I very often bring my lunch to work and supplement it with some items from the vending machine depending on my mood.  Typically, this is just a can of Diet Dr. Pepper (the only diet drink I can stand), for which I pay the outlandish price of $.65.  Sometimes, when I am a bit more hungry, I will get a bag of delicious Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips, or yummy Baked Doritos (or any of the other baked chips that taste better than the originals...even Fritos).  Anyway, the chips used to be $.75.  Today, much to my surprise, I discovered the chips are now $.90.  And no way am I paying $1.50 for some fruit juice.

I've always been frustrated by the price of things "within the walls" here, but this is ridiculous.  I feel like I'm at Disney World or something.  Ideally, I don't think anyone should make money off of selling things like food to employees at their place of work, but that can be impractical for a business to provide such services "at cost". But, under no circumstances should I have to pay more for something here than I would within a reasonable distance from here. 

I've been pretty lucky so far on the comment spam here until yesterday when the floodgates opened.  To combat it, I've enabled the Captcha feature that requires you to type a confirmation number to be able to post a comment.  It is fairly self-explanatory and should work fine.  Let me know if there are any problems with leaving comments.

P.S. This will most likely prevent using third-party tools to leave comments (like RSSBandit, etc).

[UPDATE] Jen and Dave are having a similar war on comment spam with WordPress.  Her blog software of choice.

Under duress, Brad Abrams recently posted a set of internal coding guidelines to his blog, meant mainly to be a "tie-breaker" in the holy war type arguments that result from seasoned developers who love their own coding styles. I'm a big fan of the work Brad and his team have done on the CLR and their focus on consistency in the API. And, even though there are one or two I don't care for, I'm a huge supporter/follower of the design guidelines.  That's why I was surprised at how many of the internal guidelines I disagreed with.  Roughly 50% of them made me recoil in horror.  Of course, now I understand why I don't like the Visual Studio defaults.  I won't get into which ones I like/dislike because that's not a productive area of discussion.

Now that I've had a couple of days to let them sink in, I realize why Brad was reluctant to share them.  I think they may cause more controversy than solve.  The big questions is how useful will these be in helping my team be more productive?  At this point, I don't think much.  I think we'll stick to the public API guidelines and use the somewhat informal guidelines our team has created for the internal stuff.

I never got a chance to wish a happy birthday to B-Dub.  His birthday is pretty close to mine and we usually hook up with he and Jan at some point for some dinner.  Somehow, we've neglected to do that yet, despite the fact that we live in the same city.  Maybe he should get an XBox and Halo 2, then those pesky few miles would become irrelevant.

Happy belated birthday, D-Dub.

Keep an eye on this space for a photo.  I've got the perfect one, but I don't have access to it at the moment.

I've had my performance hat on at work for the last couple of weeks, optimizing memory and CPU performance ahead of the deployment of a new system.  I've been pretty pleased with the improvements we've made.  We've got alot of in-process caching that increases speed incredibly, but has a hefty footprint.  We were able to get that down quite a bit with some pretty clever ideas.

One of the major pushes was to reduce references, especially boxed references.  That has proven a very effective strategy to reduce memory.  I wish I could just throw generics at the boxing problem, but we'll have to wait a while longer for that.  Another strategy was to take a close look at the data structures that hold the cached data.  I rolled my own AVL tree implementation for a date-based index of the cached data, and I was able to improve both the CPU performance and it's footprint substantially.

We also implemented what I've called a local string intern pool.  We've got alot of redundant string data, and we've used String.Intern in the past fairly successfully, but some analysis of our data revealed some local redundancy that we could use to reduce a 4-byte reference to a single byte that acts as an index into the local string pool.  This will also help keep our memory from bloating on the move to 64-bits when all the references in the system double in size.  (although at that point, we should have loads more memory to work with)  This as the added benefit of eliminating the need for string comparisons in running searches against the cache.

All in all, we were able to reduce the footprint of the cache by about 40%.  I thought someone googling for ways to reduce memory footprint and increase performance might benefit some from this information.  Oh, and so Google puts this in the right context, this is related to: ASP.NET, CLR, C#, DotNet.

Well, the cat's out of the bag.  It's my birthday. (Not that I was trying to hide it).  I'm 29 today (0x1D for my fellow nerds).  It's been a pretty interesting year.  Thanks to everyone who's sent me birthday wishes in one form or another.

[UPDATE 5:28pm] I missed Peter's announcement because he upgraded to dasBlog 1.7 and it broke an outdated RSS feed link.  He claims to have been the first, but my dad announced it last Friday, although he also announced his anniversary almost 6 months early as well, so I'm not sure that should count.

Well, I just completed the upgrade to dasBlog 1.7.  (dasBlog is the software that runs my blog) I've been pretty excited about it because it will address several woes I've been having, not the least of those being referral spam.  Omar, Scott, and a host of others deserve a big pat on the back for their contributions.  Thanks, guys. Check out Scott's announcement for more links and details on new features if you're interested...you're probably not.

The upgrade was complex since it attempts to do alot of fixing and cleaning of old data, but everything went fairly smoothly once I figured out I had accidently wiped out my custom theme in the move.  One nice side-effect is that my really old entries from when I was running BlogX are editable again.  Some hadn't even been viewable.  I immediately took the opportunity to clean up my categories which had gotten way out of hand.  I still have too many, but it's actually manageable now.  I'm looking forward to playing with the new features and seeing the performance improvements.  I'll probably be doing alot of upgrading of other blogs I manage tomorrow after I've had a chance to work any and all kinks out of the system.

I recently announced my dad's foray into the world of blogging.  Well, after some issues with MSN spaces, we've decided to abandon it in favor of a more controlled solution.

So, here's his new location, complete with fancy domain name, BellCountyBlogger.com.  I'm hosting his blog now using the same software I use.  We're still working the kinks out as of today, but he's already putting content up.

I recently recommended MSN Spaces to my dad to start up a blog.  He got really excited about it and began posting his thoughts and photographs.  Today, we discovered that for people to leave comments, they must have a .NET passport.  Personally, I have nothing against passport.  I think it's great, but not everyone does.  There are lots of people scared to create a passport because they think there is some kind of privacy issue involved. I can see this as a defense against comment spam on the blogs, but to my dad, it's a barrier for his friends and family to join in the conversation.  We're looking into all the options, but I may recommend he look elsewhere for his blog hosting needs.