If you are a recent IT graduate, and you want to work with .Net or Java at a cool company in Sydney, then contact my friend Andrew Green and he will give you the low down.

Disclosure: I ain't gettin paid //nuffin// for this ad. Just liked the sound of the roles.

On an unrelated note: "E-mails hurt IQ more than pot"

"In 80 clinical trials, Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at King's College London University, found... the IQ of those who tried to juggle messages and work fell by 10 points -- the equivalent to missing a whole night's sleep and more than double the 4-point fall seen after smoking marijuana."

Brisbane has a sophisticated and superfast wireless peer-to-peer network, BrisMesh.Org

BrisMesh is a way of sharing files and communicating in an unlimited way, at speeds that p*ss all over commercial wireline technologies, like modem, ADSL and broadband.

The procedure for joining Brismesh is as follows:

1. Add yourself to the Brismesh node database and check out what nodes are around that you can connect to. Make a note of your node entry number - you need this on the membership form.
2. Fill in the membership form. If you don't have a proposer and seconder, leave them blank and the management committee will fill them in.
3. Post or email a scan of the signed, completed form to the secretary, as described at the bottom of the form.
4. Upon receipt of the application an acknowledgment and details of how to pay the membership fee will be sent to you ASAP.
5. Pay the membership fee (via direct deposit or in person at a meeting).
6. Your details will be added to the membership database.

Some of you may be relieved to know that the 'Bris' in the title is a common abbreviation for the city of Brisbane, Australia -- and not a reference to the Jewish circumcision ceremony of the same name.

[Disclosure: The 'president' of this organisation is my cousin, Paul James. Top bloke he is too. Their website is hosted by my old Alma Mater.]

Using XMLHttpRequest is so hot right now, that the nifty acronym 'AJAX' has been coined (Asynchronous Javascript And XML).

Personally I take exception to the 'Javascript' term, and prefer the acronym 'EARWAX':

• ECMAScript
• Asynchronously
• Reading &
• Writing
• Agile
• XML

Also checkout EARWAX.Net, I mean Ajax.Net.

Here's a product webpage that doesn't include screen shots. It doesn't event tell you where to find them.

When you dig deeper there are some thumbnail screen shots, but even they don't lead to full size images. The thumbnails are all you get.

This is a basic mistake, and I think it lets the product down badly. The product, TopDesk, is a leader in its field. (link courtesy of the Daily Grind)

Every software advertisement should include screenshots.

** Even 'Windows Services' that don't have a GUI **. Tattoo that on the back of your eyeballs (as William Goldman would say).

There's always a way to include a screen shot, and it's the first thing that people are looking for. Once they've seen your product, then they'll have a place in their mind to store the facts and figures, the features and the detail. They'll have questions, too, and hopefully the writing will answer their questions.

Check out the front page for blogjet. That's better. A screenshot. And best yet -- the screen shot takes you to more screenshots. I feel like I know that product now. And if you know a product, well, you start to care about it. It's not just vapour.

CodeSmith's front page is another good example. It's real. So is DotPost.

This need for screenshots is probably a corollary of 'The Iceberg Secret' that Joel Spolsky writes about, and that you can read about in his book, which is like the website but a hell of a lot easier to read in a stranger's bed.

Okay, enough preaching for one post.

Apparently, this slide is not shown until after lunch on day 1 of Management 101.

And most of the would-be managers got so drunk at lunch that they delegated the afternoon sessions to their Personal Assistant instead.

Career-Saving Disclaimer: This does not depict any of my current managers. This just depicts a manager that someone told me about once. Yeh. A friend of mine. Who worked somewhere else.

Here's a bigger version:

Here's a US-english version for my linguistically dis-enlightened cousins:

Here are six points in favour of the MCAD certification.

1. It teaches you tonnnnnnnnes about .net, so you really get to know the platform
2. It's a good thing for the resume
3. It won't be out of date for a couple of years.
4. The process of ongoing study really wakes up your brain and helps you engage more fully with your environment.
5. You don't need to attend any courses, just buy the relevant books, written by Mike Gunderloy (70-305 book, 70-306 book and 70-310 book). Then do whatever practice exams you can scavenge off the net.
6. Total outgoing cost (not including time) should therefore be: 3 books (total, US$100, AU$270), plus the exam (300 bucks or so??). Tax deductible and good for the health.

So go and do it, kiddo.

(That's the easiest blog entry I ever wrote -- it's just a cut and paste from a real email.)

This week, at secretGeek, we are experiencing:

That's right, Spolsky Madness, with an IE Only CSS wave filter applied.

Upcoming book reviews include:

"Joel On Software" the handy compendium of articles written by the founder of Fog Creek software, Joel Spolsky.

This book is very worth having. I'm going to say more about it soon.

And...

Painless Project Management with FogBugz by Mike 'Daily Grind' Gunderloy.

When I finally ship my software for helping with speech-recognition amongst canines, I'm gonna get Mike to write the book on it.

First we write a .Net function library called:

• DirtyThings.Dll.

It contains "Public Class BodilyFunctions ...", and:

'BodilyFunctions' includes a Function called "Pick_Your_Nose_And_Eat_It"

Now let's get our Reporting Services Report to use the 'Pick_Your_Nose_And_Eat_It' function!

1. Copy DirtyThings.Dll into the Report Designer folder on our machine. This ensures that "Preview" will work while you are developing the report.

   (The default location of the Report Designer is C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\Report Designer)

2. Copy DirtyThings.Dll onto the Server.

   It goes in the Report Directory Server, the default location of which is C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL\Reporting Services\ReportServer\bin.

3. Tell your Report to use the DirtyThings.Dll.

   How do we do this?

   In your Reporting Services Report:

   1. Go to the Report Properties dialog (Report Menu | Report Properties, or right-click the background of the report layout and choose 'Properties')

   2. In the References tab: Click the ellipsis buttons next to the 'References' listbox(i.e., the button with three dots on it)

   3. Use 'Browse' to find the 'DirtyThings.Dll' file. Click OK.

   4. In the "Classes" list box, type "DirtyThings.BodilyFunctions" in the Class Name column. ('DirtyThings' is the namespace of our class, and bodily functions is the class we want to instantiate.)

   5. Put "oBodilyFunctions" in the "Instance Name" column, this is the object we'll be using in our expressions.

   6. Click OK and close the Report Properties dialog

4. Now we can access our functions from any expression in the report, by typing:

   =Code.oBodilyFunctions.Pick_Your_Nose_And_Eat_It()

   (Or in a more general sense: 'Code.{instance Name}.{function name}' )

Oh yeh, those boring losers at msdn have also written up how it's done, in their article Deploying a Custom Assembly

Right-click on the Start button and it brings up a handy little menu:

Thank you Vikki!