Ramblings

Love/Hate for Microsoft TFS

2009-06-09T21:49:00.005-05:00

A little rant about Microsoft Team Foundation Server, a.k.a. TFS: Virtually out of nowhere, Microsoft released an enterprise-class system for developers. It includes version control, (keep track of every change to all your source files, forever) work items (a.k.a. bug tracking), reports, build management (compile and keep track of builds/releases), and tight integration with Visual Studio, the program we use to write and debug a majority of our code.

Overall, I'm a huge fan of the product. We've been using TFS 2005 for over a year, primarily for source control, replacing an instance of SourceGear Vault and Microsoft Visual Source Safe. Writing code against TFS is nearly painless, despite its terse documentation. The API is clean and straightfoward. This is in stark contrast to SourceGear's completely unsupported, messy, undocumented and partially broken API. Not all users have a need to programmatically access TFS, but I've used it a couple times to extend its functionality and do things that you just can't do out of the box.

My beef is how complicated TFS is to install and upgrade. It has dependencies on SQL Server, SQL Server Reporting, Windows Sharepoint, and IIS. It requires a hotfix for .NET as well as SQL Server, and that's after the latest service packs. It requires 3 separate user accounts pre-configured, and this is all before you actually run the TFS Server 2005 installation. Then you can install yet another hotfix and finally TFS 2005 SP1. To be fair, if you can follow the 3-pages of instructions, the installation procedure does work.

BUT, what if you want to move the installation to a different server? Well, the first step is to go through the above installation process on the new server. Then follow a 10+ page procedure to move the databases, reporting services, Sharepoint data and a handful of other little details. To be fair again, this procedure works as written, if you follow it to the letter, and consult the comments at the bottom for a couple steps.

How about upgrading from TFS 2005 to TFS 2008? Well you can start by running the TFS 2008 Server installer which is painless. But if you want to take full advantage of TFS 2008, you have to upgrade Windows Sharepoint from 2.0 to 3.0 which is another 3 page procedure and references its own set of pre and then post-upgrade steps. Then install Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and then TFS 2008 SP1. Lastly, optionally install the Team System Web Access with SP1. If you're feeling up to it, you can now also upgrade the SQL 2005 server to 2008.

Then do it all over again on a weekend because the first run was just a test to make sure you know what you're doing...

Time Warner SDV Again

2009-06-09T17:43:00.007-05:00

Shortly after my last post, I submitted an FCC complaint about Time Warner and my distinct lack of a tuning adapter that was promised months before. Just a couple weeks later, Time Warner shipped me a Cisco STA1520 SDV Tuning Adapter. I don't know if the two were related, but I know Time Warner got the message because they responded to me AND the FCC saying the issue was resolved when they "provided a Tuning Adapter on March 17, 2009." Squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that. :) The tuning adapter has been working quite well; I think I've only had to reboot it once or twice in the last 2.5 months. Yea for Mythbusters in HD.

SDV and Time Warner

2009-03-06T22:05:00.004-06:00

Over 3 months late, it appears Time Warner in SE Wisconsin has begun to put a halt to their Screw-TiVo-Users-By-Switching-Channels-To-SDV-Campaign.

Random Update

2008-12-13T01:01:00.003-06:00

Its been way too long since I posted. Here's a bunch of random ramblings. How fitting. This is mostly for the 6 (or so) of you that actually read this via an RSS feed. If you want to know more about any of these rambings, just ask.

The basement is done. It took way longer than I expected, but it is finally done.
OSB + laminate flooring = a very nice chair mat.
Table saws are ridiculously heavy.
I hit my goal weight and rewarded myself with a ginormous TV. :)
5 months later it is in for (in-warranty) repair. :(
No, I will not be returning my TV or otherwise limiting myself access to it if I go over my goal weight.
No, I will not be going over my goal weight. I'm currently 9 pounds below it actually.
Winter feels colder now though.
I'll be spending my vacation getting Paradox to talk to Quickbooks. Next year I think I'll opt for a cruise instead. :)
Dishwasher drain pumps are actually pretty easy to replace.
Time Warner has decided to continue their screw-cablecard/TiVo-users campaign until sometime in 2009. Every week I lose a digital channel or three.

More Hard Drive Woes

2008-09-21T22:59:00.002-05:00

After last weekend's attempt to revive my TiVo's hard drive apparently my computer was a bit unhappy. I'm not entirely sure how or when it happened, but sometime this week my 500GB Seagate hard drive decided it was only 128GB.

I know what you're thinking - that's gotta be some lack-of-48bit LBA thing, 128GB/137GB limitation going on. Nope. I'm running XPSP3, the computer is only a couple years old, it is SATA, and there's another 250GB SATA drive in the same computer that was working fine. But the bios saw 128GB and Windows saw a 128GB unformatted NTFS partition. There wasn't anything critical on the drive, but at the same time I didn't want to lose it. It was filled with stuff like MSDN downloads that I could get again if I needed to, but it would have been really time consuming.

A lot of searching around lead me to Seatools for Dos that allows you to set the capacity of the drive. What? Apparently modern hard drives have a "feature" called Host Protected Area (HPA) that allows the firmware of the drive to report itself as less than the full size. Apparently some OEMs use the area beyond this to hide recovery data so that even partitioning utilities can't wipe it out. This feature somehow got enabled on the drive AND the drive's partition table was rewritten with a new one... I'm going to blame one of the many TiVo boot CDs I used trying to get my TiVo's hard drive going again, but I really don't know. Generally I disconnect any extra drives when messing around but I may have missed it once or twice.

A little research revealed several utilities that should be able to clear the HPA setting and restore the drive's full capacity.
Seatools for Dos
MHDD
HDAT2
Hitachi Feature Tool

I tried them all. They all failed. I tried them on a different computer. Fail.

Finally I tried HDD Capacity Retore, a Windows utility. That didn't even see the drives in my computer. So I tried it on that second computer, and it finally worked. Both computers now saw the drive as its full 500GB.

But all was not well. I still had the bogus partition table declaring a single 128GB NTFS partition. After failing to recover any remenants of the correct partition table with several different utilities, I gave up and used a linux boot disk to run fdisk and create the partition table manually. It was a single partition consuming the entire drive before, so I just told fdisk to do that and crossed my fingers. Windows saw the partition but still didn't think it was formatted correctly. However, with the drive the right size I was able to use some file-finding utilities for NTFS to grab the files off and make sure I at least got the data off. Whew.

This is where a "normal" person would've given up, formatted the drive correctly, and copied the data back on it. I saw it as an opportunity to try to recover the drive the rest of the way. :)

Trinity Rescue Kit with Testdisk's "Boot" option was able to find the backup Master File Table (MFT) on the drive and restore it. Windows' chkdsk fixed a couple other problems and the drive is back in operation. File compares and testing the .zip files on the drive show that everything is a-OK.

RIP TiVo S1

2008-09-14T13:13:00.003-05:00

As it typically does, a simple task turned into an all day project yesterday. My goal was to swap the old 25" Zenith TV in the bedroom for the 27" Panasonic that recently replaced with a plasma. Simple right?

The TiVo was sitting on top of the Zenith. And the Panasonic isn't flat on top, so I had to build a platform to sit on top of it. A board plus a couple 2x2's and a nice compound angle cut and it was good to go. I even spraypainted the 2x2's black. A bit overkill, but a nice Saturday morning project. I plugged the TiVo back in and it was unhappy. The cachecard startup told me that there was a possible HD failure and it was taking forever to cache the data. Hmmm. Brooke mentioned something about this TiVo not recording suggestions anymore...

With any luck I would be able to copy the data off the drive to another and get it going again. Not so much. Even though I had a spare 122GB drive to replace the 120GB in there, nothing would copy the drive. dd_rescue informed me that it had sucessfully copied 8MB and the rest was unreadable. Other utilities told me about the same.

So, faced with rebuilding the TiVo I decided to swap out the Series 1 (S1) for one of the S2s I've acquired. One was my brother's, who no longer has cable. The other was my dad's - the power supply died on it and I revived it with a new capacitor.

The S2s are faster, more capable machines. Toss a USB network adapter on the back and they can transfer shows between TiVos, download shows off Amazon, etc. It was on my todo list anyway, particularly once I swapped the TVs. The old Zenith doesn't have closed captioning so I had hacked the S1 to overlay it. The Panasonic has CC so there's no need for the TiVo to do it. However, the S2s encrypt the recordings which changes my tried and true method for getting shows (i.e. Good Eats) to DVD. I know it is still possible, but that's a project for another day.

Long, boring story short I ended up getting the S2 running around 2:30am. I had to run guided setup twice (clear all and delete between them,) take the HD out and run an "Acoustic Management" utility on it to quiet the drive's infernal head clicking, and run a cable down the hall to my computer for its PPP connection. A new (quieter) fan has been ordered and my brother is kindly mailing me the USB network dongle so I can get rid of the cable down the hallway.

The S1 will rest (retire?) in peace. Technically it isn't dead - I could toss another hard drive in it and get it running, but what's the point? S2s are basically free these days. Networking, extraction and insertion are now supported features rather than a hack.

Random Notes

2008-01-02T22:17:00.000-06:00

The basement is nearing completion. I finally finished mudding, applied texture and primed everything. All that's left is a coat or two of paint, epoxy the floor, trim, and pay someone to carpet, plus some punch-list items like light bulbs and doorknobs. The mudding took WAY longer than expected, but it came out pretty well. However, there were a couple joints that decided to bulge out slightly when the primer was applied. I'm guessing the water in the primer soaked into the mud and losened it, allowing it to expand out of the joint a bit. I think it is fixable, but I'm also fairly sure it wouldn't have happened if I had used the paper tape instead of the mesh. For the paint I'm going to try using a paint sprayer since I already had to tape everything off to do the texture.

----

Santa (or rather, my family) was good to me this holiday season:

DeWalt Jigsaw
DeWalt 18V reciprocating saw
A bluetooth headset
Spiderman 3 DVD
Indoor / Outdoor weather station
A pair of Crocs
Subscription renewal for Cook's Country
New fall/spring/winter jacket
I'm Just Here for More Food
BOCA 2006 CD
Spyderco knife sharpener
A duffel bag
A winter hat with built-in earphones
A headband
Random Redken products (conditioner and a mug)
Lots of clamps

----

2007 in review (in no particular order)

We got a dog.
I started but did not finish the basement (yet.)
My company was purchased by another.
I dove headfirst into Microchip programming and was successful at it.
We tossed Alltel to the curb and committed to 2 years to at&t, the current "best-of-the-worst" evil wireless companies. So far, no real complaints.
I put a hole in my house and modded my microwave.
We bought a lawn mower.
We bought a new stove and dishwasher.
I got a new grill for my birthday.
We bought a fire pit, gazebo and lawn furniture.
We hosted several get-togethers including a house warming party, a few over the summer and a New Year's Eve (not) party.
We hired and fired a maid, and are now on our 2nd.
After a great amount of headache, we finally got window well covers made and installed.
We drove from NJ to WI with a Penske truck full of furniture from my in-laws.
I still haven't installed Vista anywhere
I still haven't sold or given away the old dishwasher or dryer.

Microwave Update

2007-11-06T23:13:00.000-06:00

Shortly after my last post my brother-in-law and his wife came to visit and provided the perfect opportunity to put that hole in my wall, since I knew I was going to need help lifting the microwave down and back up. For the most part, things went smoothly except that there was an additional latch holding the microwave up besides the two screws that went into the upper cabinet. Since I didn't know about that handy little latch, I ended up ripping the bracket partway off the wall since I couldn't see what was holding the microwave to the bracket in the first place. So I had to reattach the bracket to the wall. I also found out that there is NOT plywood sheathing on the outside of the house and the frame is only built with 2x4s, not the "usual" 2x6s. Instead of plywood on the outside, there was 1" thick foam. The vinyl siding uses long enough nails to go through this foam and into the studs behind it. I assume this makes for a better insulated house (no 2x6s going all the way through the wall) but it was surprising and meant that I didn't really have anything to attach the vent to. Oh well - the caulk and siding will hold it in fine. Plus I taped it on the inside to the bracket with (fairly thick) foil tape, so it isn't going anywhere. As usual the whole project took me a little longer that I thought it would, particularly messing around with J-channel vinyl siding pieces. I'm still quite pleased though and now the microwave vents outside making it useful AND quieter.

I did have to take the microwave down partially today to spray some grease on the damper hinge. It was squeaking terribly when the wind blew.

I also decided to "mod" the microwave another way. It provides a light for the stove, but it only had a very dim 30 watt bulb that wasn't much brighter than a nightlight. However, when I went to change the bulb out for something a bit brighter, I found out there was a spot on the other side for a second socket. Again, Whirlpool/Estate cut corners and only provided a single socket. Off again to the sears parts website to buy a duplicate socket, plus a trip to Menards for some wire and ends, an hour mucking around with solder, heat shrink tubing and such and now the microwave sports dual 40 watt bulbs to light up the stovetop. A single 40 watt bulb probably would've been enough, so this probably falls under the because-I-could category.

Microwave Shopping Woes

2007-10-04T23:06:00.001-05:00

Our house came with a "builder's special" microwave. There's nothing wrong with it, per se, but it is nothing special (it retails for about $230.) My one particular annoyance with it is that it runs the vent fan when the microwave is on. Yes, they cheaped out so much on the design they only put one fan in it. And the fan is pretty loud.

Well, besides that, it doesn't vent outside and it is white whereas our new stove and dishwasher are stainless steel.

So I started looking at new microwaves online. I had heard about a few different new technologies and started doing some research. The latest greatest fad is to make a microwave into a microwave / (convection) oven combination by adding a heating element of some sort and/or halogen light and sometimes a fan. With today's spiffy new plastics, they can get these ovens up to 450 degrees. That's pretty nifty, but we just bought a convection oven AND we have a convection toaster oven. I'd be hard pressed to justify a third oven, especially considering the combo units start around $700. I've also heard they are notoriously difficult to keep clean if you actually use them as an oven.

Another technology that's been around a bit longer is to use an inverter (somehow) to manage the power of the microwave. Instead of cycling the power on and off, it keeps the magnetron on constantly but at a reduced power. This is supposed to help while defrosting and also melting things like butter and chocolate. Since we essentially use our microwave for reheating, melting and defrosting, that seems like a nice feature to have.

Lastly, I want a powerful fan. Real range vents are around 600CFM, the ones on microwaves are generally around 300CFM. Or so I thought.

With these things in mind I started looking at models. The first thing I found was that nobody is readily advertising the inverter technology. GE has it on a counter-top model only. Whirlpool has it on *some* models and calls it AccuWave. KitchenAid has it on *some* models and calls it (OptimaWave) True 10 Power Level. I couldn't find the feature from any other manufacturer.

The first model I found was the Whirlpool GH5184XPS for $500. A bit much for a microwave, but not terrible. Look closely at that page and see if you can find out how many cubic feet per minute (CFM) the fan pushes though. Can't find it? It isn't on there. It was only on the Sears web site I found it is only rated for 175CFM. Well crap, that's less than 1/3 a "real" range hood. Considering the power of our new gas stove, I want something that can suck up smoke from a stir fry or pan-searing a steak. I strongly suspect 175CFM just isn't going to cut it.

Same deal with the KitchenAid KHMS1850SSS. 200CFM.

Frustrated, I stopped at an appliance store to see if maybe they knew of another brand that had the inverter technology. They didn't, but they did have last year's KitchenAid KHMS155LSS on sale for $370, down from $500. The appliance guy called his rep to find out the CFM and he said it was 280CFM. Further research on the Internet shows it is only 180. :( So close.

So is there ANY microwave that has those two features? Turns out the answer is yes, but you need to be slightly insane to pay for it and have a desire for a rather strange looking microwave.

For the low, low price of only $700, the KitchenAid KHMS2050SSS Architect II series microwave could be yours! And it doesn't even include any sort of secondary heating method. For that, you need to jump up to the $1100 KHHC2090SSS.

You've got to be kidding me. There's no way I'm paying $700 for what amounts to JUST a MICROWAVE (and a fan.) We just don't use it that much.

More than a little frustrated, I did a search for our current microwave, a Whirlpool Estate TMH14XM(Q0) and found that it can indeed be vented outside! The users manual I was looking at previously doesn't mention this at all so I figured it wasn't possible. Little did I know that I was actually missing the installation guide which details how to vent it outside. I couldn't find the exact installation guide for that model, but from browsing it appears that all Whirlpool (and KitchenAid) microwaves use essentially the same Installation Guide.

The only problem is that it requires a damper which was originally supplied with the microwave but is (I'm sure) long gone now. Off to the Sears Parts web site, $20 + tax and S&H later the damper is on its way. Combine that with a handful of vent parts, some caulk, and a half-day of work to make a nice 10"x3.25" hole in the outside wall and we should be in business.

Now, the microwave is still white, but so is our toaster/convection oven and the fridge. It doesn't have the inverter technology, but it is only going to cost about $60 in parts to vent it outside which should alleviate my two biggest complaints - one it will vent OUTSIDE (lazy builder...) and hopefully the noise of the fan will be reduced when it is directed outside so you can actually carry on a conversation in the kitchen and microwave something simultaneously.

Maybe in the next year or two I'll be able to get that KitchenAid model for a reasonable price on clearance. Or maybe, since KitchenAid and Whirlpool microwaves are made in the same factory, Whirlpool will get on the ball and start producing microwaves with 300CFM instead of the puny 175.

A collection of utilities 5

2007-09-03T22:50:00.000-05:00

I don't want to fall any further behind on utilities, so here's installment #5. For convenience, here's links to installments 1, 2, 3 and 4.

August 2007 Utilities of the Month

This month is suggestion month. The three utilities below were suggested by various coworkers.

Unstoppable Copier: Got a file on a flakey hard drive, CD, or thumb drive that you really need? Windows file copy might error out, but Unstoppable Copier will recover as much of the file as possible: (Freeware, Windows and Linux)

WinGrep: Need to find a string of text in a bunch of log files? Even Notepad2 won’t help you there; try WinGrep. It provides a nice UI for searching through whatever files you specify and will even show the line found in context with up to 5 lines before and after the match. (Shareware, Windows)

AIDA32: This is quite a specialized utility, but invaluable when you need it. Have a piece of hardware you can’t identify so you don’t know what driver to use? This utility will spit out as much information about it as it can gather, which might just be enough to help you identify it. It may save you from having to take the PC apart and certainly comes in handy when you’re trying to identify something remotely. It can even tell you what memory slots are in use and free. The original website has been taken down, but it is still available for download all over the web. (Freeware, home/personal use. Business use requires a “registration request” which points to the website which is no longer available. Windows)

Utilities of the Month for April 2006

I have two utilities this month – a PDF writer, and an alternate to Acrobat Reader.

CutePDF – adds itself as a printer allowing any application that can print to create PDFs. It is free for personal and commercial use with no watermarks, popups, ads, etc.

You’ll need CutePDF itself (2MB) as well as Ghostscript 8.15 Lite (5MB (Go Badgers!)). Both installs are extremely simple wizards.

(Update: I've found PDFCreator to be an excellent free PDF writer too. It allows more customization and automation than CutePDF.)

There’s always the ubiquitous Acrobat Reader 7.0 (now version 8.1), which seems to have fixed the slow startup problems of 6.0. However, Foxit Reader (1MB) is a small, fast alternative PDF reader. It requires no installation, is only about a megabyte download, and starts blazing fast.

As a bonus and just to get them out of the way, be sure to check out Microsoft’s Power Toys

My 3 favorite Power Toys:
TweakUI
Alt-Tab Replacement
Open Command Window Here

Utility of the Month for May 2007

Tired of Exchange complaining about the amount of space your mailbox takes? Check out this utility:

Outlook Attachment Sniffer – Extracts the attachments from e-mails in Outlook and stores them on your hard drive. It replaces the attachment with an .oas file, which is simply a link to the file on your hard drive. It is a great way to keep your mailbox size down without constantly deleting or archiving to a local .pst file. (Shareware - $15 to register.)

A real update

2007-08-13T21:14:00.000-05:00

Several months have passed since my last real (non-utilities) update on my blog. Sorry. Here you go:

The basement is coming along slowly but surely. The electrical was done a month or two ago and I started on drywall. Several friends and my dad showed up to help and we got that taken care of fairly quickly. The doors went up without too much trouble and now I'm working on mudding / taping. This has proven to be a HUGE job. I've got the first coat done and am working on the second coat. I've seriously considered just calling in a drywall contracter to finish it, but I'm fairly close to being done nowq. I'm hoping my dad will be able to come down and help this weekend. After that, there's texture, sealer, primer, paint, trim, flooring (epoxy in one room, carpet in the other) closet doors, doorknobs, light bulbs... Oh, and don't forget the backup sump pump and utility sink. I'll get done someday. ;)

The garden is doing OK. The tomatoes really like it, as do the jalapenos. The bell peppers aren't doing too bad either. The broccoli got a bit large before I finally cut it, but it wasn't edible anymore since the buds had started to open. Now that I've cut it, all the plants are dying. Broccoili is best obtained from the supermarket apparently. The basil is determined to flower, despite my half-hearted attempts to remove the flowers when they appear. I should probably make a large batch of pesto sometime. The homemade salsa was excellent, though next time I'll be sure to remove the skin from all the tomatoes, not just the cherry tomatoes.

A collection of utilities 4

2007-07-24T20:40:00.001-05:00

It has been over 3 months since my last post. Every time I think about posting, it seems I've got something else to do or it is too late at night. So we'll go with the tried and true utilities again.

April 2007 Utilitities of the Month: Microsoft Hotfixes

While not technically utilities, this month focuses on things that you will want on every computer you touch. They are Microsoft hotfixes that, for whatever reason, haven’t made it into a service pack or a Windows Update but are still very useful.

WPA2 Support: Hotfix KB893357 adds support for WPA2 for wireless products without using your wireless card’s included utilities. In my experience, the fastest, easiest and most reliable way to connect with wireless is to let Windows handle the connection. However, even XP SP2 doesn’t support WPA2. Install this hotfix and you’ll be able to connect to WPA2 access points easily. You may have to update your wireless network driver too.

Hibernate Update: I use Windows hibernate daily but it gave me problems on my new computer. The culprit? Too much RAM. When you have over 1GB of RAM, hibernate may fail with the error “Insufficient System Resources Exist to Complete the API.” Hotfix 909095 fixes it.

May 2007 Utility of the Month: A-Patch

It modifies MSN Messenger to get rid of things like the advertisement window, search tab, and generally reduce the amount of screen real-estate it uses.

You’ll want version 1.3.0 RC1 (build 54) for Windows Live Messenger 8.x. 1.3.0 RC2 (build 25) is for the old MSN Messenger 6.x and 7.x.

Before and After

It can remove even more than that and alter the messaging window itself too.

Disclaimer 1 (from the author): Patching Windows Live/MSN Messenger infringes Microsoft's Terms of Use. Downloading and installing this software is your own rational choice and I am not responsible in any way.

Disclaimer 2 (from me): The author of A-patch has put many links and information about Islam on his site and in his software. I have no opinion one way or the other on Islam. You may explore the links or ignore them as you see fit.

June 2007 Utilities of the Month

Synergy – Control two (or more) computers with a single keyboard and mouse. This utility lets you seamlessly move your mouse off one computer and onto another. Keyboard events go to whichever computer the mouse is currently on, and clipboard contents move seamlessly back and forth between computers. This cross-platform, open-source utility runs on Windows, OSX and Linux and you can even grab the source and compile it for other OS’s if you desire. The setup is a little less than straightforward, but basically you setup the computer with the keyboard and mouse as the “server” and other computers (clients) connect to it over TCP/IP.

Synergy is fantastic, but it won’t move files between computers.

FolderShare is a great little utility that will keep two folders on separate computers synchronized. This is great for syncing your desktop and laptop or work computer and home computer (or all three.) Synchronization is automatic and virtually instantaneous and works through most firewalls. It is also cross-platform and runs on Windows and OSX (sorry, no Linux support.) Once you have it setup, FolderShare also allows you to download files from any of your computers by using a web browser. However, unlike peer to peer FolderShare transfers, these transfers are not encrypted. The web download feature can be disabled on each of your devices under the Settings menu in the FolderShare Satellite.

July 2007 Utility of the Month: DiffMerge 3.0

There’s lots of “diff” utilities out there. Go read Eric Sink’s blog on why SourceGear created their own.

Personally, I use DiffMerge 3.0 every day. It is a great replacement for DiffMerge 2.x, which is what ships with Vault, the source control we use at work. The advantage of DiffMerge 3.0 is that it allows inline editing. Forgot to add a comment? Add it when you do the diff right before you check in.

If you’re a vault user I’d recommend renaming the diffmerge.exe to sgdm.exe and overwriting diffmerge 2.0 in the Vault directory. That’s ensures proper integration with Vault, which otherwise doesn’t recognize merges properly.

The best part is DiffMerge 3.0 is completely free (as in beer.)

Utilities of the Month for March 2006:

This month I have 1 non-free utility and a host of free utilities for everyone.

UltraMon Many of you probably have dual monitors, which Windows handles pretty well, but sometimes not as well as I'd like. Give Ultramon a try:

Features include:
- Adding a button to the title bar of every window to move it over to the other monitor. It even works if your monitors run at different resolutions because it does some smart resizing.
- Dual task bars. Applications on monitor 1 only appear on that monitor's task bar, etc.
- Different background images for each monitor
- Different screensavers for each monitor
- Create shortcuts that always open an application on a specific monitor

There's a whole lot more, and each feature can be turned on/off individually. Free 30-day trial, full version is $40.

Sysinternals Freeware

For those of you familiar with the Sony DRM debacle back in November, you may recognize Mark Russinovich as the one that brought it to everyone's attention. However, he and Bryce Cogswell have been around for quite a while creating a whole host of useful (and, for the most part, free) utilities for Windows. (Update: Since this time, Mark has been hired by Microsoft, so the links below will redirect you to the Sysinternals site at Microsoft. The utilities are still free, and there are a couple new ones too.)

Here are some of my personal favorites:

Autoruns:
Gives a nice view of all the miscellaneous locations that will automatically start applications on startup. Great for getting rid of those pesky applications that insist on starting up when Windows boots.

Filemon, Regmon and Portmon
Lets you peek into exactly what an application is doing in realtime with your files, registry and serial ports.

Process Explorer:
An excellent Task Manager replacement that can give you a lot of information about things like:
- list a process's open file handles
- Hold your mouse over the CPU graph to show which process caused a particular CPU spike.
- A boatload of other features

BGInfo
Create a background dynamically from a system's information, such as computer name an IP address. Works great in conjunction with a KVM or PCAnywhere/Remote Desktop so you always know what computer you are controlling.

Junction
Create folder symbolic links on NTFS just like you can in *nix.

PSTools
A host of command-line utilities to do things like list the running processes, kill a process, reboot, shutdown etc. All of them work on remote computers too. PSExec, for instance allows you to start a command prompt on another computer, but display the output to you:
psexec file://someothercomputer/ cmd

And of course, the always entertaining BlueScreen
A screensaver that simulates a blue screen of death (BSOD) occurring. It even looks at the currently running processes and .DLLs to generate a realistic BSOD as well as simulating a reboot.

More home ownership ramblings

2007-04-11T23:44:00.000-05:00

Ok, enough utilities for now, though I still need one for April if you have any ideas...

The little projects in the house are done and it was time to start the big projects. Brooke apparently has all sorts of projects planned for me (like making a cat tree.) So I said I'm not doing any projects until I have a workroom to do them in. That commenced the "basement project." The previous homeowners did some basic framing but seemed to slack on the hard parts - how to hide the ductwork, pipes and beams, any electrical outlets or light switches, insulation and even mud/tape. There was a basic frame up and drywall slapped on about 50% of it.

It seemed like all I had to do was take the drywall down, run some electrical, add some insulation, and put the drywall back up. Heh. I wasn't originally going to finish off the ceiling, but once I got into it, I figured I might as well do it right. That meant building a big soffit to cover the duct work. I looked a bit further and realized I'd need a couple vents added. I'll do framing, electrical, and even a bit of plumbing, but I called in the pros for the HVAC. They did a great job, but apparently they seem to think that arriving at 8:45am and leaving at 12:10pm is 5 hours labor. Even with a bit of padding for travel time, I'm not sure how you could get over 4 hours. I've been playing phone tag all week trying to get that sorted.

Anyway, the project is progressing, slowly but surely. I finished the framing in the workroom tonight. My dad came down a couple weeks ago to do electrical work in there and we got that all done in a weekend. Next I move on to the area with the windows. There's a bit of framing around a pipe, a beam, and a support post. None of that should be too bad, but it will take at least a week. We're also thinking about adding a closet down there. I still haven't figured out exactly how I'm going to get drywall around the windows. Then there's a boatload of electrical to do in that room as well - 8 or 9 can lights plus 10 outlets and a couple switches.

In other news, we're also starting a garden indoors. However, with today's weather it looks like our tomato plants might bloom before we even get to plant them outdoors. :)

April (Snow) Showers

2007-04-11T10:06:00.000-05:00

Today's Forcast

(Emphasis mine.)

Today: Occasional rain and snow, becoming all snow after 1pm. The snow could be heavy at times. High near 35. Breezy, with a east wind between 17 and 25 mph, with gusts as high as 41 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. Total daytime snow accumulation of 3 to 7 inches possible.

Tonight: Periods of snow. Low around 31. North wind between 11 and 17 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New snow accumulation of 2 to 4 inches possible.

A collection of utilities 3

2007-04-10T23:23:00.000-05:00

I'm way behind in my blog posting. Rather than catch up, I'll catch up with a few more utilities

January 2007 Utility of the Month: allSnap

This one is just a simple app that sits in your system tray (technically called the Taskbar Notification Area) and makes your windows snap to the edge and/or to each other when resizing. It can be handy if you usually resize your windows manually.

http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~iheckman/allsnap/

Feburary 2007 Utilities of the Month: Boot CDs

This month’s utilities are all Boot CDs. When things get really bad, sometimes you have to pull out the big guns. I’ve used all of these at some time or another.

Trinity Rescue Kit:

“Trinity Rescue Kit or TRK is a free live Linux distribution that aims specifically at recovery and repair operations on Windows machines, but is equally usable for Linux recovery issues.” It sports full NTFS write support, 3 virus scanners, and a wide array of recovery utilities. Its best asset might just be the documentation including a printable version. Instead of just packing a ton of utilities on a disc and letting you dig around and figure out what they do and how to use them, the documentation will walk you through different scenarios guiding your recovery process. I used testdisk on the TRK a few weeks ago to rescue a partition table on a friends’ laptop that, of course, contained hundreds of irreplaceable baby pictures.

Ultimate Boot CD

This disc contains all the free DOS utilities the authors could get their hands on. The list is here. I used the Active@ Partition Recovery (which is unfortunately only a demo) from this disc to give me detailed information on the above laptop’s partition information and then used TRK to do the actual recovery. Memtest86+ is invaluable for diagnosing memory problems. It even includes a version of Linux meant for recovery called INSERT.

Ultimate Boot CD for Windows

Ever wish you could ignore DOS and Linux and just boot Windows from a CD? Well, you can, sort of. Many of Microsoft’s applications don’t work from a CD (including Explorer) but you CAN boot a basic version of Windows. This utility, combined with a Windows XP CD will create a boot CD that boots Windows with a huge list of utilities available for recovery and diagnostic purposes.

Knoppix

No Boot CD set would be complete without Knoppix. Stick it in any old computer and have a fully usable Linux distribution at your fingertips. Great for getting your feet wet with Linux but it is also good for a variety of recovery and diagnostics.

Bart’s Boot CD

Not for the faint of heart, this is actually an environment that you can use to build and customize your own boot CD. I’ve used it in the past with his Network Boot Disk to make a Boot CD that contains DOS network drivers and Ghost which allows me to image a harddrive straight to a network share. Very handy.

March 2007 Utilities of the Month: Virtual Machines

Ever wanted to try a new utility or application but was afraid it may mess up your system in some undesirable way? How about trying an entire operating system? Enter Virtual Machines. Both of these products emulate an entire computer in software allowing you to run a guest OS within your normal (host) OS. They emulate the basic hardware (video, network, hard drive) and present the system in a window. Instead of a physical hard disk, you simply allocate a big file on your filesystem. Since they do NOT emulate the CPU, they are surprisingly fast.

Want more info?

I’ve used virtual machines to test everything from boot CDs to emulating customers’ configurations to developing kernel drivers. In fact, you can even download Virtual Hard Drives already setup for a given operating system and application.

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007
VMware Player
VMware Workstation (30-day demo download)

While they certainly don’t qualify for Utilities of the Month, while you’re there you can check out the server versions of these same technologies for free too. These are full versions, not demos!

VMware Server
Microsoft Virtual Server

Utilities of the Month for Feburary 2006

Eventually I'll catch up and only post new ones. Until then, you'll get a double dose of utility goodness.

I have two freeware utilities for everyone this month, focusing on finding out why your hard drive is full.

The first is SequoiaView: http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/

But even better than Sequoia View is WinDirStat http://windirstat.sourceforge.net/

Both work similarly: they scan your hard drive and give you a graphical view of the files on it based on something called squarified treemaps. Basically each shaded rectangle is a file. The bigger the rectangle, the bigger the file. Files are grouped in rectangular directories, and again, the bigger the rectangle, the more space that directory is taking up. Give it a try.

______________________

The third utility for this month has a terribly boring name, but can also help find out where your hard drive space has gone.

Folder Size Shell Extension 3.2

The original site appears to have disappeared, but it can still be found on the ‘net. This utility adds a “Size” tab to the properties page of a folder from within Explorer. Again, this utility can take a while to run if you select an entire drive, but presents a display like this:

A collection of utilities 2

2007-02-09T23:42:00.000-06:00

More utilities just for you:

January 2006 Utility of the Month: Notepad2

I've come across a very nice notepad replacement. Those of you that spend any amount of time digging through log files know how limited notepad.exe is. It annoyed me one too many times with its lack of support for Unix (LF) text files, so I found a replacement:

The feature list is huge, but to note a few:

- Handles very large files even better than notepad does (especially with word wrap turned on)
- Handles Unix (LF) and Mac (CR) line endings
- Basic Regular expression Find and Replace
- Syntax highlighting
- "Mostly" adjustable – colors, toolbar, etc.
- Zoom in/out
- Line Numbers on the left
- Open Source (GPL)

It is a bit slower scrolling, and uses a bit more memory (about 4MB versus 3MB.)

To replace notepad.exe with notepad2.exe, copy the following into a .bat file in the same directory as notepad2.exe and run it:

copy /y notepad2.exe C:\WINDOWS\System32\dllcache\notepad.exe
copy /y notepad2.exe C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386\notepad.exe
copy /y notepad2.exe C:\WINDOWS\System32\notepad.exe
copy /y notepad2.exe C:\WINDOWS\notepad.exe

http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html
Since it is open-source and all, I've made a couple fixes to Notepad2 for my own use. E-mail me if you'd like a version with my own personal fixes including:
- Faster searching
- Smarter horizontal scroll
- Fix a crash when saving with word-wrap turned on.

November 2006 Utility of the Month: PuTTY

Looking through my list of previous utilities, I found one notable utility missing: PuTTY!

PuTTY is a very nice Telnet and SSH client, which is becoming ever more important to have as Linux is being used more and all the random *nix boxes around have Telnet disabled so you can only connect with SSH. If you're into SSH in general, PuTTY is also capable of setting up SSH tunnels for other protocols.

PuTTY is just a single executable, no installer required. Just click the SSH radio button, type the hostname in the box and click Open.

I haven't tried any of the other utilities on that page, but if you really need a command-line driven Secure-FTP utility for Windows, I guess that's the place to get it.
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

A collection of utilities 1

2007-01-25T22:34:00.000-06:00

It has been over two months since my last post. The holidays were hectic and we hosted a house-warming party last weekend. There's been some work behind our yard dealing with neighborhood's water, but it is time for a techie post.

I've been collecting Windows utilities and e-mailing one a month to my coworkers. I figure it is about time to post them on my blog. The problem is, I've been doing it for a year now, so I have a LOT of utilities to post. Just putting up links doesn't do them justice, so I'll put up a few and try to catch up to what I've done at work.

December 2005 Utility of the Month: KatMouse

Here’s a little utility that solves a rather annoying problem in windows – the scroll wheel works on whatever window currently has the KEYBOARD focus. Thus, I find myself clicking on a window somewhere before ever attempting to scroll with the mouse wheel. Sometimes this has undesirable effects. The little utility below fixes this problem by capturing the scroll wheel actions and redirecting them to the window directly under the cursor.

It also does some useful things like allowing you to bring a window to the front or back with the middle mouse button.

http://ehiti.sdf-eu.org/katmouse/

December 2006 Utilities of the Month: (Note: Most of the time I don't post this many utilities nor write a story; I must've been inspired or something.)

You're sitting at Uncle Bob and Aunt Betty's house, finishing your pie and Uncle Bob discovers that you work with computers. "Say," he says, "my computer's been acting a little funny, think you could take a look?" Not wanting to be subjected to any more photos of their Canada vacation, you agree. Bob leads to you the study and mentions "we just got that new broadband thing, and it used to be blazing fast, but now I get all these windows popping up and it is slow as molasses."

You sit down and open IE. Six popup windows come up, and you're taken to a shady looking search site. You try to get to Google and get redirected elsewhere. It is worse than you thought.

Its time to pull out the big guns; here's the ones I use:

Spyware/Malware removers
Spybot Search and Destroy
Ad-Aware SE Personal
Microsoft Windows Defender

Virus Scannners
AVG Free
Avast! 4 Home

Note that the above utilities are NOT licensed for corporate use and should not be installed on any computer used for commercial use.

My personal approach is to install a virus scanner and at least 2 spyware/malware removers, reboot into safe mode, and run each of them in turn. (This can take a long time so go get another piece of pie.) Safe mode disables *most* of the bad stuff so it can be easily removed by the appropriate scanners.

Then go boot back into to normal mode and run:

Rootkit Revealer

If there's anything left you may have to remove it manually in safe mode. Occasionally you'll need to Google for a special utility just to remove that one lingering executable that just won't go away.

Once everything nasty is gone, you may find that certain things are still disabled, particularly for some users and not others. For instance, malware might have set the background to a web page and then prevented the user from changing the background. Many of these are set with group policies, which you can't readily get to with XP Home. This utility will help you restore things back to normal:

Doug's Windows XP Security Console
(Sometimes it is just easier to create a new user and delete the problematic one.)

Even if you took the easy way out and Uncle Bob manages to find his Restore CD, you're not done yet.

It is time to install updates. Of course, Uncle Bob has broadband, but it is apparently the budget broadband (512kbps) and Windows Update is telling you that XP SP2 hasn't even been installed.

Luckily, you are prepared and remembered to download and burn AutoPatcher to a CD-R.

AutoPatcher

AutoPatcher is a collection if all the Microsoft updates and a few 3rd party Add-Ons (some of them are previous Utilities of the Month, like TweakUI and Google Toolbar.) It is a huge download, but well worth having if you're going to fix up Uncle Bob's computer.

Just to be safe, you might as well have XP SP2 on that CD-R as well:

Windows XP SP2

And lastly, because you're feeling the holiday spirit (or maybe that's the eggnog) you give Uncle Bob a spiffy new screensaver. My personal favorite is Helios from www.reallyslick.com :

Intel disables the hardware OpenGL on screensavers. It suggests renaming them from .scr to .sCr. But if Uncle Bob sprung for the NVIDIA or ATI graphics card, you shouldn't have any problems.

Oh, and it might be a good idea to make Uncle Bob's user a non-admin before you go and give him a special admin account to install software with.

Happy Holidays!

If you have any suggestions for Utility of the Month, please let me know. I’m looking for those lesser-known utilities you install on every computer you touch, just because they are THAT useful. Free is always better, but I won’t discount inexpensive shareware either.

Oh, and I STILL can't blog with Opera. It keeps wanting to insert non-breaking spaces everywhere, totally messing up the formatting.

The joys of home ownership part 3.

2006-11-15T22:09:00.000-06:00

I've always liked doing projects: little things I can do around the house to fix things up, building things, etc. Fun little projects. But I never imagined the sheer number of them I would have to do to a house, especially a house that's only 2 years old. Just for my own use, I'm going to try to enumerate them all. Since closing on the house I have:

Replaced all the batteries in all 8 smoke detectors
Taken down a set of shelves in the garage built solely out of 2x4's
Bleached the water softener.
Arranged to have an aerator installed.
Mowed the lawn. Twice, because it was that long.
Trimmed the lawn.
Cleaned the carpets.
Installed a check valve on the sump pump.
Taped and painted the family room and kitchen (with considerable help)
Helped Brooke paint her craft room.
Identified cable lines inside and out (with help)
Replaced the screen in sliding screen door, twice because I screwed it up the first time.
Scrubbed the kitchen and hallway floor
Stained and varnished wood for a pilaster
Changed all the lights to compact flourescents
Installed a second light on the outside of the garage
Cleaned the chimney
Scrubbed and recaulked the shower
Cleaned the toilets, got rid of the iron in the toilet tanks.
Installed plastic and then felt pads on the kitchen chairs
Tightened banisters
Cleaned my car trunk after a mishap with some leftovers
Fixed the wheel on the old fridge
Fixed the crown moulding in the kitchen
Moved a shade to Brooke's craft room
Built a cover for the tortise cage
Installed new rechargable batteries in the solar walkway lights.

Most of these projects required materials of some sort. It seems like I'm at Menards every other day. Since closing, I've purchased:

Rope to tie things down in the trailer while moving.
Eight 9-volt batteries
Paint, rollers, brushes, drop cloths, paint trays, stepstool
Areator
17' Extension ladder
Chimney brush
2 gas cans
Gas trimmer
Sump pump check valve
(rented) Rug Doctor, purchased cleaning solution
Iron out
Wood to make a pilaster
Stain, polyurathane, stain brush, coping saw, staining pad, liquid nails, wood filler, a counter sink, finish nails, dremel wood cutting bit.
about 20 more compact flourescent bulbs
A 50 gallon garbage can
plastic and felt pads for the kitchen chairs
2 electrical boxes, threaded rods, couplers, siding mount adapters, electrical box adapters.
Caulk
2 toilet brushes, toilet cleaner, sponges
Longer bolts for banisters
Staple gun, staples and screen for the tortise cage cover.

I'm sure I'm forgetting at least a few things too. Of course, this is all in addition to the normal moving stuff like cleaning the old place, moving everything, putting desks together, hooking up computers, setting up the TV and AV stuff, setting up the water bed, and in general putting stuff away.

Everything isn't done yet. The pilaster is half up, I'll probably finish it tomorrow. There's probably another dozen little jobs left to do before Thanksgiving. I should probably go do one before going to bed.

Moving

2006-11-15T21:51:00.000-06:00

As promised, the moving story:

I had everything planned out. Most everything was packed and many of the boxes were already moved. I had friends and family coming to help, food in the freezer, soda in the fridge. I just needed a U-haul trailer to hook to my car.

My first experience getting a U-haul trailer 4 years ago didn't go well. I reserved it, but when I went to call 24 hours prior (as directed) they didn't have any information about my reservation, and told me to show up in the morning and they might have one for me. Luckily (for me AND them,) they did. But I lost confidence in U-haul's "reservation" system, which doesn't actually guarantee ANYTHING.

So I didn't reserve a trailer this time. Every other time I've needed a U-haul trailer, I just show up, go to the desk, sign some papers, and head out with a trailer. Not this time. I showed up one U-haul place. They had just one truck, and it was reserved. So I went to the regional U-haul center. Several trucks (most or all reserved) and a few open trailers. Poo. I called a few other U-haul places in the area, no dice. So I called U-haul corporate and, per their suggestion, made a "reservation" for the same day. They said that the scheduling department would be calling within an hour to tell me where the nearest trailer was. It was probably 9:30 by now and I had people showing up to help around 11. So I waited an hour and nobody called. So I called the scheduling department myself. They told me there was no trailers available within a 25 mile radius. I told them to check for 50 and they found one 50 miles north. I didn't have much of a choice, so I reserved it. 2.5 hours later I was back in town pulling a U-haul trailer that had to be back where I got it by 6am the next morning. In the mean time, all my help had arrived and didn't have much to do.

So, my advice is simple - if you want a U-haul trailer, reserve one. It doesn't guarantee you'll actually get one, but it does put you at the top of a list of people who may get one, and that's got to be better than just showing up.

Once I had the trailer, things went well, but it meant we got a much later start moving than I had hoped, which meant we finished later than I had hoped. Then I got to take the trailer back the same night because there was no way I was going to get up at 4:30 to have the trailer back by 6. We did get most everything moved though. It only took a couple more car loads and borrowing someone's 4-wheeler trailer a couple weeks later to move the swing.

No such thing as white.

2006-11-10T00:26:00.000-06:00

Think about that for just a second. There is no single definition of white. Google color temperature or just go here if you don't believe me. This has bit me before when scanning wedding photos.

Anyway, if there's no such thing as white, that means there's no such thing as grey. Which is the color we wanted to paint our kitchen. So we went to the store, picked out a very neutral grey, and painted. Now, under certain lighting conditions, the wall looks blue. Which isn't bad, mind you, it just wasn't what I was expecting. We actually thought about getting a hint of blue in the grey anyway, but in the end it wasn't intentional. Next to the red wall, the red-grey counters, the light wood cabinets and the beige floor, the walls look a bit blue. Everything's relative.

And it got me again today. I've replaced every bulb in the house with compact flourescent lights (CFL.) Now, typically flourescent bulbs produce a very "cool" white light that is often described as "harsh." However, newer CFLs are designed to mimic incandescent lights, a very "warm" light. It's always been a bit warm for my taste, so I picked up a couple "cool daylight color" CLFs from Wally World today. They claim to be 6500K, which turns out to be VERY blue in comparison to everything else. I checked a box from the standard CFLs and they are around 2700K. I guess I'd really prefer something like 5000K. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if the whole house was 6500K, but I have far too many of the standard CFLs to switch everything now.

The joys of home ownership part 2.

2006-11-05T23:44:00.000-06:00

Continuing from my last post.

First off, I was only able to mitigate the sulfur smell. After quite a bit of googling, I found out quite a few things about it:

It is caused by hydrogen sulfide, a gas. Hydrogen sulfide is non-toxic in low concentrations, but we can detect VERY low concentrations with our noses.
Unless it is in very, very low concentrations, a carbon filter will NOT take it out.
The gas is created (generally) by a non-toxic, anaerobic bacteria that turns sulfates into hydrogen sulfide.

Treatments vary depending on the severity and location of the problem. A temporary and inexpensive solution is just to bleach/clorinate/shock the entire system, starting with the well. This kills off the bacteria that produces the gas, usually for around 6 months depending on how stagnant the water is. Since our house was vacant for at least a couple months the bacteria was allowed to flourish, especially in the water softener, but also in the well to an extent. The water coming straight from the well smelled mostly like iron but had a hint of sulfur smell too.

Following the instructions in the water softener manual, I was able to bleach out the water softener media and remove a good portion of the smell. It was apparent after a couple days that it wasn't going to get rid of it entirely though.

The other methods rely on oxidizing the gas back into a solid and then filtering it out:

Add chlorine to the water as it enters from the well (chorine is an excellent oxidizer and also kills the hydrogen sulfide producing bacteria.) Then the chorine must be filtered out with a carbon filter. The chlorine must be added regularly and the carbon filters must be replaced fairly often.
Oxidize the gas with a device very similar to a water softener, but with a differnt media which must also be regenerated with salt, like a water softener. This increases salt requirement and adds quite a bit of sodium or potassium to the water.
Oxidize the gas with ozone, then filter out the solid. The filter is backwashed occasionally. I haven't seen these available residentially, I suspect they use quite a bit of electricity to produce ozone, but I'm not sure.
Oxidize the gas with hydrogen peroxide, then filter out the solid. Hydrogen peroxide must be ordered and added every few months.
Oxidize the gas with oxygen by simply aerating the water, usually under pressure. Then the solids are filtered out, again, backwashed occasionally (every 3 days.) This method has the advantage of aerating the water preventing the (anaerobic) bacteria from living in the system.

We chose the last method as it was the most common around here, and was recommended for the area. It also has no regular maintenance. It cost $1200 installed, which I thought was very reasonable.

As a bonus, all of these methods also take out some of the iron from the water too meaning the water softener doesn't need to take as much out. In fact, most if not all of these systems are generally advertised as iron-removal systems. It was apparent from looking in the toilet tanks that the water softener wasn't set high enough previously.

We were also instructed to remove the anode rod from the water heater entirely though some web sites suggest replacing it with a different material. The anode rod is designed to corrode instead of the water heater itself corroding. I don't remember if the anode rod can produce the hydrogen sulfide itself or whether it just helps harbor the bacteria that can produce it, but I figured shortening the life of the water heater slightly was a small price to pay for water that doesn't smell like rotten eggs. So the aerator went in, the anode rod came out and the smell disappeared within an hour, just long enough for the aerator to pressurize.

One of the best websites on this subject that I've found is here:

http://www.water-research.net/sulfur.htm

Moving was a slight fiasco, but I'll have to save that for another post.

The joys of home ownership.

2006-10-15T22:48:00.000-05:00

Thursday, October 12th Brooke and I became home owners for the first time. We found a nice 2-story, 4 bedroom house in a small town about 15 minutes from where Brooke works. It's in a small suburban subdivision chopped out of an otherwise fairly rural area. The house is only about 2.5 years old. You can see some pictures here:

http://saturn49.dyndns.org:8008/gallery2/main.php/v/Salem+House/

(Sorry, those of you behind a very restrictive firewall won't be able to see them.)

Ignore the furniture, the house is empty now. Some of those shots are from the real estate listing.

Anyway, as you can see, the kitchen and part of the family room were salmon colored. That had to go. Due to help from my Dad, brother, sister-in-law, and friend (THANKS GUYS!) the kitchen is now a light grey, as is the wall the fireplace is on. The two opposing walls in the family room are now that deep red that used to be behind the fireplace.

We also discovered a fairly significant hydrogen sulfide (rotten egg smell) problem with the well water that I may have taken care of. More on that in another post.

We're going to be hosting Thanksgiving, so we've got a bunch of little projects that need to be done first. Move-in date is currently set for October 28th.

1.Write blog. 2.???? 3.Profit!

2006-10-02T20:43:00.000-05:00

As the classic Slashdot post goes:

1. Write blog.
2. ????
3. Profit!

Well, at least one person has figured out what #2 is:
Host a job board for the same niche your blog caters to.

In this case I'm referring to Joel Spolsky's blog: joelonsoftware.com and his corresponding job board: jobs.joelonsoftware.com.

I've talked about Joel before. I don't necessarily agree with everything he says, and even he doesn't always do everything he says, but in general his advice is simple and sound. He recently started a job board for software development (and related) jobs. You can post for $350 for 21 days with a money-back guarantee. By my count he's had 341 postings in the first month. Not counting refunds, that's almost $120k! Not too shabby.

Browsing through the board shows that there's a LOT of software jobs in Silicon Valley and quite a few in NY as well. There's also a LOT of AJAX/Web 2.0 jobs (--shudder--.) I'll save my AJAX rant for another day.

Can we get some new widgets please?

2006-09-05T21:04:00.000-05:00

Vista is coming, and Microsoft has just released Release Candidate 1. This, by itself, is not particularly interesting. What is interesting is that Vista will put a 3D capabilities on everyone's desktop in the next, say, 5 years. Yes, I know OSX has been around almost that long already, but they haven't really done anything interesting yet. Let me explain.

Look around you, and you'll see a few graphical "widgets" that comprise each and every application on your computer:

Labels (straight text that does nothing)
Buttons (also includes checkboxes and radio buttons)
Icons
Textboxes (single and multi-line)
Menus
Groupboxes (really just a label plus a line)
Scroll bars (horizontal and vertical)
Slider controls (don't see many of these anymore)
Progress bar
Listboxes
Treeviews
Status bars
Grids
Splitter bar (also pretty rare these days)
Picturebox (think Microsoft Paint)
Date picker

Then there's a few widgets that are simply combinations or alterations of the above widgets:

Dropdown box = Textbox + button + listbox
Listview = a control that can switch between icons + labels and a grid
Hyperlinks = just another way to display a button, or alternatively, a label that does something when you click it.
Toolbar = a collection of buttons side by side
Tab control = buttons + groupboxes laid on top of each other.
Checked List Box = a listbox filled with checkboxes

So look around. Your taskbar? That's just a bunch of buttons (start menu, task bar itself, and the quick lauch tray), some icons (system tray), and a label or two (the clock)

Microsoft word? That's just a glorified multi-line textbox. Ok, a HUGELY glorified multi-line textbox, but still just a textbox.

Microsoft Excel? Just a grid and a textbox at the top.

Photoshop? Just a HUGELY glorified picturebox editor.

OSX's Dock Bar? Just a bunch of buttons with a spiffy zoom effect.

Effects. That's (as far as I know) all OSX (and probably Vista) has done with the UI we all know and love; they've added effects. Windows twist around and funnel down when you minimize them. Desktops bounce around on a 3D cube. Your icons zoom in and out. Yippie. Eye candy. They've added Eye candy to the same windows and widgets that have been around since the first release of Mac OS and Windows 3.0.

What I'm waiting for is something new. Some new way to explore data, files, and configurations. By far the easiest way to display a lot of data is with a grid. The best way we have right now to drill down into data is some sort of treeview. A combination of the two isn't bad either (tree on the left, grid on the right, e.g. Explorer.) There's even some controls (see Infragistics) that combine the two together (drop down a node in a tree to display a grid, or actually expand a row in a grid to display another entire grid.) But essentially they are still just trees and grids.

I want something more powerful. I haven't yet dreamed it up yet, but I'm convinced the 3D capabilities of Vista (and OSX) will allow some new widgets that make viewing and editing large quantities of (hiearchal) data much easier.

Trees have a fundamental problem. The further you drill down, the more context you lose. Say you're in c:\documents and settings\some user\My Documents\Work\Project A\Design Documents. What folder comes after c:\documents and settings? You probably can't see it without collapsing part of the tree. And collapsing it usually means you've lost your context into \Design Documents unless you open two windows.

Moving a file from the above folder to c:\temp is really not that easy. You can either:

Open two windows and drag between them
Cut the file, renavigate to c:\temp and paste it
Drag the file into the bottom of the tree until c:\temp scrolls into view and drop it there.

None of these are very fast nor intuitive.

Grids have a fundamental problem too. Lets say you have a row of data with 6 columns, each one linking to 6 other tables, and each of those tables has 6 columns. How are you going to display it all? 36 columns is usually way too many to fit on a screen. Relational databases are notoriously difficult to display with grids and trees. UML relational diagrams are OK at showing the database structure, but not its contents.

Need another example? How about the security properties for a folder? There's grayed out items in there showing effective rights that are set elsewhere. Wouldn't it be nice to drill down into the hiearchy and find out where those rights came from? There's lots of other possibilities in security which is highly hiearchal and inheritance plays an important role.

Think *nix for a second where a file or folder may actually be a link to somewhere else. Now you've got 2 different trees to display (the tree from the link and the tree where the actual object is stored.) I haven't seen a UI that does that yet, but it could be very useful.

Surround Sound in the Study?

2006-08-21T23:36:00.000-05:00

Well, almost. I should back up a bit.
Home theater and audio has been a peripheral hobby of mine since my next door neighbor gave me a set of (very large) older speakers when I was only about 14. Well, a dozen years later I still have those speakers, though I've completely rebuilt the cabinets, replaced one of the tweeters and applied bucking magnets to reduce their effect on nearby CRTs. Soon I will replace both tweeters since they aren't matched at the moment.

By every definition my system is piecemeal and I like it that way. And it just got a minor upgrade.

A friend of a friend was selling his RCA Home Theater in a Box system for $100. Normally I shy away from these sorts of things, but a bit of research showed the receiver was slightly better in every way than the POS Aiwa I had been using. I should note that I bought the Aiwa sometime in the fall of 1999 off Yahoo! auctions for cheap because my previous Sony didn't have any digital inputs. Ah, there's the second theme to my system: inexpensive. I sold the Sony on E-bay and I think just about broke even on that one. Every one of my components has a story (or three) behind it.

Anyway, the RCA is a RT 2600. Minor features over the Aiwa AV-DV75:

It has 2 S-Video inputs and an S-Video output
It will do DTS
It has slightly better "fake" surround sound modes (I never liked the ones on the Aiwa)
The volume knob actually works
It is silver. All of my home theater stuff is black, but I suspect that will change soon, as everything seems to be silver/grey these days.

Its only real downfall is that it has two 60x15mm fans inside. They aren't any louder than the fan in my PS2, and it isn't really audible from the couch, but it is a bit annoying. Mouser came to the rescue with some quieter fans.

But why spend money on what appears to be a very minor upgrade? It came with speakers. Not great speakers mind you, but speakers nonetheless. The Aiwa was no longer being used and I have a small pile of speakers lying around, and a study with a TiVo and TV. The result is surround sound in the study. Well, almost. The RCA speakers included a subwoofer, but it is unpowered. The RT 2600 has an output for it. Well, my Kenwood in the living room is better than anything bundled with a receiver, so it stays there. The Aiwa can't drive it. I tried mucking around with getting it on the B speaker channel but couldn't get it balanced right. Instead I put 2 RCAs on the B channel and my old rear speakers on the A channel. The old rear speakers have 8" woofers, so they provide enough bass for background music and TV. So it isn't technically surround sound, but it works better for music this way. It would take me all of 10 seconds to switch the Bs to the rear connectors, and I actually have a 5th speaker hooked up as a center. Not that I'm planning to watch any movies in the study anyway. Oh, and yes, I took apart the Aiwa (again) and fixed the volume knob (again.) I'm not sure how long it will last this time.

I don't have the rears in the living room right now due to my extreme laziness in running speaker cable, and I'm pretty sure I don't have enough to run around the room cleanly, AND there's no place to put the speakers, short of mounting them on the wall. I haven't really missed them, but I'm considering tossing a couple of the RCAs on stands in there if I get bored. I might even hook them up.

Yea for Best Buy, boo for Canon

2006-07-22T23:51:00.000-05:00

A couple quick stories before I head to bed.

This morning I discovered my old Liebert Powersurge 250's battery was no good anymore when I found the cable box off. It was only hooked to the TiVo and cable box, but it couldn't even power those two things off battery for what must have been a very quick brown out during last night's storm. Anyway, rather than spending $20 to replace the battery like I did, oh, 6 years ago, I decided it is probably time for a new one.

Yea for Best Buy
Anyway, fast forward to tonight when we had a $50 gift certificate to spend at Best Buy. I found an open box APC Back UPS ES 500 for $36 (normally $61 there). Not a bad deal at all. So we grabbed it and a couple movies and checked out. When we got home I opened the UPS and found that someone had swapped the 500 out for a 350 and returned it. Despite being plastered with "Inspected" tape, it obviously wasn't inspected very closely. The 350 is clearly labeled as such on the front, and even has a different number of outlets.

Anyway, I was annoyed and headed straight back to Best Buy with it. I figured they were going to do one of two things:

Accuse me of trying to cheat them by returning the wrong product or
Simply refund my money in the form of another gift certificate, since it was open-box to begin with.

Instead, they surprised me and gave me a brand new Back UPS ES 500 for the price I had paid for the open box UPS! Kudos to them.

Boo for Canon
Brooke lost the manual for her 30D already. No problem right? Just go download it. No problem, until I tried to print it. It printed, but every page had a slight gray background and a slightly darker gray COPY across the entire page at an angle. These artifacts were not visible when simply viewing it on the screen. Figuring this was some sort of copy protection, I dug around and found the pdf was password protected too. Ug. A password protected manual? I guess there must be a ton of grey-market 30Ds floating around and Canon doesn't want people being able to print their manual to distribute with it. (Or some other just as idiotic explanation.) Well, no matter, FoxItReader printed it just fine without any such idiotic watermarks so it was actually readable when printed 9 pages to a single 8.5x11" sheet. It also printed much quicker, I might add.

Windows "Genuine" Advantage?

2006-07-21T23:59:00.000-05:00

So Microsoft has finally decided to actually put their very annoying Windows Activation to use and augment it with something called Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA). It basically checks your system and product key a bit better than Windows Activation does and prevents you from installing non-critical updates if you don't have it installed or it deems your system unworthy. It also phones home occasionally through the Internet and gives the status of your system to Microsoft.

The consensus is that WGA will not actually stop piracy, but simply inform some people that they bought their computer from a less-then-reputable seller. And it is ticking off a lot of legitimate users. Whatever. These things are discussed elsewhere in gory detail on the Internet.

What I'm posting about is their very strange name for this utility.

Genuine?
Genine: Not spurious or counterfeit; authentic.
I imagine that every copy of Windows running WGA is in fact Genuine. It is indeed authentic Microsoft Windows, not a knockoff trying to imitate Microsoft Windows. The only way I know of to accomplish any such feat right now is with WINE, and if you somehow manage to run WGA on WINE and you don't know it wasn't actually Microsoft Windows, you've got more issues than WGA can help you with.

What they really mean to say is Windows Legal Advantage. Or Windows Licensed Advantage. A pirated copy of software is a copyright violation. It may have been installed with an authentic, genuine, holograph Windows XP disc. Every bit on that disc originated from Microsoft and copied to the hard drive with accuracy only a computer can provide. Even the product key provided during the install probably originated at Microsoft. But maybe that key is no longer valid or was used too many times. Does that make the installation spurious or counterfeit? No, it just means it is not legal, as it is an unauthorized copy - a copyright violation.

Advantage
Its pretty obvious that "Advantage" doesn't refer to any advantage to the consumer. WGA is nuisance to install at best, requiring a reboot. At worst, it is a huge pain in the butt for people who have legal copies that WGA still manages to tag as invalid. Even those that are unknowingly running unlicensed copies of Windows don't get any advantage from this tool. "Hi, this computer you purchased 5 years ago doesn't have a valid copy of windows on it. Click here to pay money to Microsoft for something you've been using for 5 years or...you won't get IE7, or something. --Microsoft" Yea, that's a real advantage. Ok, you could make an argument that having a legal copy of Windows is an advantage because now you can download all these non-critical updates that you were getting for the past 5 years without WGA. What a privlidge.

The advantage is purely Microsoft's.

Maybe they should've named it Windows License Checker. "Na, we don't want people to actually know what it is doing! "

Back to work

2006-07-05T19:55:00.000-05:00

The weekend was grand. 4 days. It was like two weekends in one. Especially so for my wife and I because we spent it with two different sets of people. Friday through Sunday was her brother and sister-in-law, Tuesday was my entire family. Hectic, but fun.

Anyway, I returned to work today and wondered where the heck that Visual Studio 2003 Service Pack 1 was. See, I use Visual Studio 2003 every single day. It has several annoying bugs, some of which crash the application entirely. I even joined the beta. Supposedly, a service pack was going to be released Q2 of this year

This service pack is currently targeted for final release in June of 2006

For Microsoft, that usually means the last possible second, so I figured it would be on or about June 30. July 5th rolled around and there's still no service pack. Boo.

It's that time again.

2006-06-26T19:44:00.000-05:00

I've neglected my blog. I apologize. Here's a mis-mash of happenin' things:

I've declared that my pesky bluescreen problem has been fixed. New memory from woot.com during the recent woot-off has restored my system to 1.25GB of memory. Total uptime since failed memory has been removed: 21 days with one reboot for Windows Update. AVG is still installed and works fine. Anybody want a faulty 512MB DDR stick?

Opera 9.0 has been released. No major bugs, but as I'm typing this I'm still seeing a few problems with their WYSIWYG editor. No showstoppers though.

I've discovered a fantastic new internet site: theDailyWTF. If you're a programmer, go spend a few minutes browsing the insanity that comes from your fellow programmer's fingers. When you're done on the front page, head towards the forums to read the archive. If you've had the blessing of working with Oracle, there's a forum just for you.

I've read through over half the archive and realized a couple things:

Validating user input is hard (duh.) Many programs do it incorrectly.
Many programmers are unaware of the framework's built-in functionality for whatever language they are using.

One of my most popular pages on this blog (mostly due to Google) is how to take apart an iPod with clickwheel. I've recently discovered that it also works on iPod 3G. It probably works on any other iPod as well. Don't even bother trying use a screwdriver or even those silly plastic tools you get with a new battery.

AVG == Good. Faulty Memory == Bad.

2006-06-11T22:12:00.000-05:00

My machine bluescreened again, and this time it was during a defrag (BAD!) And yes, AVG was installed. So it rebooted, I uninstalled AVG, and rebooted again. And it bluescreened. Repeatidly. (Double BAD!)

I could get into safe mode but I couldn't get my machine booted normally. I tried all the normal things, disable any recently installed services (there had only been 1 or two) etc. I still couldn't get it booted normally. And then, on a whim, I decided to check the memory with memtest86. Bad memory! Oy. Turns out one of my older DIMMs (not the one I added in November) had gone bad. Removing the DIMM made the memtest error go away, moving it moved the error.

But even after removing it, my machine would still bluescreen shortly after logging in. So I tried a restore point from a few hours earlier (before uninstalling AVG) and it worked. AVG was broken, but re-installing it fixed it up fine. And it has been fine since (almost 7 days.)

In the aftermath, I realize what probably "solved" my problem last time with AVG was disabling its nightly virus scan. The bad part of memory was around the 1GB range and I normally don't use that much memory. Doing a virus scan will balloon Windows' disk cache, moving this around in memory. Thus, sometime in the next day or two, it would bluescreen.

The same thing happened when I did a defrag. It chewed up all my memory and things got moved around until something critical (kernel-level) hit that bad spot in RAM and then BOOM, bluescreen.

I'm a little worried that the bad memory I had might've corrupted something on disk, but I haven't run across anything abnormal yet. I wonder if I should periodically test my memory every once in a while with memtest86.

In other news, I'm using Opera 9 Preview 2 Build 8473 to post this. The editor seems to occasionally randomly changing the line wrap locations and the End key doesn't seem to work right, but otherwise it is fine.

I fixed my TV and other miscellaneous ramblings.

2006-06-01T23:29:00.000-05:00

A couple things first. Free AVG seemed to be causing bluescreens, so I got rid of it for a while. The bluescreens went away. So I reinstalled it, being more careful about rebooting at the proper times (even when not requested) and it seems to work fine now. I've also disabled the nightly scan, which might have had something to do with it. Its been 3 weeks since those two bluescreens, and 10 days of it with Free AVG installed.

In between I tried Avast! again, but the CPU problem returned. I even started a thread about it but it wasn't any help. Oh well.

Now, onto the fun stuff. This is a fairly long saga. It may be interesting to read, it might be boring as hell. I dunno - you tell me. To me, it is just my latest project.

My TV has always had some sort of color problem. It is a 27" direct view Panasonic standard definition TV. For the longest time, I attributed it to magnetic interference from my very large, unshielded speakers. Turning the speakers this way or that seemed to help, but I could never quite get rid of it. Even manual degaussing with a degaussing ring didn't work.

Over the years I've tried various ways of shielding the TV, from sheet metal to a file cabinet. Nothing seemed to work permanently. The upper left corner always turned blue into purple. At an older apartment, there was a splotch of orange where it should be red, just to the right of center.

Most recently, I discovered that you can use additional magnets to reduce the magnetic field of a speaker. Called "bucking magnets", they are just round magnets you put on the back of the speaker, about 1/2 to 2/3 the size of the speaker's magnet. You put them in an orientation such that they resist the existing magnet. There's also shields you can buy to add to speakers.

So, a few months ago I bought some bucking magnets and shields and experimented with shielding my beast speakers (12" woofers, 5" midrange, 1" tweaters). With the right combination, I was able to reduce or eliminate the field of the speakers. But the purple corner didn't go away. It was reduced, but still there.

I figured the speakers were just plain too close to the TV, and I couldn't rearrange at that apartment to get them further away. So I just lived with it.

2 weeks ago we moved from OK to WI, and the speakers got packed up a week or two earlier than the TV. The speakers were in the garage, but the purple spotch remained! My degaussing ring was packed, so I figured it was just resilient. A week later and the purple splotch didn't go away (a CRT degausses itself every time you turn it on.)

Finally we moved (purple splotch remained) and I decided to try to do something about it again. Degaussing didn't work, even with the speakers nowhere close to the TV. I started thinking somehow the TV had been damaged during one of the moves, and somehow the shadow mask had come loose in that corner.

So last weekend I got an old 25" TV that my parents were no longer using. It is probably 15 years old, but it still has a decent picture and S-Video input. So that went in the living room and the 27" went on my workbench. It is always less stressful to work on something when you know it doesn't have to be used in the near future, if ever. Let the fun begin.

After perusing this CRT FAQ, I decided to take it apart to see what could be seen. Hmmm. Nothing obviously out of alignment (such as the FAQ mentioned alignment magnets.) But it said I might be able to fix it by applying magnets to the side. So I did. I happened to have some strip magnets in my parts drawer. Applying them to the side of the TV, slightly diagonally, with duct tape seemed to clear up the purple splotch. But an orange spot developed in the upper right corner. More magnets, also diagonally cleared that up. And it stayed mostly gone for a couple days.

But I wasn't satisfied. Applying 1/2" of magnets to the side of the TV with duct tape just didn't seem like a great solution. Besides - the magnets were almost symmetrical...hmmm. And then I started noticing the convergence was off too. Maybe they were related?

I called a TV repair shop to see what someone more knowledgeable than I thought. The service tech / owner was convinced that if a degaussing ring wouldn't take it out, the TV was toast. He did offer to take a look at it, but hauling a 27" TV around town wasn't my idea of fun. So back to the FAQ and I started reading about how to calibrate such a beast. Seemed like you just needed a source for a cross hatch and a solid red field, a bit of patience, and a healthy dose of caution, since there is 50,000 volts floating around back there. The cross hatch and solid red were supplied from my Avia DVD. After marking them to know where they were to begin with, I started messing around with those 6 round magnets at the back end of the CRT:

About an hour later I couldn't seem to make it much better, though the purity rings were certainly affecting the purple splotch. I could get rid of it entirely, but then the right side of the screen would be all messed up. And I couldn't seem to get the convergence right. I could get the center converged, but the corners were always messed up.

Back to the FAQ, I realized I had missed an important part of the convergence. Once you get the center converged, you have to loosen the deflection coil and push it this way and that to get the corners to converge. And there was the root of my problem, staring me in the face the whole time. The deflection coil was actually a bit loose. The rubber wedges weren't tight against it at all.

Another half-hour of futzing and I couldn't quite get it, but I then realized the entire deflection coil wasn't close enough to the tube. Over the years, the coil had slid backwards and down, creating my purple splotch in the upper left and a smaller orange splotch in the upper right. Finally, success! Another few minutes of adjustment and I got the convergence correct on the corners. Then I went back and touched up the purity. The solid color fields on the Avia DVD were actually solid for the first time in a long time. No hacky magnets; the TV just needed adjustment.

Then I took the time to go through the Avia DVD again and adjust the user controls, and even muck around in the service menu a bit to get the sharpness down to where it wasn't adding any artifacts (zero on the user controls still wasn't low enough.)

The TV looks excellent now, for a standard definition TV anyway.

System Process using high CPU while copying files over the network

2006-04-30T21:10:00.000-05:00

The title states it all. I was having a problem with my computer. Anytime I'd copy files to it over the network, the System process would start eating tons of CPU, as high as 80%. This would bog my computer down so it was unusable while the files were being copied. Totally unacceptable.

I knew I had a problem a while ago, I just decided to track it down for good tonight. Previously I had tried switching Ethernet cards. Nothing changed.

Further digging with Process Explorer showed that it was the srv.sys driver inside the System process taking up the CPU. That's Microsoft's file server driver. Huh?

A google search wasn't particularly useful, though some people seemed to have the problem with VMWare. So I uninstalled it, as well as Microsoft Virtual PC, and my network sniffer driver. Still nothing. I also disabled my vcool.sys which runs in a loop to keep my AMD processor cooler. Still nothing.

Then I tried copying files, not across the network, but to my own computer. d:\test\ to \\127.0.0.1\d$\test2\. That exhibited the problem too, driving the System process up to 100%!

On a whim I tried the same thing on my wife's computer. Hers exibited the same problem! But both my work laptop and desktop, nor my file server have the problem. Hmmm. The only common thing between mine and my wife's computer is Avast! virus scanner. Uninstalled it. Problem went away. Yippie! How annoying.

So now I'm trying Free AVG. Hopefully it won't cause the same problem, or a completely different problem.

Closed Captioning from the TiVo

2006-04-23T16:36:00.000-05:00

I've been extracting TV shows off my TiVo and burning them to DVD for years now. Except I wanted to save the closed captioning. Previously this involved:

Extract the episodes
Edit them with TyTool, merge into .mpg
Reencode them to make them smaller and DVD compliant
Turn a bunch of episodes into one show with merge.tcl
Telnet into my TiVo with a custom Telnet program that outputs everything with timestamps to a file
Run tivovbi, which grabs the CC off the current show and outputs it to the console
Play the episodes. Wait until they are done playing (~10 hours.)
Split the output from the telnet program into multiple files, one for each episode
Copy the contents of each episode into an Excel spreadsheet
Also copy the cuts from TyTool into the Excel spreadsheet
Copy the output columns from the spreadsheet into Word
Run a find/replace macro.
Copy contents into a new .srt file
Run the .srt file through two different conversion programs to get it into the right type and sync'd with the audio
Import the subtitles into the DVD authoring program

It was a huge pain, particularly the realtime capturing, splitting, and work with Excel.

But now TyTool maintains the CC information! This makes the process much quicker and easier:

Extract the episodes.
Edit them with TyTool, mux into .MPG (old muxer) and .VOB files (new muxer).
Reencode the .MPGs to make them smaller and DVD compliant resolution.
Make a pseudo-DVD with all the episodes from the .VOBs with TyTool.
Extract the CC information from the pseudo-DVD with VSRip.
Convert the CC information into a usable format with scctools.
Use the same two subtitle conversion programs from above to make subtitles (optional.)
Import the subtitles and CC information into the DVD authoring program.

This takes a lot less time, and I end up with the original CC information preserved in the final DVDs along with subtitles for the CC-impaired DVD players (like portable ones.) There's no syncing necessary, and very little actual work. I could probably write a script to handle steps 4-7, though unfortunately not all the programs have command-line interfaces so it would have to be more of a macro that clicks buttons and such for you. However, I do an entire season (~21 episodes) at a time, and the whole process, excluding re-encoding only took a few hours yesterday.

I tried avoiding creating the pseudo-DVD and extracting the CC info right from the mux'd .MPGs using the recommended General Parser, but at best it missed some of the captions, and at worst it crashed, depending on whether or not I used the new or old muxer in TyTool. VSRip works fine, however.

Boot Camp -> Virtualization

2006-04-13T00:03:00.000-05:00

Over the past few weeks, the world has gone nuts over Boot Camp, Apple's unsupported beta application that resizes your partition allowing room for XP to create one, and a boot loader to select which one. Yippie.

All of a sudden all sorts of Windows Weenies are scooping up Macs with their sleek hardware that can now run XP so they can run that one application they HAVE to have but is only available for Windows.

But lets face it - dual booting is a less than ideal solution to the problem. Dual booting takes time, and even if Apple eventually uses my idea from long ago to hibernate one OS and wake up the other. Admittidely, I was talking about doing it on non-OEM hardware, but they did do the automatic shrinking and the fancy boot loader. But OSX can't be hibernated, that I know of. Either way you're still talking about switching back and forth which can take several minutes. XP unhibernates pretty quickly, but it can take some time to stabilize afterward and stop swapping, reloading the network, letting all the applications reconnect, etc.

A much better solution would be virtualization. Run XP on OSX or vice-versa, it doesn't matter. Or run them side-by-side giving both access to the hardware in turn. Whatever. You'll take a speed hit from dual booting, but not a terrible one.

The REAL problem is the UI. Aqua sitting next to Luna or Glass? I don't think so. At best it would be on two different screens (which is not an option for laptops on the road). There's some solvable technical problems like maintaining the clipboard between the two, but it still wouldn't be much different than having a Mac sit next to your Windows box with two monitors and one keyboard/mouse controlling both with Synergy.

Then there's WINE. Let me tell you right now that you'll never see any sort of WINE-based anything come out of Apple, even in an unsupported manner. WINE is fighting a losing battle. They are trying to implement the Win32 API. If you've ever read Raymon Chen's blog, you'll quickly understand what a losing battle this is. The Win32 API is so old and crufty, they've had to put patches into it to handle wacky applications that depended on previous versions of Windows, down to emulating certain structures within Explorer because really bad applications depend on them being in certain places at certain times. The only thing that will ever be good at running Windows applications is Windows. You could stick the same people from the Win32 API team onto the WINE team with Windows source code in hand and they'd STILL have TONS of problems getting WINE to run with the same compatibility that Windows itself provides. WINE can be tuned to run a handful of apps well, but that's not the goal. I firmly believe Apple will never depend on a technology so doomed to always be behind and ultimately fail - it would ruin the user experience, which is what Apple is all about.

So what's the answer? Remote Desktop, sort of.

So here's the dillemma - Windows applications require Windows to be running. But Windows expects to have things like a start menu and a desktop which visually interfere with OSX. Many applications depend on it as well. So it has to be there. But no one ever said it has to be VISIBLE. So here's my idea: Run Windows XP on top of OSX within virtualization. But hide it. Apple would need some hooks into the OS similar to Remote Desktop's. Heck, they could even login to XP WITH Remote Desktop. Except instead of displaying the entire desktop, you just hook into an application. Grab the window of the application and put it into a host window within OSX. The concept is very similar to how X Windows works, except it would have to be shimmed into XP. All of a sudden OSX and Windows XP applications can work side by side, layered on top of each other, etc. With some additional hacking (either with XP themes or with the OSX host window) you could put an Aqua shell around Windows applications to tie them in more seemlessly. Again, you'd need some hooks into XP to handle things like maintaining the clipboard, but these problems that have already been solved with current virtualization implementations anyway.

This sort of thing is already possible with things like PCAnywhere or VNC, which can grab hold of a single window instead of the whole desktop. The problem is that both are based on bitmap captures which tend to be much slower and less reliable than something like Remote Desktop which hooks in at a different (more efficient, faster) level. If you hook in there, any app that works over Remote Desktop would work on OSX.

Now, you'd still need a way to switch to XP full-screen in case you need to get to one of those tray icons or the start menu, but it could remain hidden until it is absolutely necessary and the user requests it. In this way, you could get (full-screen) games to work too. As soon as a Window application goes full-screen, poof, Windows XP is shown full-screen within its normal virtualization. As long as your virtual video card supports OpenGL (which VMWare is currently implementing) you could even get a lot of games to work. When the game exits, poof, you're shoved back into OSX and Windows goes back into stealth mode in the background.

This is about as close as I can imagine OSX will come to natively running OSX and Windows applications side by side, much the way OS/2 ran native OS/2 and Win 3.1 applications side by side.

If they get OSX to this point, I might even consider buying a Mac.

What goes around comes around.

2006-04-09T22:43:00.000-05:00

So I was digging through some old papers, throwing some out and organizing the rest before packing them up when I realized something interesting. My first and last computer science courses were both C++ classes. Not were they just taught using C++, but they were both ABOUT C++.

My first class was CPS 216: Object Oriented Programming, C++ (Spring 1998) taught by Dr. Bill Bultman
My last (besides my thesis) was CS5373: Object-Oriented Programming & Visual C++ (Spring 2004) by Dr. Blayne Mayfield.

The last one was actually CS5373 and CS3373 - the grad level course was required to do an extra project, but they were basically the same course.

The first course was your basic CS1 class covering for, if, while, etc, and ending up in pointers and finally objects. The last jumped right into object-oriented programming quite heavily, with an occasional diversion into Visual C++ and MFC. I just thought it was quite an interesting coincidence.

Anyway, for your amusement, below is a snippet of code from that first class that I like to bring out occasionally for giggles.

// Problem 4.18
// 2-11-98
// Inputs two integers. Outputs whether they are both positive, both negative, or one of each.
// Note: zero is positive.
#include
#include
int main() {
   cout << "Input two integers: " << flush;
   int One;
   int Two;
   cin >> One >> Two;
   if (!(One-abs (One)) && !(Two-abs (Two)))
      cout << "Both integers are positive.";
   else if ((One-abs (One)) && (Two-abs (Two)))
         cout << "Both integers are negative.";
      else cout << "One integers is positive, one integer is negative.";
return 0;
}

My professor's only comment?

what an ugly way to check for sign!

And he was right, of course. I guess I didn't know about the < or > operator yet, but I was smart enough to check the help file for Turbo C++ and find the abs() function and that 0 means false in C++.

Weekend Woes

2006-03-26T14:43:00.000-06:00

First off, on Friday night I participated in a podcast. Check it out here.

Then I put together a new file server from a combination of my old server and parts that my employer was throwing out during the move.

Interesting points:

For some reason, one of my Western Digital 60 GB drives appears not to like to be on the same chain as one exactly like it. It occasionally doesn't get recognized, and while running it seemed to lock the machine up occasionally.
Windows 2003 Server does NOT automatically add a drive letter for hard drives you add after installation. I thought my partition tables were hosed at first.
It is possible to downgrade a Fasttrak66 back into an Ultra66. Basically flash the firmware, turn off the computer, clip the resister, and turn it back on. Why would I undo a hack like this? Windows 2003 does not have drivers for a Fasttrak66, but it does have drivers for an Ultra66, and I don't need the RAID functionality anyway.
The Tekram P6B40-A4X motherboard I'm using claims to support ACPI, but Windows 2003 installer decided otherwise. When forced to use ACPI (press F5 when Windows installer says to press F6 to load a driver), it boots but refuses to shutdown. Instead it reboots. After trying most everything on this page to fix it, I finally gave up and went back to a non-ACPI HAL. What this means is that 1) when you push the power button, it turns off, rather than going through a shutdown and 2) when you tell it to shutdown, instead of powering off it stays at a screen that says "It is now safe to turn off your computer." How 1995. My other motherboard choices (2 different Asus boards with the same Intel 440BX chipset) would have limited me to 384MB of RAM and tended to have shutdown problems of their own anyway.
Windows XP Network Bridges aren't very efficient. I was getting about half the throughput I got by just using a 100Mbit switch.
XCOPY, XCOPY32, and ROBOCOPY are all slightly dumb with their handling of short filenames. If you have a file named blahbl~1.doc and another file named blahblahblah.doc on your source, it is very likely that all three of these utilities will get confused when you use one of the options to sync the destination with the source. XXCOPY has a "Preserve short file name" option that solves this problem, but that utility pissed me off in the past when it refused to run because I had upgraded to XP SP2 without upgrading XXCOPY. So I wrote a quick little utility to rename all my blahbl~1.doc files to something like blahbl-Recovered1.doc, since all of them were files I had undeleted to recover from a massive delete many years ago.

Anyway, back to house cleaning.

Generalizing the obvious - thoughts on stability.

2006-03-19T23:10:00.000-06:00

Think back 10 years to 1996. Windows 95 was quickly taking hold and replacing Windows 3.1 installations in droves. 486's were being replaced with the first Pentiums. Desktop computer stability was terrible at best. In fact, Windows 95 would crash after 49.7 days, which wasn't fixed until over 3 years after its release.

Sure, there were Unix boxes and Netware 3.x servers that had some very impressive uptimes. But I can tell you from experience that keeping Netware 4.11 running for more than a few days was a serious challenge. Trying to couple Novell's service packs with 3rd party NLMs was a recipe for disaster, but an unavoidable one it seemed.

Rebooting was something you did daily, if not several times a day. Explorer crashing? Reboot. Just finished playing a game? Better reboot or you'll have problems soon. Oh, that's just the crappy Windows 9x architecture, you might say. Windows NT was no better. NT 4.0 SP2 was so bad it caused disk corruption. BSODs were very common.

What happened? People started complaining and Microsoft focused on stability. Windows 2000 was actually quite stable even before there was a service pack for it. How'd they do that? Well, when you get a huge company like Microsoft to focus on stability, stability happens. They identified that not only was the OS problematic, but even if the OS code was perfect, a faulty driver could easily cause a BSOD. So they introduced the concept of driver signing.

Driver signing, a service of the Microsoft Hardware Quality Labs is fairly simple: The hardware manufacturer runs a series of tests on their hardware/software combination provided by Microsoft and simply sees if the driver does anything bad. They basically put the system into a watchdog mode to make sure the driver stays within its bounds while the tests exercise the features of the hardware under various conditions (such as low memory, etc). You can actually put your own system into the same watchdog mode with Microsoft's Driver Verifier, included with Windows. The manufacturer then submits the logs from those tests along with the driver, and sometimes the hardware itself to Microsoft for verification. If Microsoft deems it worthy (by running their own tests and/or analyzing the logs), then Microsoft signs the driver and sends it back. I wasn't able to find any prices, but I suspect such testing costs the hardware company thousands of dollars per test, and the actual price probably varies depending on the type of device / driver being tested. (If you have any information about actual costs, please post in the comments.)

Even Linux has moved to a similar idea with its kernel. From the linux-kernel mailing list FAQ:

Some vendors distribute binary modules (i.e. modules without available source code under a free software license). As the source is not freely available, any bugs uncovered whilst such modules are loaded cannot be investigated by the kernel hackers. All problems discovered whilst such a module is loaded must be reported to the vendor of that module, not the Linux kernel hackers and the linux-kernel mailing list. The tainting scheme is used to identify bug reports from kernels with binary modules loaded: such kernels are marked as "tainted" by means of the MODULE_LICENSE tag. If a module is loaded that does not specify an approved license, the kernel is marked as tainted.

Basically, the people on the kernel mailing list aren't going to help you if you have a tainted kernel.

Back on topic, it worked. Windows, for all intents and purposes, is a very stable operating system. Uptimes are measured in weeks or months. The only time I have to reboot my desktop is when I have to power it off to change something with hardware or on Patch Tuesday. Yes, rebooting due to a patch is annoying, but it doesn't represent a problem with stability, just a problem with dynamically changing core parts of the operating system while it is running. Supposedly this is going to change with Vista.

Anyway, I just thought it was interesting that 10 years ago rebooting your computer at least was normal. In fact, keeping a desktop on overnight was not very common. As of right now, my desktop has been up for 10 days. Though, technically I cheated because I hibernated it a couple times while switching my desk around last weekend. It seems to average about 14 days before I'm forced to reboot due to an Avast! update or a Windows Update. My MN-700 router has now been up and running for 5 days now that I got my VPN issues solved.

I can almost blog with Opera.

2006-03-17T22:19:00.000-06:00

As I mentioned in the past I use Opera at home for my primary web browser, mostly because it is so much faster than IE. At work, I use IE because I tend to visit sites like MSDN which have historically caused problems for any browser but IE, and at work I need things to just WORK and not get in the way of what I'm trying to accomplish.

Up until now, I had to resort to using IE for blogging because Opera didn't have a WYSIWYG editor. Opera 9 does, but it didn't work with blogger.com. Finally, I can force Opera to mask itself as Mozilla, and the WYSIWYG interface shows up. In the past, this would crash Opera. I just upgraded to 8265 - Opera 9 Preview weekly build. Now it doesn't crash Opera. But it doesn't work quite right either. I can't move images by dragging them around, but worse, the line-wrap is all screwed up. Sometimes it line wraps, sometimes it doesn't. It is functional, but annoying right now. That's a good start I guess.

Oh, selection in the WYSIWYG editor is a little wonky too. I'm used to dragging above or below a window and still having the horizontal selection work. It doesn't in this WYSIWYG editor. How strange.

Edit: Turns out the wonky line wraps transfer into the HTML too. I wonder if Opera is inserting non-breaking spaces or something.

Fun with VPNs and VoIP

2006-03-16T23:39:00.000-06:00

I work from home 2 days of the week. Soon, this will be every day since my wife and I are moving back to WI. Normally I can be pretty productive from home; I have broadband and I VPN into work. Everything is very usable: our source control, remote desktop into the lab machines, browsing files, etc.

But there was one pesky problem. I don't have a landline, so the occasional conference call would chew through my cell phone minutes pretty quickly. So I tried to schedule my days working from home when we don't have a conference call, but that won't be possible once we move back to WI.

Recently, a solution to the problem presented itself. As part of the company moving offices, they also switched to a VoIP phone system and purchased a bunch of Polycom SoundPoint IP 501 phones and hooked them up to an Asterisk box. Hmmm...would a cable modem provide enough bandwidth to run one? Vonage thinks so, so why not?

But there were a few technical problems to overcome first. Trying to get SIP to work straight through the Internet was not only potentially problematic, it is potentially a huge security risk. So the phone would have to go through a VPN.

Now, I could just hook the thing up behind a Windows box with Internet Connection Sharing, tell it to share the VPN connection and be done with it. However, I believe a phone is an appliance that should just work. You plug it in and it works. No double-clicking on this or that, no worrying about needing a computer up and running to have that conference call. So the goal was something that just worked - plug the phone in, and it connects. If the VPN dies, it gets reconnected. If the cable modem gets reset, the VPN is re-established.

If you've been following along, I recently got my MN-700 router to run Linux with some customized Asus WL-500g firmware. After some digging, I found out the custom firmware supports PPTP with MPPE encryption already. Sort of. It supports PPTP because the router will do PPPoE, and other VPNish things that some broadband providers require. That's not what I wanted. I didn't want all my traffic going through the VPN, and the default setup disables MPPE/MPPC, and my work's VPN requires MPPE.

After 2 nights of playing around with pptp and pppd, I finally got it connected. I'm not a Linux guy, but I'm no stranger to Linux and pppd, as that's what I used to connect my TiVo to my network for several years. In fact, I also wrote this WHY-TO back then to help other people troubleshoot TiVo-related pppd problems.

It turns getting it connected was the easy part. One of the scripts that I thought was only run on bootup turns out is run anytime the router renews its WAN IP address. The result was that pptp/pppd was being fired up again, after 12 hours. It failed miserably, but continued to try anyway in a recursive fashion until all the router's memory was gone, the kernel killed initd, and it rebooted. So every 12 hours my router would reboot. This took me about a week to track down since I headed down the wrong path thinking the dhcp client was somehow detecting the pptp connection and trying to start it up again.

I also found out that if the VPN fails (server is rebooted, internet connection goes down, etc), pppd doesn't always sucessfully kill its child pptp process, and subsequent attempts to start pptp fail to connect properly, resulting in no connection, and an endless loop of retries. So instead of using pppd's "persist" option, I used a script to call pppd with the "nodetach" option. When it exits, it kills all instances of pppd and pptp, then fires up pppd again. It is hacky, but it works great.

A bit more messing around with dnsmasq's --server feature to redirect certain DNS requests through the VPN, and an additional iptables filter to prevent my laptop's synergy client from connecting to my desktop at work and all is well.

The VoIP side is much less interesting, because I didn't do much of it. My coworker setup the Polycom phone so it would work through NAT (the router actually NATs my local network into the VPN connection - this prevents the need for complicated routing on the server side). Then there was a bit more configuration so that both phones (work and home) ring, but otherwise it just works.

So in typical Computer Science fashion, it was a lot of hard work to make life really easy. From here on out, there's nothing special about my phone setup. My cable modem and router have to be on and the phone has to be plugged into it. Coworkers can call my extension and not care whether I'm at my desk at home or work.

The best part is, the voice quality is quite good, despite all the layers and muck in between. I haven't experimented too much, but if it becomes a problem I can activate some QoS stuff on the router to give the phone priority.

How to take apart a 4th Gen iPod with Clickwheel.

2006-03-15T18:26:00.000-06:00

More on why later, but I had to take apart my iPod. I did a search but came up with a crappy PDF that didn't really help. I ended up developing my own way, which is similar to this. But instead of using a flathead screwdriver, use a flat utility knife like this:

These knives are meant for scraping paint off of windows and such and are available in the paint section of...just about any place that sells paint, including Wal*Mart. I think I got mine for under $2.

Edit: Since this page gets so many hits, I felt obligated to post some better pictures of the process.

Put the blade into the tiny crack between the white plastic and the metal base:

Then angle the blade down towards the metal base (almost perpendicular to the iPod) and push in. The metal will separate from the plastic a bit and the knife will slide between the two.

Now use the knife like a lever and pry the plastic up. There's a little lip down in the plastic that your knife should grip.

Once you have one side loose, the other will pop out very easily. Just open it like a hinge:

http://www.notpopular.com/blog/uploaded/ipod/DSC00232.jpg

Using a knife like this will prevent you from messing up the plastic trying to jam a big fat screwdriver between the plastic and the metal. Once you have it open, you'll see that the hard drive can simply be unplugged and you'll need a small (T6) torx screwdriver to take out the 6 screws holding the circuit board in place. RadioShack sells a great set of screwdrivers that includes the T6.

Note that I've also used this process on a 3rd Gen iPod and it would probably work with others as well.

Anyway - why did I need to take apart my iPod? My clickwheel stopped working. Most of the time when an iPod breaks, the hard drive has died. Mine? 3/4 of the clickwheel stopped working. And it seemed to be temperature sensitive, since it worked when it was cold but not when it was warm. I'm not entirely sure when it stopped working, if it was something I did to it like leave it in a cold car or get glass cleaner in the cracks of the clickwheel.

Well, the clickwheel is firmly attached to the front plastic of the case, so I had to get a new case. A quick search on E-bay for "ipod 20gb parts" revealed lots of auctions like this one. So $22.50 and 7 days later my iPod is working find again.

My iPod might be a flaming pile of poo, but I still use it almost every day. Without a click wheel it becomes about as useful as a Shuffle.

Lamar Ignite I820 Review

2006-01-22T01:38:00.000-06:00

After discovering that sitting on my butt all day is not really doing wonders for my knees, I decided to invest in a decent elliptical machine.

My criteria was fairly simple: under $1000, with a fairly long stride. Elliptical machines vary greatly in price, from $150 at Wal*Mart to $5000 and up for those designed for use in gyms and such. I decided early on that I didn't want to spend more than $1000 because I wasn't entirely sure how much I would use it, and I wanted to make darn sure I was going to use it before investing thousands into one. I figure one under $1000 may not be the greatest, but if I "use it up" then I can justify getting a good one, but if I don't, it isn't a huge amount of money wasted.

$1000 put me squarely at the very high end of the department store (Sears, Academy, etc) offerings, and at the low to middle range of the fitness store offerings, depending on the particular store.

There seemed to be a pretty big gap in the fitness store offerings - they generally had a model or two under $1000, and then the next model up would be $1500 or more.

After a few days of research on the Internet and browsing some fitness stores, I decided on the Lamar Ignite I820. I found it on sale for $599 assembled, which was a pretty good deal, considering it seems to MSRP for around $800 or so. It has an 18" stride, so it feels more like running than some of the shorter stride models which feel more like a stair climber. It seems to have almost exactly the same design as the Schwinn 418, which is actually manufactered by Nautilus. This isn't surprising as the founder of Lamar, Kevin Lamar, was formally the CEO of Nautilus. Decision made, I borrowed an F150 to get it home (it barely fit in the bed on its side). Onto the review:

Lamar Ignite I820 Review
In a nutshell, don't buy this machine unless you don't care about a squeaky machine, or happen to be pretty handy.

Ultimately, the machine seems to be built pretty well. Not fantasic, but pretty well. There are 5 "joints" on each side of this machine:

A. Handlebar Arm attached to "Handlebar Mast"
B. Handlebar Arm attached to Pedal Arm
C. Pedal Arm attached to Roller Arm
D. Roller Arm attached to Base (spins 360 degrees)
E. Roller Arm to Base Rails (wheels)

These are all plainly visible when looking at the side of the machine, though a plastic shroud covers each joint when fully assembled.

The main problems I've experienced with the machine stem from these joints. Basically joints A, B, and C are a sleeve bearing. I'm assuming D is a ball bearing, and the wheels (joint E) also have ball bearings in them. For the most part, A, D and E haven't been a problem, but B, and C started causing problems from about the second use.

The problem was not necessary that they are sleeve bearings; after all, they don't move all the way around, in fact joint C probably only moves 10 degrees back and forth. But yet, they were squeaking. Well, one was squeaking. Another started grinding. Another was clicking.

Over the course of the two weeks I've had the machine, I've taken apart all of the sleeve bearings and regreased them. For B and C, this involved some very annoying clip washers like this:

I also found that B and C had VERY LITTLE OR NO GREASE IN THEM. These bearings must have been assembled at the factory this way because the assembly instructions show them pre-assembled. There was a very thin coat of a very thin oil on them, but it was clearly not enough to prevent noise or wear. There's simply no excuse for that. Joint A had some grease in it, but it was assembled by the store I purchased it from. I ended up taking it apart and regreasing it too because I thought it might have been causing problems as well, though it probably wasn't.

After all that, the machine is now pretty quiet. The wheels still obviously make some noise and the rails need fairly regular greasing. But at least I can get through a 30 minute workout now without being annoyed to the point of stopping and grabbing my wrenches and grease.

Oh, before I forget, I had to re-glue the left foot pad to the pedal on the first day too, since it was making a rather annoying noise as well.

In the end I'll probably end up keeping it, assuming that the machine stays quiet and the wrenches can stay in the drawer. But I certainly can't recommend this machine to anyone else.

Windows Wackiness

2006-01-08T23:11:00.000-06:00

As I've mentioned before I have this nifty DOS boot CD I use occasionally. I have DOS network drivers and all kinds of stuff on there to help me do things like Ghost and such. The other day I was trying to use that CD and having problems connecting to my desktop computer via Microsoft (Netbios, SMB) networking. Specifically, it was telling me Access Denied. Yes, I'm sure I had the password correct.

I previously had problems connecting to a computer that was multi-homed, so I disabled all but the Ethernet adapter. Still Access Denied. The Event Audit Log showed it trying to connect and the same Access Denied.

So I tried my wife's computer. Same thing. Hmmmm.

Since my Guest account is disabled, I used the Guest account to connect to my wife's computer and connecting to \Shared Documents. That worked. Hmmmm. That was enough to get me through that particular project and I ignored the inherent problem of connecting from DOS to either computer's Administrator account.

So I decided to revisit this problem this evening and try to get it worked out. I tried to connect to a 3rd computer (server, running WinXP). That worked, even with its Administrator account. So I thought ah-HA - it has a few pending Windows Updates. One of them surely must break compatibility with DOS networking. So I installed the updates one by one. When I was done, it still worked. Hmmmm.

So I had 1 computer that worked and 2 that didn't. Something must be different between them. I dug around in Local Policies for a while, thinking maybe something turned on encryption for the MS networking. Nope. I compared my desktop's local policies one by one to the 3rd computer's local policies - no important differences. How about those IPC$ and admin$ shares; maybe those disappeared. Nope.

So I fired up a Win2k VMWare image. Everything worked fine from there - I could connect to all 3 computers using the Administrator account.

I also tried connecting to my computer with the (reenabled) Guest account. That worked. Ok, how about a new account, WITH a password. That worked. Now that's strange. It had nothing to do with whether the account had a password on it.

On a whim I reset my Administrator password (to the same thing it was before) and voilà, I could connect from DOS to my C$ share. One by one I went around and reset passwords (to the same thing they were before) on all the accounts I was trying to use, and everything started working.

The bottom line is that apparently Windows can get confused sometimes. If you are getting an Access Denied when trying to connect to XP with DOS networking, try resetting your password. It really shouldn't do anything, but apparently it does.

I suspect only the Windows developers would actually be able to tell me why resetting a user's password would fix this problem, and why the only apparent symptom was that DOS clients couldn't connect. I suspect it has something to do with how and where the password is stored - perhaps it is actually stored in more than one place and they somehow got out of sync on my computers.

Post-back: Update to previous entries.

2005-12-23T23:34:00.000-06:00

Slashdot has Slashbacks, so I'm having a post-back: Conclusions to previously open-ended stories.

Kyocera 7135 and Alltel
A month after getting the 7135, I've concluded it is a keeper. The only real downfalls are that it is a little bigger than I'd like and the battery life is shorter than I'd like. There is/was a Samsung PDA phone that Sprint offered running Palm OS 4.0 that is smaller, but my coworker has one and says the battery life is terrible and getting worse, the touch screen is failing, and you can't even put custom ring-tones on it. The battery life on the 7135 isn't great either, but I got an extended battery for it on E-bay for under $10 that works a little better.

I bought a (uber-cheap $18) 256MB SD card at Wal*Mart to play with the phone's MP3 capabilities. It works OK, but isn't anything special. The card access is stupidly slow, so it doesn't work for previewing images from our digital camera either. Oh well. Maybe I'll get some Palm street-atlas software and use the card for maps.

On the upside, connectivity is spectacular - the fact I can use Alltel's QNC service OR dial up to an ISP and only use plan minutes is quite cool. It turns out there's 3 browsers pre-installed on the phone. One text-only from Qualcomm, one Kyocera branded generic browser, and one that only works with their high-speed service. The Kyocera branded generic browser seems to work fine.

I can't complain about Alltel's coverage, though we'll see how it fairs on the drive to WI in a couple days. Another coworker is about ready to dump Cingular because he had trouble getting service in the middle of downtown Edmond. Still another complains about Sprint because his phone goes into analog mode when in the office and sucks down his battery. My 7135 gets a full digital signal from Alltel in the same office.

I downloaded and installed the 7135's API as well as Palm's development environment, which looks pretty spiffy (based on Eclipse). However, with all the freeware and shareware Palm apps out there, I can't think of anything I'd want to write for it.

Scanning Photos
After struggling to get some sort of color correction done on our wedding photos I simply gave up. The auto-correction using the black didn't work quite right. I even tried Photoshop CS2's color matching feature. Nothing worked well. I'll let my wife do the correction as necessary as she gets prints of them.

Silicone as a Speaker Surround
The silicone I put on my car's speaker appears to be working just fine. The buzzing hasn't returned since.

Memory
The 512MB DIMM is back in my computer and the Unknown Hard Error hasn't returned. My computer appears to be as stable as it was before the upgrade.

Afrin
It turns out Afrin isn't so good for you, or so says my doctor. Apparently if you use it for more than a couple days, your nose gets addicted to it, so when you try to stop using it, it gets blocked again. Luckily a couple days after I posted about it I went to go see my doctor. I've been on 3 different antibiotics since, and I still can't seem to kick this sinus thing. He started with a simple 5-day course of something, which didn't work very well. Then he prescribed 20 days of Amoxicillin, 2000mg, twice a day, along with a steriod for the first 6 days. When that didn't finish it off, I went to see an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist. I'm now in the middle of an 8-week (!) course of Levaquin, with a nasal steroid (Nasanex). I also get the unpleasant experience of getting to do sinus rinses 2-3 times a day. Never done a sinus rinse? You get to squirt 4 ounces of saline up one nostil only to have it come out the other. Then you blow your nose and rinse the other way. Weeeeee. Ick. It seems to be holding the infection at bay, but I don't think I've quite kicked it yet, as I still occasionally feel the sinus pressure returning. A couple tylenol and a sinus rinse usually take care of it though.

MN-700
My Microsoft MN-700 router, blissfully unaware of its own identity crisus seems to be working just fine. I've had a bit of trouble with my Cox connection dropping packets since then, but it was unrelated to the router.

Lawn Mower
Ye old lawn mower still works fine. It generally starts on the 2nd or 3rd pull now, and seems to work best when starting it at 3/4 throttle. The only issue I have with it is that it seems to either leak or just expose the gas in the tank. My garage smells like gasoline for days after using the mower, and every time I use it, it seems to be empty. I thought it was just evaporating through the vented gas cover, so I covered it with saran wrap and a rubber band, but that doesn't seem to help. Maybe I'll investigate further.

Air Conditioner
After looking around the neighborhood at the new duplexes being built, I'm pretty sure the new air conditioner they installed is still undersized. It did cycle on and off more than the old one, but still couldn't quite keep up on the really hot days. I suspect they cheaped out so they didn't have to replace the A-coil on the inside with a bigger one, but instead just replaced the outside unit with one that matched the (undersized) A-coil. Oh well, just a few more months in this place.

Cool Mouse Wheel utility

2005-12-14T23:22:00.000-06:00

Scenario: You're browsing a web page or a document or whatever, and you try to use the scroll wheel, but it doesn't seem to work. So you click on the document, then scroll, and magically it works. If you're lucky, you didn't accidentally click on a link. This works because Windows sends the scroll commands from the MOUSE to whatever window has the KEYBOARD focus. How intuitive.

Due to the way Microsoft Windows handles the scroll wheel, over the years it has trained me to always left click on something benign in the window before trying to scroll. How entirely annoying.

I was going to write a utility to fix it, but I found one that already existed instead: KatMouse.

This little utility will send the scroll wheel "clicks" to whatever window is directly beneath the cursor, even if it doesn't have focus or isn't on top. If you tell it to (via a registry setting) it will bring that window to the front too.

As a side effect, if you hold your cursor over a horizontal scroll bar, you can scroll horizontally with your normal vertical scroll wheel.

It also has some interesting features that use the middle mouse button to push a window backwards or bring one forward. I had to disable this feature because I use my middle mouse button in Opera and it was interfering.

Unfortunately, this wonderful little utility interfered with Synergy. KatMouse managed to grab the scroll wheel clicks before Synergy and supressed them. As a result, the scroll wheel didn't work at all on my Synergy client unless I disabled KatMouse first. Well, disabling it is as simple as clicking on the taskbar icon, but I wanted something more automatic.

Since I had already altered Synergy for my own uses (due to my strange combination of using a KVM and Synergy, and a bug-fix) I simply altered Synergy to turn off KatMouse when my cursor left my Synergy server, and turn it back on when the cursor returned. It is a little ugly, but I just send a mouse click event to the KatMouse window handle. Let me know if you're interested in this strange hack, and I'll post the code to do it.

Now all I have to do is untrain myself from left clicking before scrolling.

Why TiVo is doomed

2005-12-02T20:02:00.000-06:00

I like TiVo. I have one. I'm even an "early adopter." I have a Series 1 TiVo hacked all to heck. It was not cheap ($200 for the device, $300 for drives, and another $200 for lifetime service) but I still like it.

For years people like John Dvorak have been predicting the death of TiVo. I just realized why they are right. I'm making a lot of assumptions about the business models of companies in an industry I've never worked in, but they seem reasonable to me. If I'm way off on something, let me know.

TiVo, by and large, is a service / software company. They are not a hardware company. They license out the design and have them manufactered by other companies like Sony, Phillips, and Huges. I'm fairly certain they subsidize the cost of each one too, either directly to the manufacturer or via rebates, or both. Every time you buy a TiVo, it COSTS TiVo money.

They try to make this money back with their $13 a month service. But what is this "service" really? The heart of the TiVo service is simply guide data, which you can get free with any standard (non-DVR) cable or satellite box. No value-added there.

Another part of the "service" is the software updates that come automatically. However, there's really only so much you can add to PVR software. As far as I'm concerned, TiVo perfected their DVR software sometime between version 3 and 4. As a note, my Series 1 is still on version 3. It is almost entirely bug-free, and feature-rich. So what did they do? Add useless stuff: A way to play MP3s and view Photos off your computer, both of which can be done easier and better by a host of other set-top or handheld devices. Extract video in a crippled fashion, which was accomplished LONG before TiVo ever authorized it, via hacking. With certain TiVos, you can burn DVDs, though you can't take out the commercials first. Recently they've added MORE ads to the box. How exactly is that value-added?

Recently they've struck deals with Yahoo, Apple and Sony. The first allows you to program your TiVo from Yahoo's site, something that's been available from TiVo's site for a LONG time. Nothing added there except a few press releases. The later is simply the natural marriage between extracting video and putting it on an iPod or PSP, which, by the way, was accomplished HOURS after the iPod Video release without any help from TiVo or press releases. So what's going on?

The biggest problem is that TiVo is STILL trying to provide a service when their product is STILL hardware.

TiVo's problem is that they can't seem to get into the market they deperately need to be in - Cable TV. If I would call up Cox and order a "TiVo", they'd bring me a DVR, possibly one that supports HD, distinctly lacking the TiVo brand anywhere on it. People call them TiVos, but they aren't. TiVo can't sell boxes to Cox (or Comcast, or any other cable company) because they don't make any money on the boxes. TiVo wants to sell a SERVICE, which is exactly what the cable companies are doing. The cable companies only charge about $4 a month extra for a DVR. How much of that $4 goes back to the manufacturer of the box? Probably none.

See, cable companies have a model where they buy hardware from companies like Scientific Atlanta and essentially rent it out to their customers, hopefully eventually at least breaking even before the box dies. This is a symbiotic relationship. SA makes money selling boxes, and the cable company adds value to their service and makes a little money too. Lets say, for a moment, that TiVo realized the error of their ways and tried to compete with Scientific Atlanta and just sell DVRs to cable companies at a fixed cost. Scientific Atlanta would blow them out of the water because they make their own hardware and TiVo does not. At most, they'd make a few dollars of a software licensing fee and the manufacturer of the box would get the rest. That's simply not enough to sustain TiVo. Plus, as mentioned above, the TiVo boxes really aren't that much better than your standard cable DVR. Yes, they are a little better, but the other companies have been catching up with features and stability for several years now.

The bottom line is that people really just want a DVR, and while TiVo makes the best DVR out there, they simply can't compete on price and they are losing ground with features. In the end, TiVo will lose the war in the revolution they started because DVRs are simply hardware and TiVo is not a hardware company.

The last of the wireless phone stuff.

2005-12-01T23:31:00.000-06:00

Well, they didn't make it easy, but we finally got new phones. 2 Kyocera 7135 PDA phones, 500 nationwide minutes, unlimited mobile to mobile, unlimited nights and weekends. But that doesn't mean they didn't try my patience first.

We went into the Stillwater Alltel on Sunday, filled out a sheet with all our information, plan, account, etc and was told it would take about 20 minutes. So we left. 5 minutes later they call to say they don't have any 7135's, but they would get some in on Monday. So we said we'd wait until Monday. 5 minutes later they call AGAIN to say they are only getting 1, but they could order a second and have it in by Wednesday. So I went back and talked to them, and they said they'd tag the phones as they came in with our name, and give us a call when they come in. I was *this* close to just going home and ordering everything online or via the phone, but I figured it would be easier to have them do it at the store. Wednesday rolls around and we didn't get a call (big surprise). That store's phone number wasn't even in the corporate guide, so we had to go to Google just to get the phone number. They said the phones were in, I asked if they could activate them and we would just go pick them up. 5 minutes on hold later, they say no, we'd need to give them more information.

An hour later we show up, they dig up the sheet, and all their "salespeople" are busy. So we wait a good 20 minutes. Finally a salesguy takes our sheet and says he has all the information he needs, but they don't have any 7135's. I told him to go look in back, and lo and behold, 2 7135's come out. For such a small store, the communication between employees is simply terrible.

Another 20 minutes later and we have 2 activated 7135's. But remember this was Wednesday. The unlimited nationwide, 500 minute, $40 plan didn't start until the next day (today), Dec 1.

So today I called up the customer service to get changed to the new plan. After first being told that the plan didn't exist, I told her to check again - today was the 1st and they had a new plan. 10 minutes later we were on the new plan. Finally.

In the mean time, the local store has stopped carrying (and displaying) the 7135, though it is still on Alltel's web site.

Was it worth it? I don't know, but I DO like the 7135:

1. It runs Palm OS 4.1, so it can run a host of time-wasting games. I've already loaded several on mine.
2. It syncs with Outlook calendar and tasks, which makes Brooke happy.
3. You can actually use it as a modem for your computer, through the dock, and dial up an ISP to connect to the Internet. This mode, from what I can tell, only uses your plan's minutes, and does not require a data plan. So, free Internet past 9pm and on weekends, no matter where I am. It is slow as heck (around 14.4 I guess) but it might be good enough for looking up phone numbers and such in a pinch. I still have yet to play with it and see if I can get it working in that mode without connecting it to a computer to use the built-in browser. Edit: This works too, though I have to get a web browser installed.
4. The sound quality is fantastic compared to our old Samsung x426's.
5. With some modification, my Jabra headset works too.

The only real downside is that the phone is pretty big, about the size of my wallet. Thus, it can still go in a pocket, but not with anything else in the same pocket. Luckily, it came with a belt clip too, which I'm going to be trying out instead.

Wireless phone stuff part 4

2005-11-26T16:35:00.000-06:00

I was all ready to ditch Alltel, let our "contract" expire and just go with Cingular with an OSU discount. I had the phones picked out and the cart saved online. Wifey wanted an Audiovox 5600 and I was going to get a Motorola RAZR.

But then I realized Brooke was starting to send out resumes, and it would probably not be a good idea to abandon our phone numbers right now. So I stopped into the Alltel store to see what kind of hoops they would make me jump through to transfer the service, then cancel and transfer the numbers to Cingular. Then I got sucked in.

Turns out they DO carry the Motorola RAZR, but not the Audiovox 5600. Their phone selection is a bit limited, but they are offering $50 off each phone, plus the first month free, and a free car charger and a crappy headset. They waive the activation charge, so if we decided to switch, we'd only be responsible for the amount of the first month we used in service. Not a bad deal.

BUT, they also have a $39.99 Nationwide plan, and $19.99 for an additional phone. That comes out to slightly less than Cingular per month, even with the OSU discount, plus the phones would be cheaper. Lastly, the salesguy informed me that starting December 1, the $39.99 plan will have unlimited nights and weekends, as well as unlimited mobile-to-mobile.

The service rep said that they share towers with Sprint, Verizon and US Cellular, so as long as you have a signal, you're fine, with no roaming charges. As a bonus, if you get a tri-mode phone, it'll even switch down to analog when you're really out in the sticks.

The RAZR, unfortunately, is NOT a tri-mode phone; it is digital CDMA only. Then I got looking around and saw they have the Kyocera 7135 PDA phone for $150 (with the AT&T customer discount) which IS tri-mode. I have wanted a nice small PDA phone for quite a while, if only to play games on. I'll maintain that PDAs are mostly useless, but our current Samsung x426 phones are so underpowered they can't even play the most basic of Java games. The only cons to the Kyocera is that it doesn't have bluetooth, and it is a bit bigger than the RAZR, but I'll deal with it.

The only trick was finding another phone for Brooke, who had previously had her heart set on the Audiovox 5600. After a bit of probing, she really just wanted a phone that she could put names and addresses into, as well as some calendar stuff, and some memos / lists, and Bluetooth. With the exception of the memos / lists, it looks like any modern Motorola phone can do all that stuff with the Motorola PhoneTools software, so she'll probably just end up with a fairly plain Motorola V710.

Edit: Turns out that Motorola V710 doesn't store any sort of address information, only phone numbers. So the software is rather useless. We may just end up getting two 7135s. I really don't understand the point of entering all that information into the PhoneTools software if the phones can't doesn't even display it.

Edit2: After browsing some forums I realized I had been looking at the National Freedom plan, not the Total Freedom plan. That means there could be some roaming charges in certain areas, though the map tends to make it look like it is mostly "out in the sticks" places. Comparing the National Freedom coverage to Cingular's coverage, I guess roaming coverage is better than no coverage. *sigh*.

Also a quick note for myself for later:
"I can also confirm that the "R" roaming icon is off when you are in your home area, and blinks slowly when you are using friendly towers, but if the "R" icon stays on steadily, then you are out of the network. I am on the National Freedom plan, so these indicators work to tell me when I can roam for free and when I can't."

Color photography is a pain

2005-11-20T01:48:00.000-06:00

About a year and a half ago, Brooke and I got married. As part of this ordeal, we hired a photographer who was nice enough to sell us the negatives to our pictures after our order was complete. This was actually one of the determining factors in who we hired. Anyway, so about 9 months ago we got our wedding negatives, which consists of about 150 medium-format negatives, 75 35mm black and white negatives, and 120 jpg files from her digital SLR.

Now I'm responsible for digitizing them. I have an Epson 3170 scanner which scans at a native 3200 dpi, plenty for scanning negatives, almost down to the film grain. The black and white pictures are easy, I just turn off all the auto-correction in the software and scan them. I'll do cropping and levels in Photoshop later, that's easy.

Color, however, is another story. See, if you scan a negative and simply invert the colors, it doesn't look right at all. In fact, it'll look pretty blue. This is because negatives aren't perfect - they tint the photo quite badly until it is corrected during processing. This correction, from what I can tell, depends on the type of film that was used. In this case, it is Kodak Portra 400 NC (Natural Color) film. The lab uses a set of filters combined with the paper to print the negatives and shift everything back so it looks good.

Now we come to the digital world. You'd think that you could just select the film type and it would apply the digital equivalent of the filters used in the physical world. Nope. You get automatic correction or nothing, at least in the Epson software my scanner came with. The automatic correction works pretty well, but it tended to shift things a bit yellow. An updated version of the software now actually appears to shift it blue. Great.

SilverFast sells alternative scanner software starting around $50 that DOES allow you to select the film manufacturer. However, the instructions state pretty clearly that you need to make sure none of the edges are included in the scan, which indicates it is still using some sort of automatic correction algorithm.

Now, realize I'm finding all this out AFTER scanning about 140 of those medium format negatives using mostly the old version of the Epson software. But what if I was smart and had turned off my auto-correction on my scanner and just saved those original blue-tinted negatives to be corrected later in Photoshop? Maybe Kodak could provide me with the digital equivalent of those real-world filters. Not likely. Here's what they have to say about it (emphasis mine):

You can easily scan PROFESSIONAL PORTRA Film negatives with a variety of linear-array-CCD,area-array-CCD, and PMT film scanners. You can scan negatives on desktop scanners as well as high-end drumscanners. Because no standards exist to define the colored filter sets that film scanners use to capture the red, green, and blue information of the film image, each manufacturer’s scanner has its own characteristic output. The output depends on the scanner’s sensitivity to the dyes in the film. This sensitivity is determined by the spectral distribution of the colored filtersets and/or the spectral sensitivity of the charge-coupled-device (CCD). In addition to these spectral specifications, scanner output depends on the look-up tables or matrices that the scanner uses to output information for CRT monitors, transmission, etc. These tables or matrices are part of either “plug-in” programs used with specific software packages designed for image manipulation, updateable ROMs included with the equipment, or fixed algorithms for calibrating and balancing, similar to thoseused in photographic color printing equipment. The generic “color negative film” channel designation available with scanner software is only a starting point. You can adjust the final color balance and the scene-dependent contrast and brightness of an image by using the scanner’s controls during pre-scan, or by using an image-manipulation software program or workstation after acquisition. Some scanners allow you to use “plug-in” programs to customize scanner setups.

To me, that sounds like you get auto-correction or nothing in the digital realm. So on the bright side, it probably wouldn't do me any good to start from scratch and scan all these images in RAW mode because in the end, I wouldn't end up with an image any more "correct" than I would by applying Photoshop's auto-color and manual tweaking.

Luckily all the groomsmen and I were all wearing black tuxes, which should provide an excellent neutral to base the color balance on in almost every picture. Tomorrow I'll setup some sort of batch process to help me out with that.

iTunes and iPod poo update

2005-11-18T22:28:00.000-06:00

I'm long overdue for an update to my previous rant on iTunes and iPods. First, an update on the items that have changed since last time.

iPod

1. Apparently iPod Nanos don't go completely braindead in their hibernate mode. I don't know about the iPod Videos, and it still doesn't help those of us with previous generation iPods.

3. My 4G iPod, even without a firmware upgrade, can bookmark mp3 files, making the whole (bug-ridden) conversion to m4b files entirely unecessary. I'm still not exactly sure when an iPod creates a bookmark though, since I've seen my iPod go into hibernation and wake up and forget where I was, even in an audiobook. In fact, it took me to a previous bookmark, so it obviously hadn't created one before it decided to hibernate. Thus, issue 1 still makes bookmarks pretty much pointless, unless you either keep your iPod plugged in to keep it from going to sleep (avoiding the need for bookmarks altogether) or sync with iTunes and listen to part of a book or podcast on your computer, or switch between different books/podcasts often.

8. I've been informed that the iPods that don't come with a power adapter no longer need them to update the firmware. Good thinking, I guess.

iTunes

Nothing to update here. iTunes is still a flaming pile of poo in every way I described before, even though it is now on version 6. In fact, version 6's driver installer crashed on me on two different computers during installation as well. It still seems to work fine, but you have to wonder...

In fact, I have a couple NEW things to add to the list of reasons iTunes is a flaming pile of poo.

7. Podcast updating is really braindead. Lets say you have 5 podcasts on your iPod, and you've listened to 4 of them, and are halfway through the 5th. You only have 15 minutes left to listen to, but you still have your 45 minute commute home. So you fire up iTunes, let it download a few new podcasts and plug in your iPod. (Note that if you do this in the reverse order your iPod will not get the new podcasts unless you force it to update.) So you've done things in the Correct Apple Order and your iPod is updated. So you unplug it, hop in the car and (since your iPod has severe amnesia after being synced) try to browse to that podcast you hadn't finished and hope that it created a bookmark properly. But it isn't there. In fact, iTunes took it OFF your iPod because it had been marked as "listened to" even though you haven't listened to all of it, even though the podcast was paused in the middle of playing when you plugged it into your computer.

Yes, there's a workaround for this: manually check the podcasts you want to add to your iPod and manually uncheck the ones you've already listened to, and put iTunes in braindead (upload only checked items) mode. Spectacular. How intuitive and user friendly and entirely MANUAL.

The iTunes / iPod combination should be able to figure out that if I've only listened to half of a podcast, I'm probably not done listening to it, and don't mark it as "listened to." Or at LEAST figure out that if the iPod is paused in the middle of a podcast when I sync, I'm PROBABLY NOT DONE LISTENING TO IT. Yeesh.

8. This one's for a friend of mine (Hi Cam), as it doesn't really bother me so much. iTunes doesn't distinguish between two different albums with the same name. Now, we all know the RIAA couldn't possibly be so nice as to make all their album names unique, so you end up with over 900 albums with the name Greatest Hits. The chances of someone owning more than 1 of the albums on that list are probably pretty good actually. iTunes provides no way to tell these albums apart, either in its interface or on the iPod itself.

9. You can't change iPod options without your iPod connected. This is probably because they are stored on the iPod itself, but makes for a terrible user experience when trying to change, for instance, what playlists you want to sync to your iPod. You plug it in, and it begins its long, slow, laggy update process, which you need to cancel, then update your iPod settings, THEN tell it to resync.

Well, lets recap. The iPod is supposed to be the easiest, most intuitive MP3 player on the market, and I have to put it in full-manual mode because its counterpart, iTunes is one of the most most braindead and slow applications on the planet. If I knew I was going to have to manually manage this thing, I probably would've gotten a Rio or something.

Oh, and I tried ephPod too. It crashed consistenly halfway through loading the database from my iPod. It got uninstalled very quickly.

Another blog for the uber-geeks.

2005-11-09T20:32:00.000-06:00

I've never been a believer in the mantra that Windows must be wiped and reinstalled every x months, where x is usually somewhere between 1 and 6. People get frustrated with their machines, they start to slow down for unknown reasons, some programs stop working, and cruft is left around from uninstalled programs. Much of this is attributed to spyware these days, but this mantra has been around since at least the Windows 3.1 days.

I instead prefer to track down problems individually. For instance, I ran a single installation of Windows 98 for several years in college. Sometime in there I upgraded to Windows 2000. Once I got all my driver issues sorted out and Win2k up and running for the first time, I never deleted it and started over. This included multiple upgrades including a new motherboard and processor. Once or twice I had to install Win2k over itself, but I never actually had to delete and start fresh. If I had planned my motherboard upgrade better, I could have prevented at least one of those install-overs by switching to a generic IDE driver first. But I digress.

The only time I ever decided to start over with Windows was when I was having a BSOD problem that turned out to be a hardware problem (actually a BIOS setting.) I used that opportunity to upgrade from Win2k to WinXP as well. As a side note, no matter what your motherboard instructions say, don't try running your memory at a different speed than your front side bus (FSB); it wrecks havoc with video cards and sound cards apparently and can cause Bad Things™ like BSOD stop error 0xA. This may have been the cause of my Unknown Hard Error the other day too: somehow my BIOS had reverted back to a 333Mhz memory speed when my FSB is only 266. My uptime is now over 8 days with the new memory reinstalled.

That first installation of Windows XP almost 2 years ago and I haven't reinstalled since. Prior to that, my Win2k installation lasted about 3 years. Over that time, I've had some nasty spyware infections and wierd slowness issues that I've managed to solve.

Apparently I'm not the only one who would rather track things down than just reinstall. Mark Russinovich, of SysInternals, developers of wonderful free utilities like RegMon, FileMon, AutoRuns, Process Explorer, and Rootkit Revealer seems to have the same idea. This is the same guy who has written an entire saga on the Sony DRM fiasco: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. His blog is full of entries of little annoyances that he's taken the time to track down and post about:

Explorer Hanging Randomly
Problems Saving a File Randomly
Microsoft Desktop Search finding the wrong stuff
Unkillable Processes
Periodic System Hangs / High CPU usage

I'll have to subscribe to this guy's site - it is a fascinating read for those of us who not only use Windows, but make a living writing software for it.

2 ohm speakers?

2005-11-06T14:08:00.000-06:00

While driving to work Friday, I figured out my right front speaker in my car was having problems; specifically, it was buzzing on lower frequencies. My guess was that the foam surround that supports the cone had separated from the housing. For you non-techies, the "surround" is just the flat piece of foam (or paper, or rubber) around the outside of the speaker that flexes as the speaker moves in and out.

Well, the car is a '97 Camry, and doesn't have a particularly good sound system, so I thought it would be a simple matter of taking out the existing speakers and replacing them with some inexpensive replacements from Wal*Mart or Parts Express.

I attempted to get at the speaker without instructions, but as it always is with cars, you have to know where those buried screws are, and when to just pull and in which direction. Since the library was closed, I headed to AutoZone to pick up the Haynes Repair Manual. With its help, it wasn't terribly difficult to get the inside door panel off and get at the troubled speaker.

I had guessed correctly, the foam surround was deteriorated and had separated from the housing in places. However, the back of the speaker said Harmon Mobile Audio, 2 ohms, along with a bunch of what I presumed to be some sort of model numbers. 2 ohms? Who ever heard of a 2 ohm speaker? Otherwise it looked like a pretty standard 6.5" speaker and replacement wouldn't have been difficult. The Haynes manual suggests that it is connected in parallel with the tweater, which implies that the amplifier sees these two speakers as around 1 ohm. For you non-techies who happen to be reading this, car audio speakers are almost universally 4 ohm. If I were to replace the 2 ohm speaker with a 4 ohm speaker, I'd get approximately half the volume out of it, which would put it all out of whack with the back speakers and the tweeter. For reference, the back speakers are 6x9's at 3 ohms. WTF?

So, in desperation, I did my best to fix the existing foam with a bead of silicone around the very edge. I figure silicone sticks to almost anything and stays flexible in cold temperatures, so it has a small chance of actually working. If there's any audiophiles reading this, they're probably screaming bloody murder at this point, since I no doubt changed the audio characteristics of that one speaker. However, I doubt I will be able to notice it while driving 75mph down the highway listening to Leo Laporte - not exactly the highest quality listening conditions and material.

If the silicone fails to deliver, I did find a replacement kit for the foam surround for 6.5" speakers for $20, which really isn't bad, considering I'd probably spend twice that on even cheap replacement speakers.

Unknown Hard Error

2005-11-01T21:04:00.000-06:00

So there I was, using Remote Desktop from work into my home machine like I do most every day. I went to Start -> Run and was typing in the box when I got this dialog box:

This error is not your friend. Shortly after getting it (before I even clicked OK), my Remote Desktop lost connection. I managed to grab this screenshot as it was trying to reconnect (hence why it is in black and white.)

I had never seen this error before, but Google turned up a few hits on people that had a dying hard drive or something. Last night I had installed an additional 512MB of RAM, so I thought maybe that was bad and causing a problem.

The machine didn't reboot on its own. When I got home, I found the screensaver locked up. I moved the mouse, the screensaver went away and I could still move my mouse cursor, but otherwise the machine was totally locked.

I stuck a boot CD in with MemTest and did a hard reset. I let MemTest run through a pass which took about an hour. Upon rebooting chkdsk decided my drive needed checking (uh oh) and found a few miscellaneous things out of place, but it didn't look like anything terribly important.

Chkdsk rebooted my computer and it got to the point of Loading System Settings and rebooted. Actually, it bluescreened really quickly. Disabling the reboot (F8 on startup) showed it was a 0x51 REGISTRY_ERROR. Crud.

Safe Mode did the same thing.
So did Last Known Good configuration.
Recovery Console rebooted as soon as I selected the windows configuration to "login" to.
Double Crud.

I ended up sticking the drive in another computer and restoring the registry from one of the restore points in \System Volume Information. My first two attempts didn't work, so I tried a slightly older restore point, and ALSO restored the NTUSER.dat from the user that logs in automatically when the system boots. That worked. (sigh of relief.) Once I got it up and running I used System Restore to go back fully to a restore point to get it to a known good configuration.

Yuk. I suppose I could've used my Ultimate Windows Boot CD to recover instead of pulling the drive out, but I don't think I have that written to CD, it is just a .iso on my hard drive at the moment.

In the process of troubleshooting, I took out the new memory. I'll probably try it again in a few days once I know the system is back to its normal stable self.

Interestingly, the memory claims to be DDR400 only, though I'm only running it at 266Mhz. This is supposed to work as far as I know, so maybe it is PNY marketing BS. MemTest worked fine with the extra memory in place, so I'm inclined to think it is just coincidence, but it is hard to say.

Now I get to shut down and reconnect my floppy drive. Wheeee.

Hurray for...

2005-10-20T23:50:00.000-05:00

I have two things I'd like to mention:

1. Hurray for Oxymetazoline Hydrochloride 0.05%. That's the active ingredient in Afrin Original Nasal Spray (as well as the generic Wal*Mart brand equate stuff I actually bought.) I've been fighting a sinus infection / cold / nasal congestion for about 3 weeks now. I thought I had it beaten, but it came up for a second round last weekend. All this week my nose has been very blocked. Blowing doesn't help like it was before. Sudafed (pseduoephedrine hydrochloride) was only helping slightly. This nasal spray though is something else. I tried it as I sat down in my car in the parking lot. By the time I managed to get OUT of the parking lot, my nose was much clearer. By the time I got home I could breathe through my nose quite normally. I've still got a little sinus pressure, so I'll be back on the (generic) Tylenol (acetaminophen) for a while.

2. Hurray for "A non-stick, polymer coated aluminum foil comprising: an aluminum foil; and a non-stick, polymer coating bonded on at least a portion of one side of the aluminum foil wherein said polymer coating comprises a non-stick, coating composition comprising, a silicone resin selected from the group consisting of dimethyl polysiloxanes, polyester-modified methylphenyl polysiloxanes, and hydroxyl functional silicone resins; a silicone release agent; and a hindered phenol antioxidant."
See patent #6,423,417

In other words, hurray for Reynolds Wrap Release Non-Stick Heavy Duty Aluminum Foil.

I decided that cleaning the toaster oven pan and grate was something I did once and never want to do again. It took more elbow grease than expected, even considering I was using Barkeeper's Friend. So I tried the Release stuff and it worked great. Now there's a new rule in the house - anything that goes into the toaster oven must have this Release wrap under it. I keep the grate wrapped in it, and wipe it down after each use. The stuff works surprisingly well.

To test how it did under extreme heat I put it on a bare electric burner. The foil melted to the burner, but I didn't see or smell any wisps of nasty stuff burning off the foil first like I expected. I don't know what happened to the polymer, but it appears to be able to withstand extreme heat.

Success! MN-700 now has an identity crisis.

2005-10-11T00:20:00.000-05:00

After an hour driving around trying to find an electronics store that was actually open and would sell me a 12 pin header (unsuccessfully), a couple hours messing around with solder and another couple hours messing around with software, my Microsoft MN-700 now thinks it is a ASUS WL-500g.

The hardware part wasn't particularly difficult, but I did pick up a desoldering iron from Radio Shack today for about $11 when I couldn't find anywhere to buy a new header. The desoldering iron worked much better at desoldering than the combination of a soldering iron and a solder sucker; I was able to pull a header of an old I/O card without much difficulty. I had a heck of a time trying to get all the solder out of the holes in the MN-700 board though. The ground pins were particularly difficult since the board is thick and the ground plane on the board makes for a nice heat sink. I only managed to get one cleaned out, so that's all I ended up installing. So I have a funky JTAG connector on my MN-700 now, but it worked fine.

My cable was totally ghetto. I didn't have any 100 ohm resisters, so I used two 39 ohms and a 22 ohm in series. I needed 3 of these. So it made quite a mess of stuff coming out of the back of the DB25, so I smothered it with hot glue. The JTAG connector was actually an old game port connector, but that was too wide, so I had to snip it a bit shorter so it didn't hit that nice coil of wire. Amazingly it all worked.

The software side only took a long time because I did a backup of the entire flash memory (4MB) through the parallel/JTAG cable before uploading anything new. That took about an hour. Then I uploaded my new CFE (bootloader), and THEN realized I hadn't actually downloaded a firmware image. So I had to hook my computer directly up to the cable modem and go download one. Once that was flashed, it was smooth sailing.

I now have static DHCP mappings and the potential to do some QoS if I need to in the future, along with a TON of other features I'll probably never use. The WL-500g software is quite capable. I'll probably only try out OpenWRT if this modified ASUS stuff ever proves unstable.

Hacking a Microsft Wireless Router (MN-700)

2005-10-09T22:34:00.000-05:00

So sometime in the last days or so my trusty Microsoft Wireless G router (MN-700) crashed. Somehow it was still routing packets, but wouldn't display the web interface or dish out DHCP addresses. So I rebooted it, and all's well in the world again.

But that got me thinking, I wonder if there's a firmware upgrade for it. The last firmware upgrade from Microsoft fixed quite a few bugs dealing with WPA, shortly after they announced they were no longer going to sell wireless routers at all. It has been doing fine since then, but I wish it had a few more features (like QoS and DHCP reservations.)

A quick google search revealed a few pages showing that the hardware is actually very similar to the infamous Linksys WRT54g, which can easily be replaced with Sveasoft or OpenWRT firmware. The MN-700, however, can't be flashed with new firmware without the use of a soldering iron, a few resisters, and a parallel port.

That doesn't faze me, but I want to make sure I can go back to the Microsoft firmware if the 3rd party stuff gives me problems. Replacement MN-700's are only about $30 on E-bay, but buying a second one would kind've defeat the purpose - to use the existing hardware. If I were to buy a new one, I'd probably opt for a WRT-54g instead.

Anyway, I was thwarted tonight because I couldn't manage to salvage the 12-pin header off an old I/O card, so I'll have to get one from Radio Shack sometime this week. The MN-700 still runs WinCE for the moment.

Wireless phone stuff part 3

2005-10-06T22:36:00.000-05:00

I don't know why I'm watching it this closely, but Cingular is down to only 4 plans - 2 personal plans and 2 family plans. Ick. What great choices. However, it seems we qualify for a discount through OSU, bringing their cheapest family plan down to $61 a month. Not bad.

I can't tell for sure, but it looks like Alltel's family plan starts at $75 a month.

T-Mobile, however, has a nationwide, no-roaming 2 phone plan (and only a year contract) for $60 a month. Not looking too bad anymore. Coverage looks pretty good around here and NJ, but looks like it is "roaming" in WI. I'm not sure who they are contracted with in that area, but I'd guess it was Cingular, I don't know of any other GSM providers.

I don't know why I'm sweating this extra $10 to $20 a month, I guess I'm just really irritated that a 2-year contract isn't really a contract at all.

Avalon and AutoLayout

2005-10-01T17:12:00.000-05:00

A bit curious about Avalon after my last rant, I headed over to Microsoft's site and discovered something that should've happened a long time ago - built-in support for autolayout:

The layout protocol is a recursive process that is a form of negotiation to ensure that all elements get a "fair" amount of space based on their request. Firstly, a measure process takes place where a parent asks the child how big it wants to be, and the child responds with a DesiredSize. Then the arrange process takes place where the parent tells the child how big it's going to be, in the form of an ActualSize property. When calculating, the special value Double.PositiveInfinity means "size to content". You handle this by overriding the MeasureOverride and ArrangeOverride elements for your panel.

What does this mean? Simple - Microsoft has finally integrated dynamic sizing right into the framework. What's dynamic sizing? Lets say you are writing an application, and you make your buttons and labels just the right size, and everything fits nicely. Then you find out you need to translate it to German. Except the word for "Cancel" in German is about twice as long and doesn't fit on the buttons you've created all over your application. Now you have a problem.

To solve this very problem where I work, we adopted a little piece of software from Chris Anderson called AutoLayout. It was actually done as an (incomplete) sample, and is completely unsupported by Microsoft. But it mostly worked. It had a few bugs, but I took care of those and now we use it all over our application. The word for Cancel is too big? Button resizes itself. Which moves everything over, which makes the entire form bigger if necessary. It isn't perfect, and it is a little slow, but it is better than 1) making everything as big as the longest language or 2) customizing the sizing for each translation of the software. Ever notice in Windows how all the labels for a textbox are above the textbox, not next to it? This is why.

FINALLY, Microsoft has included such a thing directly in the framework. This is not a new concept by any means, I played with QT a while back which also has the same sort of autolayout built in.

If Avalon added nothing beyond Win32 & Windows Forms, this layout mechanism would be reason enough to switch. If we're lucky, at the same time Avalon will remove the very annoying rule of needing to do any GUI operations on the same thread as the message pump (the GUI thread). This is something that was problematic in Win32 and due to leaky abstractions, found its way into Windows Forms in .NET, especially when you have to be VERY aware of what thread your handle gets created on. This has caused more headaches than I care to go into, but head here if you want a glimpse into how deep that rabbit hole goes.

Flicker flicker flicker

2005-09-30T21:51:00.000-05:00

A little rant about software. Or maybe Windows. Or maybe video cards and drivers. I'm not really sure who's responsible, but there's a problem with almost every application that exists today. Flicker.

Want to see what I mean? Make your browser window fill up about 1/4 of your screen and then drag it around real fast. Don't look at the window, but what is is covering up and uncovering. Watch your desktop icons repaint. Watch AIM redraw its little icons. Watch the window you are moving around jitter like crazy.

Now try resizing your web browser real fast. I don't care what browser you have, just resize it. Watch the edge of the window and scrollbars be redrawn jumpy and strain to keep up with your cursor. Yuck.

Some apps are worse than others. iTunes, for instance, doesn't flicker like this, but simply redraws VERY slowly. Whereas IE might redraw 10 times at a given resize speed, iTunes will redraw 3 times. That's not acceptable either.

Not everything in Windows is bad like this though. Try scrolling up and down REAL fast in your web browser. I dare you to try to notice any flicker. Windows draws the scrolling region just as fast as your monitor can display it. In fact, as you resize your browser window, you may notice the Windows widgets flickering, but notice the web page inside: it doesn't flicker.

While you're trying these little tests, bring up the Task Manager and watch your CPU usage. It'll spike to 100% and stay there until you stop moving windows all over the place and leave them be like a good little Windows user.

So what's wrong here? I'm not exactly sure, but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the old Win32 API everything you see is built on. Something to do with that lovely old WM_PAINT message that the window is getting over and over. Something about invalidated regions that need to be redrawn. I'm a software developer, I've dealt with these things, but something's inherently wrong, because you can't ever get rid of the flicker entirely.

No, don't go blaming my CPU (Athlon 1900+) or video card (Radeon 9800 Pro). More power is not the answer. Not when I can get hundreds of frames per second in games using the same or lesser hardware.

We didn't have this problem in Windows 3.1. Why? Windows 3.1 didn't even attempt to draw the window while you were moving it or resizing it. Not until 95's little "show window contents while dragging" came about did the fun start. Yes, you can still disable it in XP, butI shouldn't have to.

Microsoft is telling us Avalon is coming and it will be 3d accelerated. Goodness I hope so. Microsoft Max (a beta photo manager built on Avalon) doesn't flicker like IE, but it resizes about as fast as iTunes. Ick. Maybe Avalon isn't acclerated yet or something, I don't know - I can't find any sort of control panel for it at all. But if Avalon gets rid of this problem, it simply can't come soon enough for me. If it gets rid of this problem for existing Win32 applications I'll jump up and down and do a little dance. But I'm not going to hold my breath.

Technical Mumbo Jumbo 2

2005-09-23T22:48:00.000-05:00

And a great sigh of relief was heard all over the land as the boot cd's last remaining obstacle was overcome.

About 6 months or so ago I discovered Bart's boot CD and floppy disk creator. It is a fantastic environment for creating boot CDs and boot floppies customized for what you want. It isn't the simplist thing in the world to setup, but it is quite dynamic once you know your way around. Anyway, I had made this custom CD with all my favorite utilities and also managed to get networking and CD-ROM support on the same boot floppy.

But fdisk didn't work. For a while I ignored it, then about 2 months ago I took another stab at it. I discovered that they way the CD was booting a boot loader (isolinux), which then emulated a floppy disk from an image file (memdisk) was totally borking up fdisk's hard disk detection scheme.

I tried a couple workarounds, including simply making the floppy disk image the cd boot image. That worked, but then I was stuck always booting to that one disk image, which wasn't very flexable. I also tried a few options in isolinux, and a multi-boot-image CD, which is supported by almost zero bioses on the planet. So I gave up again.

Lately some on the TiVo Community needed a boot CD, so my interest was sparked again. Again I played around with isolinux and even ventured into a different boot loader (boot scripter) and a different disk emulator (diskemu). The results were the same.

Then a little more digging revealed the FreeDOS version of FDISK, FreeFDISK. It is interface compatible with Microsoft's FDISK, but appears to detect the hard drive just fine when memdisk is in use. It also supports a ton of command-line functions (some of which MS's FDISK support, but are undocumented).

Finally I can commit to a single boot CD for everything and not have to worry about pulling out another boot CD or a boot floppy the next time I need to use fdisk. I'm slightly tempted to ditch isolinux for boot scripter now that I've used it though - it seems quite powerful for what is simply a boot loader.

On a side note, I've known about FreeDOS for a long time but never really looked into it much, since I have no problems using one of the many copies of MS-DOS I have floating around. They appear to have made good progress, but it is somewhat feature-incomplete and hasn't reached version 1.0 yet.

I'm also surprised that Bart's boot CD (BCD) and floppy system (BFD) are a creation of the early parts of this decade. I remember messing around in 1999 at UCLID trying to get all the DOS networking stuff to fit on a single floppy along with Ghost. BCD and/or BFD would've been amazingly useful back then. I'm almost equally surprised that the BCD and BFD related projects have been abandoned. I guess with the world moving towards NTFS, and utilities like Ghost now having a complete Windows version, DOS is less useful now. It also lacks good USB support. I guess things are moving more towards solutions like PEBuilder. There's a certain simplicity to DOS though, and knowing exactly what's been loaded and being able to hit Shift-F5 and drop straight to DOS and know that NOTHING can possibly mess up your BIOS update, since it is the only thing running.

Ok. New Rule.

2005-09-21T22:24:00.000-05:00

My new rule for comments:

You may NOT pimp your own website or blog in the comments

Anything violating this will be immediately removed. Thank you.

More wireless phone stuff

2005-09-21T22:09:00.000-05:00

As of recently, Cingular has dropped their $60 a month 500 minute National Family Plan. Their cheapest Family Plan is now $70.

In other news, Alltel is still offering $50 off a phone, along with a similar-phone-trade-in option. Sure, now they offer that, after I just sold my Tungsten on E-bay. Their family plans seem rather comparable to Cingular these days. They are also promising to charge a $175 cancellation fee, even though they are not honoring the contracts through to the end, which is a bit illegal. My boss was able to call up and get his early termination fees taken off immediately however, after switching directly (back) to Cingular. He's got a couple recorded phone conversations with Alltel representatives that say you won't be charged an early termination fee.

None of this makes me want to jump up and sign a new contract with any carrier at all anymore.

All I want is the contract I signed up for - $50 a month, 2 phones, nationwide, a few hundred minutes, lots of nights, weekends, and mobile to mobile.

At this point it would be cheaper to go back to 1 cell phone and 1 landline.

Why CRTs rule

2005-09-21T13:13:00.000-05:00

Without even going into all the problems of LCDs (contrast, color reproduction, response time, etc) and just knowing that LCD monitors are fixed-resolution native I'll tell you why CRTs rule.

I have a Viewsonic P95f monitor. It was advertised as a maximum resolution of 1920x1440 @ 77hz.

Today, just for fun, I decided to see how high it would really go. With a bit of convincing (telling Windows to ignore the .inf for the monitor) I got it into 2048x1536 @ 70hz.

I also have a Samsung SyncMaster 900p. It was advertised as a maximum resolution of 1600x1200 @76hz.

I got it up to 2048x1536 @ 60hz.

That 6.29 million pixels of desktop space.

Now, the flicker isn't so nice and everything's really tiny... but that's not the point. These monitors support a HIGHER resolution than they were advertised for. My Viewsonic is 4.5 years old and can still handle the maximum resolution my very recent (Radeon 9800 Pro) video card can handle. The Samsung is even older.

Ok, back to 1280x960, I'm getting a headache.

I'm getting back into the "loop"

2005-09-14T00:59:00.000-05:00

Somehow, either from living in Oklahoma and/or graduating from college I've found myself a bit out of the "loop." What loop? The technology loop. The latest greatest software, utilities, hardware, toys, etc.

I read Slashdot fairly regularly along with the TiVo Community Happy Hour forum, but not much else. What have I been missing?

Podcasts. Homemade radio shows distributed via the web and now iTunes. I've discovered This Week in Technology (TWiT). TWiT is basically an hour (or so) long radio show about what's the latest and greatest in technology. But what makes it great is the people that do it: somewhat famous people like the former cast of The Screensavers, John Dvorak (tech journalist), the author of SpinRite, etc. It seems there's a slightly different cast every week but the topics are always interesting, ranging from computers to consumer electronics to the space program. Geek stuff. This also lead me to:

Konfabulator. Little widgets you stick on your desktop to do...well, almost nothing. Like a clock. Or a widget to display today's Dilbert. I'll admit I tried it and I don't get it. It seems more like a distraction tool more than anything - a great way to waste a Friday afternoon at work, downloading and installing widgets, filling our desktops with things that go boing and poof and look pretty because we are the MTV generation. Anyway, I tried it but I didn't find any really useful widgets. Oh well. I used to use 3m Post-It Notes software to stick notes (mostly todo lists) all over my desktop, but I haven't used it since I graduated. Back then I had a billion small, completely unrelated tasks to keep track of. These days I use a giant white board along with an Excel spreadsheet and sometimes a program called Bridgetrak to track my todos. At home I don't really need anything like that at all.

RSS One of these days I'll get around to trying out an RSS reader/agregator and pulling down a few other blogs on a regular basis. Maybe. Of course, that'll probably be the day IE7 comes out and I'm lured back. Got favorite one? Let me know in the comments.

Opera Oh yes. Lured back to IE, implying I'm not using IE anymore. For now anyway, I'm using Opera.
What I like:

It's fast. Blazing fast. Faster than IE and Firefox, hands down. This was the primary reason. The rendering is fast, the downloads are fast. Going backward and forward are LIGHTNING fast.
Mouse Gestures. Hold down the right mouse button and draw an L to close a window. Very handy, reminicent of Mentor Graphics, where you'd use the middle mouse button and draw a question mark for Help, etc. Might be nice if it showed you somewhere briefly what command you just executed.
It isn't a memory hog/leaker like Firefox.
It correctly renders Slashdot, even while running through Proxomitron
UserJS is a really neat idea - load client-side javascript files for every page, allowing them to modify the page on the fly and fix problems, re-enable functionality, etc.
Fast Forward to click the most likely link for things like "Next Page" is really useful, especially on sites I frequent and know it is going to work properly. Might be nice if it made that link stand out or something.
A built-in download manager. I know there's a hundred I probably could've downloaded for IE, but I just never bothered to try to find one that had good functionality, was stable, free, ad-free, etc.
No major rendering problems. Either Opera does a great job of emulating IE's bugs (or nuances) or the web has become a friendlier place for non-IE browsers since the last time I tried to switch browsers.

What I don't like:

Alt-S to submit was a 2-day project to get working via UserJS. Read about it here: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=100757
No Google Toolbar. The one feature I really liked, being able to click on one of my search terms to scroll through the page to find it is possible, sortof, with an addon. See link above for that too. No google toolbar also means no Google Autofill. Handy for the few times I use it. Opera's Wand is nowhere near as good.
Blogging doesn't work well at all due to Opera's lack of a WYSIWYG editor.
Outlook web mail doesn't work well at all, even worse than Firefox (no big surprise)
It occasionally corrupts jpeg images, turning orange stuff like faces blueish. I'm not sure, but I suspect it is related to my heavy use of Remote Desktop, which may change the color depth to 24 bit or something. Still investigating that one.

What's that? You say I missed the most important feature over IE? Tabs! Meh. I could take them or leave them. I ended up turning them on because Opera fires up additional blank pages when they are turned off. I'm wierd and have my taskbar on the LEFT side of my screen, leaving plenty of space for lots of browser windows and such along with the rest of my applications so I can switch between anything very quickly.

So, for now the pros outweigh the cons, but only slightly. If IE7 is as fast as Opera, I'll probably be lured back quite easily. I might even be convinced to try to find a download mananger and mouse gestures add-ons for it.

And on a completely unrelated note, I'm back to having dual monitors at home. The 17" Fuzzy Mag wasn't doing me any good, so I put a sign on it that said "FREE! WORKS!" on it and stuck it out on the curb. It was gone in under an hour. A coworker was nice enough to give me a Samsung 19" 900p. It isn't quite as good as my Viewsonic P95f, but it is still very nice. It's not quite flatscreen, but it is very sharp and supports fairly high resolutions and refresh rates. It was pretty easy to get the color to match my P95f too. A small desk extension later and I actually have more desk space than I did before. Having 2 19" CRTs on a desk along with a 17" widescreen laptop seems a little obscene. :)

Why iTunes and iPods are flaming piles of poo.

2005-09-10T22:51:00.000-05:00

No, this is not another rant about Apple and how iPods are crappy, expensive and lack tons of features from someone who hasn't actually touched one. I have an iPod. I use it everyday. I like it, for the most part. But there's a few things that frustrate the hell out of me in what is supposed to be the easiest to use MP3 player on the planet. I've documented some of them before, but I'll reiterate here with things I've learned over the past 6 months:

iPod

1. iPods shut themselves off after a couple days (36 hours?) of non-use. This is not so bad by itself, but they not only lose track of the current place in the current song/audiobook/podcast but they forget entirely what song/playlist/podcast was even being played. Update: Nanos don't do this.

This is a HUGE inconsistency. Why should it matter if I haven't listened to my iPod for 10 minutes or 10 days? I can understand from a technological point of view that it does this to save battery life, and that starting up after this extended sleep MIGHT take a little longer. But completely forgetting this information is unacceptable. I can turn my car off and the CD player inside will remember where it was. My wife's 5-year-old Soul Player will remember where it was after shutting it off. It will even remember which song it was on when you switch CDs, for up to 10 CDs or something.

5-year-old CD MP3 technology beats the current generation of iPods. Totally unacceptable.

All they have to do before going to deep sleep is spin up the hard drive, write a few bytes to designate where it was, and then turn off. Yes, it uses a bit more power, but makes the user experience SO much better.

2. iPods lose their song/position/playlist when syncing too. Along the same lines as #1, but this seems unnecessary. In fact, if you switch playlists, it doesn't remember your position in the previous playlist either.

3. iPods will not "bookmark" mp3 files, only m4b (audiobooks). This is likely to change shortly, as podcasts are done more and more in mp3 format. iTunes 5.0 suggests that it will keep track of place in any file you tell it to, though no update for the 4G iPods has been released yet. Update: 4th Gen iPods can bookmark mp3s now.

This leads me to a few actual bugs, fairly well documented - the iPod's handling of large audiobooks and bookmarking is buggy. It might be the fault of iTunes AAC mono encoder, but there's definitely problems trying to make your own m4b files. Anything longer than 13.5 hours will get completely screwed up, likely due to a integer overflow. Even shorter ones appear to have problems if they are mono. And even then, the mono ones will occasonally screw up when trying to resume from the bookmark and reset themselves.

I'm hoping this entire mess will get resolved in the next iPod update and I won't have to mess with m4b files anymore.

From 1, 2 and 3 I can conclude that the iPod is simply a braindead device with absolutely no short term memory. This would be understandable if it were simply a MP3 CD player reading from a disc (even those manage to remember SOME things.) But it has an entire hard drive of non-volatile storage, it should at least attempt to be smarter.

4. The backlight is way too bright to use in the dark when your eyes have adjusted. The thing dims out when it shuts off, so I know it is capable of multiple brightnesses. Completely unacceptable for car/night use.

5. The B&W LCD screen update is a little slow, and things tend to blur, especially the scrolling song title. Completely irrelevant now that all iPod are color. Mine isn't and the LCD screen on it sucks.

6. Album names don't scroll, anywhere. I have several "Best of College A Cappella xxxx' where xxxx is a CD's year. Can't see the year.

7. Still no thumbs-down-and-skip-this-song button, but nothing has this. Someday we'll get amarok style playlists that take into account number of plays, how far into the song it was played before being skipped, etc. In fact, amarok is one of the only applications I wish I had on Windows that the Linux users do.

8. Upgrading the firmware requires the A/C power adapter, but it doesn't tell you that until after you've pushed the firmware onto it. A great way to ruin an afternoon when you leave your iPod A/C adapter at home but still have a 45 commute at 5:00. Update: iPods that don't come with a power adapter do not need one to update the firmware.

iTunes for Windows

1. The interface is stupidly slow due to the use of non-standard widgets. Scrolling, resizing etc is jumpy and not smooth despite a hefty processor and video card. Simply unacceptable. Skinnable widgets can be done without being that slow.

2. Syncing w/ an iPod takes forever, even when it ends up doing nothing. Any second-year CS student could write a merge/update routine that would work faster. I've recently taken to doing manual syncs instead of automatic ones. Along the same lines, if you try to sync something with the iPod, you have to sit and wait for it to do its thing, 5 minutes later it comes up and says you don't have enough space to sync. No options to help you reduce the size, no preview of the sync to see if it'll fit or not, just an OK button and a checkbox to say don't tell me this again. Lovely.

Between 1 and 2, and the occasional random lockups/pauses (especially lately when trying to download podcasts) my impression of iTunes gets worse every time I have the misfortune of firing it up.

3. It doesn't play nice when you update ID3 tags outside of itself. The only way to scan all the songs is the workaround to select everything, hit Get Info on it, then hit OK. It works, but is a little kludgy. It would be nice if it automatically did this based on file dates, etc.

4. Sometimes it gets confused syncing to the iPod. I had a case where I put songs on the iPod, but the iPod refused to play them until I got them off the iPod and back on (deleted from iTunes, resync, back into iTunes, resync)

5. Multiple people accessing the same music from a server doesn't play nicely. iTunes seems designed for the 1-user-1-iPod-1-Computer-1-Library and doesn't facilitate much else. My wife and I share our music on a network share, certainly it shouldn't be difficult. When she updates a song's genre, it should appear in my iTunes and likewise on my iPod automagically. Again, an amarok solution with a backend database would be ideal. Maybe someone will port it to Windows for me.

6. iTunes was kind've a pain to get setup - it didn't work right on the first computer I put it on. iTunes 5 installer crashed on me somewhere during the driver install process. It seems if I update iTunes and don't update my iPod to the latest firmware I have sync issues.

Want more? I've posted an update to this article.

Lawn Mower Update

2005-08-31T23:22:00.000-05:00

Today proved that the book was indeed correct. This afternoon I went out to try the lawn mower and it fired up on the first pull! So apparently I must've done something right. The mower runs great now.

I used it to mow the yard and it had no trouble at all, even in the back with the 1-2 foot grass back there. However, I did manage to break one of the front wheels trying to get it up over a small retention wall when I was done. The 20-year-old plastic is very brittle.

So I ran off to Atwoods and found a couple plastic wheels for $3 each. Unfortunately, they had 1/2" diameter holes whereas the originals were 9/16". I didn't realize this until I got them home. Looking online showed that I could get the proper size for $5 each plus $6 shipping. Instead I decided to try my hand at boring out the holes. I don't have a 9/16" drill bit so I attached a bit of sandpaper to a 1/2" drill bit. The heat tended to melt the nylon/plastic, but by slowing down a bit it worked just fine. If I'm not careful, I'll need to replace the rear wheels too as they are already cracked.

I also picked up some 4-cycle lawn mower oil ($2.64) and a 13/16" sparkplug socket ($4.96). Technically I no longer need the sparkplug socket, as my crescent wrench worked ok, but I thought it'd be a good tool to have.

So far this project hasn't been blown too far out of proportion. I've spent under $25 for a working self-propelled lawn mower, and learned a bit about small combustion engines at the same time.

I earned a tiny bit of manhood today.

2005-08-30T22:03:00.000-05:00

No, not that; I fixed a lawnmower. I put a WANTED ad out on FreeCycle the other day asking for a lawn mower. We have a very small yard we are responsible for, but due to the recent rain it was getting very tedious to mow it with just a weedwacker. A nice couple in Edmond offered me their old Snapper self-propelled mower. It had a bit of trouble starting, but ran well once you got it going. Now, before you think "Wow, a self-propelled lawn mower for free, what a deal." the keyword above is old. This lawn mower is probably about as old as I am. The self-propelled feature is quite primative, I'll take a picture and post it if anybody is interested. Brooke exclaimed that her dad had one just like it when she was little when she saw it.

So I took it on as a project to get it running right. It cost me:

1 trip to the library for 3 books on Briggs and Straton engines and lawn mower repair. ($0.00)
1 gallon gas container ($1.93)
1 gallon of gas ($2.85 !)
1 spark plug gapper ($1.27)
1 can of carburetor cleaner ($0.93)
2 raw hands since carburetor cleaner is nasty stuff ($o.uch)
1 smashed thumb because I'm an idiot ($#.%^)
several hours of taking it apart and cleaning it

What I did to it:

Take apart and clean carburetor.
Adjust choke linkage
Adjust air gap (two pieces of paper is darn close to 0.010")
Remove, clean, gap and replace spark plug. (it was 0.020", I expanded it to 0.030")
Take apart and clean head, cylinder, and valve area
Adjust mixture (1 turn instead of 1.5 turns)

The problem is, I have no idea which, if any of these things actually did any good, except for the last one which got the mower back into a running state. Between most of those steps I put the whole thing back together and gave it many pulls. I'm sure I did much of it wrong (re-used all the existing gaskets, got carb cleaner on many of the rubber pieces, etc) but it works pretty well now. Unfortunately it was dark when I finished so I don't really know how it'll handle actually cutting grass. :)

I also learned that carburetor cleaner is quite a nasty solvant. It made my hands quite raw, but also took off more paint than I would've liked. There's quite a few bare spots on the mower now. Oh well.

Edit: Apparently my success was short-lived. I installed the carburetor wrong. I was digging through one of my three books and stumbled upon instructions for putting the carburetor back together. It said I put a spring on the wrong side of the diaphragm. I was a little dubious that I could've installed such a thing wrong and still have the engine run, so I did a google search and came up with this:

(from here)

Sure enough. I did it wrong. Another 15 minutes in the garage and it is back together with the spring on the correct side. It is too late tonight to test it though as I don't want to wake the neighbors. It'll have to wait until tomorrow. However, I'm fairly certain the spring was installed the wrong way when I took it apart, so maybe that was the problem all along and it'll work much better now.

Neon Genesis Evangelion

2005-08-28T01:35:00.000-05:00

Neon Genesis Evangelion is an Anime series. Even if you don't like, or (gasp) haven't even heard of anime, this blog entry might interest you. Or maybe not.

My first exposure to the Evangelion (or Eva) series was my 2nd year of college. My roommate had seen it before and wanted to introduce it to the rest of the gang. So they went down to the local video store and rented all 22 episodes in a backpack full of VHS tapes. I came home from class to find a bunch of people sitting in my room watching this anime series with a catchy intro song. Then the foreign guy of the gang (Pavle) instantly informed me that if I wanted to watch, I would need to contribute to the cost of renting the tapes. Not only was I turned off by the prospect of having to PAY to watch something in my own room, with my own stereo, but I really didn't feel like being absorbed for 10+ hours of 4fps Japanese entertainment.

The series did pique my interest a couple of times, but I didn't really get involved with it. The next year, however, I took 12 plane rides in 8 days to 3 different interviews over spring break. So I borrowed a bunch of DVDs from a friend, 3 of which were the first 9 episodes of Eva. It was actually interesting, but the rest of the series wasn't out on DVD yet, so I stopped there and forgot about it for a while.

Just recently I decided to watch the series again. It started out fairly typical and brainless. Big robots, big combat scenes, unknown powerful enemies, etc. It touched on a few interpersonal relationship points and kept some running themes and open questions. As the 26-episode series progressed, however, it seemed to be raising more questions than it answered. By the time I got to the 24th episode, there were a ton of questions and seemingly not enough time to answer them all. The last two episodes became almost surreal and didn't seem to answer anything.

But ah, there was still more content to watch. There was a 1-hour movie made that was a summary of the first 24 episodes (Evangelion: Death), then another movie that appeared to be a remake of Episodes 25 and 26 (End of Evangelion). EoE does a much better job of tieing up the loose ends, but it still leaves a lot unanswered or open-ended.

Luckily, there's people far more interested in analyzing this kind of thing than I am, and a quick Google for Evangelion FAQ reveals two sites that do a decent job. They contradict each other in some places though, finally accepting that Eva is fairly open-ended, especially concerning the very last scene of EoE.

Ikari Gendo's Ultimate EVA FAQs
Neon Genesis Evangelion: FAQs

It is a well done series, for the most part, worthy of watching. It starts out pretty brainless, but don't expect it to stay that way. If you feel the need for more information after you've watched everything, you're not alone. I think Writer/Director Hideaki Anno was a little messed up, and I don't think the TV series ended well, and neither did the crew (search for "Kazuya Tsurumaki interview" in the second link above.) They made a decent stab at redoing it with EoE, but a lot of the finer points (and some major plot points) get lost without extremely careful analysis of the surreal parts.

Air conditioners part 2.

2005-08-22T19:42:00.000-05:00

In a surprising turn of events I came home today to find a brand new air conditioner outside:
It is a Concord CCU10A24A-1. According to this site, it is a 2.0 ton unit that runs about $400. Best I can tell from a simple chart here, that's about right for our 1000 sq. ft. apartment (2.0 tons == 24,000 BTUs). However, this site makes it looks like you need a PhD in Physics to properly size an air conditioner, so who knows.

This is what the old one looked like (this one is our neighbor's):

Best I can tell from the model (0AUA-152-A) I'm guessing it is a 1.5 ton unit. It also has a type number of 469-44-1-B, and I have no idea what that means.

It is a bit early to tell if the new unit is doing any better than the old since it rained all morning and wasn't terribly hot today. However, I did hear it cycle on and off a couple times since I've gotten home from work. If anything, the new unit should be a whole lot more efficient and therefore cheaper to run. Next month my electric bill might actually be reasonable.

Coke Zero

2005-08-21T00:33:00.000-05:00

Coke Zero is really good. It tastes nothing like Diet Coke and everything like Coke, without the nasty sugary, almost gritty aftertaste. It really takes me back to my Neenah Bike and Fitness days when the fridge was always stocked with Coke and nothing but Coke.

Short food science lesson

2005-08-21T00:19:00.000-05:00

Most of my blog entries are long. Very long. So here's a short one.

Today I found out Hidden Valley Ranch dip powder contains sugar. I was making a recipe which called for the dip to be mixed with oil. In my brilliance, I decided to substitute 1/3 of it with (better tasting) butter. So I melted the butter, added some olive oil, then the dip powder. All was well until I turned my back for a minute. I went to stir the mixture, which had gotten quite hot. I stirred with my wisk - instantly a bunch of bubbles and then the dip powder congeled into a big mass on the end of my wisk. The sugar had entered the soft ball stage. Oops.

Time for another rant.

2005-08-20T23:25:00.000-05:00

This time I get to rant about the real world. Let's talk air conditioners. Marvelous devices really. One set of coils inside, one set of coils outside, a compressor, a couple of valves, 2 fans, and a thermostat. The compressor moves the nifty refrigerant between the two sets of coils, the valves keep a pressure differential between them. The fans blow air, the thermostat turns it on and off. Quite simple really. Not a whole lot that can go wrong with them.

When things do go wrong with an air conditioner it is usually in the form of something completely breaking. The compressor dies, one of the fans motors die, the thermostat fails to kick the system on, or a circuit breaker or fuse blows. Simple to diagnose, fairly simple to fix.

But air conditioners don't always fail in nice, neat, binary ways. In fact, they can appear to be working fine, but be completely inefficient. Usually this is the result of the system being low on refrigerant, due to a tiny leak or something. But apparently not always.

We live in a duplex in Stillwater, OK. Nice place, but judging from the kitchen cabinets and the colors in the bathroom, it was probably built in the late 70's or early 80's. And the air conditioner is original. Which means it is quite old, inefficient, and (according to the A/C guy who has been here 4 times) undersized.

All this, and our air conditioner hasn't been able to keep up this summer. By "not keep up" I mean I have the thermostat set to 74 at night and 78 during the day. When it switches from 78 to 74 at 6pm, it generally takes until 2am for the house to actually reach 74. Now, comparing that against other thermometers in the house it appears the thermostat is actually a couple degrees warm, so those temperatures might be more like 76 and 72, but that's fairly irrelevant.

So, not owning the duplex, we call the landlord (actually an apartment complex management company), who has generally been quite responsive. The first time I called, about a month ago, they sent an A/C guy. He cleaned the inside coils and said the pressure in the system was fine. That did little to nothing, but it was cooler for the next couple of weeks, so it wasn't an issue.

So I called again. Again they sent an A/C guy. This time he replaced the air filter. Yippie. A lot of good that will do. I had a little chat with him and he said the unit was really too small for the place, and old. I encouraged him to go back to my landlord and try to convince him to replace it, but apparently that didn't do any good. At this point I kind've gave up for a while.

A week or so later, I heard the unit in back starting to make some strange noises. I hoped it was dying, but a couple days later they went away. About a week ago both me and my wife went out of town. She returned before I did and found the A/C wasn't working at all. A couple days later the A/C guy comes out and finds the fan out back completely dead. He replaces it. I was hoping that would solve the problem once and for all. No luck.

This week I had a couple days off and stayed home to do some chores and lots of resting. I'd get up around noon, set the thermostat to 74 (override the programmed 78). It would kick on. And stay on. Until 3 am. And throughout that time, it never even came close to 74. In fact, it usually went up to the low 80's until evening.

So I called again. They sent the A/C guy out again while we were running errands and dinner. In all his brilliance, he replaced the thermostat. Now, normally this might be an OK thing to do, but this was a fairly new, digital thermostat, clearly not malfunctioning in any strange way. He set the system to 74 degrees, 24/7. Ok, I figure we'll try that for a while. Nevermind the fact it was 87 degrees when we returned. It ran until 1:50am.

This morning I woke up around 11, the system was on, and the thermostat said 78. And it wasn't going down. In fact, by about 2pm it said 82. It was fighting as hard as it could and losing, badly: clear evidence the system STILL cannot keep up. Today's high was 95 according to www.weather.com, certainly not uncommon for Oklahoma. It appears the A/C can only hold the temperature about 15 degrees below outside temperature, even while running constantly.

So I called again. They called the A/C guy and said the only thing left to do is replace is the compressor (duh.) They said they may also have to replace the inside unit, not quite sure why, but I'm not complaining. I really don't see why they are bothering to patch this old, undersized unit up instead of simply buying a new one, but it is really frustrating (hence the blog.) They said they will (finally!) replace the compressor on Monday.

Luckily, this evening a cold front moved in along with a big thunderstorm and the system kicked off sometime around 9 or 10. By then outside temperature was in the mid 70's anyway, so it didn't have to work that hard.

The two things that frustrate me the most out of the whole ordeal is that 1) I can't keep the apartment at a comfortable temperature and 2) it is costing a fortune to run the A/C 20+ hours a day. Our last month's bill was $150. When I moved in, the electric company said the highest bill for the previous tenants the previous year was around $100. Our bills last year were comparable to that. Now they are 50% higher, and that was with a week's vacation in July with the thermostat set to 78 the whole time. If this keeps up, August's bill will be close to $200.

I work from home on Wednesdays, and hopefully it'll be 2 days a week soon. But if I can't keep the house cool on Wednesdays, there's really no point working from home because I can't think straight when I'm uncomfortable.

Apple's Gold Mine

2005-08-18T22:04:00.000-05:00

As more and more is discovered about OSX x86 the more I think Apple is sitting on a gold mine.

In case you've been living under a rock, Apple has been developing OSX and their core applications for the x86 (Intel/AMD) platform for the past 5 years. A while ago, Apple announced this fact and shortly after started shipping OSX 10.4 (Tiger) x86 machines to developers.

Initially I thought that OSX x86 would be locked to a specific chipset, specific network card, specific sound card, etc. I thought my chances of seeing it run under VMWare or any non-Apple hardware were slim to none.

Boy was I wrong. The developer version of OSX has leaked into the Internet and aside from needing to patch out the Trusted Computing stuff, it works just fine on MANY non-Apple computers and even runs quite well under VMWare. The compatible hardware list is staggering, as is the list of drivers it shipped with. Take a look at that last link for a couple minutes and notice these excerpts:

AppleAC97Audio.kext
AppleACPIPlatform.kext
AppleI386GenericPlatform.kext
AppleI386PCI.kext
ATIRadeon*.plugin
GeForce*.bundle

The compatible hardware list reveals an extensive list of Ethernet drivers including:
3Com, Broadcom, Intel, Nation Semiconsuctor, and Realtek). It supports most of the recent network chipsets right out of the box.

The question is, why? If Apple were to do things the way Apple normally does, there would be exactly 1 chipset driver, 1 video driver and 1 Ethernet driver.

The answer may be that they've been developing OSX on standard x86 hardware for the past 5 years, and simply added support as necessary. But that doesn't explain why the developer version still includes support for everything. Why not strip it down?

I have a couple theories. One is that Apple fully expected their developer version to leak out, and simply WANTED to have all that support in there so people could play with it and see how cool it is. A great marketing tactic.

The second is that Apple is planning a shrinkwrap version of OSX x86 for general release. Or perhaps they are simply planning to strike up a deal with Dell or some other OEM.

No matter what their motive, Apple is sitting on a gold mine of a product. They've carefully placed themselves in a position to gain a huge marketshare. The biggest hinderance to competing with an OS in the x86 marketplace is software. BeOS, OS/2 and even Linux fall short of replacing Windows because of the lack of software. OSX (and previous Apple OSs) has always ran on custom hardware, creating a huge financial barrier for people to switch to Apple. But they have software - lots of software. Even the most popular games are cross platform.

And now OSX can run on probably 50% of the x86 hardware out there. With a few additional drivers, that number could easily be 90%. With their Rosetta compatibility layer, the entire realm of Mac software was just opened up to the x86 world. Initial reports are finding that PowerPC native OSX applications run at 60-70% of their normal speed on OSX x86.

So, without further ado, my predicted Apple roadmap:
1. Apple releases their next set of desktops and laptops based off of Intel Pentium 4s. Hardware will be manufactered as a joint effort between Apple and Intel. Prices drop slightly.
2. Apple strikes up deals with other OEMs to increase OSX coverage. Operating system dropdowns on at least one OEM site will include Windows XP Home, Windows XP Pro, and OSX. Yes, this means Apple will open themselves up to clones. Prices drop through the floor.

After this, if Apple is smart, they will market a shrinkwrap version of OSX. Their target market? The hundreds of thousands of Windows XP boxes that have almost been reduced to doorstops thanks to spyware. XP SP2 provides decent protection, but it was too little too late. OSX can provide a clean, snappy, intuitive interface. Microsoft has been flopping around for the past 3 years trying to figure out a way to convince people to upgrade from Windows XP. Apple has the answer.

There's still several rather large hurdles Apple must get past before they can shrinkwrap OSX as an XP replacement. The first is a dead simple installer. It must be dead simple. It must migrate the user's bookmarks, e-mail settings, and documents. It must dual boot with the current operating system so the user can get back into Quicken, or whatever show-stopper application they have but don't use regularly. This means dynamically shrinking NTFS volumes, a spiffy boot loader, etc.

But imagine if they did it right - you could hibernate XP and unhibernate OSX. Switching operating systems could take less than a minute.

Now, there's several good reasons why Apple would avoid releasing a shrinkwrap version. Number 1 is that hardware is cheap. Why would someone spend $100 on an operating system upgrade when they can get a whole new computer for $300? Number 2 is driver support. Windows XP supports a staggering amount of hardware out of the box. Even with OSXs extensive list, it doesn't get anywhere close to Windows XP's level. They'd need a darn good return policy because there's going to be a lot of computers with wierd hardware that simply won't work with OSX. It will boot, but it won't support the sound card, or the scanner, or the printer. Something like that. Number 3 is upgrading sucks. Upgrading an OS is a huge technical hurdle riddled with lots of big and small problems to solve. Avoiding the upgrade path entirely is much easier.

What's wrong with Vault?

2005-08-14T09:39:00.000-05:00

As I posted earlier, I really like Vault, but it has a few things I'd like to see fixed or improved.

Better support for Programmer QA
Probably #1 on this list is how it handles (or rather, doesn't handle) PQA. PQA is Programmer Quality Assurance, something I picked up at my year working at Epic Systems. PQA is simply having another programmer (or preferably 2) take a good look at your changes to make sure you didn't screw anything up. It is much easier to catch bugs before they even get checked in than to let a tester or customer find them. Not only does it help find bugs, but also architectual and design problems.

At Epic, we used to tag every change in the code with a project number. The PQAers would then search for that project number and review the changes that were made. With Vault, we don't have to be so archane; we have MergeDiff, which does, for the most part, do an excellent job of figuring out what's changed and what hasn't. The problem is, Vault doesn't let you see other people's changes until they have checked them in (by definition, really).

The problem with checking in files that hasn't been PQAed is Get Latest on the tree grabs that new code, even though it may change drastically before it is finally considered done. Sometimes you might want to ask another developer's opinion on what you're doing even before you're done. At that point, your code may not even compile or it may break 5 other things. But as soon as you check it in, the compile server will pick it up and try to use it, as may other developers. That's bad.

What do I want? I want to be able to do a diff between the lastest version in Vault and what's sitting on another developer's machine without checking it in and without resorting to manually copying the files through some other method. Basicaly I want to see the diff that the other developer sees on their machine, without actually using their machine.

How could this be implemented? I'm not exactly sure, but something like a "staging area" per developer seems like a pretty good idea. You would essentially upload (check-in) the files to your staging area. But no one would see those files on a normal Get Latest. It wouldn't touch the main branch at all. I would be able to see the other developer's changes only by specifying I want to see their staging area.

Other little problems in vault I'd like to see fixed
There's a bug with the double-click handler on a file in the upper right window view. Sometimes this will give you an index out of bounds error. I haven't been able to reliably reproduce it, but it seems to happen if you have a different file selected than the one you are trying to double click on.

The search window won't let you check out multiple files at once if your search is set to "Any Status". If you right-click on an individual Renegade file, you can check it out. If you select multiple renegade files, the option to Check Out goes away from the context menu. If you search by "Renegade", only then you can select multiple files from the search window.

DiffMerge
The one thing I'd like to see in DiffMerge is the ability to manually align files. It does a pretty good job, but sometimes you want to say - No, that's wrong, THESE two lines actually match. Beyond Compare has this ability and it comes in quite handy sometimes, especially for particularly messy diffs. As a visual thing it doesn't much matter, but for a merge, it can mean the difference between being able to do the merge with DiffMerge and having to do it by hand.

I'd also like to see the ability to edit a line manually in DiffMerge. I'm not looking for a full-featured editor or anything, just a single-line edit. Again, this is a feature Beyond Compare has.

Why don't I just use Beyond Compare? I'm not particularly fond of the way it handles other things, particularly the "thumbnail" bar on the left. DiffMerge shows you the entire file. BeyondCompare doesn't if your file is really long. Instead, it scrolls with you, meaning you can't really get a good overview of what's going on sometimes.

To make sure my comments actually get looked at by the dev team, I've cross-posted them on their forum.

Technical Mumbo Jumbo 1

2005-08-11T22:22:00.000-05:00

Interesting thing I learned today. Say you have a ref cursor in an Oracle stored procedure that you want to populate with a dynamically constructed string. Like this:

myString := 'SELECT * FROM ' someTable;

So you might try something like this:

EXECUTE IMMEDIATE myString INTO RC1;

which fails miserably, complaining about expecting a Number and got a Cursor.

My coworker discovered that, surprisingly, this works instead:

OPEN RC1 FOR myString;

I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it work with my own eyes.

Great. Another blog I have to read in its entirety.

2005-08-11T22:14:00.000-05:00

Towards the end of The Best Software Writing I, Splosky included a couple of articles by Eric Sink. I didn't know who Eric Sink was until he mentioned SourceGear, at which point I headed to the beginning of the book to find out he is the founder of SourceGear. SourceGear makes an excellent product called Vault which we use at work as our software versioning product. It basically helps us keep track of who did what, including a truely excellent "Show Blame" feature which quickly answers the question "who the hell put THAT in here," by line number. Its one of the few tools I use every day that I don't have any MAJOR gripes with. I have a few, which I might actually document someday, but overall Vault does exactly what I need it to.

Anyway, it turns out Eric Sink is fairly well aligned with Spolsky and has his own blog. I suspect I'll be spending a lot of time on his site over the next couple of days while I'm out of town on business.

Why does everything have to be so difficult part 2.

2005-08-10T21:09:00.000-05:00

Going back in very recent history I'd like to relay two stories of the trials that life presents. In the grand scheme of things they are trivial, but possibly interesting.

Part 2: AT&T vs. Alltel.

In case you've been living under a rock, Cingular acquired AT&T. Well, most of it anyway. They weren't allowed to acquire small parts of it, like the 405 area code customers. Those had to be purchased by Alltel. The problem is, AT&T and Cing1ular are on GSM. Alltel is not. So I knew that sooner or later Alltel would be offering new phones, since they don't want us to be using AT&T's towers any longer than necessary. My boss and coworker are in the same boat. So this week we got a coupon in the mail for $50 a new phone if we sign up for new Alltel service. But Alltel is more expensive for less service than our contract with AT&T.

The problem is that we keep hearing conflicting information from Alltel and AT&T. For instance, my boss forwarded me an e-mail from Alltel stating that after September 30, we would no longer have service on our AT&T phones and should switch before then. A phone call to Alltel revealed a different date – Dec 12. A third representative from AT&T said Dec 31st. Which is true? I can't tell for certain.

The second dilemma is whether or not we can port our phone numbers to someone OTHER than Alltel without incurring a $175 contract cancellation fee. Alltel says it is up to AT&T. AT&T says they can't waive the cancellation fee because they are still fulfilling their end of the contract (by selling it to Alltel as allowed in Section 6 or something). However, the AT&T rep pointed me at an 800 number (888-483-6855) of Alltel's and indicated that THEY have the authority to waive the cancellation fee if you have a good reason.
So I called the number and explained that Alltel's offerings were more expensive than my current contract. After a bit of arguing with Dewey (yes, the rep was arguing with me) he said that I would not be charged a cancellation fee. I'm not sure if he actually DID anything or not, however, though after a bit more inquiry I found out he had pulled up my account information automatically because I called with my wireless phone. I asked him how he could guarantee I wouldn't be charged when other Alltel reps said maybe and AT&T said yes. He said Alltel couldn't hold me to the contract since they couldn't (or rather, wouldn't, in my opinion) uphold their end. He gave me a "confirmation number" which might've just been his agent ID or something.

In the end though, all the current services (except for T-Mobile which has really crappy coverage) are more expensive than the "contract" we signed with AT&T. We signed up for:

Nationwide:
$50 – 2 phones, 600 anytime minutes, unlimited mobile to mobile (M2M) and unlimited Nights and Weekends (N&W)

Alltel's cheapest nationwide plan is:
$60 – 2 phones, 500 anytime minutes, 1000 M2M, 1000 N&W.
That's not only more expensive, but isn't even as good of a plan. To get the same plan, Alltel offers:
$70 – 2 phones, 600 anytime minutes, unlimited M2M, unlimited N&W.

Now, you might say, do we need all those minutes? Right now, no. We don't use more than about 300 anytime minutes in a month, and nowhere close to 1000 M2M or N&W minutes. However, we might approach that when Brooke is doing her off-campus rotations starting in January. 1000 minutes a month breaks down to a half hour a day.

Besides, Cingular offers:
$60 – Family talk 500 – 2 phones, 500 anytime minutes, unlimited M2M, unlimited N&W, plus rollover.

Now, we'll probably never need the rollover, but that's $10 cheaper a month than Alltel. Icing on the cake: we get more phone options, the ability to use SIMs, and we get to use the Cingular+AT&T network, which may have less coverage than Alltel (which uses Verizon towers I believe) and it isn't some rinky-dink carrier that no one had heard of until this buyout thing came around. Goodness, what happens when Verizon buys them out in 18 months? Or worse, T-Mobile? In this industry, it appears a 2 year contract is longer than the average life span of the company. Sounds like some of the DSL resellers. And, in fact, they probably aren't much different. Alltel, from what I can tell, is nothing more than a Verizon reseller. Now they own a few GSM towers thanks to the AT&T deal in this area, and I suspect they'll convert them to CDMA as soon as possible.

Anyway, after all this I'm tempted to just use my current plan until my phone no longer works (or at least mid-december) and go sign up with Cingular. Let them turn off my phone, I've only had the phone number a year, so it won't be that big of a deal if I have to get a new number.

Other thoughts on the subject: The coupons they sent us expire Sept 30. What happens after then, assuming the service lasts until December. Is Alltel going to offer a better deal? Are they going to treat us like any customer off the street? The bottom line is that they PAID money for our AT&T accounts, but aren't going to honor the contracts. They have to convince us to sign up as Alltel customers on a new contract or they are going to lose money on the deal. I imagine they are actually losing money every month we are still using our AT&T phones, but paying the bill that says Alltel at the top.

In other news, I am selling my Tungsten W PDA phone that I bought. I didn't like it much as a phone, but thought I'd keep it in case it gave me leverage with Alltel. Turns out Alltel doesn't care what phone you have.

Why does this have to be so difficult?

Part 3 will come later. Part 4 would probably be the crap I had to go through to recover even half of this post, since the server ate it the first time I tried to hit Publish due to scheduled maintenance. Thanks again Blogger.com.

What's a blog?

2005-08-10T19:27:00.000-05:00

What's a blog? Standard definitions say that it is the combination of weB and LOG. I disagree. It is nothing more than an online diary. Some people use them for exactly that, others use them more like editorials. Mine will be a mix of both.

A bit about me:

I'm a software developer. I have a BS and an MS in Computer Science from the Univeristy of Wisconsin and Oklahoma State University, respectively. Currently I program in C# on top of Microsoft SQL and as of recently, Oracle 9i. I'm not particular to these platforms though. I am also quite familiar with Java and C++. I did my Master's thesis work on Linux 2.6 in C. Our wedding website was PHP on MySQL.

I've been married to Brooke for just over a year. We are currently living in Oklahoma while she attends veterinary school and I work.

I'm a big fan of Joel Spolsky and am currently reading The Best Sofware Writing I. I very much enjoyed his previous book too. Since I recently became a project head (i.e. pseudo-management) I've become interested in the management side of things, of which I tend to agree with Spolsky on almost everything. He's also helped me pad out my bookshelf with other books such as The Pragmatic Programmer. Someday I might post my own list of recommended reading.

Ok. Not a lot of content above, but certainly a few links to distract you until I can think of some good content.

Why does everything have to be so difficult?

2005-08-10T16:48:00.000-05:00

Welcome to my blog. I have many thoughts on what I'm going to put here and why, but that'll have to wait. I'm going to skip the introduction and go straight into the technical stuff.

Why is it that everytime I want to do something with a computer it ends up being 10 times more difficult than it should be? Creating this blog, for instance. I found the site, setup and account and ooooo, it says I can publish on an FTP server instead of on blogspot. I've got an FTP server! And I really like the idea of keeping backups of my blog myself, rather than depend on a free web site. So I set it up, add a user to my FTP server and hit Publish. ERROR. Details show this error:

001 java.net.SocketException: Connection reset2005_08_01_archive.html

Wonderful. So I figure maybe its a bug in my ftp server, WarFTP. So I get an updated version (1.67), install it, and still the same thing. So I get the latest-greatest 1.80 which is COMPLETELY different. Once I get past the new crazy interface, setup my directories the way I want (it did ATTEMPT to migrate my settings), I try the whoe thing again. Same error.

At this point I've given up on WarFTP and submit a bug report. Then I try Microsoft's FTP server. Simplistic, but I figure it just might work. Once I get around a few security and permissions problems, then try again. SAME ERROR.

Finally I try using my (limited) ftp space on an ISP. Regular FTP doesn't work, but Secure FTP apparently does. So at least I know blogger.com's FTP stuff isn't COMPLETELY broken, just mostly.

If you haven't guessed by now, I've given up and simply used blogspot.com for now. Whether I can migrate to my own server or not in the future is anyone's guess.