Technology Changes in My Life

Most people are familiar with the term "Spring Cleaning". It offers one an opportunity to throw out the old clutter and be open to something new. I've spent the past few days doing the same thing with assorted technology in my life. This includes:

1. Reformatting my laptop's hard drive and reinstalling Windows XP from scratch. I've actually had to do this twice because of some problems the first time. Things had gotten so bad with the state of my Windows that my software development tool, Visual Studio 2005, was no longer working properly. Rebuilding everything from scratch is a looooooong process so this time, once I have a base system that I like, I'm going to back it up with Acronis.
2. Moving my PocketPollster.com website to a new Windows server hosted by GoDaddy. The previous temporary site for PP was just pure HTML. The new one in the future will work with Microsoft's .Net technology. It's not done yet but I'm working on it! To test out the new functionality I built a simple .Net webpage to more quickly bring up the CKNW Audio Archive, something I access a lot. You can reach it here. It doesn't look fancy but there's actually a lot of coding under the hood to determine the correct hourly segment that needs to be accessed. In order for this page to work, you need to enable pop-ups. This is what you'll see - very simple, but also very effective:
   

The final thing I'm doing is forwarding all of my PocketPollster e-mail to my Gmail account. It's a new way [for me] of having all of my e-mail online but a transition I want to make.

Problem Discovered, Solution Found!

I'm working double duty these days to add some extra features to my Pocket Pollster software and get it installed on some mobile computers for my new client. Things have been going well but today I discovered that there was a terrible problem "synching" their newer, more modern devices.
It turned out that the problem wasn't so much with my software but rather due to a change that Microsoft made to the latest generation of their mobile operating system called "Windows Mobile 5.0". When I first saw the error happening I freaked out, "Oh my god, this is the last thing I need with the tight deadlines I have!" But after MUCH research I finally found a posting on a software forum that provided the key to the answer. After many hours of code changes and testing, testing, testing I am now proud to say that Pocket Pollster is better than ever before!

Pocket Pollster is QUICKLY Taking Off

I just learned that my Pocket Pollster software is going to be test on a prominent transit project here in Vancouver. Very cool but also a little intimidating. It's a great opportunity for me though. Things are moving forward at lightning speed . . .