Peder M Rice

Giving Back to the IT Community

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:00:40 -0500

Trying to get my StackOverflow reputation up above 500. It takes a while; all the low-hanging fruit has been taken already, so you’re stuck only ever answering the obscure questions.

Using Trello for Menu Planning, Pantry Inventory

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:37:10 -0500

My girlfriend and I have started using Trello, rather than Google Docs, to track our pantry and to plan for meals. Trello is a web-based project management tool built around Scrum ideas. It’s great for small teams managing simple projects, but I’ve also found it ideal for work around the house. We’ve turned our kitchen, in essence, into an ongoing project.

We’ve broken out our wall into seven lists:

Groceries - Today
Groceries - Within a Week
Pantry Items
Freezer Items
Fridge Items
Eaten Items

With one list that doesn’t really fit in with the others, but it provides our meal calendar:

Menu Plan

The Menu Plan doesn’t really fit in with our other lists, and that’s because we’ve established a sort of workflow for the other lists.

First, we record what food we have in our kitchen into the three categories: pantry, freezer, and fridge.

Then, once we’ve eaten something, we move it to the “Eaten!” category.

What’s cool here, is that by moving something to the Eaten category, we can then just move the Eaten item back into our Grocery list. Let’s say that I just ate our last Healthy Choice frozen dinner (go ConAgra!), we could then just drag Healthy Choice dinners into our Grocery list. We can then recycle our tasks, minimizing the amount of text entry.

[ Pantry -> Eaten! -> Grocery List -> Pantry ]

Also, since Trello makes it extremely easy to drag items from list to another, it’s also ridiculously painless to keep each list up to date. Further, Trello tracks all wall activity, so that my girlfriend can see when I updated “2 bags frozen peas” down to “1 bag”, and won’t get caught trying to make carbonara only to find out that she doesn’t have enough peas (though I can’t imagine you’d actually need that many peas in a carbonara, seems like overkill, but you get the point).

Test Driven Development

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:32:30 -0500

I’m going to go ahead and give myself a test-driven development badge.

ConAgra Foods is in the process of piloting an Agile methodology (ACE, or Agile for ConAgra Enterprise) catered to us by IBM. Part of that methodology is the use of Test Driven Development, a practice we’ve talked a lot about, but never implemented, due to challenges with our traditional approach.

The most critical among those challenges: we never wrote software based on discrete requirements.

We would jump right into coding after a quick conversation with our functional teams, and we never gave thought about individual units of functionality until we reached our testing phase. Simply, we never had an opportunity to write tests before we were already knee-deep in code.

So today I finished my first three tests, and tomorrow I’ll knock out a few more. Thereafter, I’ll re-read some TDD blog posts I had saved, and see just how TDD my approach was (I’ve probably done a few things wrong this first go around).

Wikibooks + iBooks?

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:34:29 -0500

I think yes.

Using iBooks Author to Drive Lower-Cost Textbooks

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:32:40 -0500

With the release of the iBooks and iBooks Author applications, I think the time has come for crowdsourcing the textbook industry. Generally speaking, the curriculums of K-12 and even many college degrees have stabilized, meaning that the value of their textbooks should be dropping.

In economic terms, the supply of most knowledge—globally, certainly—has been increasing, so the cost of that knowledge should be decreasing.

Why should the textbook companies continue to make $120 for an introductory physics textbook that hasn’t changed in 10 years?

I finally found the piece that I was missing: the BizTalk Server...

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:53:05 -0500

I finally found the piece that I was missing: the BizTalk Server Addin in the LOB Adapter SDK Install

Getting closer, at least I found out where I SHOULD see the...

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 12:38:46 -0500

Getting closer, at least I found out where I SHOULD see the option. Under Add > Add Generated Items -> Consume Adapter Service

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/dd788586(v=BTS.10).aspx

I currently only have an option to Consume WCF Service

Nope, still missing

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 12:13:53 -0500

I still have no option for an adapter reference… not sure where to turn next

Trying out the “Tools” install option….

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:57:44 -0500

Trying out the “Tools” install option….

Consume Adapter Service

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:57:22 -0500

When using a BizTalk project in Visual Studio 2010, There’s supposed to be a way to open a wizard for a BizTalk schema for an SAP RFC. Thus far, I haven’t been able to get it to show up, even though I’ve been through the BizTalk installation a few times.

I may have just noticed, however, that when installing the BizTalk Adapter Pack, under the WCF LOB Adapter SDK setup, that you have to check the “Tools” install, which includes a VS2010 add-in.

Trying this now…

United Football League Power Rankings over time.

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:58:58 -0500

United Football League Power Rankings over time.

I Hate: the new Google Reader

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 08:32:16 -0400

In what way was this change for the better?

Cain doesn't even try, leads Iowa polls

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 09:58:00 -0400

Cain doesn't even try, leads Iowa polls:

Herman Cain, who barely campaigns in the state, currently leads the pack in Iowa. Though I’m a fan of his tax proposals, I believe that his sincerity, his speaking ability, and his newness are what separate him. At this point, I would be surprised to see anything but a Cain nomination.

HP will stay in the PC market

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:41:24 -0400

HP will stay in the PC market:

Slowly undoing the damage caused by her braindead predecessor, Meg Whitman has made the decision to stay in the PC business.

Visionless Apotheker had made an abrupt decision a couple months ago to exit the PC and mobile markets, even though the PC market represented the company’s identity and the mobile market was only beginning to flourish. I’d even suggest HP could re-enter the mobile market and still have a decent shot at gaining traction; the market is still so young with the potential for rapid innovation and entrance of new competitors. In fact, Apple and Android’s positions in the market are on very unclear footing. It would only take a small disruptive innovation to completely change the market landscape and reshuffle the deck.

While the Whitman sorts out the decision of whether to re-enter the mobile market or not, it’s clear to me that the company is back on the right track. It should have been clear that Apotheker was not the man for the job based on his performance as the chief at SAP. For years, SAP has been falling behind its competitors in the user-experience realm, and that suggests to me an inability to inspire, to lead, to implement a vision. If he was unsuccessful with user experience in a B2B world, how could he have been expected to succeed when selling a user experience direct to consumers?

I Hate Eclipse

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 13:56:03 -0400

I must be missing something, but why can’t I have project-level configurations that let me specify which version of the JDK said project should be built against?

Visual Studio changed my development life years ago, and it still seems like it’s so much further ahead than the other tools. Now, I know that sounds like a fanboi, but I’ve played with Eclipse, dabbled with Xcode, and I used to love Zend Studio; but I always come back to Visual Studio where the entire experience is around making my life easier as a developer.

Big Ten Digital Network on Roku

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:16:58 -0400

I’m a big fan of my Roku player, so much so that I just bought a 2nd one for the living room a few weeks back. The one area where it doesn’t rock is sports programming. I believe the only available sports programming is on BYUtv, where you can catch the occasional volleyball match-up plus one football game per year.

Recently, the SEC Digital Network went live on Boxee, and the SEC Digital Network is powered by the same back-end technology as the Big Ten Digital Network. That got me thinking that the Big Ten Digital Network is also probably coming to Boxee shortly.

I’d like to think that they’ll eventually turn their attention to Roku also, which is selling like hotcakes (something like 3m units projected this year). Also, the Roku isn’t a horribly shaped, half-functional device like the Boxee box; it simply works.

But until this app is launched, I’ll still be glued to my Roku, hoping that small players like them can continue to take on the big guys like Apple and Microsoft.

Reboot Fixed It...

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 16:17:29 -0400

Not sure why that made an ounce of difference, but I’m up and running iOS 5

But of course...

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:39:12 -0400

You can’t upgrade (even if you’ve already downloaded the update) without an internet connection….

Apple's Servers Swamped?

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:38:05 -0400

Apple's Servers Swamped?:

Apparently the reason for the upgrade error is simply that Apple’s servers are getting hit hard right now. I don’t really believe that, however. I’m going to try a test with my wifi turned off and see if the error still pops up.

…and getting an error immediately.

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:21:20 -0400

…and getting an error immediately.