Jerry Wayne Odom Jr

That’s not a type0 it seems like 2011 was never actually here and I can’t believe 2012 is already days in.    This had to be one of the quickest years I’ve ever experienced and I know it’s got to be mostly because of our daughter Ella.   She’s so action packed and non-stop fun we can’t imagine how people keep up with more than one.    The last big thing she learned how to do in 2011 was opening door knobs herself which essentially takes the gloves off for 2012.   I had no idea how much different things would be the day she could get out of her room in the morning without our help.

2012 goal number 1 is building our house.   We’ve had our property for 3 years now and I’ve painfully watched my wife and father in law dueling over house plan designs.  I personally settled everything I wanted in the house around a year ago but as we all know the last 10% takes longest and I’m personally never worried about the last 10% of anything.   Hopefully I can press them to finish it and let us get that project done.

Driving from Lake Charles a few back with a coworker who’s about two decades older than me we were discussing kids and cough remedies given the time of year and colds going around and he shared with me the recipe his grandmother used to make back in the day. My how things have changed because I’m pretty sure you’ll get on national news for giving this to your children as a cough remedy. His grandmother would take a bottle of Jack Daniels and dissolve those large hard peppermint sticks in to it and then flavor it to taste with honey and lemon juice. That was what they used for cough syrup and it worked great. It also apparently would knock you out for a few hours which is about what you’d expect the results to be on kids. It actually sounds like a fairly tasty concoction. Certainly more so than say Jagermeister or one of those type of liqours. (yuck.)

Here’s a fun little piece of code I scraped together today for an ongoing issue we’ve been having. Seems for years nobody can figure out how to locate whether a user(jodom for example) exists in our Active Directory and how to add them to a group via C#. A few people have tried but always given up and used a web service built by a consultant that no one knows what happened to the source code. The service is a pain because it dies silently whether the user exists or not and whether it succeeds or not.(really dude)

The code isn’t that difficult as you can see and I’m almost certain my peers came up with something similar on previous attempts. I’m almost certain their failure was the result of not being able to obtain appropriate DN because nobody even our network engineers had heard of LDP Tool for Querying Active Directory(LDAP) which will assist you in building LDAP queries in C#. There’s obviously a disconnect there in the developer community because I must of ran through a dozen HELP threads on various .NET boards concerning this topic.

So….code is below and should work fine to add/remove a user to a group that the userName/password provided has Management rights to. It first uses the DirectorySearcher to find the DN of the account and then uses that DN for the Add/Delete. There might be a simpler(mo better) way to do it but this hammer works so swing it.

string NTId = "jsmith";
bool IsAdding = true;
string userName = "UserWithManagementRightsToGroup";
string password = "Password";
var exists = this.ObjectContext.SomeEntitys.Where(p => p.EmployeeID == NTId);
DirectorySearcher userSearcher = new DirectorySearcher();
userSearcher.Filter = "(&(objectclass=user)(objectCategory=person)" + "(sAMAccountName=" + NTId + "))";
if (userSearcher != null)
{
userSearcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("distinguishedName");
SearchResult searchResult = null;
using (SearchResultCollection src = userSearcher.FindAll())
{
if (src.Count > 0)
{
searchResult = src[0];
string DN = searchResult.Properties["distinguishedName"][0].ToString();
try
{
DirectoryEntry entry = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://domain.com/" +
"CN=My_Users,OU=Security Groups,DC=domain,DC=com",
userName, password);
 
if (IsAdding == true && !entry.Properties["member"].Contains(DN))
entry.Properties["member"].Add(DN);
else if (IsAdding == false && entry.Properties["member"].Contains(DN))
entry.Properties["member"].Remove(DN);
else if (IsAdding == true && entry.Properties["member"].Contains(DN))
OnError(new DomainServiceErrorInfo(new CustomError("Attempted to add user that is already in group. : " + NTId)));
else if (IsAdding == false && !entry.Properties["member"].Contains(DN))
OnError(new DomainServiceErrorInfo(new CustomError("Could not remove because user was not in group. : " + NTId)));
 
entry.CommitChanges();
entry.Close();
}
catch (Exception uhoh)
{
}
}
}
}

Kind of interesting story I came across today. A lady got burned at the stake for being a Witch a few hundred years ago for prescribing the following to a neighbor who’s symptoms sounded like a bad fever/cold/flu.

A tonic of one part ginger, cloves, aniseed, liquorice and some strong ale blended together.. Served every morning before breakfast and the lady needed to walk a bit before eating.

I guess it didn’t help her case that her ghost friend told her to do it which is what got her the wrong end of the witch treatment. However I found it interesting and decided to use my good friend the Internet to breakdown what was good about this tonic:

ginger – reduces nausea, vomiting, and cold sweating. Very potent anti-inflammatory compounds effective against pain and swelling.
liquorice – soothes a sore throat, loosens bronchial congestion, reduces inflammation, soothes digestive and gastrointestinal issues, helpful with stomach ulcers.
Cloves – A stimulant that acts as a stimulant and improves circulation. Helps stabilize blood flow and regulate your body temperature. Helps with coughs, stops vomiting, headaches, asthma and a bunch of other random things.
Aniseed – Helps remove phlegm from the bronchial tube and helps with digestive disorders, upset stomach, gas.
Strong Ale – Well I found all sorts of things about B vitamins in strong ale, anti-inflammatory and other properties of hops but lets face it: beer makes you feel better.

It sounds like this lady got the torch for creating a 16th century cold medicine….bummer……but it was fun to research what these ingredients do.

I just read over an excellent series on using Elmah. If you’re unfamiliar with Elmah it’s a great tool for logging and debugging exceptions in an MVC # app. Unfortunately we got to the Elmah stage on our application at about the point the application was being piloted. However it’s been a big help in smoothing out some of the errors in teh app. This series was specifically useful to us in regards to getting Elmah to send exception emails. The exceptions weren’t making it past the MVC Error Handling to be handled by Elmah.

Joel’s Elmah Post Series

Bahama Bob’s Beach Side Cafe in Gulf Shores Alabama came highly regarded by Baton Rouge locals. You have to take all the help you can get when going out of state because as we all know there’s nobody who does seafood like Louisiana. But when we walked in to Bahama Bob’s small yet friendly cafe we knew it was going to be a good time. Tables full of people having a good time and conversing over plates of shrimp, fish and huge crab legs. It was a little loud in the dining area but everyone was having a great time although it may have been loud due to the dining area only being big enough for 30 or so people.(maybe 40 if you count the bar seating)

I’d been told to order the Royal Reds which are large deep sea shrimp. Unfortunately they were out of the reds but offered to serve up some large gulf shrimp steamed. I was ready for shrimp so that’s what I went for. They were served with a side of green beans and perfectly steamed potatoes. It was an excellent take on steamed shrimp and some of the better streamed shrimp I’ve had out of Louisiana. However the BEST thing there by far was their grilled Mahi Mahi which another in our party orderd. It was fantastically grilled fish with a perfect black edge to it. Very tasty and full of flavor. I definitely recommend that over the shrimp. Additionally the table next to us had orderd the giant crab legs and they talked very much abuot how much they enjoyed it.

I’d read only people complaining about slow service and this simply isn’t true or they caught a new waitstaff member. Bahama Bob’s staff was rocking and rolling through that place slinging food and checking on tables. I paid careful attention to them after reading some reviews online. Bahama Bob’s gets a definite thumbs up and I’ll be going back next time I’m in Gulf Shores, Alabama.

The Hangout is a huge restaurant, bar and all around tourist attraction at the end of highway 59 in Gulf Shores Alabama right on the beach. When we were checking in to our condo we saw an ad for their place and it looked like a great time. We decided to check them out for dinner.

The menu was a wide array of different types of food. Pobodys, wraps, salads, burgers, seafood, gumbo, hotdogs, quesidillas and generally anything you can think of. I had a Chicago style footlong hotdog which I thought was very tasty. It wasn’t in the same league as actual Chicago dogs but it was a good meal. My wife had a quesidilla and my in-laws shared a shrimp poboy. Did we enjoy our food? Yes it was good but man it was expensive and we had to pay to park on the public area. The price with drinks to eat here is more like $20+ per person for average food. However food aside there was a band, the waitresses put on a dance show on the tables and the place was huge. It’s a very good tourist attraction that I’d definitely take the kids back to.

• 2 sticks unsalted butter melted in a skillet
• 6(8-10 oz) fish fillets(redfish, channel bass, pompano or flounder) cut about 1/2″ thick

Seasoning Mix:   

• 1 tablespoon sweet paprika
• 1 teaspoon onion powder
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1 teaspoon ground red pepper(cayenne)
• 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano leaves
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 3/4 teaspoon white pepper
• 3/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme leaves

Heat heavy skillet over very high heat until it is beyond smoking stage.(at least 10 minutes)     Melt butter in seperate sauce pan.   Thoroughly combine the seasoning mix.   Dip each fillet in melted butter coating both sides well.   Sprinkle seasoning ix generously and evenly on both sides of the fillets patting it in by hand.   Place in hot skillet and pour 1 teaspoon butter on top of each fillet.(may flame up)   Cook until looks charred(around 2 minutes) turn fish over, pour 1 teaspoon butter cook until done.(2 minutes) serve piping hot.   Serves four.

I realized a few years back that unless I wanted to be only a software developer for the rest of my life I needed to grow professionally beyond just staying latest and greatest in software development. Lately I’ve been noticing a number of my peers having decades more experience and still basically doing the same job. There’s nothing against that as it’s a high pay, low stress profession that allows you to solve new problems every day. However I got in to software development because I enjoy the challenges but my time working with others who are more experienced made me realize that eventually it’s all the same thing even with the business problems you have to address.   I’ve thought of earning an MBA(still am thinking) but something came upon me that allowed an opportunity to grow right now.

To me it seemed if I really want to take it to the next level then I’ll need to move in to project management or architecture and I was lucky enough to move in to the project management sort of role around a year ago. Being double lucky they’ve enrolled me through the Business Project Management Program at LSU and for me it’s really added so much perspective in my day to day as a software developer let alone my growth as a Project Manager.  The courses are designed to develop you in project management as defined by the Project Management Institute which is “the” organization for the promotion of project management as a profession.  Essentially if you learn to manage a project their way you can manage a project anywhere for any business sense.  But that aside I have to say that as a developer you gain so much more insight on goals and objectives within an organizational structure.   Things that previously made no sense about why certain things were being done become clear or you at least understand the possible reasons your enterprise might be doing what they’re doing.

To me becoming skilled as a project manager is also exciting because not only can I manage IT and software development projects but I can also manage any project in any business beyond IT with their framework.   By pursuing this extension of my skillset in to this field I’ve given myself a world of new possible opportunity where I was presently pretty much set on being a developer.   You might think “Does this mean you’re thinking of leaving software development?” and the answer is no but options for consideration are nice to have.   I love developing software but I’ve had friends talk about their fields and thought it’d be exciting to work in that direction.   As a skilled project manager you have a niche that allows you to move across industry beyond a certain functional area.(IT)

As I said the program at LSU allows you to learn as it relates to the PMI but it also bridges gaps between yourself and other professionals.   For instance in the construction business you have planners & estimaters who consider many of us software developers so alien we might as well be from Mars.    However when they saw PMP study guides and material in regards to Project Management they instantly had something to talk about from their perspective.   On the other hand I found myself better capable of discussing software development with them.  So instantly this was positive and showing to be a worthwhile investment.   Further in later discussions