I agree with Zurvan. Every good consultant I've worked with has been hired through recommendations and the few that I've talked to about it have all said that when they get to the point of needing a new gig they just email their friends/past co-workers and get more than enough leads.

Good consultants aren't hired by their website.

I think its about being professional tho.... certainly, word of mouth and a portfolio is more important that your own website, but remember that your company website is part of your image. You obviously shouldnt turn down work to improve your own site, but for a web design company, a small portfolio and contact/about us site shouldn't take you more than a couple of days.

Its the same reason that companies pay more to be in modern offices.... the fact that their office is brand new doesn't improve the quality of their work, but it does improve their image.

My understanding is that the page looks fine - just ugly html/css code. Who cares?

Anyone use lambda/linq? Every time I use it I learn more, and it's just awesomely powerful and useful, seriously seriously good stuff!

did you go for a server yet? interested in results

Not yet, but I think we're going to go for 1&1. We paid 1 year in advance for our current one which expires in June, so it seems like a bit of waste of money at the moment but seeing as our entire business relies on the website we're going to go for it. It's a big job and I got tons of stuff to do in the meantime, I'll probably get round to moving some time in Feb.

No idea what to do with the empty server lol.

What's you guys opinions on infering data from a table structure?

For example, I have a table `Visits` that has a sequential `VisitID` and `Date`.

Due to design reasons I can't query and pull out all the VisitIds >= certain date, due to the way I handle the data later.

However what I can do is find the first record that falls into the date range. When I have that, I can do queries on foreign key tables such as:

`where VisitID > FirstRecID`

And theoretically every record above that ID should also be above it in date.

The type of data this table holds is the static log type, once records are created it's highly unlikely (impossible) that the records will be manipulated in any way.

So is it OK to approach a problem like this? It has the benefit of also making my heavy queries a ton faster. I've just never done it this way before because I've never needed to, but I need to now and am just wondering is this sort of practise more common than I think? I think it would be a bit difficult to manage potentially and maintain as you are inferring logic from the structure of the data rather than the data itself which abstracts everything a bit more.

I use linq to xml a bit, and love it. compared to C# old way of dealing with xml documents its fantastic.

+1 for Linq. I think I'd love it even if SQL queries weren't one of the first things I was exposed to in a professional capacity.

given this, i infer that this table's structure is poor.

i don't understand how doing some comparison on foreign keys could possibly be easier/better/faster than using native keys. can't you just, like, add an index on the Date field and call it a day?

Is anyone using CodeMirror, or have a better suggestion for mixed html/css/js "It acts as a textarea but it's not" syntax highlighting without using a full blown editor?

I've come to the conclusion that a legit wysiwyg editor that isn't garbage does not exist so the next best thing is an editor with syntax highlighting. I'm just looking for something to give to a small staff of non-coders so they can have an easier time making posts. I did plan on having shortcut buttons for common things (alignment, making links, bold, etc.) but other than that they really don't need much -- certainly not trying to recreate tinyMCE or anything.

You can try ACE. I've had to hack it a bit to do what I want, but overall it's worked out alright. Better than code mirror at least.

edit plus perhaps?
I use it for when I copy large amounts of c++ because I need to change a few items on like every third line - its a generic form routine to read from database but the data read is consistently handled different

it does coloring which is nice and has some buttons for common html stuff
bold italics font etc along with a couple that look helpful for table design etc

Also why not have them use a WYSIWG but manually type the code?

Note: I cant for the life of me recall any CSS despite taking 2 classes on it, so I cant really comment on the css option but it does have the templates for that along with Javascript

Ace is a little too big I think, but it looks solid.

Jeff, it has to be web based. It's for people to write posts.

Anyone know of any automated minutes apps? I'm thinking some kind of journal thing with the capability of automatically keeping track of action items and their status. Something to make it easy to keep track of what's going on in meetings and be able to track what needs to be done. I'd like something easy enough that the other mouth breathers I work with could use...

We use OneNote and it is so-so. Works like other ms products which seems to help the mouth breathers.

Is there anything like javadoc for .Net other than sandcastle?

Doxygen supports C#.

Will have a look. Thanks

We're a Mac shop, thank god, I couldn't all this crap lugging around some POS windows lappy...

does onenote not come with office on mac? i'll be damned, it sure doesn't. lol wtf.

we sometimes use the wiki for this (we have TWiki but w/e) but it involves manual wrangling of action items and may not be great for mouthbreathers. but maybe they've already learned how to deal with your internal wiki?

edit: also vmware fusion on my macbook is quite sufficient for the windows-specific stuff i need to do. i agree with lol @ windows laptops.

Did you check out Hetzner? (Unless it needs to be UK-based)

Best price performance ratio I could find, we have been there for a while and I'm very happy with them.

Yep it's awesome, I love how it get's you one step closer to sort of the concept of natural language. For instance a simple transformation of a collection is much less bloated and very readable...

OneNote is pretty good on Windows but the closest you get is a notebook template in Office for Mac. Good for notes but not the same. This isn't really a problem until I get back to the States and am with the home office again. Our support team is good at starting stuff but then it just drifts off into no status land and never gets done. I figure if you keep getting shamed about it in meetings you'll do it. Automating the whole action list thing would reduce the likelihood this process becomes another thing we start and never follow through on.

We are hiring if there are any java wizards out there that want to come to Boulder, despite my talking it up...

What's the best place to find someone who I can hire someone to coach me in programming. I'm just looking for someone I can hire a couple hours a week and to walk them through some problems that I had and to get feedback on the way that I have done things. Is this something for elance, or are there better optoins?