It was an honor to be nominated; it's even a bigger honor to receive a formal announcement congratulating me for an MVP award. Being in company the likes of Scott Mitchell, Scott Watermasysk, Scott Hanselman, and Scott Cate is doing pretty well – and that’s just the Scott list.

Over the holidays I tried again to get mono and monodevelop running under SuSE on a Virtual PC. (Note: the monodevelop website has been offline for at least a week. Apparently there are a number of worms targeting PHP vulnerabilities going around). The good news is: Service Pack 1 for Virtual PC seems to resolve all the kernel panics I saw a few months ago. The bad news: is nothing is ever easy in RPM land.

SuSE 9.2 seemed to work well with everything but mono, and I could not get both mono and monodevelop running even when building every piece scratch. My nix chops were just not up to digging out the root of the problem, so I stepped back a version.

SuSE 9.1 does work well, although monodevelop would only launch after I rebuilt icu from source. One oddity with SuSE is that it does not install any source control clients by default, even when you ask for a development setup. During the install you’ll have to dig out the Subversion client from the list of RPMs (if you want to build mono from source).

And now for some experiments…

I’m convinced smart clients will rule the world again one day, and we will all look back at ‘web application’ development as being the gigantic kludge that tied over application development until everything underneath us became virtualized.

A few weeks ago I pitched a web service / smart client design to a handful of people at a customer site. The people who will use the software loved the idea, but the people who make the final decision do not – they seem to think every solution involves server generated PDF files. PDFs are to usability as lead weights are to mobility.

I don’t remember the early 90’s being so bad as to scare everyone off of thick clients forever, but it does seem like an uphill climb at times.

I’m persistent though….

It happens to everyone. You pop into the grocery store to pick up some soda and head to the 10 item or less express checkout lane. The person in front of you has 25 bags of vegetables. The clerk has to do a price check on red onions. The customer can’t find their debit card. The cash register runs out of paper. Suddenly, a wormhole appears and sucks all of the employees into the vast space-time continuum. While you wait in line for hours, the store staff drinks gin and plays blackjack inside an East Cleveland speakeasy circa 1921.

I’ve been in these situations before, and I hear the people around me start to grumble as the minutes tick by. Instead of complaining, I find times like these are perfect for meditation and brainstorming, except it is difficult to concentrate around tabloid magazines. Here are some article ideas I came up with at the store, but I don’t think I’ll follow through with them in 2005.

• Embezzlement for Fun and Profit: Implement a Salami Slicing Algorithm with C#

• Biztalk Installation – The Musical

• Build A Comment Spam Engine With the .NET WebRequest Class, You Slimy Rock Sucking Twit

• Phiber & Cybergrrl: A Post Modern Love Story.

I’ve given some thought about what I’d like to write about in 2005. I enjoy writing, and I even enjoy thinking about writing. Writing is a great way to come to grips and form opinions on a topic, and thinking is a relaxing way to pass time. I’ve thought up a list of topics I’d like to research and write about for OdeToCode next year. Here are some of the general areas.

• Interviewing
• Configuration management
• Debugging
• Patterns
• Unit testing
• Project management

How’s that for a list of vague predictions?

Perhaps I should post the top 10 articles I won’t write ...

Happy Birthday, OdeToCode. You are one year old now. I'm amazed at how well you've done in just one year. Let's see what we can pull off in 2005.

When I was growing up, I thought I lived in the most boring place on earth. The Blue Ridge mountains in Maryland reach a humble elevation of 2000 feet (600 meters). The mountains are known for coal, and coal is relatively uninteresting – at least compared to, say, the hot magma inside of Mt. Saint Helens. As a kid, I always wanted to know what an erupting volcano would look like.

The climate in the northeastern United States is tame. Tornados are extremely rare, and I figured there was little chance of me being whisked into the Land of Oz with Dorothy. Growing up, I always wanted to save Dorothy from those flying monkeys.

Earthquakes also fascinated me. I used to picture earthquakes as making a cartoonish clean split in the ground. The ground here is rich in limestone – a soft rock. The most interesting ground features in this area are the numerous caves and sinkholes formed by erosion. Being I’m a tad bit claustrophobic, I’ve always considered spelunkers to be quite mad.

Then there is the Maryland shoreline. The waves in Ocean City are mostly small, and often cold. You won’t see any surfing championships here. As a kid, I used to look at pictures of surfers with waves towering behind them and imagine how exciting it must be to be ahead of a wave so large.

Being a little older now, I realize there are some events I don’t want to witness first hand.

Nature’s extreme forces make life look so fragile.