweaks to his server and various laptops. Configuring a dial-up app for when he's in countries with limited access, setting up Microsoft's SyncToy to backup his laptop whenever he's in town, configuring the Microsoft Office Apps to look in specific folders by default, and so on and so forth.

Basically, I do all the techie stuff so that he can focus on doing what he does best, which is the goal for all non-technical professionals. But the kind of personal service he (and my family) enjoys comes at a cost in that it's that much bigger a hit when I'm gone. Sure you could get any lackey to install a virus scanner but what happens when you're in Kuwait and you start getting a svchost error every time you boot up right before you're supposed to teach a five-day seminar (to take a totally hypothetical example that didn't happen just last year).

Yes, I should be documenting everything and yes, I should have a will and yes, I should take the hair of the chipmunks before I cook 'em. But I haven't, okay? And unfortunately, there are businesses that rely on them now. And this isn't to mention this har blog thingy and its long-forgotten sister-site, The Hillbaley Ho Down and Extravaganza (or, more importantly, its e-mail domain).

So while you're making a backup strategy, don't forget to include the passwords, URLS, network locations, domain info, and various tweaks to unknowing victims' computers alongside your will in the safety deposit box.

Oh, and if by chance you DO get a svchost error on boot up, it's probably your Automatic Updates.

The picture up top is the banjo player from Deliverance. The duet he does with another character in the movie is kind of an informal family theme song.

The Coding Hillbilly is out at the Sundance Film Festival these days folks, so things'll be mighty quiet for a bit. If you get a hankerin' for my comings and goings, it'll all be chronicled here. Let me know if you want me to pass on any messages for specific celebrities, preferably Kate Beckinsale. Note, however, that I will not, nor will I ever, for anybody or for any reason approach Paris Hilton.

This blog attracts some odd searches which I expected, given my theme. "hillbilly names", "hillbilly cycle", "hillbilly look", and "how to be a hillbilly" (!) are just some of the wacky things in my Referrers section as is "legal definition of office hours" which I'm kind of proud of. And apparently nothing bumps the numbers like referring to a free copy of Leon Redbone and Zooey Deschanels' Baby It's Cold Outside (sorry for you folks going away empty handed, I swear I have it around here somewhere here it is kiddies).

But how in the name of all things .NET did I come up twelfth in a search for "why does my ocd get worse when I'm praying to allah"? And even more baffling, why is the searcher clicking on a link that says "The Coding Hillbilly"?

Oh my Sweet Jayzus, I just scared the living crap out of myself. My wife's listening to the soft hits station on TV and Air Supply's Even the Nights Are Better comes on...and...oh, jeezus, I can't even bring myself to type it...It's far too frightening. OK, Baley, suck it up and blurt it out...

I KNEW THE WORDS!!! Every single, *#$% sappy one of 'em. All the inflections, the slight key change at the end, the way he pauses slightly on "since I fooound yoooooou". I was god-damned pitch perfect.

Where do you run when your own mind is what scares you most? Along with Graham Russell and Russell Hitchco--OH GOD, I KNOW THEIR NAMES!!!

Just chatting with a friend who will remain nameless. He informs me that the company he's contracting at his installed a proxy to monitor MSN and IE traffic to see how much efficiency is lost to these activities.

I have read no empirical studies on this and am basing my opinion on exactly nothing but here it is: This idea is ridiculous. To me, it screams, "we have no faith in our hiring process." It means the company believes that the people they hired are lazy and easily distracted. And that they would perform better if this dang internet thingy was limited to work and not play.

This is coming on the heels of an article I just read (equally biased) on the nature of nine to five as well as Joel Spolsky's Field Guide to Developers (which is geared toward techies but I'd like to think it applied to all fields). The first article argues (correctly) that attendance != performance. My brother is capable of zoning out so completely, he actually starts drooling. Cheap, effective, and just as non-productive as doing the daily crossword online. Sometimes, he'll murmur random words to himself, too. "hippoooo, hippooooo, hippooooooooooo" But trust me on this, he's a superstar at what he does.

And I admit freely that I spend work hours reading news and blogs, chatting on MSN and playing solitaire. Not a lot but probably enough to make some managers freak out. Sometimes I do these things at companies that I know have monitors on and advertise that fact proudly. I admit I'm doing it to pick a fight but so far no one has called me up on it.

But I'd love to have someone try to reprimand me for spending too much time on these activities. My response: "Are you dissatisfied with the quality of my work?" I like to think I'm above average productivity-wise. Which is how companies should rate your performance. Not on the amount of time you've spent on a task but whether you completed it on time, on budget and with high quality. If you didn't, time to start curtailing your privileges.

My case is somewhat different than an employee's, though, because I bill by the hour. And I don't charge for time I spend on non-work-related activities. I won't necessarily dock three minutes from my timesheet to answer a technical question from a friend but neither will I charge for the half-hour I spent shopping for man-purses. In general, if the company is good to me, I'll reciprocate. If they aren't, I'll fulfill my contractual obligations to the letter. And if anyone from my current employer is reading, I don't mind saying they are definitely in the former category.

Of course, not all contractors are as pure and holy as I am and employees have different motives. And I don't necessarily want to get into ethical dilemmas. But my feeling is: let your people surf. They have tasks and deadlines and goals. If they're meeting them, consider the internet and MSN a perk of the job. If they're not, fire their asses. Instead, we have managers treating employees like children: You can have *one* website as an afternoon snack but that's it! And it has to be a healthy one.

Besides, this is the 21st century for Jayzus' sake. I thought spying on employees went out in the 90s.