This month’s Geek Challenge is in honor of Cinco de Mayo. The traditional Mexican sombrero has an elegant symmetrical shape, and is fun to express mathematically.     Your challenge is to match three sombrero graphs with their corresponding functions in cylindrical coordinates.  Each graph is plotted from 0<r<2.  Graph A   Graph B   Graph C   Is the correct paring?  A: 1→A 2→C 3→B B: 1→C 2→...

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A big question that lingered after looking at the results of the geek challenge was how much luck played into the outcome against how strong any specific entry was over any other.  Most entries relied heavily on seeding and used other factors to tweak the effect of the overall seeding. Only Dan Freve chose a different approach, weighting strength of schedule heavily and actually using a negative coefficient on the tournament seed. His formula is reasonable, somewhat mimicking the RPI rating...

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If you attended the recent Tres de Mayo party at DMC's office, you hopefully walked out with tunes like “Basin Street Blues” or “Muskrat Ramble” stuck in your head.  As one of the founding members of the DMC brassband, I’m proud to announce that our first “gig” was a hit! We played a set of six songs during the peak of the party and filled the southern half of the office with swingin’ traditional Dixieland and brassband music. Credit for founding the DMC band goes to our tuba playe...

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To continue the ongoing plan to conquer the world via our autonomous robot, several enhancements were made to the robotic platform and a new path finding algorithm was tested. Hardware Changes After deploying the robot around the office, it became clear that the Bluetooth wireless module used for communication would not provide sufficient range and coverage to give the robot full mobility about DMC’s office.  With this in mind a new wireless communication method was sought.  After re...

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In the event that a site needs to be created when an item is added to a list, users are able to manually create the site from the out-of-the-box templates or even a customized template if one has been created.  To avoid users having to perform these manual steps and chance them creating the site incorrectly, the custom "Create a Site" action from ILoveSharePoint which can be downloaded free is the perfect tool. This action, along with other custom actions that are included in the package...

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Those who visit DMC may notice our ever-changing "Quote Board." This is where we document the most infamous utterances of the moment.

DMC's Director of Consulting Services, Rick Rietz, led an educational session on April 27 at the Control Systems Integrators Association (CSIA) Executive Conference. "Capture Success" was the theme of the 2012 CSIA Conference, held from April 25-28 in Scottsdale, AZ. Rick led a session entitled "Take Control of your Projects with SharePoint Dashboards." A review of this presentation was featured by Control Engineering. To view it visit the Control Engineering website or the ...

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What are you doing on May 3rd? DMC is hosting a Tres de Mayo party and we hope you are able to join us! Tres de Mayo Party at DMC Thursday, May 3, 2012 3:33pm - ??? 2222 N. Elston Ave, Suite 200 Chicago, IL 60614 [Driving Directions] Stop by anytime throughout the evening for food, beer, and fun. There will be plenty of convenient parking available. Feel free to bring significant or insignificant others along (husbands, wives, girlfriends, old college roommates, etc.). R...

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First off, I would like to start out this post by apologizing for using significantly more than my allotted month of time for this tournament. You might have noticed I subtly dropped the “March” piece from the title, but let’s be honest, intense, compiler-versus-compiler competition is entertaining no matter what time of year it is. I could probably find a way to tie this in with the Stanley Cup playoffs, but there is no way I’m writing up 7 game series for each...

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Congratulations to Dean Schmitz, who earned victory in the March Madness Geek Challenge thanks to Kentucky’s win over Kansas in the final. He used his superior average bracket score to best Dan Freve, who turned in the tournament's highest individual bracket. Six of our seven entrants centered their choices primarily around tournament seed, while DMC employee Dan Freve chose to highlight a combination of Win-Loss percentage and strength of schedule. Both methods proved effective as Dan, Dean, a...

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After a great time on last year's DMC ski trip to Breckenridge, nine DMC employees and friends decided to continue the tradition. Last month, we headed west to hit the slopes in Vail, CO. Enjoy the photos below and live vicariously through our ski trip limericks!   Leftovers –or- Pound Some Fruit Bananas, eggs, granola and cheese Two whole carts we needed to seize Don’t be mistaken There was 4 lbs of bacon Next time eat before shopping, pretty please Bad Things o...

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Those who visit DMC may notice our ever-changing "Quote Board." This is where we document the most infamous utterances of the moment.

On March 25, 2012, for the 7th year in a row, DMC competed in the Shamrock Shuffle, an 8K (4.98 miles) race through downtown Chicago. It was a great day for the race and we had more than respectable results. Of special note is race newcomer Dan Lawler who looks like he might be able to give Sully a run for his money. Check out posts from some of our previous races here: Hustle up the Hancock 2011 Shamrock Shuffle 2011 Chase Corporate Challenge 2011 Hustle up the H...

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DMC is proud to announce its continued achievement of Gold Partner status within the Microsoft Partner Network. In obtaining this highest level of competency for both Software Development and SharePoint Portals and Collaboration DMC enters its eighth consecutive year of Gold Partnership with Microsoft. Gold Partner status distinguishes DMC among the elite 1% of more than 64,000 Microsoft partners worldwide. To earn a Microsoft gold competency, partners must successfully demonst...

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A client of our Consulting Services team recently decided to take the plunge and upgrade their SharePoint farm from Microsoft Office SharePoint Services 2007 (a.k.a. MOSS 2007) to SharePoint 2010 Standard Edition. They also decided to add a separate SQL server to their farm, which up until then had been a single-server farm. This wrinkle presented both opportunities and challenges for our upgrade strategy. I'll describe that strategy in this blog post. SharePoint offers two broad strategies for...

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I recently encountered an error in SharePoint Designer without much documented information available and wanted to share my workaround with others who may be experiencing it. The bug occurs when attempting a specific action in SharePoint Designer 2007 and 2010, known as “collect data from user.” In SharePoint Designer 2007 the options you choose will not be marked as complete when you click “Finish.” The solution is to click through the...

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Although I have admittedly not been keeping pace with the rate of elimination of the other big tournaments this month, I like to think that the delay between updates is building at least some semblance of suspense.  Even if most of my coworkers think I have already crowned a champion, I have legitimately been analyzing and researching each matchup with an open mind.  After the first half of round one, the field is still wide open, so without further delay, let’s jump into the next four...

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Are you a new user of Siemens PLCs and wondering what terms like "process image" and "peripheral address" mean?  What does the "P" in "PIW" stand for?  Are you an experienced user and are too embarrassed to ask?  Or, maybe you are like me and just need refresher every once in a while? Fortunately, the Siemens support website has a great article that explains these different ways to access I/O for Siemens S7-300 and 400 PLCs.  Here are some summary thoughts and highlights t...

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With the first few rounds of the tournament in the books, I figured it was time to dive into the first round of our programming language tournament (or Nerdament as I like to call it.) For a run-down of the competitors, you can check out the opening bracket or you can also review some of the snubs. Once you are caught up, I hope that you are as excited for some fast-paced compiler vs. IDE action as I am. Our first matchup features the highly favored C# .Net taking on lowly, olde-timey...

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Recently, I needed to read a command line parameter within a VBA code (it's for an Iconics SCADA application, but I developed it with Excel VBA which is essentially the same). It doesn't sound like a big deal but there were a few not-so-obvious tricks that I thought were worth sharing. I started with the simplest solution using a "GetCommandLineA" Windows API function from kernel32.dll. It was supposed to return a pointer to the command line string, ...

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