One question I’ve been unable to answer about this blog is the standard, “what’s it about?” Is it about technology? Software development? Business? Music? Books? My family? Well, the short answer is: it’s about everything I’m interested in, which would be all of the above and more.
Well, I’m finally branching off the family posts into a blog that we are going to be sharing as a family. Introducing petersfive.com.
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So, I’m starting a new job tomorrow. Today is my last day with StoneHenge Partners and I begin a new job back at Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group tomorrow.
My time at StoneHenge has been great. For those that have been in this industry a while, you know how different the corporate and consulting worlds are. There are great things and challenges about both. I’ve learned a ton from the consulting world by working with lots of different companies, and StoneHenge has given me lots of opportunities to grow in my career. Leaving StoneHenge was very hard; I feel like we are a family. But, sometimes I just becomes clear that it’s time to move on.
I formerly worked for Dollar Thrifty for about 3 1/2 years. DTAG then outsourced IT to EDS and I became an EDS employee. I worked for EDS for about 6 months, then left and came to work for StoneHenge.
Recently, however, DTAG has become bringing parts of IT back in house. They then announced the hiring of 19 new IT managers. I applied for one of these positions and was offered the job.
I’m excited for the change, it seems the IT department is moving in the right direction. It will be a lot of work, and a big change from the consulting world. but I’m ready for it.
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A new blog post of mine has just been published to my company’s blog. You can find it here: The difference between project success & failure
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We took Emma to her first day of preschool today. She was very excited.. until she found out that Mommy was not staying with her. Here are a couple pictures of our big girl!
Off to school
At school
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I have been anxiously awaiting Derek Webb’s new album. Looks like he had released a new single from it today. Wow!
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So, I started using SugarSync here at work. It’s a great tool — not only does it sync files I’m working on between my work computer and my MacBook, but it makes those files accessible from my iPhone. So, I’m in a meeting a need to pull up some notes that I didn’t bring with me — it’s right there on my phone.
But, there is danger.
Yesterday, I worked remotely from my MacBook all day. It was great.. zero distractions and I got a ton done. I then came to the office this morning and logged on to my work computer. My document was still open there from when I worked on it at the office 2 days ago. Oh, that’s an old version, I thought.. I’ll just close it. I close it, it asks me to save changes, and I always say “Yes”.
This is where the danger comes in. To the sync application, that is now the latest version of the document because it has a newer time stamp. The sync application will pick up that version and transfer it to my MacBook, overwriting the version that was there which was the newer version I had spend and addition 10 hours working on.
Fortunately, in this case, I could see what was going to happen and I disconnected my MacBook from the network before it could. But, I could have easily lost a day’s work.
Another danger to watch out for is cascading deletes. A lot of syncing tools will, by default, sync deletes. So, if you accidently delete a file from one computer, the tool will see that and delete it from all of the others. Your file that you thought was backed up is now gone.
So, in conclusion, be very careful when using sync tools. I use to use one as my only method of backup until I realized all of the potential dangers. As long as you know what to look for, they are terrific time saving tools. Just be careful!
Update: Since writing this post, I have been told that SugarSync does keep older versions of files, instead of overwriting them, and it moves deleted files to the Trash so they can still be recovered. When I get a minute, I need to test that out and see how it works (with some much less important documents!).
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Emma’s fourth birthday is next week. We created this video to be played at her party. The theme is ‘princess’, so Steven Curtis Chapman’s song ‘Cinderella’ seemed to work perfectly.
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Note: This is part of my series on Domain Driven Design:
One of the questions I received related to the topic of Domain Driven Design was related to how we implement DDD in a three tiered architecture. The key to this is with the Repositories and Factories.
Let’s take for instance a website that consists of a web front end, a middle tier, and a database. The customer comes to the website and saves an order. The web front end will create the Order entity and populate it with the information submitted by the user. It will then call the RepositoryFactory to determine what Repository to use to save the Order. In the config file, it is specified that MiddleTierRepository should be used to implement IOrderRepository. So, the Factory returns the MiddleTierRepository and the web front end calls SaveOrder on it. This Repository calls a web method in the middle tier called SaveOrder.
The middle tier then receives the Order. It performs an type of validation upon it and decides to save it. It calls the same RepositoryFactory used above, but in its config file it is specified that SqlServerOrderRepository should be used in this instance to save the Order. So, the Factory returns the SqlServerOrderRepository, which also implements IOrderRepository, and calls SaveOrder on it to save it to the database.
We do use an ORM tool in this environment. We use nHibernate. So, in the situation above, we would use NHibernateOrderRepository instead of SqlSeverOrderRepository for the middle tier to save the order to the database.
In a nutshell, that is how we translated these patterns into a three tiered architecture.
Posted in Software Development, Technology | 5 Comments »
I’ve been a fan of Jars of Clay ever since college, but their last few albums have been very exciting. Their latest, ‘The Long Fall Back to Earth’, released today and it is very, very good. You have to check it out. If you want to try only one song from it, I’d recommend Closer (which was released a few months ago on an EP) or The Long Fall. But every song on the album (there are 14 of them!) is awesome.
Updated 4/22/09: So, the more I listen to this the more I’m struck by different songs. ”Hero” and “Weapons” are both must listens. ”Headphones” is pretty much the only song I could do without. It sounds like he wrote “Boys” for his kids, which as a father really strikes me. Anyway, just wanted to add a couple of the songs I listed above.
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In these challenging economic times, everyone is looking for some ways to save money. Well, I have an idea that will save a ton: Fire your cable company!
Here’s the deal. I have not had cable TV for at least 7 or 8 years now, and I don’t miss it at all. I have never missed an episode of Lost or Battlestar Galactica. Yes, I know Battlestar Galactica was on the Sci Fi channel. But I saw every episode without paying the cable company $50+ per month for the privilege of watching their content.
So, how do you fire your cable company and yet still get to watch high quality content for all of your favorite TV shows? There are a number of options.
Online Streaming is going to be your cheapest option. If you have a computer and have broadband internet, you can stream almost every television show for free. Hulu is the best place to find content, but all networks are not represented there, so you can go direction to the network’s website as well. Normally shows are posted online the day after they air, but sometimes you have to wait a week (as in the case of the final couple of Battlestar Galactica episodes). ABC’s streaming player is particularly good, for all of my fellow Lost fans out there. You do have to wait through commercials with this option, but there are normally one 3 or 4 and they are very short.
If you can’t find a show available for online streaming, you don’t want to wait, or you want to be able to watch the show disconnected from the internet, iTunes is a good option. Using iTunes, you can download standard definition episodes for $1.99 and HD for $2.99. You can also buy season passes for shows that will save you some money. This is a great solution if you want to watch while on an airplane, on an iPhone, or other portable device. There are no commercials to watch if you use this solution.
The above solutions all have you watching television shows on your computer. But, you can also watch this content on your TV. That’s where a Home Theater PC, or HTPC, comes in to play. I wrote a post a while ago about my HTPC. I took an old Dell laptop and plugged it into my HD TV. This is great for most content, but sometimes I run into problems with that older PC not having enough horsepower for rendering the video. I’m hoping to upgrade this soon with a new Mac Mini or Dell Studio Hybrid. If you use a system like this you have the freedom of watching online streaming content on your TV. Adding a TV tuner to the computer will give you a DVR that you don’t have to pay a monthly fee for.
TV show come out on DVD normally a couple of months at the conclusion of a season. You can buy the DVDs, but normally I don’t watch a given season of a show enough to justify buying it. Using a service like Netflix or Blockbuster.com is a great solution. Jenny and I have watched several seasons this way and it worked great. Each disc normally has 4 episodes on it, so we’d watch a disc over the course of a week. When we were done, we’d put it in the mail and get the next one a day or 2 later. We could watch an entire season of a show in 6 weeks this way. We watched all 7 seasons of Gilmore Girls in the course of a summer a couple years ago doing this.
None of the solutions I have outlined above will work for sporting events, local news and weather, or my daughter’s morning cartoons. When we moved into our new house I installed an HD antenna in the attic. I took the output from this antenna and tied it into the coax running throughout the house by finding where the cable company’s line comes in, unplugging it, and attaching the cable from the antenna. I now have HD content coming to the entire house without having to pay a cable company for it. This is only going to be local broadcast stations, but that’s more than we normally watch. Plug this into the TV tuner built into your HTPC (above) and you have an HD DVR.
So, as you can tell, there are a lot of alternatives to play a ton of money to a cable company to receive television content. I use all of the options above from time to time with great success. I never miss a show that I want to watch and I don’t have to play a huge monthly fee for it.
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Matt Peters - a husband, father, and technology enthusiast. More about me here.
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