West Memphis 3

One of the things that Henry Rollins mentioned the other night at his spoken word was the West Mephis 3 case.


This is something that I've been following along with great interest for quite a while now as I find the whole thing totally unbelievable and really quite scary.
The basics of the case are that back in 1993 in west mephis three young boys were murdered. Shortly after 3 teenagers were arrested and in 1994 convicted of murder. One was sentenced to death, another received life without parole and the third got life plus 40.
While if they actually committed the crimes that they were sentenced for this would seem like a reasonable penalty the problem is that there was no motive or physical evidence provided that pointed to these guys, somthing that you would normally imagine would at least raise a reasonable doubt.
Instead they were convicted on some really dodgy evidence including things like the fact that they wore black t-shirts that were heavy metal related and they read Steven king novels which apparently is enough to prove you are part of a satanic cult. Also there were some highly suspect witnesses accounts which by people who were basically badgered by the police into giving false evidence and who have mostly all since recanted.
The fact that you can be convicted of a crime primarily based on what you wear, read and listen to is a really scary prospect even if this is over in America not here, especially considering I wear a lot of black, listen to a heavy metal and even have a few Steven king novels myself !
The good news is that slowly more people are getting behind the case and it looks like some of the essential bits of evidence like the DNA are finally being processed after supporters raised the money to allow this to occur, so at least there has been some slow progress towards getting them a fairer day in court.
There is a global action day being held around the world on July 23, 2005.
If you are interested then click here to find out the details click here
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The Amazing Angry Man

Went along to see Henry Rollins spoken word last night. This is the third time I have seen one of his performances, but they don't get any less amazing.
It's quite hard to explain to someone who hasn't been along how interesting it is. The entire night consists of him just standing there and recounting various experiences he has had and just generally chatting about things he cares about for 2 and a half hours.
But it is kind of like being on an emotional roller coaster, one minute you can hardly stop laughing then a few minutes later your sad and/or angry along with him. The topics range from various things that happened to him at performances or while on tour to political topics such as George Bush and gay marriage.
He has such a great stage presence and is so passionate about he views that I think he could keep the audience enthralled even if he was talking about the most dull of topics.
It's was truly a great night, I'll definitely be along next time he's back in town.

Off to Adelaide and back to the Database

I'm off to spend the rest of the week in Adelaide working on a BI project.

After spending a couple of years trying to keep away from the database programming against SharePoint it's a nice change to get back into some database work.

incidentally SmartLibrary the product which I got to do a bit of work on at OBS/Nintex actually got a mention on Mike Fitz's blog recently in a post about keeping away from the SharePoint database. It makes some good points about some of the problems you can cause even just reading from the SharePoint Database. Fortunately the job I'm working on is a straight SQL/DTS/OLAP job with no SharePoint development involved.

The other great thing about heading to Adelaide is hopefully getting to spend some more time talking with some of the solutions architects. I'm really liking the fact that there are a bunch of people with so much development and architecture experience at SDM. It's quite amazing how many tips I've picked up so far from talking through some of the solutions that have been proposed.

On the downside I'll be missing this months MDNUG and the applications user group which is a shame as the sessions sound really good, but I have the feeling I'll be pretty busy this week any way

Code Camp - I was there

Some photo's have been posted of code camp at the following link
http://www.itmasters.com.au/photo_gallery/code_camp/index.html
I love that there are as many pictures that involve pizza and wine as there of any of the sessions :)
If you look carefully you might even see me in a couple of them.

New NIN album

I've been listening to the new NIN album over the last couple of days and it is quite impressive.
It is probably a bit more mainstream than some of the previous albums with most of the songs even being quite radio friendly (at least if you listen to TripleJ or TripleR) , but it still maintains the level of complexity and that edge which makes Trent Reznor great.
For a more comprehensive review on the tracks see Andy's blog at http://andyneumann.blogspot.com/2005/05/nin-review.html

The only thing that is bothering me is that over here we didn't get the 5.1 version. We have actually ended up buying an import that is 5.1 and after hearing that and the normal version there is no doubt that the 5.1 version is far superior
I have another album in 5.1, Animositisomina by Ministry which is also a great listen.
The Nin album is especially cool as one side is in the 5.1 DVD format and the other is a normal CD, which means even the technology challenged can play it.
I hope more groups bring out albums in this format as if they actually record them to take advantage of the 5.1 features there is definitely a lot of cool stuff that can be done.
I'm also looking forward to the new SOAD album that comes out next week, it's been a very long time since two albums that I have been eagerly anticipating have come out so close together !!

MDNUG in the Real world

At the next Melbourne .Net user group there is going to be a presentation that is a bit different that what we normally see.
Damian Edwards who is a fellow student in the same degree as me, is presenting a session on an application that he has been working on along with a fellow developer.
It will be an interesting change to discuss a real world application as well as the issues that have occurred in developing it, rather than just focusing on a particular technology point.
From what I have heard the application is particularity interesting as one of the developers works in c# and the other in vb.net, also the database is oracle rather than just SQL server.
It will be interesting to see how this style of presentation goes, personally I think it would be good to see a few more real world examples in between the new technology sessions.
Details are at http://www.mdnug.org/

SharePoint Style Designer

Saw this great site called SharePoint Style Designer in on a post by Angus Logan.
It looks really great, especially for a developer like myself who is much more comfortable in C# than css. You can really quickly alter the style sheet for SharePoint and or WSS using a very friendly GUI and when your done copy the style sheet down to use on your server.
Now that SharePoint is getting quite popular I'm sure there are whole bunch of cool tools that make things a lot faster.
One of my other favorites is CAML builder which I has saved me a lot of time recently when I have to put some CAML queries together.
The other tool I've used a lot is the SharePoint Configuration Analyzer which is great for finding problems with installations that customers have done themselves. Also has a very useful feature that lets you find where web parts are being used and extract them as CAB files which is good for when you need to do a reinstall or add a front end box and the customer can't find the installers for all their custom components.
Anyone else have some favorite tools that they also think are worth checking out ?

Tomorrow Night is going to be Awesome

Tomorrow Night is going to be Awesome or so I keep being told ;)

I'm off to see a spot of amateur musical theatre show that my husband is performing in called Jekyll and Hyde. It's being put on by Cloc , who from what I have seen put on such a good show, that it is often better than the professional performances. After seeing a lot of there past shows I can fully understand why everyone involved gives up so much of there time despite not getting paid.

The last show that Greg was in of theirs was Chess, which also happens to be one of my favorite musicals. I saw the professional show of that a few months before Cloc did it and there was just no comparing the two, the amateur one was a clear winner.

I'm really looking forward to seeing the show that I have heard so much about.
Even though Greg has been so busy this week with rehearsals that I have be mainly hearing about it in notes, on messenger and on his blog. For once I'm not the busy one !

I saw another amateur production done by Nova of it back a couple of months ago. It really is a very interesting show, the lead role is so demanding switching from Jekyll to Hyde all the time. The guy who played the lead role Mike Gardiner was great, but he was really let down by some of the rest of the cast as well as a bunch of really clunky set changes that stopped the flow of the show.

I really like these modern shows and admire the companies that have the guts to put them on as they often end up loosing a lot of money.
Unfortunately a lot of the theatre going crowd are a lot more traditional, in fact I heard that a lot of the groups that normally go to every Cloc productions have said they don't want tickets to this one at all which is a shame. Also a lot of younger people aren't willing to go along to something as arty as a theatre show.

In fact I hear there is quite a few tickets left for the mothers day performance so if you live in Melbourne and want an interesting afternoon out check out the website for details.

You've got to know where your towel is !

I saw the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy movie the other day and I thought it was awesome.
There were some truly funny moments where I couldn't stop laughing and I also really liked the simple visual look that was used. I think it was a great choice for this movie to use puppets rather than large amount of digital effects it really highlights what I think is the best thing about the books. They are very simply laid out, they don't use a lot of complicated language or settings but it's just so damn clever.

I haven't read the books for quite a while but I think that probably helped and surprising Greg who hasn't read them at all also enjoyed it. I think I have him convinced to series now :)

One of the things that is a bit odd about hitchhikers is that although many of the central characters are the same the story and in particular the order of events has altered every time that the story has changed mediums. This is all explained in "A guide to the guide" which is in the compilation book for the first four books in the trilogy.

The funny thing is since the movie came out I have had several people who call themselves die hard fans claimed that the movie wasn't right as they changed the order and then claim this must of been done after Douglas Adams died (some of these are the same people who I have had to bring the fifth book in the trilogy to show them as they didn't believe there was one)

People who take this line with movie adaptations of books really bother me. It is such a narrow way to view a film. In my opinion they seem to ignore the point that the way you explain something in lines of text on a page is not necessarily the best way to do it in the visual medium. What is important are the main concepts not all of the minute plot points along the way.

So as long as you don't expect it to be 100% what is written on the page (although there are quite a few bits that are) I would highly recommend going along to see it.

The next movie I see will probably be the star wars movie...I hope it's better than the last 2 !