just3ws

5:01 is for pants.

Henryka Zalewski — 1952-08-10 to 2010-02-06

Henryka Zalewski
Of Carpentersville

Visitation for Henryka Zalewski (nee Tekien) will be held Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2010 from 3-9pm at Michaels Funeral Home, 800 S. Roselle Rd. (Between Irving Park and Higgins Road) Schaumburg. Funeral services will begin Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 with 11:00 AM mass at St. Margaret Mary Church in Algonquin, IL then proceed on to the interment at St. Michael the Archangel Cemetery, Palatine.

Henryka, 57, was born August 10th, 1952 in the northeastern part of Poland and passed away February 6th, 2010 at 7:25 PM at Sherman Hospital, Elgin following her two year battle with cancer.

She was the daughter of Eugeniusz and Honorata Tekien (nee-Skutnik). She was the youngest child of three with two older brothers, Stanislaw and Jozef. Since a very young age she was passionate about education and always received top-marks throughout her academic career. Once she completed her post secondary education, she was accepted to and attended the prestigious Medical Academy in Bialystok, Poland. Throughout her entire life, she has had a close relationship with God. She attended Catholic mass every Sunday, which led her to meet the love of her life, Daniel Zalewski, who had been an organ player at the Fara Cathedral Catholic church in Bialystok Poland. They were married at 22 and had two children, Aneta and Daniel while still living in Bialystok.

In March of 1980, her husband Daniel came to United States. She joined him in July of 1988 and had two more children, Angelika and Laura. The older children joined them in United States in 1992 in Streamwood, IL. The family moved to Lake in the Hills in 1996 and became parishioners at St. Margaret Mary Church in Algonquin, IL. Once the older children married, the family moved the last time and settled in Carpentersville, IL.

Henryka, also known as “Henia”, “Halinka”, “Bielka” was very intelligent. She was very passionate about many things but most particularly medicine. She taught herself English and was very fluent. She took great pride in her work ethic. She brought the same dedication to her family and maintained an immaculate home and provided a safe and comfortable place for her children to thrive in. She put her heart fully into everything she did.

She was a faithful believer and devout Roman Catholic and attended Polish mass at St. Margaret Mary church in Algonquin, IL for many years.

She loved the United States and was always proud of being Polish. She was sworn in as a United States citizen in 2004.
She was a strong and proud woman who was never without an opinion on any given subject and believed strongly in public welfare, fairness and equality. She had a quick wit, and although sometimes her sense of humor was too subtle for the rest of us, she always had a bit of a wry smile behind any pointed observation she made.

She was a great wife, mother, friend, companion and advocate for anyone in need. She was always someone who can be counted on. She helped many people throughout her life in many different ways. She will be greatly missed and loved by all who had an opportunity to know her.

She is survived by her husband, Daniel Zalewski, of Carpentersville; four daughters, Aneta Hall of Crystal Lake, Angelika and Laura Zalewski of Loyola University; son Daniel Zalewski of Cary, IL; and granddaughter Penelope Hall.

For information please call 847-891-2900 or visit www.michaelsfh.com

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February Challenge: Very Improved Developer

Okay, here’s my next personal challenge. Learn Vim. Period. I’m taking away all my editors, save Visual Studio. I need Visual Studio to pay the bills (for now). So bye-bye TextPad, Netbeans, Aptana, Komodo Edit, Monodevelop, Livewriter, e TextEditor and Notepad++. I’m gonna be a Vim’er by the end of the month.

This means all my non-Visual Studio related text editing needs must be processed through Vim. No dropping into Notepad cheating. I have to relearn my traditional text management flow to utilize Vim.

Oh, and I’m installing ViEmu for Visual Studio and Sql Server Studio. Because I’m a masochist.

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Tags vs Categories in WordPress

I’ve not been categorizing my last dozen or so posts. I don’t get what the difference between tagging and categorizing is supposed to be anyway. Maybe if I felt a little bit more retentive about the structure of my blog it would matter. For the most part I just want it to be a linear series of posts. Since most technical articles are outdated within months of their writing, why bother with long time indexing? At least the way categories are implemented in WordPress is a bit of a pain. You actually have to click a series of checkboxes to select your category, or open up a popup box to enter new categories. Whereas adding new tags is just a matter of typing in a series of comma-delimited words into a textbox. So, with tags you have a relatively stream of conscious method of marking up your posts, but categories are clumsy and non-intuitive.

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Biting Off (Almost) More Than You Can Chew.

37 posts in 31 days!

I’m finally at the end of my month long challenge to blog everyday. I had lofty goals of writing insightful and info laden posts but given the aggresive schedule of a post a day and the demands of life and other commitments, I was just happy to get a paragraph or two written by the end of the day. Wow, that was quite a bit more work than I anticipated. But I’m really happy.

My blog reached over 1600 unique views across the thirty odd posts I made. Which, in some circumstances that wouldn’t be very impressive. But in perspective that’s the most traffic I’ve seen in ever.

All I can hope is that some people found some humor or information in my postings. And I am not going to open my mouth for this kind of exercise again, for at least a little while. :)

Thanks to everyone who did visit. I’ll be concentrating on writing more solid articles with more focused content over the coming weeks. Please stay tuned, as I will be writing about IronRuby and using alternative platform tools to support development on the .NET platform. Also, I’ve toyed around with screencasting, so I may be throwing my hat into that arena as well.

Thank you.

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McHenry Cloud Developer’s Group February Meeting

February 8th, 2010. The McHenry Cloud Developer’s Group will be hosting it’s 3rd meeting.

The night’s topic will be “Hello, World.” on the Microsoft Azure Platform. Presented by none other than Clark Sell, a Senior Developer Evangelist for Microsoft. He’ll be walking us through what it will take for developers to get started on the Azure platform. I’m excited.

We’ll be meeting at the big private meeting room in the Crystal Lake Panera. It was very comfortable for our last meeting, and the room is big and has plenty of space to stretch out. Not to mention free wireless and sufficient places to plug in your laptop. Top it off with a layout of free (for you) bakery treats. Doesn’t get better than that!

Oh, wait. It does! If you’ve registered for the event via our Eventbrite registry, then you’ll be eligible for free swag. http://helloworldazure.eventbrite.com to register for the meeting and be entered in a swag giveaway! SWAG!

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What comes after Alt.NET?

Between contracting with Obtiva and working at a client site where I and my co-developer are the only .NET developers on the site I’ve been focusing on learning tools and languages that are so far out of the Microsoft development stack that they barely register on the typical .NET developer’s radar.

Rake, Ruby, Cucumber, Watir and RSpec are fast becoming my primary tools for testing and development. And I’m doing more personal development in Ruby and Python than ever before. I’m starting to wonder how long it will be before I replace my entire toolbelt and become a Not.NET developer? I’m in no rush, overall the languages and frameworks that are readily available to me as a .NET developer make me quite happy. What doesn’t make me happy are many of the tools provided to support them. Microsoft’s versions of testing and build tools are a mess. Source control seems to be desperately trying to catch up. And, unfortunately, working with a lot of the open source frameworks on .NET don’t feel anywhere as complete and polished as their Ruby originals. Which is unfortunate, as I know that these developer’s are working very hard to bring this functionality to the .NET world.

But, the fact remains, as things become easier on other platforms, they will erode away the reasons for me to remain with the .NET platform. I have no political or ideological reasons to leave. I don’t invest emotions in the tools I use, only in whether they help me do a better job. If I do leave the Microsoft platform will be be for the only reason that counts, because there was something that felt better elsewhere.

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Presented “Building .NET w/Ruby” at LCNUG

Had a great time presenting “Building .NET w/Ruby” at the Lake County .NET User Group in Grayslake, IL this evening.

Slides: Builds .NET with Ruby

The audience was relatively new to Ruby and Rake in general. So taking the introductory approach breaking down how Rake tasks are strung together and dependency chains are created before getting into the actual use of a library like Albacore was the right choice. I’m really happy with the questions from the audience. And there were some opinions defending MSBuild and even a new build engine from Microsoft that will support parallel builds. I’m very interested in learning about the build engine from Microsoft. I’d like to see what that might look like.

An interesting thing that Sergio Pereira brought up was how the Rails developers use Rake for a lot more than just builds. Pretty much any repetitive task will be handled via script automation through Rake. And that even led me to question why we still use BAT files in conjunction with Rake? Why not just do ALL the scripting via Rake and skip the BAT files? Going to look at converting some of my BAT scripts to just be Rake scripts.

Thanks to Clark Sells for lending me his very cool laser pointer+slideshow controller. And Scott Seely for hosting the event!

Sergio even snapped a shot of me talking.

Me presenting Rake at LCNUG

Last but not least. Hosting your blog on GitHub is not crazy. And thanks for the beers Clark!

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Pair Programming

After over a year of working solo it’s great to be working in a team again. And we’ve been aggresively pair programming for two weeks now and I have to say that it has been extremely intense but rewarding.
After working alone for so long working “intimately” with another developer takes some getting used to. The first thing I noticed was the need to articulate my ideas better. I’d gotten so used to working inside my head that it was quite exhausting having to explain every detail of my design. But the exercise has ultimately resulted in a better design. When I’d get to a point that was involving too much hand waving I’d realize my understanding of the problem may be incomplete. So we’d work through the process together and end up with a cohesive design.

Training has been incredibly fast. By disciplined pairing for the first week alone we were able to get up and running and producing value in mere days, not weeks or months that training typically takes. By having the new developer sit in my cube and share the keyboard all day, everyday for a week we were able to finish wiring up some of the actual work in less time than would have been wasted elsewhere.

So far, I’m really enjoying pairing. I recommend doing it to any developer. It will be hard at first but the result will be better code and two better developers.

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IronRuby at Obtiva’s Geekfest

I got a chance to present IronRuby to a group of some of the most hardcore Ruby fanatics in Chicago today. And I’ve survived to tell the tale. Not too much to say other than my .NET cohort at Obtiva Scott Parker aka @citizenparker presented the DLR and what it means for languages like Ruby and Python. Then I closed with a quick presentation on IronRuby and a tidbit of some other Ruby goodness that has been adopted by the .NET community.

I’ve attached the slides here.

Slide deck: IronRuby

BTW, I wrote the slide deck this morning before I left for my commute. So I’m pretty happy with the results. If Scott says it’s okay I’ll add his presentation to this post later.

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MVC Song

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