Mad Props!

Dave tagged me, so here goes:

1. I practised karate for nearly twenty years, achieving a fifth degree black belt by the time I was 18. At one point my brother and I ran three classes a week, with the most students of any school outside of the capital cities.
2. I never earned a degree from uni, dropping out of computer science after three years.
3. Between uni and my first (and only) software development job, I worked as a bouncer at almost every nightclub and pub in Albury.
4. I don't drink alchohol, and never have, except for a few stolen sips of dad's beer when I was a toddler (and one incident when I was about ten involving a small cup of warm sake and a good night's sleep).
5. My surname technically isn't Hamilton. My great grandfather changed his name to Hamilton (from Smith) when he discovered that he had the same name as his prospective father-in-law. Apparently I'm actually related to Charles Kingsford Smith. I only found this out last year!

That was fun! I tag Pete, Euan, Andrew, Julie and Paul (for whom it won't be hard to find five things, since I don't know him at all).

For those of you running Community Server who have access to the back-end database and would like to generate some stats like those I posted yesterday, here's "one query to rule them all":

select top 20 p.PostID, p.Subject, p.TotalViews, count(c.PostID) 
from cs_posts p with (nolock) 
    left join cs_posts c with (nolock) on c.ParentID = p.PostID and c.ApplicationPostType = 4 
where p.SectionID = 3 -- change this to your blog's SectionID 
    and p.ApplicationPostType = 1 and year(p.PostDate) = 2006 
group by p.PostID, p.Subject, p.TotalViews order by 3 desc

This query will give you the top 20 most-viewed posts for your blog in 2006. You'll have to look in the cs_Sections table to determine which SectionID your blog is.

If you change that last line so that it reads: "order by 4 desc" and re-run the query, you'll have the top 20 most-commented posts in 2006.

Start posting stats, guys!

Major Nelson recently posted some statistics from his blog from over the past year. My numbers are nowhere near as impressive, but here are some figures from Mabsterama 2006:

Number of posts: 224 (that's 4.3 posts per week, which isn't too bad for me)

Number of comments: 596 (2.66 comments per post! Nice!)

Number of trackbacks: 42 (42! That's gotta mean something, right?)

Top Ten Most-Viewed Posts:

1. Metadata in Reporting Services (3144)
2. Typed DataSets and SqlTransaction (1598)
3. Reset IIS on a Remote Server (1579)
4. A Web Browser on the Xbox 360? (1559)
5. Great ADO.NET 3.0 Screencast (1434)
6. Microsoft Update and Windows Genuine Advantage - Solution (1227)
7. Pioneer PDP-507XDA Impressions (1022)
8. ClickOnce and Visual C# Express (817)
9. Sql Server Reporting Services and Parameter Label Fields (769)
10. Me and the Xbox 360 (720)

Top Five Most-Commented Posts:

1. New TV and Mental Freak-Outs (17)
2. A Web Browser on the Xbox 360? (15)
3. I CAN SKIN!!! (15)
4. Vista vs OSX (13)
5. Windows Live Messenger Beta Invites (12)

I'd like to do a lot better than that this year, but I think in truth that I'm too slack to continually make really high-quality posts (like, say, Jeff Atwood or Scott Hanselman do). If anything, that top-ten list shows that technical posts do better than non-technical posts, so perhaps I should post technical stuff more often. What do you think?

Marko Djurdjevic is the cover artist for Marvel's Thunderbolts series, when Warren Ellis takes over as writer.

I was impressed with some of the art and character designs of his that I've seen previewed on the web, so I started searching around for some of his other work. In doing so, I found this:

Marko Djurdjevic's He-Man Redesign!

This is amazing. He's gone over all of the major characters from the Masters of the Universe toy and cartoon line, and reimagined them with his own slant. The "Marilyn Manson" version of Skeletor is inspired, and the Evil-Lyn design is proof that this little take on the mythos will never see light of day in mainstream media!

Here's a little taste - Merman! Click on the image for the original:

The new year will be here in less than five hours. Sal and I were thinking back on 2006 earlier, and realised what a great year it has been.

I've completed a major project at work - one that has been on my year-end "goals for next year" list almost every year in the 12 years I've worked there. Not only did I complete it, it was a raging success.

On top of that (and partly because of it) I got a nice little payrise too - can't complain about that!

We kicked off the Albury/Wodonga Dot Net User Group.

We visited Perth and the Great Ocean Road, which were both great getaways.

I got an Xbox 360 and a new high definition plasma TV.

And to top it off we had a fantastic Christmas, as well as Sal's sister's wedding, which was last night.

So yeah, 2006 has been very good to us. I can only hope that 2007 lives up to the benchmark set by its predecessor!

How about you? Did you have a good year?

Christmas is all about family, and coming together with-- ah, screw it! Let's talk about presents!!!

First, from Sal:

• Three shirts
• Four t-shirts
• A pair of shorts
• A bottle of Armani Code
• The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett
• Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett
• Pyramids by Terry Pratchett
• Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
• Family Guy Season 1 DVD
• Family Guy Vol 2 DVD
• Family Guy Vol 3 DVD
• A History of Violence DVD
• The Bourne Identity DVD
• The Bourne Supremacy DVD
• Open Water DVD
• Wallace & Grommit: The Curse of the Were Rabbit DVD
• Madagascar Limited Edition Tin DVD
• Gears of War
• Sam's Town by The Killers
• Just Like the Fambly Cat by Grandaddy
• Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie
• Directions DVD by Death Cab for Cutie
• ... and of course the seemingly endless supply of chocolates etc! :)

From Mum & Dad we each received a gold gift certificate for a Sydney Harbour Bridge climb. I'm going to have to start training now to get fit enough to make it to the top!

With any luck my Brother and his family will be coming over for Christmas dinner tonight, so I'll update the post at that time with the rest of the haul!

In case you haven't already seen it: you can check out a picture of the Silver Surfer from the upcoming sequel to "Fantastic Four" here.

I haven't yet seen the original FF movie - it just didn't look anything like the way I imagined the FF should look on-screen, so I avoided it. I really hope they get the Surfer 'right', because he's one of the greatest characters in comics, but he's also very difficult to write.

Feature requests are a bit like onions. They make you cry, and they have layers.

Dig a little deeper than the surface of an ordinary-looking feature request, and you can often find a whole set of business practices that you didn't know about.

Case in point: We have a farm who has started receiving pregnant sows from another farm. Let's say they were mated at farm 'A' and then transferred over to farm 'B'.

Senior management came to ask asking that all the matings on farm 'A' be changed in the database so that they appeared to have happened on farm 'B'. It seemed odd to us that a manager with so much experience would be asking that data be changed so that it is less accurate, so we probed a little further.

What he really wanted was a way for farm 'B' to find out how many animals currently on their farm were mated back on farm 'A' in a given week. We explained that it was a simple, half-hour job to write a report that could give them these figures, rather than altering the data. Thankfully he acquiesced.

Now, let me pause right here and say: Why can't managers have a bit of foresight? Didn't he realise that one day he might have actually wanted to know how many animals were mated on farm 'A'? If we had blindly followed his instructions, those figures would be lost forever.

Anyway, the story continues . . .

Julie creates the new report and contacts the manager of farm 'B' to demonstrate it. We haven't talked to this guy yet, because the initial instructions were from his boss. He looks at the report, and likes what he sees. That's a win for us.

However.

Julie probes even further, and discovers that the real reason the manager of farm 'B' wants this report is so he can tell how many animals came from farm 'A' to his site! It has nothing to do with matings! In fact, there's already an 'Animals Transferred into your Farm' report that he could have used! Once we pointed that report out to him, he agreed that the new report was no longer necessary. We were able to set up a subscription in SQL Server Reporting Services so that the 'transfers in' report is emailed to Farm 'B' every day.

So there's a couple of wasted hours, all because the original feature request was based on a false premise. I guess there are two morals to this story:

1. Never implement a feature request without knowing the real reason behind it, and
2. Always ask the guy down in the trenches rather than relying on the word of senior management.

Those of you out there who, like us, aren't in the habit of lighting cigars with $100 bills and therefore can't afford Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System, have probably looked at FogBugz from Joel Spolsky's Fog Creek Software. It's a great little HTML-based bug and feature-request tracking application.

When you pair FogBugz with a source control system like SourceGear's Vault, you end up with an integrated solution that's much like VSTS. Vault can actually talk to FogBugz (or vice-versa) so that check-ins can be associated with open cases etc. Great for finding out what work went into fixing a certain bug.

The only missing functionality from this pairing has been integration with the Visual Studio IDE. Vault integrates nicely - you can check in, check out, compare versions etc from the Solution Explorer. FogBugz, however, has never had an integration story with Visual Studio. Until now!

Today Joel announced a Visual Studio 2005 Add-In for FogBugz! I've installed it, and it works really well. You can view cases from within Visual Studio, and pop them open in VS's in-built browser window, like this:

As an affordable alternative to VSTS, the FogBugz/Vault combo is now hard to beat.

Back again from the monthly gathering of the Albury/Wodonga Dot Net User Group (I'm spelling it out in a bid to give the site a bit more Google weight).

This month Anthony and Kaarel gave us a rundown on the new Office 2007 XML file formats, and much discussion was had over the vagrancies of backwards-compatibility, file protection etc. We also had a valuable discussion about the directions the group might take in 2007, with a resolve to communicate more about upcoming meetings.

Next month it's Mabster month, with the inevitable Comicster presentation finally happening. I'll run through some of the .NET features that Comicster makes use of, like ADO.NET, the WebBrowser control, web services, ClickOnce etc. I think it'll be a fun discussion, and with any luck will give others some inspiration to demo some of their own projects (be they personal or work-related).

January 10th at Albury TAFE! See you there!