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June 2005 - Posts

• Screw It, I Filed the Claim

  This is the fourth installment of my ongoing Small Claims Court Experience... In yesterday's blog entry I mentioned that I went to the company's office and was told, upon informing them that I was heading to the courthouse to file a small claims court case, that a partial payment had been sent earlier in the week.  I felt I was being lied to, but didn't know what else to do than just wait it out and see if payment did arrive by the end of the week.  After reading the comments in yesterday's blog post and a few private emails, I decided that I had a better chance winning the lottery then getting payment (or a truthful statement) from this company, so today I went and filed the paperwork.  The courtdate is in early August, assuming everything goes to plan (i.e., the don't file for a later date, they are properly served, etc., etc.). <rant> When filing the paperwork the employee who was assisting me did a quick search on the company and noted that the company's address as recorded by the secretary of state was different than the address I had put down as the place to have the defendent served.  This piqued my interest so after leaving the courthouse I stopped at this other address and found yet another office for this corporation.  A bit more of an exhaustive search on this company revealed that they also have offices in San Jose and Scottsdale... but they can't freakin' pay their instructors the small sums they promised them for the services the instructors have already performed.  Gah. </rant> Ok, enough ranting on about this.  In fact, you probably won't see another entry on this small claims court hubbub for a while, until the actual court date draws nearer.  I don't mean for this series of entries to turn into a whine-fest, but rather to serve as a source of information for other independent consultants who arrive in a position similar to the one I find myself in.  As aforementioned, the best way to avoid such a headache is to not let yourself get in this position in the first place.  See the first blog entry for more suggestions on this matter.  A complete list of blog entries related to this topic can be found at My Small Claims Court Experience and through Going Independent category.  Your feedback is most welcome - please leave a comment or drop me a line. Posted Thursday, June 30, 2005 3:39 PM from Scott on Writing | 1 Comments

• yay @ atlas

  The cat's out of the bag about Atlas. AJAX may actually get productive soon. Not to dismiss the other frameworks in place at all. ( AJAX.net has some great ideas there ) It's just easier to incorporate a library into custom controls when it's already baked into the system. Boy, I would _kill_ to be on the team working on that. Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! Posted Wednesday, June 29, 2005 1:18 AM from Andy Smith's Blog | 0 Comments Filed under: asp.net controls

• Fooling Around With Media Center and Messenger

  I took a little time last nite and today to put together something that i've been wanting since msn messenger 7 came out with its What I'm Listening To feature. See, I don't run any local-machine music players anymore since I got my Windows Media Center box from HP, so this neat little feature was fairly useless. But since it's all player-plugin based, I figured it'd be completely possible to write some code and get that info zipping across the lan. So looking into it a bit, it turns out that Messenger does it with good ol' SendMessage, and I downloaded a nice little vb.net module that does all that win32 gunk for me. So then the question becomes, "how do I send that info across the network?". I decided to have a little fun and use Remoting. I ended up with a local-machine Service ( that runs as System but can interact with the desktop so I can use FindWindow and SendMessage ) that exposes my VB module thru a named remoting uri. And so on the MCE box, I have a Service that gets media-state events from MCE and remotes them to my local machine. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite completely work yet. :) So far, I've only been successfull with a normal windows app running on the MCE. When I put the same code into a service, I get nothing, but I haven't been able to figure out how to properly debug the bugger. But hey, with the media center shell running fullscreen, it's not like i can see my remoting app anyway... So it might just stay the way it is for a little while. At any rate, Yay @ fun little projects. :) Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! Posted Friday, June 03, 2005 10:58 AM from Andy Smith's Blog | 0 Comments