MST, MDT, MT or Mountain Time

I have had an uncommon interest in time zones ever since I developed software to handle them in NetTime. Living in Arizona has added to this. We buck the daylight savings system most states follow in the USA.

So this morning I was prompted by a pet peeve. When referring to a time zone which one is most appropriate to use?
MST (Mountain Standard Time)
MDT (Mountain Daylight Time)
MT (Mountain Time)

Grammar Girl says,

"It seems to me that people often don't even know whether it is standard time or daylight-saving time. It doesn't hurt to use EST or PST, but I've certainly seen people write PST when it is daylight-saving time, so I think it's fine to say just eastern time or Pacific time. It's better to leave off a detail than to get it wrong!"

I agree with grammar girl. If you have the discipline to use CST or CDT accurately, go ahead. Otherwise, you should play it safe. For March 20, 2008, use "The server issue was resolved at approximately 6:30 AM Central Time". Grammar Girl continues to describe a frustration that Arizonans can relate to.

"Also, after living in Arizona and missing enough meetings because of time-zone confusion, I like to spell things out as clearly as possible, so I appreciate it when people say something like "We're meeting at 1:00 p.m. eastern time -- that's 10:00 a.m. your time." (Of course, then you need to make sure you do the conversion right.)"

Budgets

We have been navigating the red tape in our company to get some software tools we want to be effective. This quote from Milton Friedman kept coming to my mind.

There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you're doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I'm not so careful about the content of the present, but I'm very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else's money on myself. And if I spend somebody else's money on myself, then I'm sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get.

Here is a video of Milton Friedman about this. Here is a chart of the quadrants he talks about.

We have been working in quadrant III. Trying to get our company to spend their money on tools we need. We had to convince them that they will get a timely return on their investment.

Key words: budget

Programs I use at work

Windows Settings I Like 

- Select which icons appear on the taskbar - right-click on the taskbar and choose "Taskbar settings". Scroll down and choose "Select which icons appear on the taskbar"

- Dark Mode for the Win

- How to Remove the Windows 10 Search Box from the Taskbar

Beyond Compare

Set the diff tool and merge tool by right clicking on the parent repo folder, choose TortoiseGit->Settings. For the Diff Viewer and the MergeTool setting use the following. C:\Program Files (x86)\Beyond Compare 4\BCompare.exe

Notepad++

Instructions on how to install the Obsidian Notepad++ theme.

- Open "%AppData%\Notepad++\" in windows explorer

- From \RichA\Work\CBRE\ComputerSettings\Apps\Notepad++\Themes, copy the Obsidian.xml file into the "Themes" subfolder. Create it if necessary.

- Close Notepad++, Reopen it. 

- Settings->Style Configurator, select the Obsidian style. 

Visual Studio

Since I run applications in IIS and not IIS Express, we need to run Visual Studio as an administrator.

- Right click the program

- Right click on Visual Studio in the taskbar.

- Right click on "Visual Studio 2019" and choose Properties then the Advanced button

- Check the "Run as administrator" checkbox

Screen Resolution

1920 x 1080, "Change the size of text, apps, and other items "125%

Programs

Here is a list of programs I like to use at work. Someday I may need this list to install some of my favorite apps. 
Prioritized 2021-03-12

7-Zip
Beyond Compare
Calendar 2000 CNET Link
CutePDF Writer
DS Clock - Time format "h:mm t", Arial (9 pt.), disable sound, pale green background, black text
Eye Saver - choose overlay from the mode. click on the gear icon next to the Overlay checkbox. Set Opacity to 30%. change the color to black. 

FastResolver
f.lux
FogBugz
IntelliJ IDEA (Java IDE)
Internet Download Manager
Large Text File Viewer - View very large files. 
MS Visual Studio 2013
MS SQL Management Studio
Notepad++
  Add JSToolNpp for JSON viewing support. In the Notepad++ installation folder add the NPPJSONViewer folder and its dll to the plugins folder. You can find this in the Apps folder Rich has. 

  Change Theme to Obsidian Settings > Style Configurator
  Increase font size by one, View > Zoom (Ctrl + Num +, Ctrl + Num -, Ctrl + Num + /) Num=Number pad)

pgAdmin 
PureText
SourceTree - Tools > Options > General > Theme > Dark

- Git GUI 
TightVNC
TortoiseGit

Typora for Windows (MD document editor) - Check Auto Save in File > Preferences > General 

Unlocker 1.9.2
VLC Media Player
WinDirStat

Crimson Editor 3.70 - Has column mode editing [Edit/Column Mode Alt+C ] and it is open source
Also has Convert Tab to Spaces (Document/Tabs & Spaces/...)
Cygwin
Subversion
-- TortoiseSVN
Log Parser 2.2
NeoShooter, 4.0.3b*
Regex Coach
Simple-Adblock.com (Ad Blocking for Internet Explorer)
AdFender

If your menu toolbar is not visible you get to these settings by clicking on the "Firefox orange button in the title bar and then choose AddOns.
Change the Alt+Tab behavior to the FF and Chrome default. In the "Tab Opening" tab, uncheck Location under the "Open new tabs for". This will allow the same behavior as before where Alt+enter opens in a new tab.

Adjust the appearance given to unread tabs.  Under the Appearance button, choose Tabs.  In the Tab Highlighting section, click Unread.  Uncheck enabled. I do not need to be so distracted just because one of my tabs refreshed itself.  For the "Current" Tab uncheck the color.  It is also distracting.

- Omnibar  Instead of Omnibar, customize what is shown in the navigation tool bar. Right-Click in the tool bar and choose customize.  Drag the items you do not want into the Customize toolbar dialog.  I drag everything except the address bar, the refresh button, the stop button, Ad-Block Plus and favorites.  The address bar in FF seems to behave like the omnibar in Chrome.  There is no need for the search box.

IECookiesView
Blank screen saver
- path "C:\WINDOWS\system32\scrnsave.scr"
- Shortcut key Ctrl+Shift+F
- Put the shortcut on your desktop and you can always hit the shortcut to quickly eliminate the screen and the distraction while on a phone call and then instantly return to your work.
Foxit Reader (PDF), 2.0*
Dropper - get the color of any pixel on the screen

Chocolatey - a command line download and installation utility for windows
The following commands use Chocolatey to download and install stuff
"choco install 7zip.install" "choco install 7zip.install" install 7zip and put 7zip in the path.
"choco install gow" installs Gnu On Windows, lightweight alternative to Cygwin


* Older or hard to find version. I may have to login to pages.google.com to get these through a web filter.

"8 billion existing web pages be damned"

"8 billion existing web pages be damned" is my favorite one-liner from the latest article on JoelOnSoftware.com. It is was the idealists said when they said IE8 needed to be strict when rendering web pages.

It is a good description of the chasm between idealistic engineers and compliance with the standards and pragmatists who want to make the software work with the existing customer base.

There is no solution. Each solution is terribly wrong. Eric Bangeman at ars technica writes, “The IE team has to walk a fine line between tight support for W3C standards and making sure sites coded for earlier versions of IE still display correctly.” This is incorrect. It’s not a fine line. It’s a line of negative width. There is no place to walk. They are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

That’s why I can’t take sides on this issue and I’m not going to. But every working software developer should understand, at least, how standards work, how standards should work, how we got into this mess, so I want to try to explain a little bit about the problem here, and you’ll see that it’s the same reason Microsoft Vista is selling so poorly, and it’s the same issue I wrote about when I referred to the Raymond Chen camp (pragmatists) at Microsoft vs. the MSDN camp (idealists), the MSDN camp having won, and now nobody can figure out where their favorite menu commands went in Microsoft Office 2007, and nobody wants Vista, and it’s all the same debate: whether you are an Idealist (”red”) or a Pragmatist (”blue”).

_

TIOBE Programming Community Index

I looked at this several years ago. It is interesting to see the long term trends of programming languages.

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

It has a nice graph displaying the trends.

Could not load type error in VS 2005 Web Application

Occurring in an existing project

Occasionally I get an error like

Could not load type 'MOS5.MOSLinks'

when editing a web page. I have seen a lot of posts that address this error. For MOS5 it has always come down to case sensitivity.

I end up comparing the existing version to a previous one. Today I noticed that the MOSLinks.aspx.vb had this at the top of the file.

Imports MOS5.mosLinks

I edited this line in MOSLinks.aspx

Inherits="MOS5.MOSLinks" 

to this

Inherits="MOS5.mosLinks" 

After compiling, the error went away.

Occurring in a newly published project

Make sure the folder you are publishing to is a virtual directory.

Repeat a String n Times

I was looking to repeat a string n times using only T-SQL. My friend found it in this article. This reference may prove useful later.

From SQL BOL 2000:
Replicate - Repeats a character expression for a specified number of times.