At work, we create weekly reports to let our boss know what we're doing.  The important stuff then get pushed up the chain of command so that upper management knows what we're doing.  When I first started at Motorola, I automated the system our group used so that it was a web-based app that emailed the report at the end of the week.  It went through several iterations and feature additions over the years.

Recently, after I began blogging both at home and at work, I noticed a striking similarity between blogging and entering our weekly reports.  We scrapped the old system and built one that uses the RSS syndication of our blogs to publish the weekly report.  We've used it the last several weeks and it's a fantastic hierarchical model.

This week, we began to see the real power of this approach.  We recently wrote some software to aid in embedded memory bitmapping on devices we test. I posted an image of a memory defect the software found to my bog, and it was automatically aggregated, and emailed up the chain as part of the report.

I'm trying to get management to let us clean up the report software and sell or license it because it's pretty sweet.

With Becky in Fort Worth for a Chamber Winds concert, I was free to sleep on the floor.  Those who have shared an apartment, youth mission trip, or other sleep-inclusive event with me know that I slept on the floor just about my whole life until I got married.  (Although, I did sleep in a bed my last few semesters of college to get used to it)  I'm not talking about lush carpet with a thick pad either.  I've been known to find a flat rock on a camping trip and bed down right on it.  As such, I prefer a hard sleeping surface.

Last night, I decided to jump on the chance to experience that again.  Even though I didn't get all that many hours of sleep, I woke up very rested.  The problem is, Becky prefers an extremely soft surface.  I think we need to get one of those sleep number beds where you can adjust your side to the right amount of hardness...or softness...to suit you.  I've heard several endorsements from acquaintances at work.  Anyone else have experience with one of these beds?

I finally had some “spare” time at work today, so I re-worked the layout of our huge data analysis web site using CSS styling and layout rather than the original old skool methods we used when we first built it many years ago.  The original design was done back in about 2000, and I didn't have alot of time to do it, so I just threw it together.

I've had a fair amount of experience in the last couple of years with all-CSS layouts.  My favorite place to learn is CSSZenGarden.  Anyway, the benefits of separating content from presentation are well known, and CSS is not the only method of decoupling, so I won't really go into why I was doing it.  Although I did come to the conclusion that CSS is lacking some things that would make what I was doing much better.  Anyway, I did do some searching for some examples when I couldn't eliminate a stray pixel spacing here and there.

What I found was alot of people raving about having no tables on their site.  Personally, I think that's a little silly.  Not to say I'm not impressed by what people can do without tables, but that would be like me saying, “I built a house, but I didn't use any bricks” and expect people to be impressed.  Certainly, there are many houses built without bricks.  Very functional, beautiful, well-built houses.  But you can't build a brick house without bricks.  Most people who brag about not having any tables don't realize why they would want to banished tables other than they read someone else bragging about being table-free.

The point is not to rid the earth of the table because it's evil. Tables are perfectly fine for identifying content as being part of a table, after all, you don't replace all the images on your site with thousands of tiny DIV tags perfectly sized, colored, and positioned to replace every pixel.  That sounds silly, but I've seen people do the equivalent of that in trying to replace a table in the quest of table-less HTML.  The point is to organize the structure of the content so that it can be interpreted as simple data, and can then be “styled“ for presentation.

Well, looking back over this entry, I find it to be one of the most lame entries ever.  Oh well, I feel better having griped about that.

Well, I'm off to bed early tonight (not that this is that much earlier than I normally go to bad).  I've got a 7:00am test time slot to bitmap some packaged devices for correlation with data gathered at probe.  Hopefully, I can get the data I need before my slot runs out at 10:00 and I get kicked off the tester.

On another note, I grabbed the latest snapshot of RSS Bandit, which now has ATOM support.  So now I can get Dave and Jen's ATOM feed (their blogging provider doesn's support RSS evidently).  The new version also “double-click a tab to close it” support just like MyIE2 so I don't sit there like an idiot trying to close a tab.

If you're like me, you get tons of credit card offers in the mail.  Many with those, “just cash these checks to sign up” checks.  I hate those.  I just came across a nifty number that allows you to opt out of this “service“.  Let's hope it works. 1-888-OPTOUT

Correction: The number is: 1-888-5-OPTOUT (1-888-567-8688).  I was wondering why no one had left a thank you comment.  Thanks Dave.

After many frustrations, I seem to be back up again (if you hadn't noticed, my internet connection has been really flaky the last several days.  I replaced an aging router today that seemed to be on the fritz.  The upside is that I now have 54Mbps 802.11g wireless access in my house.  Whoo hoo.  Hopefully this is the end of the trouble.

My new router also natively supports dynamic dns registration, so I don't have to run the registration client on my pc anymore. Me likie.

I know what you're thinking...“Too many posts!  He's mad!  He's beating the pants off of Jenkies!“  Well, this one's technical.

If you're like me, you've always been annoyed at the inherent coupling between pages that pass data to each other through a Server.Transfer() call.  I think it leads to poorly designed, tightly-coupled workflows, and tends to lead people to taking shortcuts or breaking the model to make their stuff work.

Until now, I've tried to minimize this issue by giving my base class page a TransferData property typed as an object so every page can use it to pass data.  This has its own problems.  For instance, if you call Server.Transfer twice in the same Request and use Context.Handler to retrieve the transferer (which seems like a hack to me), it's the first page, and there's not a reference to the second page in the call chain.

I now have discovered a nifty little storage location for putting things like this... HttpContext.Items. It's just an IDictionary that stores stuff in the context of the current request.  Since you can always get the current HttpContext with HttpContext.Current (an implementation worth taking a look at with Reflector), you can get to it from anywhere, regardless of whether you have a reference to ANY page.  It works even if you're passing control to or from some handler that's not even a page.

Think of it as the analog to Application state, or Session state, but for the current Request only.  It automatically decouples your pages because they only have to agree on a common key.

UPDATE: I should note that it was my co-worker Casey Marshall who initially brought the property to my attention.  Thanks, Casey

For those that are not aware, my wife Becky has a black belt in kung fu.  They had a tournament this past weekend.  Becky wasn't as involved as she normally is since she is going back to school, but she managed to get first place in the “two-man set” event.  She and her friend performed their spear vs. broadsword kata at the public exhibition Saturday evening.  I got it on video.  I may put a few choice frames up.

Congratulations, Becky!!!

Well, the other day, I fot one of the things on my wishlist that was mostly for fun...the Roomba vacuum cleaner.  Basically, it's a vacuum cleaner that vacuums without you.  I thought it was mainly going to be a toy, but it's incredibly effective.  Perhaps the most pertinent example is that it can vacuum under the bed (provided there's not alot of crap under there).

Since it operates best when the room is clear of large debris, it has the side benefit of providing a good excuse to generally keep the floor clear.  Both Becky and I are pretty bad at just throwing things on the floor.  As most of my former roommates can attest, I treat it like it's like one big shelf.

Anyway, needless to say, I've done alot of vacuuming the last few days, without really spending very much time.  I would recommend it to non-geeks as well.

Update: I suppose I should say, “Thanks Mom and Dad!!!!”.  I helped them with some computer stuff and it was a thank you gift from them.