Sol 3

I've been in debates with several people over the direction our President is taking us.  Bailouts are not the answer.  IMHO, a bailout puts the corporation into Government hands.  The last I looked that is part of a Communistic political regime.  Now, Obama is trying to push a Nationalized Health Care plan – yet another step towards the Government running our lives, telling us what we are worth, stripping away the American Dream.

To illustrate, this is a letter from GM's CEO and a response from one of their suppliers:

Subject: Auto Supplier tells GM Where to go. - One to read!

This is GM's letter:

Dear Employees & Suppliers,
Congress and the current Administration will soon determine whether to provide immediate support to the domestic auto industry to help it through one of the most difficult economic times in our nation's history. Your elected officials must hear from all of us now on why this support is critical to our continuing the progress we began prior to the global
financial crisis.
As an employee or supplier, you have a lot at stake and continue to be one of our most effective and passionate voices. I know GM can count on you to have your voice heard.

Thank you for your urgent action and ongoing support.

Troy Clarke
President,
General Motors North America

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Response from:
Gregory Knox, Pres.
Knox Machinery Company
Franklin , Ohio

Gentlemen:

In response to your request to contact legislators and ask for a bailout for the Big Three automakers please consider the following, and please pass my thoughts on to Troy Clarke, President of General Motors North America.  Politicians and Management of the Big 3 are both infected with the same entitlement mentality that has spread like cancerous germs in UAW halls for the last countless decades, and whose plague is now sweeping this nation, awaiting our new "messiah," Pres. Obama, to wave his magic wand and make all our problems go away, while at the same time allowing our once great nation to keep "living the dream." Believe me folks, The dream is over!

This dream where we can ignore the consumer for years while management myopically focuses on its personal rewards packages at the same time that our factories have been filled with the worlds most overpaid, arrogant,  ignorant and laziest entitlement minded "laborers" without paying the price for these atrocities. This dream where you still think the masses will line up to buy our products for ever and ever.

Don't even think about telling me I'm wrong. Don't accuse me of not knowing of what I speak. I have called on Ford, GM, Chrysler, TRW, Delphi, Kelsey Hayes, American Axle, and countless other automotive OEM's throughout the Midwest , during the past 30 years and what I've seen over those years in these union shops can only be described as disgusting.

Troy Clarke, President of General Motors North America, states: "There is widespread sentiment throughout this country, and our government, and especially via the news media, that the current crisis is completely the result of bad management which it certainly is not."

You're right Mr. Clarke, it's not JUST management. How about the electricians who walk around the plants like lords in feudal times, making people wait on them for countless hours while they drag ass so they can come in on the weekend and make double and triple time for a job they easily could have done within their normal 40 hour work week. How about the line workers who threaten newbies with all kinds of scare tactics for putting out too many parts on a shift and for being too productive.

(We certainly must not expose those lazy bums who have been getting overpaid for decades for their horrific underproduction, must we?!?)

Do you folks really not know about this stuff? How about this great sentiment abridged from Mr. Clarke's sad plea: "over the last few years we have closed the quality and efficiency gaps with our competitors." What the hell has Detroit been doing for the last 40 years?!? Did we really JUST wake up to the gaps in quality and efficiency between us and them?  The K car vs. the Accord? The Pinto vs. the Civic?!? Do I need to go on?  What a joke!

We are living through the inevitable outcome of the actions of the United States auto industry for decades. It's time to pay for your sins, Detroit .

I attended an economic summit last week where brilliant economist, Alan Beaulieu, from the Institute of Trend Research , surprised the crowd when he said he would not have given the banks a penny of "bailout money."

"Yes, he said, this would cause short term problems," but despite what people like politicians and corporate magnates would have us believe, the sun would in fact rise the next day and the following very important thing would happen. Where there had been greedy and sloppy banks, new efficient ones would pop up. That is how a free market system works. It does work if we would only let it work."

But for some nondescript reason we are now deciding that the rest of the world is right and that capitalism doesn't work - that we need the government to step in and "save us". Save us my ass, Hell – we're nationalizing and unfortunately too many of our once fine nation's citizens don't even have a clue that this is what is really happening.

But, they sure can tell you the stats on their favorite sports teams.  Yeah - THAT'S really important, isn't it?

Does it ever occur to ANYONE that the "competition" has been producing vehicles, EXTREMELY PROFITABLY, for decades in this country? How can that be??? Let's see. Fuel efficient. Listening to customers. Investing in the proper tooling and automation for the long haul.

Not being too complacent or arrogant to listen to Dr.. W Edwards Deming four decades ago when he taught that by adopting appropriate principles of management, organizations could increase quality and simultaneously reduce costs. Ever increased productivity through quality and intelligent planning. Treating vendors like strategic partners, rather than like "the enemy." Efficient front and back offices. Non union environment.

Again, I could go on and on, but I really wouldn't be telling anyone anything they really don't already know down deep in their hearts.

I have six children, so I am not unfamiliar with the concept of wanting someone to bail you out of a mess that you have gotten yourself into – my children do this on a weekly, if not daily basis, as I did when I was their age. I do for them what my parents did for me (one of their greatest gifts, by the way) - I make them stand on their own two feet and accept the consequences of their actions and work through it. Radical concept, huh.  Am I there for them in the wings? Of course - but only until such time as they need to be fully on their own as adults.

I don't want to oversimplify a complex situation, but there certainly are unmistakable parallels here between the proper role of parenting and government. Detroit and the United States need to pay for their sins.

Bad news people - it's coming whether we like it or not the newly elected Messiah really doesn't have a magic wand big enough to "make it all go away." I laughed as I heard Obama "reeling it back in" almost immediately after the final vote count was tallied. "We really might not do it in a year or in four." Where the Hell was that kind of talk when he was RUNNING for office.

Stop trying to put off the inevitable folks. That house in Florida really isn't worth $750,000. People who jump across a border really don't deserve free health care benefits. That job driving that forklift for the Big 3 really isn't worth $85,000 a year. We really shouldn't allow Wal-Mart to stock their shelves with products acquired from a country that unfairly manipulates their currency and has the most atrocious human rights infractions on the face of the globe. That couple whose combined income is less than $50,000 really shouldn't be living in that $485,000 home.

Let the market correct itself folks - it will.. Yes it will be painful, but it's gonna' be painful either way, and the bright side of my proposal is that on the other side of it all, is a nation that appreciates what it has and doesn't live beyond its means and gets back to basics and redevelops the patriotic work ethic that made it the greatest nation in the history of the world and probably turns back to God..

Sorry - don't cut my head off, I'm just the messenger sharing with you the "bad news". I hope you take it to heart.

Gregory J. Knox, President
Knox Machinery, Inc.
Franklin , Ohio 45005

NOTE:  According to SNOPES (http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/knox.asp ) this is a true story, with a little interesting additional information.

What is your take on the direction this once great nation is heading?

Just a quick blog to say I finally have Live Writer setup to post computer technology related posts to http://weblogs.asp.net/kbarrows now.  I still have a few things to get setup like publishing images and files and such but that will fall in place soon.  I will still be posting all topics at http://sol3.net/blogs/starpilot/default.aspx.

I am currently developing on a Win 7 (build 7000) x64 box using the newly released MVC addition for ASP.NET.  While the promise of MVC is great, the reality that this developer has been experiencing for the last 2 weeks is not at all what I expected.  For instance, trying to get my routes to behave.

Code:

Results:
  

Compare the data in the “Route Data” table to the “All Route” table (“Defaults” column). 

Now, I run it without the route debugger and this is what I see when I step through this particular URL:

Now, I change the route to http://localhost:1620/Catalog/nav I see this when I inspect the variables:

The position element should be null.  It is not. 

So let’s take this one step further.  Let’s navigate to http://localhost:1620/Catalog/LifeStyle and inspect the variables again:

Now mind you, this is a running instance of VS2008 and I have the Locals window open to the right of my code window.  The inspector object on the left has different values than the Locals window!

This is but 1 of many, many examples of what is acting in a very strange way on my machine.  It has brought my productivity down to nearly zero.

Anyone else having “weird” problems running VS2008 (MVC) on Win 7 x64?

28 Mar 2009 - Today is a new day and I just hit another weirdness in VS2008.

I am playing with the various parts of a menu system, working at meeting client needs (and learning of course).  I am “handling” pagination in a more manual method for the moment.  The Red circled bits are what I see in the code while stepping through it.  The Blue circled code just plain does not run.  While stepping it passed over them and did not execute them.  :(

My wife and I were supposed to go to her Doctor’s appointment today.  After nearly 15 minutes of driving we had made it about a mile into a 30+ mile drive.  Time to turn around and try it another day.  Nasty, nasty day today.  White out conditions, 8-12 inches of snow already with more on the way.  Even here in Colorado where rural schools are rarely closed due to snow, the whole county is shut down. 

Hot chocolate, a warm fire and a couch are beckoning.  But – I have a home office so it is back to work for me.  I’m working on an MVC project currently – what are you doing today?

I am working on an application using MVC and discovered quite quickly that there is no documented way to control my main menu’s looks while it is in the master page.  After searching for an hour or more I knew there had to be a way to overcome this without resorting to adding a code-behind file.

I found a couple of java-script solutions but wanted something more robust.  I queried out to several tech lists, including my favorite on http://aspadvice.com/lists and got some quick hits back.  I think my favorite was “extension methods are your friend. :)”.  Thanks Paul – I’ve never used Extension Methods.

So, on to Extension Methods – which are wickedly cool!  MSDN says this about Extension Methods:

Extension methods enable you to "add" methods to existing types without creating a new derived type, recompiling, or otherwise modifying the original type. Extension methods are a special kind of static method, but they are called as if they were instance methods on the extended type. For client code written in C# and Visual Basic, there is no apparent difference between calling an extension method and the methods that are actually defined in a type.

So, after a couple of false starts and a few blog entries that were semi-complete I finally have my first Extension Method working!  It is not very clean yet so feel free to suggest ways to make this code block better:

using System;
using System.Web;

namespace System.Web
{
    public static class HtmlExtensions
    {
        public static string GetSelected(this HttpRequest Request, string id, string target)
        {
            if (target.ToUpper().IndexOf(Request.Url.ToString().ToUpper()) > 0)
                id += "active";

            return id;
        }
    }
}

To use this I am twiddling the ID attribute on my <LI> elements.  The CSS uses a PNG image with offsets (a sprite I believe it is called) and is looking for either the CSS tag of navA or navAactive.  So, in my code for my menu bar I now have this:

div id="main_nav">
    <ul>              
        <li id="<%= Request.GetSelected("navA", "") %>"><%= Html.ActionLink(" ", "Index", "Home")%></li>
        <li id="<%= Request.GetSelected("navB", "Product") %>"><%= Html.ActionLink(" ", "Index", "Product")%></li>
    </ul>
</div>

Now, depending on what URL is being passed through the Master Page the Extension Method will pull out the URL from the Request object (which is the object we are extending), check to see if the target is in the string. and if it is, append the active token to the id that was passed in.   Obviously this is a site specific Method Extension so I added it to a folder called libraries under my MVC app directory.  I also changed the namespace to System.Web so I don’t need to prefix it when I use it, nor do I have to add a reference for it in any page.

Comments?

I am biting the bullet now.  I have a desktop that is running an AMD Opteron (Dual Core) and have never run a 64 bit OS.  I have Win XP Pro x64 on my MSDN subscription so decided to repave this desktop and install it.  Several false starts later I finally have it up and running.  Getting the drivers to work was no where near the nightmare so many have said it was.  Nvidia had the x64 drivers for my geForce 6200 card and the other drivers I needed were on the motherboard's CD.  MY motherboard is an ASRock 939Dual-SATA2.  Then onto installing the software.  Because of certain add-ons I run in Outlook I opted for Outlook 2003.  VS2005 and VS2008 went on smoothly once I figured out how to properly mount ISOs in the 64 bit environment.

I'll try to post out here as this experience progresses...

Note #1:  I installed the .NET 1.1 Framework and got this message before installing it:

Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 Microsoft Issue Description: This software has known incompatibility with IIS services on this platform. To maintain IIS functionality, we recommend that users complete the following steps after the software install is complete: 1- From the Start menu select Run then press the Enter key 2- In the "Open" edit field enter the following command: "cscript %SystemDrive%\inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil.vbs set w3svc/AppPools/Enable32bitAppOnWin64 1" 3- Press the Enter key

Note #2 - Seems none of the Microsoft Live pieces will run on XP Pro x64.  According to the system requirements page:

Operating system: Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (32-bit edition only), Windows Vista (32-bit or 64-bit editions), Windows 7 Beta (32-bit or 64-bit editions), or Windows Server 2008. Note: Windows Live Movie Maker is not supported on Windows XP