Jeremy's Blog

People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power. – Bill Clinton

Say what you want about Bill Clinton, but that one line is probably the single best thing I think I’ve ever heard him say.

We’re getting really close to releasing some stuff over at Omega Vortex. One of the products that’s coming out soon is Steven’s NextShout. NextShout is a shoutbox add-on to vBulletin that’s been designed to be extremely fast and bandwidth efficient. Where similar shoutbox add-ons are not only more expensive, but end up requiring you to pay more in bandwidth costs to use, NextShout is a cost-effective alternative that will actually save you money, in the long run.

NextShout is now available for pre-order at $15 USD. Purchase it today to get it cheaper than the release price.

Stay tuned for more release information.

The slides for Rasmus Lerdorf’s FrOSCon 2008 presentation are up. If you’re involved in PHP Development at any level, you should go look at them. You might be surprised at the performance of your favorite framework.

I wish I was cool enough to add pictures of myself doing random stupid crap to fan galleries of celebrities on Facebook. Why can’t you people follow the rules? I was looking for a specific picture and ended up seeing some random guy’s exposed buttocks in a gallery for a celebrity. On Facebook. Your bare behind has been reported. Hopefully the picture will be removed so you don’t burn the eyes of others like myself. It’s a lot to hope for, but maybe you’ll get deleted and/or banned, too.

While I was a little strapped for cash this year, I took on a job as a Sales Representative for Planet Celluar, an Authorized Retailer for AT&T Products and Services. It was an okay job, about as glamorous as retail sales can be. Due to some expansion at Omega Vortex and the fact that I didn’t really need the job anymore, I decided it was best that we parted ways. A recent e-mail that was circulated among the people I used to work with makes me glad that I did.

So, here’s my attempt to tear apart an e-mail from a retarded business executive. Some people’s names, product names, and location names have been changed to protect the guilty … or the mentally retarded.

(continue reading…)

As classes and consulting work at Omega Vortex keep pushing me more and more into .NET development, I thought it would be a good time as any to try to start learning new things and try to keep my mind working on this stuff. I decided to start looking for an Open Source project that I could contribute to.

After noticing someone on Twitter mention a LINQ to WMI project, it seemed like the perfect fit. LINQ (Language-Integrated Query) is something I’m not too familiar with and want to learn. While I’m somewhat familiar with WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation), it’s huge. There’s still plenty left to be learned about it.

I’ve become a developer on the LinqToWMI project at Microsoft’s CodePlex and I’ve already made two major updates for those who are interested. One of which is the ability to generate “Commonly Used” WMI classes instead of just generating the ones you need one at a time. The next is a major speed enhancing change on the ClassGenerator.

It came to my attention while testing the project that it would crash with a NullReferenceException if there were no instances available of the class you wanted to generate. (Example: It would crash when trying to generate a Win32_FloppyDrive class. My laptop has no floppy drive.) In re-working the generator to not use an instance to generate code from, we gained a pretty huge speed boost from not having to search for an instance. Before, it took about 4 or 5 seconds to generate around 15 classes. Now it takes a fraction of a second.

If you’re needing to use the WMI on a project and want an easy way to query it, give this project a shot. If you think it’s good, help us out by contributing patches or bug reports so we can make the project even better.