Holy crapola

My team has a European counterpart.  One of the guys from that European team just stopped by to introduce himself.  Turns out he’s Scottish. 

He wanted to say hi, because he fully expects to accidentally send me something personal at some point in the future.  Why?  Oh, that’s because his email address is taken from the name of a soup (apparently he really likes it).  The name of the soup?  Cullen Skink.  No lie.

And he told me about the town of Cullen, in Moray, Scotland.  Check out the picture at the bottom.  My town totally rocks!  I really want to go, after seeing that picture.

An interesting alternative medicine site

I’m not really into the whole alternative medicine thing, though I know a bunch of people who are.  It seems to me that most of them are folks who are desperate for any hope, because traditional medicine has failed to help them.

I stumbled upon a link to an alternative medicine blog, and read a few of the posts.  They seem pretty interesting, if for no other reason than to see the thought processes behind this type of medicine.

This site interests me primarily because I can’t see anything that’s trying to sell me something, other than Google AdWords (which I primarily blank out anyway).  Hopefully this means the blog author is actually trying to share his/her point of view, rather than just trying to make a quick buck by preying on people’s fears.

Regardless, it’s worth a read, especially if you’re a hippie (hi mom!).  Check out the health blog.

Deploying ASP.Net MVC apps to IIS 6

I had to do this today, and found two blog entries that made it really easy.  I figure I’ll have to do this again at some point, so I’m putting them here for easy reference, and to give this guy another link, which he deserves.

http://blog.codeville.net/2008/07/04/options-for-deploying-aspnet-mvc-to-iis-6/

http://blog.codeville.net/2008/07/07/overriding-iis6-wildcard-maps-on-individual-directories/

Woot! Release date inc!

Win7 has a release date: October 22!  You definitely want to get your hands on Win7, it’s way better than XP, and a definite improvement over Vista.

More details here: http://tinyurl.com/pbw3v6

WoW on Vista and Win7

I’ve been using Win7 and Vista to play wow for a couple of years now.  Along the way, I’ve learned a few tricks that may help other folks out.  For those that have been following my blog a while, or who were pointed here by a friend that plays WoW, you will probably know about my previous entry on this subject, http://cullenwaters.blogspot.com/2007/04/disable-aero-for-better-game-perf-in.html.  It’s time for an update, and some additions.

So, here are the steps I take to get the most out of WoW on Vista and Win7, while running in windowed mode.

1. Update all your drivers, using the latest Vista drivers.  We particularly care about sound, video, and network drivers here.  If you are running Win7, avoid the beta network drivers.  I’m using the beta NVidia drivers for Win7, and those are pretty good. 
2. Disable Aero while WoW is running.  Right click on wow.exe, select properties, and click on Compatibility.  On that tab, check the box that says ‘Disable Desktop Composition’.  This will cause windows to disable Aero while you have WoW running, which should result in less contention for your video card’s resources, and therefore higher framerates.
3. The next time you run wow, be ready for a ‘toast’ message in the bottom right of the screen.  Click that message!  Once you click the message, you’ll be able to tell windows to stop alerting you that it has disabled Aero (after all, you just told it to do so).
4. There’s a little known setting that can, generally, cut your latency in half.  WoW makes heavy use of TCP traffic (which is rare among games, most use UDP).  Windows, by default, sends an acknowledgement (ACK) every 2nd TCP packet.  We are going to modify the registry so that windows sends the ACK every packet, instead.  I’ve seen this, almost without exception, cut everyone’s latency literally in half (mine went from ~120ms to ~60ms).  There’s a catch to this tip, though.  You have to be running XP SP3, Vista SP1 or Win7 for it to work.  There was a hotfix because Vista was ignoring the setting.  Anyway, here’s an article about how to change the setting: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328890/.  As with all registry changes, you should backup your registry before you do this.

Of course, all this stuff is provided with no warranty, don’t complain if your computer blows up, etc.  This has worked well for me so far, but I make no guarantee that these steps will help you.

I was reminded today

of the funniest story that has ever been told.

http://cullenwaters.blogspot.com/2005/11/you-wont-believe-this-story.html

Please, go read this old post, and have a laugh yourselves.

Testing

This is a test post sent via email

Sent from my iPhone

Syncing your RSS feeds across multiple computers

As many of you know, I use several PCs regularly.  There’s the work PC, my personal PC, and a laptop that I use.  The work and personal PC are both at my desk, just on opposite sides.  I switch back and forth using a super cool KVM switch that supports dual monitors (anyone know of a KVM for triple monitors?).

As such, it is pretty frustrating for me to have data on one machine and not the other; I use the same keyboard, mouse, and monitors to interact with each PC, so it always feels like I am using the same PC.

I found Live Mesh, and I freaking love it.  I have all my docs synced, as well as my favorites folder, and some other random folders.  I’ve used up about half of my online storage space :).

So, I’ve got most of my stuff synced between these three machines, but my RSS feeds were a sticking point.  Previously I’d used outlook to synchronize between the two primary PCs.  This requires having outlook set up to connect to my MS account from my home machine, though, and I’ve not had a need for it yet.  I wanted another solution, and figured Mesh was a good place to start.

I found a blog posting that pointed me right where I needed to be: http://www.windowsobserver.com/tag/common-feed-list/.  The key part of this article is the location of the feeds files: c:\users\<user name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Feeds.  So I added the Feeds folder to my Mesh, and voila, I have sync’ed feeds!

The dryer’s not broken, honey

Courtney: Is our dryer broken?

Cullen: I’m not sure, is it?  What’s wrong?

Courtney: It won’t start.

Cullen: <looks in the laundry room>. The light’s on, it’s got power.  Was the door closed all the way?

Courtney: <blushing, closes the dryer door>.  Dryer works!

My name is Cullen, and I support this message

FizzBin.  I’ve said it.  I hope it works, though I doubt it will.

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/FizzBinTheTechnicalSupportSecretHandshake.aspx

Duplicity in Advertising?

I just installed Java on my home PC.  Amazing how often I forget to do that, until I need to run a java app.  For reference, it’s been weeks since I went to win7 at home, and I just, today, needed java installed.

Anyway, the java installer tries to install the MSN toolbar also.  Big win for MSN, bundling the toolbar with java, rather than having google’s toolbar bundled.  I bet that bundle results in tons more installations (and more ad revenue, I bet).

Right after the option to install the MSN toolbar is an ad for openoffice, which is a direct competitor (though with very minor market share) to MS Office.

I wonder if the guys that built that installer felt dirty while they did it?  I would have, selling ad space on page1 to MS, and ad space on page2 to a competitor, and having to code each explicitly, rather than it being a byproduct of some advertising mashup or whatever.

What do you think?  Semi dirty?  Or just fine, as a business practice?

The windows7 release will so be better than vista’s

I’ve installed win7 on all my boxes now (well, except my home server box).  And I’ve finally made the move entirely to 64bit. 

Aside – I read an email that explained some ways in which having a 64 bit OS installed would increase your computer’s perf (assuming you have recent, x64 hardware, like a core2duo or later chip).  I don’t know if the difference is really noticeable, but I certainly haven’t noticed any problems, and I get access to more memory now (32 bit can only address 4 GB of ram, of which 1 GB is used by the platform, and 64 bit can address like a bajillion GB)

Anyway, I installed win7 on my home machine yesterday (the super cool one with badass graphics, etc).  Intel has already shipped two windows 7 drivers.  There was one available via windows update yesterday around 4 PM, and then a new version was released via windows update last night.

Part of the reason, at least in my opinion, that the Vista launch kinda sucked was driver availability.  Vista changed the driver landscape dramatically, moving a bunch of drivers from kernel mode (really low level, OS stuff) to user mode (application level stuff).  This was painful for device driver writers, because they had to re-write all their drivers, and had to learn how to be performant in user code (they had been in kernel mode since like win95 or so, I think, maybe earlier).  This is why XP drivers were generally faster than vista drivers when vista shipped; those drivers were like version 80+, while the vista drivers were version 1, exclusively.

In addition to changing the driver landscape, Microsoft failed in that we announced vista ship dates several times which we didn’t make.  Similar to the boy who cried wolf, when we finally did ship, we caught our hardware partners by surprise; they had grown accustomed to ignoring our ship date announcements.  This was obvious even within Microsoft.  Visual Studio (VS), one of our flagship products, wasn’t Vista compatible at ship time.  Then VS shipped SP1, and they still weren’t vista compatible.  They had to ship a QFE/windows update (called vsvista) to enable vista compatibility. This took several months after vista shipped. 

Win7 is not changing the driver landscape so dramatically.  Vista drivers continue to work with win7.  So, all your existing software and hardware should work just fine on win7 (all mine does, without exception).  The upgrade path from vista->win7 should be easy, which should drive acceptance of the product sooner, and should result in win7 having a much better image than vista does/did.

I’m really excited for win7 to ship!

Warning to the family

In case it wasn’t clear, all of the posts I’m going to write about Gobi are going to be very technical in nature.  Hopefully you all didn’t get super excited about seeing a new blog post, just to have your excitement destroyed by learning it was all geek-speak.

Win7 first impressions

I love Win7.  I can’t wait to get it installed on all my PCs.  I am now exclusively on win7 for work, and will be moving my home pc to win7 soonish.

I really like the new taskbar, which removes the difference between a shortcut and an open window.  I have an outlook shortcut on the taskbar, but when I run outlook, the icon for the window is in the same place.

I still don’t love IE8, though I am getting used to it.  It seems like this version of IE8 auto-detects when it needs to run in compat mode, and does a pretty good job of that.  The colors in the tab group coloring are a bit too colorful for me, I wish they were more muted or more like pastels, but that’s ok.  Hopefully they are customizable, and I just haven’t found out how yet.

The window preview thing takes some getting used to.  If you mouse over an icon in the taskbar that has more than one window associated (like multiple IE windows/tabs), you can see a thumbnail from each window/tab.   Then, if you hover over that thumbnail, you see the full-sized version.  Intuitively, if you then click somewhere, you would retain that full sized version you ‘selected’ by hovering.  In reality, however, the version you hovered over goes away, and you end up back on the window you started on.  In order to select that hovered window, you have to click on it.  It’s hard to get used to, I’m still hoping I’ll get there.

Overall, a big thumbs-up for win7, though.  Drivers for vista have all worked just fine on win7, at least for all of my devices on two pcs.

I know some of this stuff is hard to visualize without pictures, but I’m lazy and haven’t figured out how to take screenshots of the preview thumbnail things.  If you want to try it out, the win7 beta is publicly available, and you are welcome to come by the house and I’ll show it to you (requires that you know where I live already, though :) ).

Announcing Gobi

I’m going to be starting on a new application very soon.  It’s designed for/targeted at professional window tinters.  The goal is to make it easier for those folks to figure out how much window tint they will need in order to complete a given residential or commercial job.

Since I’m going to be learning some new things, I thought I’d take the opportunity to share my process for building this app.  This will be my first commercial, only for-sale application, and I’m pretty excited about it.

A good friend of mine is a professional tinter, and he mentioned that it was hard to get these estimates done, since there’s a fair bit of calculation involved in minimizing the number of rolls of tint you have to order.  Tint rolls are sold by different companies, with different properties, and in different widths.  One of the tint manufacturers produces a piece of software to help with this process, but the software only supports their brand of tint (duh, right?).

Since I’m a software dev and not a tint manufacturer, my plan is to support products from multiple manufacturers.

The basic design of the app will be a desktop application which does the calculation and layout.  I will provide a cutlist diagram, so the tinter can easily see which windows’ tint should be cut from each roll, and how to optimally lay those cuts out, to maximize tint usage and minimize the material needed.

The software will save these quotes/proposals locally, and let you come back to edit/revisit them later.  This will help tinters to create an estimate for a customer, then edit that estimate if the customer wants to make changes.  A new cutlist will be generated every time the size and/or number of windows in the job gets changed. 

The application will also have a webservice that i can contact in order to receive updates to the tint products database.  This way, I can easily keep all the copies up to date as I add support for more manufacturers and tint products.  The database will be stored locally as an XML dataset, since I expect it to be pretty small.  If the DB size grows larger than I expect it to, I’ll move to using SQL Express (or perhaps the embedded sql solution).  I’d prefer to avoid that, so I can avoid having that dependency in my code.  The less people have to download to get up and running, the better.

The UI will be done using WPF.  I’ve not done any WPF coding before, so this is a good chance for me to learn what’s up with WPF, and use it in a real application.  Turns out that working at MS, on a software service, tends to keep you behind on new desktop UI technologies.  I need to get caught back up on the cutting edge, so this project will help me do that.

I picked Gobi as a codename because thinking of window tint always makes me think of heat, and Sahara is pretty well taken by the movie :).

Windows 7 features

There's a super cool blog on windows 7 (the one after vista) that I read. Sometimes the posts are too technical for my audience here (primarily my family). Today's post, though, should be of interest to all of you.

It's about the windows 7 taskbar, and how window opening and switching is changing in windows 7. I, personally, am super excited to get my hands on win7.

Check it out: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/11/20/happy-anniversary-windows-on-the-evolution-of-the-taskbar.aspx

We call it nap time

Courtney just sent me a transcript of an exchange between her and Mik:

Courtney says:

"Mommy, my eyes keep closing."

Courtney says:

"That's okay"

Courtney says:

"But, I can't keep them open."

Courtney says:

"That's okay, sweetie, just close them."

I’m a geek. I know it

Today's reason that confirms my geekhood:

We got word today that we get to switch to Visual Studio 2008 (off of VS 2005), and the .NET Framework 3.5.

I'm all giddy with excitement. I can't wait to start working in VS 08 tomorrow.

 

See, geek.

Flashing the BIOS is not fun

I recently sold my motorcycle, and decided to spend a bit of cash on upgrading my PC. My PC was pretty beefy already, but I had skimped a bit on my processor, getting a 2.2GHz core2duo. This processor was a huge upgrade from my 3.0GHz P4HT, but it was still kinda old.

Newegg.com had a great deal on a 3.0GHz core2duo, so I jumped. I also bought a huge cooler for the processor, so I can overclock it, I'm hoping to see close to 4.0GHz.

I read a really great, geeky blog of a guy named Jeff Atwood. He is very passionate about hardware, and building excellent pcs, so I generally look to his blog when it's time for me to pick components or upgrade. I was reading an entry of his, and it talked about how he bricked (ruined) his pc by flashing the BIOS, and having that fail, due to a software bug. Here's the link: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001102.html.

Anywho, I got the new processor, dropped it into my motherboard, spent way too long dealing with the huge heatsink and fan, then turned on the pc. Nothing. Crap, I thought, the CPU I got was dead. This is the first item I've gotten from newegg that showed up defective, so I contact them for an RMA. While I'm waiting, I decide to stick my processor in my sister's new computer (which I'd just built a couple of days before), to see if maybe the processor was ok, but something else in my system was the problem. It booted fine, she showed the 3.0GHz, and it ran like a champ.

Something tickled in my brain, from the article Jeff posted. He had to flash his BIOS to support the newer proc. So I visit Asus' website, and sure enough, support for that series of processor was added in a BIOS version about 6 newer than the one I had. Yay! I should be able to have the PC up and running in an hour, I think to myself. Download the BIOS file, read all the directions, I'm good to go. After reading about Jeff's problems, there's no way I'm going to try the software that runs inside windows; that failed for him, and he had to get a new motherboard. I'm pretty sure my motherboard is not under warranty, so I'm going the safer, slightly more complicated route. I read the directions from Asus, and it says to put this file on an USB drive, then reboot the machine, and go into the BIOS screens. They have an ezflash utility in their BIOS that will handle the upgrade for me.

EZFlash works a treat. It finds the file, does some preprocessing, shows me some progress bars, and announces that the upgrade was successful, and the machine will reboot in 5 seconds. All the lights turn off on the computer, the hard drives spin down, and the monitors go black. Once I'm sure the process is over, I remove the usb drive, and wait semi-patiently for the BIOS screen to load, and show me my shiny new processor. Nothing happens. So I wait another couple of minutes (this should have taken 30 seconds, max). Still nothing. Oh crap, I think. I'm afraid to turn off the power to the computer, since every site I could find on BIOS updates said turning off during the update would fry your motherboard. But, the sign said the upgrade was complete, and successful, and the mobo rebooted itself. So I cycle the power to the PC, and wait some more. Still nothing.

At this point, I'm literally sick to my stomach, cause I'm certain that something went wrong, and my mobo is trash, and I'm going to have to buy a new one, since I'm sure mine is out of warranty. I go to sleep for the night feeling sick, and determined to call Asus in the morning. I get tech support on the line, and they tell me almost immediately that the bios update failed, and I will need a new bios (most likely requiring a new motherboard). The wonderful tech support lady, though, asks me to look for a socket near my southbridge (this chip thing). Turns out some of Asus' motherboards have removable BIOSes. Mine is one! Hallelujah! They can ship me a new chip (with the most recent BIOS already installed), I can swap them, and I'm back in business. $15 for 3day shipping, or $20 for overnight? Overnight, please.

Right now my chip is on a fedex truck, in my town, on it's way to my house. I'll let you know how the BIOS chip swap goes, and how the new processor works out.

[Edit] I got the bios chip, installed per the instructions, and still have nothing with the new processor. I called Asus back, and they're shipping me another bios chip, with the previous bios on it. The one they sent me is the most recent, which says it has a bug fix for newer processors. The one they're sending me now is the one before that, which is where they added support for my new processor to start with. We'll see if this fixes it. I sure hope so, not having that pc available sucks.

Asus

I really want to take my hat off to Asus. My motherboard is a couple of years old, and they could have easily told me I was out of luck, and to buy a new one (many companies would have, I'm certain). Instead, they are shipping me a free BIOS chip, asking only that I pay for the shipping. Their tech support staff was incredibly friendly and amazingly efficient; I went from first contact (after hold) to having my bios in the pipe to ship in literally 10 minutes. I received an email and a phone call following up on the order, and the email even came from a real person, with a real return address. Thank you, Kara, and all of the other folks at Asus support. You folks totally rock.

I've bought several boards from Asus, and always been happy with them. This experience has made me even happier, and has certainly cemented me as an Asus customer for life.

How much is time worth to you?

There are a lot of grandparents that read this blog (most of my readers are my kid's grandparents :) )

How much do you think it's worth to spend a day with your grandkid?

If you had to pay $100 (in gas, or lost wages, or whatever) would you do it?

What about $200?

$300?

Personally, I would pay nearly any price in gas or lost wages to get to see my kid more. Obviously not all parents and grandparents feel this way, though. How much is time with your family worth to you?