Avanade - ATS - Seattle

Well I've been in Seattle for almost two weeks now.

For those of you who don't know me personally I have taken a Software Engineer position with Avanade in Seattle. Avanade, is the premier Microsoft solutions provider, and is going to be an excellent opportunity for me to learn from some bright and experienced professionals. If you are interested in the possibility of joining Avanade shoot me an email and I'd be happy to forward you to our recruiter.

Right now I'm working on getting some certifications under my belt, MOSS in specific at the moment. In the future look forward to posts about general Seattle things and more technical write ups on Microsoft technologies.

Migrating my iPhone from my iBook G4 to a Vista 64 machine

Since I'm moving to Seattle this weekend I am working on consolidating my belonging. One of the big unknowns was if I was going to be able to bring my desktop. After considering it sometime I decided there was no way I could leave my massive music collect at home and didn't think my iBook would cut it as my only personal computer.

My big issue was I wanted to slowly phase out my iBook, but I had been using it to sync my iPhone (no Vista 64 support at the time). So I looked around the net for a bit looking for guidance and could only find pre-iPhone 2.0 information.

I decided to take the jump and was actually successful, so here is some information about my setup and how the transition went.

Setup:
iBook G4
Small amount of music on iPhone from my Vista x64 box
~20 iPhone Apps
Contacts synced with Google
iPhone formatted at FAT32 (if you used HPFS+ you maybe SOL or at the very least require a reformat of your phone)

Transfer:
Hooked iPhone to desktop.
Setup contact sync in iTunes and synced phone. Everything looked perfect.
Setup music sync in iTunes and synced phone. Replaced music on iPhone and success.
Copied all IPA (iPhone App) files from iBook to Desktop through Windows shares.
Added IPA files to iTunes by drag & dropping them into iTunes.
Synced iPhone and was prompted to Authorize Computer for iTunes Store. (I said yes 4/5 authorizations allowed)
Checked my iPhone to verify applications were there and settings hadn't changed... perfect!

ToDo:
I haven't setup syncing photos yet, because I haven't found the time to see if a solution similar to iPhoto is available. My suspicion is no, but the facebook and twitterrific apps allow me to post to both places from the phone. This may just become a moot point.

Conclusion:
I'm happy everything seems to be syncing same as iBook minus photos. I have easier access to my music library and will probably be able to phase my slow iBook from my life.

For the trees - Recycling paper

I've always been bothered by the slogan for recycling paper, "Save a tree."

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with recycling paper. The process required to bleach wood fibers is typically not very environmentally friendly and the less chance of those chemicals being released into our air and water the better. What I have a huge problem with is the idea that our trees need to be saved.

The United States is rich in natural resources and timber is probably one of the most abundant. With wood prices nearing all time lows are forests are far from being endangered. The other great benefit of wood is it grows back fairly quickly, 30-40 years until harvestable again. Modern logging techniques have enabled us to utilize this resource while minimizing environmental impacts. Logs are typically delimbed on site protecting against erosion and returning nutrients to the soil. Strict laws are in place protecting fragile headwaters so commonly found in logging areas. With proper management logging can even replicate biological processes which typically take place with naturally occurring fires.

Logging is most certainly not a perfect science, but suggesting trees need to be saved is naive. Please do recycle, but don't do it for the trees... do it for the children.

Google Analytics and the ASP.NET wizard control

I've search Google long and hard... and to my frustration no one else was able to figure this out yet, so here is my working solution for getting Google Analytics to be able to track the steps within an ASP.NET Wizard control.

First you will need to define the StartNavigationTemplate, StepNavigationTemplate, and FinishNavigationTemplate. I just stuck with something simple a Next button for the Start, Previous and Next for step, and Previous and Finish for finish.

You will need to define two functions for each. OnClick you will need to advance the Wizard forward so really only need three functions you can reuse StepNextClick, StepPreviousClick, and StepFinishClick.

The tricky part is you need to add a OnPreRender function to all the buttons. I used just two functions here on the forward buttons I used "FixPostBackNext" and "FixPostBackPrevious". Both are pretty simple functions and here is some sudo code below:

FixPostBackNext(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Button nextButton = (Button)sender;
nextButton.PostBackUrl = Page.Url + QuerystringVariable + (CurrentWizardStep + 1)
}

FixPostPagePrevious(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Button prevButton = (Button)sender;

if (CurrentWizardStep == 1)
{
prevButton.PostBackUrl = Page.Url;
}
else
{
prevButton.PostBackUrl = Page.Url + QuerystringVariable + (CurrentWizardStep - 1)
}

}


Bam! You now have querystrings added to your ASP Wizard control for your Google Analytics without changing the functionality of your Wizard.

Kudos

It is always nice when getting positive feedback on your hard work. Below is a copy of the University of Idaho's Friday Letter, a weekly publication targeted towards alumni and donors. This weeks letter happens to be about the new website we launched last week.



September 26, 2008

Dear Friends,

Smart investments in marketing - particularly in the communication technologies that young people use to connect with each other and the world - can solidify an institution's image and transform its interactions with students, their parents and the public.

Last week I reported great news about increased overall enrollments at the University. Also last week, the latest, very comprehensive and important phase of the University of Idaho's Web site redesign was launched. The work represents a revamping of no fewer than 800 pages of our site, with special emphasis on information and tools for prospective undergraduate students and parents. Thanks in large part to the support of the University of Idaho Foundation, our investment in a comprehensive marketing and strategic communications effort, now in its third year, is showing visible, tangible results.

Take a tour through our Web site, and you'll see a very sophisticated part of our overall effort. The revised portions are much more audience-centric, leading a viewer on a path toward getting what they need from us in a logical and linear, but very engaging, content- and graphics-rich fashion. We give visitors to the virtual University of Idaho a "shopping" experience.

The main University site presents the full breadth of information and services we have to offer, including Student Life, Academics, Athletics, Research and Outreach, as well as information organized by our primary audiences, including Future Students, Parents & Families and Alumni & Friends. This structure enables our external visitors in particular to quickly find the information they need to engage with us here at the University.

The Future Students site provides students and parents with information and resources they need to make the decision to become a Vandal. The site gives an overview of the student experience, academic excellence and value of our institution. Content is organized to answer a student's questions during the decision-making process - everything from what our faculty members are like and whether they share his/her interests, to lists of accomplished alumni.

The completely redesigned Undergraduate Degree Finder gives students and families an easy way to connect their interests and desired academic outcomes with specific degree programs at the University. Each of the 100+ degrees we offer has a profile with key information about the program. A Degree Finder for graduate programs will launch next month.

There are many more new and improved sections of our Web site, from the Giving site for donors to sites for University of Idaho Coeur d'Alene and our College of Business & Economics, which help students make the decision to join those specific programs and communities. In the next two months, you'll see new sites for University of Idaho Boise and the Colleges of Natural Resources and Art & Architecture, among others. I am extremely proud of this effort. I thank the skilled and dedicated staff who have led the work, creatively and technologically - as well as their staff, faculty and administrative partners in colleges and units around the University - for the outstanding result we see today.

While it's sometimes assumed that marketing dollars are invested in "ads and slogans," our Web work, and related new media projects targeted at prospective students, represent about a quarter of our marketing and strategic communications campaign budget. Through these investments, we are moving swiftly and purposefully toward increasing two-way awareness, understanding and engagement with our many audiences, increasing our enrollments and achieving our vision for the future of the University of Idaho.

Steven B. Daley-Laursen '79, '84
President

Browser War, Part 2

Google will be releasing a new browser based off of WebKit this morning, called Google Chrome. Certainly an interesting development in the browser wars. I'll be sure to take some time to check it out today and update this post with my thoughts.

Well I got a chance to play around with Google Chrome yesterday for a little bit. My first impressions are it feels like Firefox, but with some noticeable improvements. JavaScript feels snappier, as well reported, and I couldn't find any cases where Chrome rendered pages any differently than Safari PC or Firefox. There is still some UI polishing to do and I was able to get the entire application to freeze momentarily (multiple tabs) when a web server I was doing development on stalled out. All in all seems like a solid product for a first release beta, Google's development and testing practices have really shown through here.

Click trails and search engine war

In the quest for a "perfect search engine" the solution is simple. The search engine which can perfectly predict your query before you search and provide the perfect answer will win. So the question is how do you even begin to attempt to predict what someone will query for let alone the search result you are truly looking for? I believe that data modeling will be the solution to this problem.

People are creatures of habit and we behave like a mob. Look no further than popular websites like Boing Boing, Slashdot, and Digg who have reputations for bringing web servers to their knees and you quickly see that our movements have a pattern ripe for modeling.

To generate a data model for a "perfect search engine" you need two important aspects, a "perfect formula" and "perfect information." I would like to first focus on the latter.

Imagine an world where a search engine provider could track and record your every mouse movement. We already have available complex analysis tools which takes this data on a site level and allows designers to make user interface improvements. Today most of these tools are expensive packages of analytics software, but I wouldn't be surprised if certain free analytic tools made these available to their customers. Of course part of providing these tools free will be you allow the vendor use this data for their own purposes.

Next even for those sites who choose to not partake in analytics software need some sort of revenue model. The world of advertising drives free content on the web. To enable sites of all levels to reach advertisers of all levels you need a broker to help these transactions. For only a small percentage of the money exchanged between these parties, the broker will handle all the transactions and even host the ads! Be sure to check the terms of service here as part of participating in this service as I'm sure it will include a little ditty about tracking users.

Still not enough data yet? How about providing free web services like email, blogging, web hosting, and social networking? Why not partner with other companies to provide free services or discounted advertising in trade for more user tracking?

Once you have data from the vast majority of web properties in the world you now need to look toward completing your model with a formula. This is where things start getting tricky. A generalized formula isn't going to meet our need for a "perfect model." Today the web is filled with too many demographic/sociographic/geographic groups who all use it differently. So you will need to create a model which is flexible based on the individual or at least group. Good thing you are collecting that personal information from your free web service and partner companies. Still don't have enough information to identify a person? No worries, your click trails from your analytics software and advertising will quickly allow to quickly file an individual into a group.

Even with all the data in world a model this complex will likely stump the world's data experts for some time. I think it is pretty safe to say Google has the head start in both the model and data. Luckily for Microsoft they only need enough data to keep their confidence interval high and a better model to win. Who would I hire to help make a perfect model? Some brilliant economists, statisticians, psychologists, and sociologists would certainly be a good start, but a quick search on both Google's and Microsoft's career sites don't show much interest in any of these fields. Are Google and Microsoft missing an opportunity here or am I missing something?