Shawn Cicoria - CedarLogic

IntelliScanner™ Express

This is a very interesting device...

Make barcode technology work for your home or small business with the new IntelliScanner™ Express – the easy way to organize books, media, and wine, automate online selling, track home assets, print insurance reports, and much more. Utilizing the same barcode systems that retailers use to automate their operations, you can keep track of the items in your life, right on your Mac or PC.

Available in both USB and Bluetooth® wireless (pictured) models, the IntelliScanner Express barcode reader offers seamless, high-performance barcode scanning capabilities with just one button. Use it with its included software, or scan barcodes anywhere with keyboard emulation. It's part of your IntelliScanner Express package, and is also compatible with exclusive add-on software for business use as well.

IntelliScanner™ Express

Dynamic Systems Initiative...

I'll be spending the next several weeks working with our TI practice on envisioning around DSI and how we will provide assets, process, and approach towards the concepts.  Looks like it will be fun.

Microsoft Dynamic Systems Initiative

The Dynamic Systems Initiative is a commitment from Microsoft and its partners to help IT teams capture and use knowledge to design more manageable systems and automate ongoing operations, resulting in reduced costs and more time to proactively focus on what is most important to the organization. Microsoft is investing heavily in software research and development and working with partners to deliver end-to-end offerings integrated across application development tools, operating systems, applications, hardware, and management tools that will result in:

• Increased productivity and reduced costs across the entire IT organization.
• Reduced time and effort required to troubleshoot and maintain systems.
• Improved system compliance with business and IT policies.
• Increased responsiveness to changing business demands.

P&P Threat Modeling

Good addition to the process of Threat Modeling web applications (6 sections) with templates and a cheat sheet.

Threat Modeling Web Applications

This guidance presents the patterns & practices approach to creating threat models for Web applications. Threat modeling is an engineering technique you can use to help you identify threats, attacks, vulnerabilities, and countermeasures that could affect your application. You can use threat modeling to shape your application's design, meet your company's security objectives, and reduce risk.

SharePoint Resources for dealing with the Search API

The Importance of Documentation...

Today I was asked about a utility I wrote nearly a year ago.  Originally, I wrote the utility in different tools to aid a few coworkers as they required on Application & Domain Migration projects.  Later, I merged the utilities into a single tool to make my management of the different tools easier, and of course to leverage reuse of some common things (mostly I did it as I can't keep track of more than a few things at a time.)

So, someone in our company in Central US required the functionality of the tool.  They successfully found it on the internal Knowledge Management system (the KM environment  sucks BTW and I was surprised anyone could find it.)  They use the tool and crap, doesn't in their situation.

Reading through the tool Readme and seeing the configuration file supports some sort of logging, they enable it.  Only problem is, the stuff I hobbled together initially wasn't logging anything in the functionality they were using.  Bad choice on my part - and I'm always giving people crap about failing to do enough logging ( Mental note: fire me).

This gets back to the real problem - lack of enough documentation.  Even the stuff you spend your own time on and put out for others to use, it pays you back if you take the time to document clearly and with enough scenarios, issues, etc. that one call can easily offset the amount of time you spend addressing the problem.  That along with some logging would have prevented any issues.

Now, I officially don't have to support the tool, but I take serious pride in what I build and it really helps my ego to see things I work on get used, effectively, and makes other's lives easier.  Hell, if we make a buck on it, then I feel like I earned something.

In the end, they were able to get it working and they must've missed something in the tool such as a parameter.  I really don't know what the issue is as I have no friggin log file.  However, they did say they would provide possible screen shots and feedback so I can fix/improve the tool - good customer service is promise stuff once the customer figures it out and never look back :)

Moving from Blogger

Now that Community Server is up & running I'm looking to move my blog (entire history) from Blogger to this site.  How?  Well, blogger does have a HOWTO on their site:

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=130&topic=12

How do I create a backup of my entire blog?

Blogger does not have an export or download function. However, you can use the following instructions to create a single file with all your posts which you may publish and then copy to your own computer for use as desired. Note: If you intend to continue using your blog, please save a copy of your existing template in a file on your computer as you will need to have it at hand after this process is completed.

Nice XML tool for Excel 2003

In General, Office 2003 has some relatively good support for XML; however, a recent tool adds some significant ease of use features that are otherwise hidden behind the curtain.

Excel 2003 Tool: Excel XML Toolbox for Microsoft Office Excel 2003

The Excel XML Toolbox for Microsoft Office Excel 2003 provides many useful tools for working with XML in Excel.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e315c516-2c2c-4870-a189-d47a5d7ffeb3&displaylang=en

Using the Excel XML Toolbox for Microsoft Office Excel 2003

http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/odc_xl2003_ta/html/office_excel_xml_toolbox.asp