Ingo Rammer's Weblog

Florida Sunsets

At the beach and meeting a friend of Katja

Today was just a pretty lazy vacational day. Went to the beach and later visited a friend of Katja whom she got to know due to her addiction to Everquest. Greg invited us to a great steakhouse in this area and after dinner we went to B&N (+ Starbucks). Even though I'm on vacation, I really had to check out the computer books section there and noticed a very strange thing: not a single Apress book there - no "C# and the .NET Platform", no "C# Guide for the Experienced Programmer" and of course, also no "Advanced .NET Remoting". There's basically only Microsoft Press books on .NET available at this branch ... hmmm ... looks like someone made a deal there.

In the evening - that is, around midnight - we did some laundry and prepared for tomorrow's drive to Key West. Checking the map to realize: it would take us about two days to get from Napels to the Keys and back (and an additional day on the road to go to Orlando where I ought to be next week) resulting in about only 2 days of beach time. It only took as about five seconds to decide against the Keys ("well, it's not going to be our last trip to Florida ...") and in favor of another week in Bonita Springs, Naples and Ft. Myers.

Did we find the paradise?

It struck like lightning: there's no decent coffee in the outbacks. No Starbucks. No nothing. Fortunately, there's caffeine in cans available - important straight from Austria where I live. And yes, I'm just so slightly addicted to caffeine ...

After finding caffeine, we went further south-east to Fort Myers and continued - just by chance (err ... "because I like the name") - to Sanibel, a nice islandish land mass right next to Fort Myers. If we weren't to continue to Napels tomorrow and planned to go to Key West later on, Katja and I decided that we would probably have found the best place to stay. At 4 pm the weather was brilliant and water temperature was just like our swimming pool at home (that is, the pool during the hottest summer days - right now snow is falling in Austria).

Oh, and by the way: It's Holiday Inn today. No more experiments in this regard ...

Boston, MA to Orlando, FL in a nap's time

Yes, we did it! We really got up at 4:00. It took as more than one and a half hour to get ready and leave for Boston airport.

After getting lost, finding the way again, returning the rental car and taking the shuttle to the airport we still arrived way to early so that we had to force ourselves to stay awake for another two hours. Both Katja and I however fell asleep right after boarding the plane. Slight advantage: the trip from Boston, MA to Orlando, FL basically took only the duration of an extended nap.

Ok ... let me recap: we left Boston in at about 50 - 60 °F and arrived in Orlando in the 80s. Boy, the weather here rocks! I'm already envious of anyone living in this area. Any software company with a need for a .NET architect and developer in this area? ;-) [sorry folks, no H1B1 yet]

As we are going to meet a friend who lives around Naples, FL we went south-west through the outbacks where we managed to find the something which easily matches the description of worst motel room ever! Both of us have been so tired however, that we couldn't figure out who's about to tell the manager that we wouldn't accept the room ... instead we just fell asleep.

WIN-DEV - Part 2

Fine. Today's the day. My first talk in the US. Good signs for all superstitious people: bright, sunny - alas chilly - day again.

Slept until about eight, been in bed until nine, did some final touch-ups of my slides and demos until eleven. Went to the conference.

Heck, I haven't been on the stage for about two months and could hardly remember how great it is. I can only speak for myself, but I get lots of energy from public talks. This was one of the better (maybe the best) audience I ever had. The small size of the conference really allowed for lots of questions. discussions and ad-hoc changes in the samples and topics. Absolutely rocked! Thanks to anyone who's been there.

In my second talk, Mike, Keith, John and I switched the topics rapidly between Remoting Internals (the talks topic) and the pitfalls of threading, late thread detachment and non-existent timeouts. Short story: don't use TcpChannel if you depend on your application working with delegates' .BeginInvoke() calls. Reason: The thread is only detached after the message has been sent to the server and there's no possibility to set a timeout on the TcpChannel. Combine these two and a malicious server which just accepts a socket connection but doesn't read any data from the socket and you end up with applications which won't perform as you'd expect them to do.

After the talk, John and I planned to have a look at his Common Language Aspect Weaver (CLAW). Right when leaving the conference facility, we bumped into Sam Gentile and took him with us.

Lucky us: Sam's a local so he could lead us to some great food before John got the chance to install CLAW on his laptop. He originally planned to install it on mine, but unfortunately it occurred a sudden loss of battery, going from 4 hours of battery power to zero minutes in about 5 seconds after John told me that "I just need to run NGEN /prof System.Windows.Forms.DLL and don't really know what it does ...". Sam's been more brave than me:

I had to leave the party at about 1:00 am, pack my luggage (ok, I admit - Katja packed as I dropped into my bed nearly instantly) and prepare for a short two hours of sleep. Argh ... do you know this feeling of having to set your alarm clock to 4:00 am?

WIN-DEV - Part 1

Got up way too early - 7am - to be ready for the first day of WIN-DEV. As this is the first conference I'd speak at in the US, I really wanted to sit in on at least one other talk before doing my talks tomorrow. You'll never know ...

Summary: nice, small conference. Great setting. Great speakers. Bad - that is, really bad - weather.

Spent the evening with preparing the demos for tomorrows talks.

Getting in conference mood

Katja's sick today. Argh.

I basically spent the time with answering some emails, hacking some stuff and later this day met a bunch of DM guys and Wintellectuals at the WIN-DEV speaker dinner. Sushi!

First day in Nashua, NH

Start of WIN-DEV Week.

When a week starts as shown in the following photo (taken right from my hotel room), can anything go wrong?

Bright, sunny day. Unfortunately also quite chilly here in New England. Feels like home ...

Stayed at Sam's

Stayed at Sam's. Thanks again, Sam!

After lunch, Katja and I left for some more leaves and checked into the conference hotel in Nashua. Not too many new discoveries today, apart from the fact that the conference hotel is supposed to look like an ancient European castle. Hey folks, we have the real things around in Austria and I can tell you that a castle's walls are supposed to be at least 5 feet thick - also there's just a very small number of ancient castles with A/Cs. Technology wasn't that great 500 years ago ;-)

Party at Sam's

Katja and I have been at Sam's and together with his family went up to White Mountains for some foliage peeping.

 

Sam and me. Who is who?

Katja 

After returning back to Sam's (where we were stayed for the night. Thanks Sam!), watching Matrix and sending the Girls - Katja and Sue - to bed, Sam and I got the chance to dig into Rotor until about 2 am. The GC really is a beast ...