sfeldman.NET

Year end is always an interesting time. Reminds a sort of retrospective, but that’s a geek in me that sees it that way. Yet what happened this year? A lot for me. Here’s a list of significant things for me:

One of our latest projects has failed to restore nuget packages on the build server. Error message was

Quite amusing to read pros and cons of not having a start menu button in Windows 8. Debates from how great it is to how poor the decision was to remove it are all over the web.

Our group is moving to Git for code management and we were looking for in-house hosting option on Windows platform. I was surprised to find out that out of the box there are not many options. Rolling your own solution (aka setting it up manually) was not an option as we are a small group that is already tasked with enough work. So I started my search for free or paid options. You can guess that options were limited, yet one product I found has exceeded expectation and was just perfect – SCM-Manager. Easy, simple, smooth integration with Active Directory and Jenkins build server. What else a boy needs Not to mention that it’s absolutely free. Amazing piece of work. Highly recommended.

Among the features I love about Gmail is to be able to access multiple accounts w/o signing out and signing in. I’m late to learn this, but apparently you can do the same thing with Windows Live IDs. Same idea, straight forward.

I ran into a situation today when one of our microsites that was developed by a 3rd party is no longer… manageable. To be less politically correct, we don’t have access to the data anymore. Nothing significant, but annoying. The only way to see the data was through the web site. Yet data was paged, with about 40 pages. This is where curl was really helpful. Apparently, you can parameterize URLs (thanks to Sameer’s post) passed into the command, as well as the output. Here’s an example:

This is it. Liam has built his first program (sort of) and I am glad that the reason he did it was to confirm what he learned and not as a desire to become a programmer. If you haven’t seen http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/ check it out. An outstanding resource for kids to learn basic programming and practice some math skills. Liam has started Algebra and this was his first “program” to solidify understanding of concepts such as variable,  algebraic expression, formula, input, and output.