A Trip to Springfield

We are doing a "stay-cation" for Spring Break this year. We decided to take a familty trip to Springfield, Illinois to see the Lincoln Museum. We'd heard good things about it and Springfield is only 3 hours away, so it made a good day-trip.

This was my first trip to Springfield and I wasn't sure what to expect. Springfield has a nice downtown area centered around the old state capitol building. When we got there, we parked in the underground parking facility on 6th street. It was easy super easy, convenient and not too expensive.

We were hungry from our drive, so we went to lunch at Robbie's. Robbie's was perfect for the family. There was a story on the menu of how Lincoln had used a storage room in the back of the restaurant to write his inaugural address when the restaurant was a dry goods store owned by a friend of his. Robbie's was nice, not too fancy, with a good lunch menu. I had the special - meatloaf with cheesy potatoes - very tasty. Their special was coconut cream pie which we all had to try - it was excellent.

After Robbie's, we walked a block North to the Lincoln Museum;
http://www.alplm.org/home.html

We had heard a lot of good things about the museum, and it exceeded expectations. It was a perfect family activity for an afternoon. Not too expensive, lots to see, interesting reading for the adults and older kids, lots to see for the younger kids. There were 2 shows; "Ghosts of the Library" and "Lincoln's Eyes". Both shows were high-tech, educational and entertaining.

My favorite part of the museum was the "White House" area which gave us a brief tour of Lincoln's years in the White House and what he went through. The Lincoln's Eyes show we saw and the White House area both did a good job of humanizing Lincoln. Between the death of his son, the Civil War and the political stresses at the time, it was clear from the exhibits that Lincoln had a very tough time as President. Though Lincoln is revered by most Americans today, there was an entire room with posters showing political cartoons from the time admonishing Lincoln on a variety of topics.

1. Nothing about Lincoln's Presidency was easy or clear cut - it was a struggle.

2. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation did not, (in itself), free any slaves.*

http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/emancipate.htm

3. Lincoln lost 2 of his 4 children while he was alive and a 3rd died a few years after his assassination, which sent Mrs. Lincoln to the brink of insanity.
Click here for more on Mary Todd Lincoln's "insanity episode".

After the museum, we walked across to the old state capitol building. It was almost 5:00 pm and teh capitol closed at 5:00, but we had enough time to take a quick tour. The tour guides were very friendly and told good stories.

See more about the old state capitol building here:
http://www.state.il.us/hpa/hs/old_capitol.htm

After visiting Lincoln's home, we went back downtown. It was after 5:00, so there was parking on the street. We walked around a bit and ended up in Cafe Brio, about a block South of the old capitol building. Cafe Brio was a bar and restaurant with a great family menu. It has a Mexican theme, but they have a variety of food which made the kids happy. The food was excellent - perfect after a day on our feet.

click here to see Cafe Brio.

After Cafe Brio, we packed up and drove home. The kids slept most of the way.

Exploring Chicago's Pepper and Egg Sandwich

During the Lenten season my thoughts often turn from IT to P&E. P&E, of course, being the infamous Chicago Pepper and Egg sandwich. While Chicago might be known for its Vienna beef hot dog or its Italian beef sandwich, on Fridays during Lent, a different breed of sandwich appears. The Pepper and Egg, in its essential raw form consists of a portion of gently scrambled eggs and fried green peppers placed on a French roll. I don't know if it's just me, but I seem to be having a difficult time finding places that serve the P&E -- especially in the Loop -- where lunchtime dining has suffered in general with a steady influx of corporate chains and the fading away of lunch spots with table service.

However, I did manage to find the sandwich at a handful of places, and I've supplied some notes below.

Keep in mind, I did have to break my golden rule of only patronizing places with table service, but it is Lent, and we're called to make sacrifices.

Cafe' Bionda's Bionda To Go
400 S. Financial Place
Score: A
A popular and tasty spot mostly frequented by the trading community, Bionda serves the P&E as a special for Lenten Fridays only. The egg had a great balance -- not too soggy, not too firm. The peppers were a nice blend of green and red and were grilled but with enough crispness to preserve a bit of the raw pepper taste. The pepper and egg was served atop an extremely fresh Turano roll and with a side of fries. I'll be back!

Boni Vino
111 W. Van Buren
Score: B
One of my favorite sit-down lunch spots in the Loop, Boni Vino just feels like home. Everything there is delicious, and maybe it's my high hopes that influenced my scoring. The P&E was average at best. The eggs were a little soggy and the green peppers were barely cooked. Also, there were so many green peppers, that they just overpowered the sandwich. However, I love this place -- just not so much for the P&E!

Luke's Italian Beef
215 W. Jackson
Score: A-
If memory serves me correctly, Luke's serves the P&E every Friday, not just during Lent. This may go back to the pre-Vatican II days when every Friday was supposed to be meatless. Anyway, the P&E at Luke's was pretty straight up. Eggs and peppers both a tad soggy, but otherwise right in the ballpark. The bread was fresh (important) and I got an order of their excellent fries, a one-pound bag of greasy goodness! Yum!

Portillo's
100 W. Ontario
Score: A
A bit outside the Loop and a well-known chain, Portillo's puts out a surprisingly good P&E during Lent. The egg to pepper ratio is accurate and the consistency is perfect. Also, you can mix things up a little -- like getting your P&E on a croissant or adding onions and cheese. Good stuff!

Google Apps - Premier vs Standard Editions

At Chicago Technologies, our clients often ask us what's the difference between Google Apps Premier Edition and Google Apps Standard Edition. Here's a quick comparison:

Premier Edition:

• 24/7 Phone support and 99.9% up-time guarantee.
• 25GB storage per user without advertisements.
• Increased security and privacy of data.
• Unlimited users and groups .
• Blackberry and Microsoft Outlook interoperability.
• Client conversions are automated.
• Virus and spam protection by Postini.
• Postini archiving at an additional cost.
• Full administrative and data control.

Standard Edition:

• No Phone technical support is available. Standard users will have to access the Google Apps forms to resolve any issues. Up-time is not guaranteed with a service level of “best effort”.
• 7GB storage per user with advertisements.
• Limited to 50 users and 10 groups.
• Limited Blackberry and Microsoft Outlook interoperability.
• Client conversions are manual.
• Limited administrative and data control.

Invalid or malformed application: check Manifest

I started building a brand new Silverlight 3.0 Application today and ran into this error message in my browser the first time I ran my new app:

Invalid or malformed application: check Manifest

I did some research and came across this hint:

In human-readable words, this is what fixed it for me:
1. Open the properties of your project.
2. On the first page, open the drop down list of "Startup object".
3. Select the page your project starts with. In my case, changing the name of the namespace broke the startup object.

from this blog post:
http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/t/11452.aspx

This pushed me in the right direction. I remembered that I had changed my initial namespace in my .cs files, but not in the project properties. I changed the default namespace and then selected the correct startup project, (xxx.app where xxx is my default namespace).

Problem resolved.

Lesson learned:
If your startup object is not correct in the project properties window, you will get the dreaded, "Invalid or malformed application: check Manifest" error.

ASP.NET Web Services vs. WCF Services

The term “web service” is similar to the term “cloud computing” in
that it’s pretty vague, and it can mean different things to different
people. So when I hear someone say we need a “web service that does
x”, I immediately start asking a few clarifying questions:

Is the individual referring to the traditional “.asmx” web service
or the WCF “.svc” web service?

Will it implement a SOAP or a REST architecture?

Is it really a web (http) service or some other type of
communication service, such as a named pipe communication, a tcp
communication, or a MSMQ messaging queue communication?

The answers to these questions help determine whether a web service, a
WCF service, (or something else), should be utilized.
In the next few paragraphs I’ll differentiate a web service from a WCF
service and point you to a nice link that further summarizes the
differences.

The key thing to understand about ASP.NET Web Services and WCF
Services is that they are very similar in implementation and concept,
but that there are some key differences to be aware of.
Both technologies define contracts for passing xml data and both
technologies can leverage SOAP and WSDL concepts and work over the
http protocol.

That’s where many of the similarities end. Windows Communication
Foundation, as its name implies, supports many types of communication
between disparate machines (or between processes on the same machine).
This may seem obvious, but it was especially eye opening to me as I
first used WCF for tcp communication and, later, worked my way
backwards to use it for http web service purposes.

ASP.NET Web Services were Microsoft's first attempts at building
service oriented concepts into the ASP.NET platform.
The core library for ASP.NET Web Services is the XMLSerializer.
Since there are other formats for exchanging data, such as POX and
JSON, WCF’s DataContractSerializer is expanded to accept these types
of data as well.

WCF Services came along after ASP.NET Web Services and it looks to me
like Microsoft saw the value in a service oriented architecture, but
saw some flaws in how ASP.NET Web Services were built.
It appears that they wanted to make sweeping improvements to their
service oriented architecture without breaking the existing code base,
so they built upon the concepts of ASP.NET Web Services, but on a new
platform.

I see this platform as a communication standard launching point for
the next decade, and look forward to the technological innovations
that it will spawn.

The following blog post by Kalyan Bandarupalli goes into more detail
about the specific differences between ASP.NET Web Services and WCF
Services:
http://www.techbubbles.com/wcf/wcf-vs-aspnet-web-services

What's the name of that color?

I would rather work in WCF, the middle tier and SQL Server. The reality is, when I work with end-users, I often have to work as a designer and get into screen layout and color schemes.

Here's one tool that makes working with colors easier - especially when the user has a named color and you need to find the RGB or Hex equivalent:

Name that color

It's also helpful when you are trying to find a color and Photoshop is not available.

SQL Server 2005 Restore Error: Exclusive access could not be obtained because the database is in use. (Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo)

I do a lot of prototyping, so I am backing up, moving and restoring SQL Server databases a lot. We are using SQL Server 2005.

I recently ran into this error:

I shut down all services and applications using the database, and I still got it. I then noticed that I had a query window open in Enterprise Manager. I closed all of the query windows, tried again and was able to restore successfully.

Hind sight is always 20/20 - duh, the query windows open a connection to the database - but when you work in Enterprise Manager a lot, as I do, it's easy to forget something like that.

Lesson learned.