A Spanish Anthem?

I try to avoid ‘political’ topics, not because I don’t have political views, but because I find they trigger to many emotional, not rational, discussions. Today however, I feel the need to talk about a situation that’s become very political, but that I feel is really societal in nature.

I was doing a bit of blog surfing this morning, and came across a post that dealt with the recent controversy about a version of the National Anthem recorded in Spanish.

He said, exactly what I’ve been saying for over a week now when ever I’m asked about it. Read what he had to say here.


I have a couple of thoughts about that specific issue…

First, if it were a book being translated into another language, the author would be delighted that a wider audience would be able to read their work.

Second, why on earth are we so troubled by the fact that a song, words put to music, will now have those words in another language? Are we Americans that insecure, that fragile, that this simple thing sets us off?This country we have, and you all know I love this country, has many strengths, and weaknesses.

Our greatest strength, in my opinion, comes from the fact that we are, for lack of a better term, a ‘melting pot’. People from every corner of the planet have come here, in hopes of building a better life for them, and their families. These same immigrants have built our country. Our roads, our skyscrapers, our industries,

They got up every morning, went to work, did their jobs, and in doing so, literally built this country. Their children, grandchildren, great and great-great grandchildren continue that process today. I know, I’m a great-grandchild of immigrants.

No group of immigrants has ever been ‘welcomed’ by those already here. You can look back through history and see the stories of outrage against the Irish, the Germans, Asians, Polish, Russians or the Italians… pick a country and you’ll find when they arrived here in numbers, there was ‘national outrage’ from those already here.

They all stayed though, despite feeling unwanted in many cases, because they believed, in their hearts that they, and their families would ultimately have a better life. In the vast majority of cases, they were right.

I know it’s popular to be concerned about ‘illegal immigration’, and I am concerned about it. Concerned not because the majority of folks illegally here are from Mexico, but, because we’re doing such a poor job of managing the borders!

I’m of the opinion, that if someone wants to come here to build a better life we should let them do so. Grant them access, require that they meet a set of standards we apply to all Americans (essentially obey the law), become citizens (pass the tests and get ‘sworn in’) and build their own dream life.

If, on the other hand, they don’t meet the standard, commit crimes etc… they should be deported… The border patrols should be sufficient to keep out those who don’t make the proper application for entry and pass a standard background check (as in let’s not give immediate access to criminals and terrorist type individuals).

We’ve got this big sign, at the statue of liberty…

“Give me your tired your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free”

Hell we’re so proud of it we put it on the back of the 1986 silver dollar!

That sentiment is one of the reasons I love, and am so proud to live in, this country.

We’re a nation of misfits, and adventurers. Our ancestry is filled with people who had a dream, and went after their dream, people who often arrived here with nothing, or next to nothing.

They spent their only savings on that one-way ‘ticket to America’; sometimes entire families pooled their money to send just that one person here. All of this risk in the hope that they, eventually, could build a better life and send for the rest of the family.

Is it all that hard to understand, that we, one of the richest nations on the planet, would be a desired place to live for those in less fortunate circumstances? I for one am proud of the folks who risk giving up what they know, move to a country where they can’t speak the language, risk failure, losing what little they had to begin with, all to live in a country I was fortunate enough to be born in. I’m frankly flattered they’d do that. We have people in this country who are afraid of moving to another town, or state, to get a better job.

Of course I had that good fortune (to be born here), because, my great-grandparents took that very same risk! Yes they struggled, they were hated by some, and they worked for low wages, but despite it all, they believed they were better off here, than from where they came. I was only the third person on my Dad’s side of the family to get a four year college degree, but all seven of my siblings did so as well… We, like our parents went one step further up the educational ladder. It’s what they raised us to believe we not only could do, but, should do!

One last thought… Do you know how difficult it is to legally immigrate to America? It’s incredibly difficult. I had the opportunity to work with two young men, both from Russia, who were educated here in the states, one was valedictorian of his class at Elon University, and each of them faced a long, expensive and protracted legal process to get a ‘green card’. They both did so however, and both are citizens today.

I remember thinking at the time that the process had to be flawed. Here there were two, college degreed young folks, both with bright professional futures, who would be good ‘earners’, pay taxes and contribute positively to society and they were all but being told, “go home”.

If the laws were changed, made it easier for folks to come here legally, our ‘illegal’ problem would go away, and fairly quickly. We could then turn our attention to where it belongs, keeping those folks who want to come here to cause trouble, out.

Technorati Tags: America - Immigration - Spanish Anthem - Meting Pot
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We Made the Trade Press. . .

I get a number of business related trade newsletters everyday, more than I can really read. I do scan the headlines and try to look at the articles that interest me. In the e-stack today, was an article in “ComputerWorld” that actually addresses one of the initiatives going on where I’m working.

One of the newer industry buzzwords (or TLAs) is SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). To hear most folks talk you’d thing it was the next wiz-bang, going to solve the world’s problems, process.

It’s not all that new really; it’s more an extension of what many of us have been doing for well over a decade. Most of us in PC based development that is. The “mainframers”, those “big iron” guys, you see have been developing application under what they now call the ‘waterfall’ model. Large monolithic applications built with little or no component reutilization.

Us “PC” guys, using tools like Visual FoxPro, Visual Basic, C++, and now all the .Net languages have been building libraries of reusable components for years. Some, like me, started doing so out of self-preservation, and to construct a toolbox and framework, from which we could quickly, and cost effectively build custom applications for our clients.

At first, we called them Procedures, then Functions, UDF’s and now in the object world of application building they’re called ‘methods’. This next step in the evolution and it is evolution, not revolution, is placing these functions on a server where your application can place a ‘call’ to them, and receive back the desired result.

Ten years ago it was called “Client/Server” computing, today it’s been given a new lease, a fresh paint job, new terminology and some help from the server architecture and it’s been transformed into ‘Web Services” or SOA.

It’s always nice to be on the front lines, and this article isn’t at all far from the truth. There are folks embracing this fully, and folks dragging their heels, but SOA, is here to stay. It makes far too much sense, especially in companies who have large investments in mid-range and larger hardware.

Security and authentication for data access can be handled for the application at the server level (like the mainframe folks like), access to applications can be handled at the desktop level and the servers handle all of the, often complex, data location and retrieval for the application.

We’ve extracted the need for a developer to know ‘where’ the data store is, what driver is needed to get to it, and replaced it with a ‘black box’ that simply responds to a request. I’m sure when Greg stops in, he’ll remind me we were doing very similar things with PC networks in the 80’s… and we were… the point is, not much really changes, just what we call the process, and exactly how it’s put to work.

You can read the actual article here, in keeping with my stance on not naming my employer; I won’t mention which of the companies in the article it is. I think even the non-detectives among you will figure it out though.

The big central customer file and Dun and Bradstreet sync process I’ve been working on for nearly a year, kicked off in production mode today. The first day went flawlessly, we had a couple of tense moments very early this morning, but once we got everything restarted properly, all phases scheduled for today ran, completed normally and within our estimated time frames. We’ll start the message generation for distribution to the industry tomorrow, and that will run though mid-day on Sunday.

I have the Midnight to 8:00am shift Friday night, and, with any luck at all, I’ll be a pro at navigating the mainframe screens by morning!!

If I have a chance, I’ll update you all on our process and how my POL process worked in the final analysis. That tool has a lot of potential, even working on remote datastores, and making approximately 1000 character comparisons per record, it was still processing at a rate of five records per second. I’d estimate that 60% of that time had to do with the fact that ODBC remote data calls are on the very lowest tier of the priority list. That means that every other non-ODBC request to the server was processed before mine.

All in all, I’m very pleased!

Technorati Tags: FoxPro - Microsoft - SOA - Software Development
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Surf’s Up. . . and legal!

I read today where a judge in NYC ruled “that on-the-job Internet use is equivalent to reading a newspaper or talking on the phone”. Imagine that… surfing the web at work is now legal!

You can read the whole story here, and to me, this is a pretty amazing ruling.

There are all sorts of possible down stream repercussions to this ruling, from expansions in employment agreements, additional chapters in the “Employee Handbook”, removing internet access from all but specific personnel, to all sorts of lawsuits from folks who were unfairly treated for surfing the web while at work.

The case in question involved a governmental (education) employee, who was reprimanded for surfing the web while on the job, but between phone calls…

I don’t know if I could do my job, or be nearly as productive as I am, without the web. The instantaneous access to online help, discussion groups and research material is like working side by side with experts in every field.

On the other hand, almost I never, and I mean very, very, rarely browse for anything not directly related to my duties while I’m on the clock. Maybe it’s because I know I’m a contractor and my actions and production are being not only watched, but analyzed and evaluated weekly. Maybe it’s just the way I was raised, and the work ethic I learned when young, but to me, work is work, not ‘play time’.

(For what it’s worth, I’m tele-working today, and I’m off the clock right now!)

I know several of my regular readers stop in from work, and I know that the DoD, and other governmental visitors are not stopping in here to get answers to our national problems, so my question to you all is:

Do you surf in here from work? If not, why not? If you do, are you stopping in on you breaks, or just when you have a break in the work ‘flow’?

What’s your take on the ruling?

Technorati Tags: websurfing - Internet use at work - Work Ethic - Work
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The DotNetNuke experiment. . .

It’s been an interesting day.

I got notification this morning that the new Hosting Account was ready so I went ahead and got started with the DotNetNuke (DNN) installation. If you want to have a look at the type of skins and modules that are already available, you should check out SnowCovered they seem to be the spot to go for that stuff.

I took advantage of the Hosting Company’s “Auto Install” feature, which worked very, very smoothly (automatic you could say!), for this initial testing phase. It was as easy as clicking some items on their menus and watching the install roll by. It was sort of reminiscent, of our old Accounting enhancement installs, a ton of messaging by to let you know it’s running, and a very comforting ‘Installation Successful” message when it was complete.

One nice feature, or at least I thought it was, is that the default page that launches when the site comes up for the first time has all of the default username and password combos right there for you. No fumbling through the documentation trying to find them, and, with them displayed on the home page, you pretty much either have to clear the home page or change them!

The basic config work took only minutes… and I spent the rest of the day, off and on, between running a couple of batch jobs for work, tearing apart a toilet and talking to some friends on the phone…. building, and destroying the same 5 page website, at least 5 times.

This tool is indeed pretty slick.

Doing that in any other web development tool would have taken much, much, longer, for me anyway.

The basic package has all sorts of ‘built in’ pieces in the core. Modules like account login, User registration, Banners, contacts, User accounts, discussions, documents, FAQ’s, Events, Announcements… and more.

There’s even a RSS feed module that you can install on a page and link to a news feed for topical stories, events and so on. You can even place two or three different feeds into separate modules, on the same page. They can be set to be ‘open’ or ‘closed’ when the page is rendered, as well as hidden until the user logs in.

The real proof to me though was that my wife also found it intuitive, while she’s not really had much web development experience, she found the interface clear, and fairly straightforward.

This thing has a ton of options; most of our time today was spent searching out ‘where’ to turn on, or off, the feature in question.

Yes, we did, ‘blow it up’ a couple of times, but that might have had more to do with both of us making changes to the same site, at the same time…. SQL can be funny about that sometimes…

All in all… it was a day well spent.

The tech support folks at the new hosting company continue to be outstanding, helpful as well as knowledgeable!

I’ll keep you posted, but I fully expect that by this time next Sunday I’ll have two sites in pretty good shape and being ‘served up’ from this one web application. This is pretty slick stuff indeed. Right now, my biggest concern is the hassle of moving the domains to a new provider!

Well that… and graphics!!

Technorati Tags: DotNetNuke - ASP.Net - Hosting - webhost4life
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CyberSpace Moving. . .

I’ve been working on a new ‘look and feel’ for my personal and professional websites.

Until lately it’s been mostly a ‘back burner’ type project, something I’ve tinkered with when I felt I had some free time.

With the recent developments on the job, I've decided that I need to move the project to the ‘front burner’ and begin moving forward with it

I’ve had some serious design concepts in my head for the move. That’s generally the problem with projects I want to develop for myself, grand plans and limited time.

Some things I wanted to include were:

• Fully develop the site using .Net and ASP.Net 2.0 and Microsoft SQL Server
• A consistent yet different ‘Look and Feel’ for each site
• A method for managing the ‘content’ that involves placing the content in a database for later storage and recall.
• That the 'database driven' method would mean content on the site becomes driven from database contents, not static HTM pages.
• Allow for multiple domains and sub-domains to be hosted through the same account and front end portal
• Provide a way to incorporate the blog when/if I ever decided to move it from “blogspot”
• Allow the look of the site to change without requiring a full underlying change to each and every page.
• User registration/Login to provide a subscriber area for uploads/downloads as well as for content not available to casual site visitors.
• Include a discussion forum, possibly linked to the blog where extended conversations could grow from a blog topic.
  

So, last evening, I decided to start doing a little research on how I could accomplish these goals, and several more, with the least amount of time and effort on my part.

I rediscovered a .Net ASP framework called “DotNetNuke” that unbelievably has most, if not all of my wish list already in the package! That’s right, despite having a ton of already completed components; I’m going to utilize a framework as the underpinning for the new portal. Imagine, a hard core, write everything from scratch, developer, like me planning to use a framework… what with that?? It’s hard even for me to believe!

One of the reasons I’m going to give this package a try is that it’s an “Open Source” project. That means it’s free, that if I make any useful improvements those cahnges can be added to the project, and, tested by the entire community. It also means that anything anyone else adds to the framework can be added to my site’s functionality as well.

Another reason is flexibility, the framework has many, many embedded features that it would take me weeks, if not months (or longer), to develop, and even then I’d be several more months sorting out any bugs.

Last, but certainly not least, is that the framework is based and located on the server, which means content updates can be done ‘online’ and from anywhere I have internet access, not only from a PC where I have FrontPage, Macromedia or another web development tool installed.

Once I’d settled in on DotNetNuke as the base of the revamp, I started looking for any problems others had encountered with the installation.

I found out a couple of interesting things. First, my current hosting provider, has had a lot of problems with folks attempting to install, and get new DotNetNuke sites up and running, without incident. Second, that there are providers who specialize in hosting DotNetNuke based sites.

This morning I found a host who not only provides an ‘Auto-Install’ option, but also includes multiple domain hosting, full .Net 1.1 and 2.0 support, component and web service registration as well as providing SharePoint collaboration services as well!

Having access to SharePoint, might not mean much to many of you, but, it’s a very powerful online collaboration tool. You can schedule online meetings, route documents for review and approval, or just simply build an online document library and grant access by user to individual documents, or entire groups of documents.

Considering I’ve also been working on a ‘virtual company’ concept, where I’d bring together other IT/IS professionals to form teams, and solicit projects, this is a very big bonus for switching. It was available from my current provider, but only through an ‘add-on’ service, not as part of the base package,

All of this, for the same price I’m currently paying for hosting.

Yes, I checked, they do provide daily backup of both the site and the databases (on site and remote site), and they include a tool for backing everything up locally to one of my machines as well.

So, I’ve signed up with the new hosting service, and shortly, hopefully later today, once I receive my temporary URL and get everything set up I’ll start porting the sites. The first one I intend to port is the family site I started almost a year ago and never really finished, once that’s up and running, I’ll point you all there for some feedback. Why that one? Well, it’s got a fairly limited audience, and moving it will have little or no influence on my financial situation if it’s not successful!!

If any of you would like to know the hosting service I settled in on, drop me an email and I’ll send you a link.

So, the “cyberspace move” is on. Like any other move, I’m sure there will be problems, I’ll temporarily lose some items, or forget where I’ve put them, finding them again only after I’ve rebuilt them. Also, like any other move, there’s excitement, and anxiety, but, in the end I’m sure it’ll all work out!!

Technorati Tags: DotNetNuke - ASP.Net - Hosting - CyberSpace
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