Jason Alexander's Blog

A day of mixed emotions!

jalexander — Fri, 14 May 2004 19:43:00 GMT

First of all, I'm sad today that with great remorse I gave my two week notice here at Match.com. I'll be leaving behind a very talented group of developers, as well as a great group of friends. The camaraderie we shared was nothing I had experienced anywhere else before. It's going to be greatly missed!

But ultimately, I’m INCREDIBLY EXCITED to be moving on to new endeavors. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about where or what it is exactly just yet. But, it’s big and it’s coming with the momentum of a freight train! Now I just have to hang on for the ride of my life! :)

nGallery now Mono Compliant!

jalexander — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 01:48:00 GMT

One of the great things we haven't really touted with this release of nGallery 1.6.1 is that it now:

This is something we on the nGallery team are very proud of! Ken worked closedly with Vlad and Miguel working through the issues that we had, and I think the Mono guys even found a few things that nGallery helped uncover.

A few things to keep in mind for those of you wanting to be Mono Aware:

Rule #1: Never, ever, ever use the \ to seperate directories when doing any file I/O. Instead, use the System.IO.Path.DirectorySeparatorChar constant. This translates directly over to the *nix world and makes for a smooth transition in Mono.

Rule #2: Just as most of us have learned case sensitivity in .NET, carry this forward to your file I/O operations, again, and make sure all files and directories are case sensitive.

Rule #3: Make sure you don't compile your assemblies with the /incremental flag. Mono can't support incremental compilation. For more details on what "incremental compilation" is, see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cscomp/html/vcgrfincrementalenableincrementalcompilation.asp

nGallery 1.6.1 Released!

jalexander — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 14:15:00 GMT

As my co-hort in crime with nGallery, Ken Robertson, reports:

http://weblogs.asp.net/krobertson/archive/2004/04/26/120342.aspx

We just released nGallery 1.6.1! This release is pretty awesome. It has a number of really cool features, including the album sorting, RSS support, trackable invitations, "friendly" URLs via URL rewriting, a number of huge performance improvements, as well as many other features.

Check it out!

Whew!

jalexander — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 19:45:00 GMT

Unfortunately, I haven't blogged in forever, and my blog reading has been limited to quick power scanning through posts. I've been really busy, sorry.

Last week I judged the INETA ImagineCup event at my old university, the University of North Texas. It was a really interesting event! I love the theory behind these events. It's really interesting to see how such fresh students with a limited knowledge of industries and problem domains tackle problems. I love it! I think we, as IT professionals, can sometimes get into a pattern (er, excuse the pun) with our solutions. So, it's neat to see the way people come at problems from different angles. The event, overall, was wonderful. I really enjoyed being involved. ImagineCup is very well organized for being such a new program. I only see this event getting better and better, and I hope to continue to be involved in the coming years.

Last night we had our first meeting of the Plano .NET Users Group! And, I'm still reeling today... To give you some background, our group has only been in existence for, literally, one month. We sent out RSVPs just over a week before the event. Within an hour of the RSVP mail, we already had ~40 people RSVP'ed. Fast forward 30 minutes before the event and we had 143 people RSVP'ed. This is where panic began to set in.

I never really realized the logistics behind these events until this. Then, I didn't understand just the sheer volume for a large group. I don't see how professional event planners do it. With 143 people, we estimated 3.5 slices of pizza per person, and 2 drinks per person. The final order was 35 pizzas, and 10 cases of drinks. This was all based off a survey we had sent out earlier to our members. That was no problem. We were lucky enough to have great sponsors to carry our costs.

Back to sheer volume: Sheer volume can make mountains out of mole hills. Take for example, ice. We needed ice. I had no idea how much really. Shane bought a big color when we went to Sams earlier, so I just picked a number out of my head. 10 bags of ice. Sounds good. Nice and round. I went to purchase it and start loading it up into the cooler to carry out when I realized that I had 10 8 lb. bags of ice. My weak self, there was no way I was getting it to the car. I was lucky enough that the station attendant helped me carry it out.

So, our final number was 132 people attended to see Rob Howard speak. He was awesome, as usual. He's such a great speaker and brings so much excitement to any event. Rob spoke for basically two hours straight, and not one person every got up, let alone flinched. When we finally did take a 15 minute break, we lost maybe 5 people. That speaks volumes about how enthralling it is to watch Rob do his talks. If you haven't seen him first hand, I highly suggest you catch him at one of the ASP.NET Roadshows when you can.

So, with that, I finally have a bit of a break. Well, I still have a big project at work, and trying to get the next version of nGallery out the door. But, my place has lightened. For now. ;)

Hello World!

jalexander — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 19:36:00 GMT

Well, this is my obligatory "Hello World!" blog post! :) Thanks to Steve Smith and Alex Lowe for setting me up here. I'll be transitioning my blogging over from my current one at http://weblogs.asp.net/jalexander. I'm really glad to be here, surrounded by so many well known faces in the .NET world!