Power-coder.net

For my birthday this year my girlfriend said she was going to take me to see the Lord of the Rings musical playing in Toronto. She checked for tickets every couple of weeks during the year, we wanted decent seats but they always seemed to be so expensive. Luckily, one week in June when she was checking the site, she stumbled across this deal where you get a 3 course dinner and ‘Premium Seats’ for the bargain price of $89! She called right away and was able to reserve us both DD (4th row) seats, which actually end up being 2nd row seats due to the space alloted for the conductor.

Our dinner was at The Strip House just around the corner from the theatre and was absolutely fantastic, I would highly recommend it to anybody looking for a new place to try.

Being a huge fan of the original books and the movies and after the lackluster reviews I was a bit skeptical about how the show would be. Needless to say, I was amazed. The sets and effects were brilliant and overall they interpretted the story very well. Those who only saw the movies may find the end a bit confusing as it does not end with Frodo going to the West, instead, the story of Saruman returning to the Shire is told, a great surprise that had many in the theatre wondering what was going on. For me, the most memorable scene was the Bridge of Khazad-dum, the stage was lit to appear as though it was on fire, then suddenly there was a huge blast of air whipping past us with pieces of tissue paper as ash. It felt like and earthquake was happenening beneath our seats. All of this was compounded by our proximity to the stage.

Overall I thought the show was very well done, my only disappointment was that the voice of the actor who played Gandalf was very weak, almost to the point of sounding scared most of the time. Mind you, he had very large shoes to fill after the example set by Sir Ian McKellen.

If you get a chance to see it before it closes on Sept. 3rd, I highly recommend it.

So I’m officially on the path to getting my Microsoft Certified Professional Developer certification. I’ve purchased the recently released Self-Paced training kit for exam 70-536 (.NET 2.0 Application Development Foundation) from Chapters and it just arrived at the office today.

My plan is to maintain a log of sorts of my progress through the whole ordeal so that others can learn from my experience. I’ve already made my way through the first chapter of the text so I’ll be posting about that soon, check back for all the gory details.

With the development of my PHP Time Tracker tool I’ve come across a question that I’m sure many other software developers have had to answer.

"How do you decide if your software will be open source or closed source?"

At this point I’m not sure what the answer to that question is but I’m going to try to work it out here. I’m really hoping that somebody out there that has some experience with these sorts of things will be able to weigh in with some of their thoughts as well.

The advantages I see for the open source perspective are:

• Potentially wider breadth of knowledge can be used to solve problems
• Faster development through multiple people working at the same time
• Better cross-platform support due to developers with different backgrounds
• Better quality and security due to peer reviewing of code before deployment

• Here’s the advantages I see for keeping things to myself:
• I get to keep things to myself, maintain full control over the project<
• My work and my code stays private, can’t be taken and used in other projects
• If a business opportunity presents itself as a result of the project, I don’t have to take the open source implications into consideration.To me it seems that the pros of each end up being the cons of the other. I’m still quite confused about the whole thing. For now though I think I’m going to keep the PHP Time Tracker project to myself.

I know I said that I would have the PHP timeTracker client application available late last week, but I’m having a hell of a time getting my app to build using ClickOnce. Each time I run the generated setup.exe file the installer crashes. I’ve been trying to work through it but simply cannot discover what it is that I am doing wrong.

When I build the app in debug mode it works fine, but when I packaged it for release the exe refuses to run. It’s not like I’m doing rocket science here, it’s a very simple app with two embedded icon files. If anybody out there knows of something I might be overlooking please let me know.

Once I’ve got this problem fixed I will make the app available.

[UPDATE: 2006/03/23] – I have fixed the deployment problem by removing some icon resources that weren’t set up properly during my first attempt. When you sign in to PHP time tracker you will now see a ‘Get Client’ option under the Functions menu that will take you to the installer page.

I am pleased to announce the beta release of PHP Time Tracker. A client-server application system for tracking the amount of time required to complete tasks and projects. I am hoping it will help potentially everybody involved in doing work discover how much time it actually takes to do certain tasks so that future estimates can be more accurate. I know that is a problem I currently have, being a relatively new software developer, and I would really like to start to build a baseline for estimating.

There are two main components to the system:

A web-based management interface:

• Allows for the creation of new user accounts, new projects and tasks for those projects
• Will allow for assigning tasks to different users
• Will allow for creating sub-tasks for any task
• Displays a complete log of all the time entries for any task along with user comments

A client-side Windows Forms application:

• Captures an XML feed of all tasks for a user from the web system
• Allows the desktop user to start and stop a timer that will automatically update the time logs on the server
• When a user stops a timer they will have the option to attach a comment to the log update that will be visible through the web interface

So yeah, that’s where I’m at today, the web system is online now at www.power-coder.net/timeTracker. The client application requires a couple of tweaks after some changes I made tonight, so it will be made available for download tomorrow.

Please remember, this is a beta release, it is not by any means ready for production use. I do encourage you to post any feedback you have.

Known Issues:

• Styles don’t work properly in IE (not 100% in firefox either, but much better)
• On pages where there is currently no info in the DB you’ll see a lot of [--someThing--] tags. This is because not all of the queries have been written yet and I have not yet taken an empty result set into account. This will be repaired this week.
• There is absolutely no validation on any of the input. I know, this is bad, no excuse, but it will be repaired this week. Please don’t SQL Inject my database, that wouldn’t be nice!

Please browse through the site, tell me what you like, tell me what you don’t like and what can be improved. That’s the whole purpose for this beta release.

Over the next while there are going to be lots of changes going on to the whole system, I have a huge list of features that I would like to add in, which I will attempt to post as soon as possible. So please don’t be alarmed if things aren’t the way you left them when you sign in after a couple of days.

Thanks for testing it out!