It's been soooo long since I've posted, I'm not sure if anyone is still subscribed or not, but just in case... I've decided to move my blog to a new home where I am going to be spending a lot of time in the future. Stop by and say hi! http://blog.xambi.com C ya...

I’ve had a lot of people asking me lately what has become of the DeployNow .com site and more importantly, about Smoke – my Windows Installer validation tool. As enthusiastic as I was about building a community site for installation developers, the idea just didn’t take off on it’s own, and I just don’t have the time to invest in it right now. The domain expired a while back and I just never bothered to renew it. I just paid the renewal fee a few minutes ago, so it should

Last Wedenesday, Amanda and I got the phone call that everyone dreads. The details were vague and sketchy, but in a shaky and uncertain voice, my Mother-In-Law informed us that my Brother-In-Law Zach had been in an accident and she needed to go with the police to identify his body. Zach and two of his friends, Chance and Andy were speeding down a back road in Loganville when Zach lost control of the car and struck a tree. All three boys were killed instantly. The car was destroyed to the point that

If you’ve been following along , I am trying to recover some money that I paid for web design work that I ultimately learned had been stolen from http://www.creative.com by Shayna McCullough under the name of a non-existent company called Iconic Media. Early on in the process, I went to guru.com which is where the transaction took place, hoping that they had some policies in place to protect me under these circumstances. I search ed all over the place and couldn’t really find anything

A few months agao, I contracted a “company” that goes by the name “Iconic Media” through http://www.guru.com to design a new site for an eCommerce project of mine which was to be launched at http://www.xambi.com . A woman named Shayna McCollough was the one and only person from this outfit with whom I have dealt with. After paying her $2000.00 and investing significant amounts of time in waiting for a design, she finally delivered what I initially believed to be a decent design

So, after all that ruckus with Rob Mensching about COM Advertising from before Christmas, and my sincere gesture to clear the air , it seems that nothing is really resolved after all. Just before I posted my very nice attempt at clearing the air, I put together a little sample that exactly duplicated the scenario Rob gave me under which COM Advertising had the alleged ‘bugs’ or ‘wonky’ behavior. Of course, no matter how hard I tried, I could not break COM Advertising or even

The last few days have been pretty interesting around the WiX Toolkit community, and I guess I’ve been the catalyst for most of the commotion. A lot of folks have been following along as I publicly aired by feelings about some of Rob Mensching’s comments on COM Advertising, but what you may not know is that Rob and I have also been exchanging some very lengthy emails offline. In spite of what you may have seen publicly, our offline emails have been anything but a shouting match. We both

Ha! Ha! Thanks for the laugh Justin ! Seriously now. How anyone can come to the conclusion I have a secret agenda to promote some other product when I am in the process of contributing smoke, and fighting hard to keep features working with WiX Toolkit is a mystery to me, but I guess stranger things have happened… For the Record: I have NO AFFILIATION with any company anywhere. I am NOT pimpin’ any commercial product, and frankly, even if someone wanted to pay me to evangelize their product

Yesterday I mentioned some discussion on the WiX Toolkit mailing list about the use of COM Advertising support and the challenges that go along with it. Rob Mensching argued that the tables which enable this functionality should be avoided due to some “strange behavior” that he has seen. I pressed him for more information, pointing out that most of the 43 merge modules that you can get here and the MSXML, SOAP, FoxPro, and Crystal Reports Merge Modules all use this technique without any

I’m getting beat up a little bit on the WiX Toolkit mailing lists . L It seems that since I’ve been questioning some issues ( here and here ), and now Rob and Orion think I’m on a war-path. They’ve got me all wrong. I’ve given tons of time to helping other people solve their problems and it would be completely out of character for me to try to undermine everything I’ve done by being obnoxious for no reason. I tend to write passionately and in a very “animated”