Buying shoes – a pain in the sole

I hate buying shoes. I’m a tightwad anyway, and lately I have been running on the treadmill in my old, old, “basketball” style shoes – the ones that are leather all the way around. The only problem is that they also had holes in the soles and also the insides were so worn out that the plastic inners were showing through. So, I decided it was time to only use those for mowing the lawn and time to get some running shoes for the treadmill.

I went to Sports Authority to look at some the other day. I was amazed at how many brands and models of running shoes they have! A veritable smorgasbord to choose from. The only differentiator seemed to be price and color, because all any of them said was “man made uppers”. Nothing about “stability”, “cushioning”, etc. Nothing about for “over prontators” or “under pronators”, etc. Not only did the boxes and labels on the shoes themselves not say, but there was no literature explaining it either. How the hell was I supposed to pick from this morass? So I came home and looked at the manufacturers web site for one of the brands that was well represented at Sports Authority. I started with ASICS. These folks had a decent site and good information about their shoes and which were meant for which type of foot, etc. However you couldn’t print the list of their shoes with pronation range because they put it in some stupid little sub-window with its own little non-standard scroll bar. (ASICS – fix your site; this is a great resource – we need to be able to print it). So I had to pick a couple of models, print them, and head back to the store.

Well, I found those models actually hurt my left ankle. The right one was fine, but the left on both models hurt. I tried a couple of pair of each to be sure it wasn’t just some strange defect. OK, back to the web sites.

Next, I tried the New Balance web site. Not as well organized as the ASICS one, and didn’t easily offer data on what type of foot/gait their shoes were designed for – you had to dig for it. About this point, I found that the Sports Authority site gave better info on these shoes than the New Balance site. Between the two sites, I picked two more models of shoes and went back.

Of course, the Sports Authority brick and mortar store didn’t carry either of those two models. About this time I was getting tired of this and just picked a New Balance model that seemed to have the right level of arch for my near flat feet and looked to me to be a stability shoe. Bought them, came back and checked the web sites, and sure enough they were the right type.

I got to run in them today for the first time and they felt fine.

But I have to ask: why in the hell do they make this so hard? It should have been EASY to go to any of these manufacturer web sites, click “men”, click “running”, click “compare” and get a printable list of what foot type / gait type each of their shoes is made for and what its key characteristics are. How can they NOT do that? All I can think of is massive incompetence on the competitive advantage they could get by making this easy and by placing such information clearly on their boxes and in stores.

Apple Still Hates Me

Today I woke the computer from sleep mode a few minutes after I resumed from sleep. My computer usually resumes a little better than I do: most of the time in a happier state and it doesn’t even need to shave. Anyway, this morning after the computer woke up the Apple Software Update came up. I figured, oh, there must be an update for some critical vulnerability in QuickTime! Possibly they released a new firmware version for the iPod and want me to update iTunes. Something at least marginally in my interest was bound to be there, right? Wrong! All they had in the list was a lame-oh also ran browser aptly named “Safari” and some silly thing called the MobilMe Control Panel. Of course I didn’t want to go on Safari as FireFox (default browser) and IE 8 are good enough for me and I sure didn’t want to become Mini-Me or MobilMe or whatever.

Revenge of the turds

So I simply hit the quit button as their disingenuous attempt to get me to load useless crap had once again been foiled. However, they managed to extract their revenge: for the next hour – until I killed it in Task Manager – the Apple Software Update program managed to take an entire core (causing Task Manager to show 50% utilization). Good thing Apple didn’t write it to take both cores or the computer would have become completely unresponsive.

Apple – stop trying to foist your silly crapware on me. I could understand advertising it on your web site. But just because I am required to load your excuse for a media player to manage the music on my iPod doesn’t mean that you should get to advertise junk neatly disguised as updates. Take a hint from say Ubuntu. Their software updates are just patches and upgrades to the THINGS I ALREADY HAVE INSTALLED. Same thing for Microsoft – critical updates and recommended updates are just for what is already installed. Get with the program guys.

I am in Hell, sir!

Or at least I’ve just been there. Dell Hell that is, and the line from Mr. Christian in The Bounty sums up that mephitic place of perdition nicely. For those that haven’t heard “Dude, you’re getting a Dell” lately, Dell Hell is where you are when your machine won’t work and support doesn’t seem to respond. I’ve actually been there twice recently.

The first time, my son’s machine was going into thermogenic shock. Yes, it was overheating. This was a Latitude D820, and it would reproduce by playing an MP3, booting from a memory key into the diagnostics and running them, or just entering the BIOS screen and moving around between items for 30 seconds. After several emails back and forth with Dell “technicians” (all of which told them the specific of an overheating machine and that it would do it in their diagnostics), I got a suggestion back from them: reinstall Windows. I figured, gee – that may somehow miraculously cure Windows (how I sure don’t know), but it won’t do a whole lot for the machine overheating and turning itself off during their diagnostics. I finally got nasty and sent the “flame note” asking them what part of Windows was running when booted from their diagnostics on a memory key and insisting on escalation to a supervisor.

That got a new mainboard installed. However the problem remained. We then got a new board again, a new fan, a new heat sink, new memory, and a new processor. Problem solved (it was apparently the heat sink all along).

I thought I was out of the Dell Hell, that Latitude Limbo, that processor purgatory. Alas, no – next my machine (an identical Latitude) started on the journey to Gre’thor to see Fek’lhr. I came down to use the notebook and found it on a Blue Screen – something about memory management – and it had hung at 0% on the dump file. I powered it off and it would not come back on. At least the screen wouldn’t show anything. No post test, no logo, no boot, nada.

So I took it out of the dock and opened the screen, but that produced nothing better. It would have on solid green LED, two blinking ones and then would power itself off after 60 seconds. Not good. I look up that particular combo of blinking Christmas Tree lights and it is something to do with memory. So I swap the memory with another machine that is working. The bad machine is still bad and the RAM from mine is chugging along great in the other box. I then try just one stick of RAM (1 GB instead of 2) in mine. Low and behold that works and it passes the diags. Put any 2nd stick of RAM in and the machine is useless. OK, needs a mainboard.

Back to the email with Dell Support. I have next day on-site service so this should be a snap, right? Send them a note on a Sunday (3/22/2009) and again, and again, and then finally get a reply on Friday. Still in Dell Hell like this guy. A couple more emails back and forth and they dispatch the mainboard which gets installed on Tuesday. OK, so that’s 9th day on-site support.

Every been in Glade Gehanna, Trough Torment, or Dell Hell yourself? Well I have! (I can just see Andy Rooney starting out with that one…)

Apple Hates Me

I'm not sure what I've done to Apple, but whatever it was it must have been something major. They either really, really hate me or iTunes is just a piece of garbage. Heck, it could be both.

For Christmas, the kids, my wife, and I all got new iPod Nano's - the 16 GB Gen 4 variety. These are pretty sweet little devices. I think Apple pretty much knocked it out of the park on the hardware for these new Nanos. However, the software is another story. In fact, the software is abysmal. (Even the OS on the Nano itself isn't perfect as the Nano locked up on me after about 15 minutes of use). The real problems didn't start though until I wanted to actually PLAY some music.

I already had 146 albums on my computer organized in Windows Media Player in pretty standard fashion as Artist \ Album \ Song. Many were MP3, but a few WMA's accidentally snuck in there too. I installed iTunes 8.x and told it to import the C:\users\GIL Dude\Music folder. It complained about the WMA's and said it would convert them (all other players I have used handle WMA fine). It seemed like this worked. The operative word is seemed like. I went ahead and synched my new Nano and that worked fine. I tried the new "Cover Flow" and saw just silly "Music Symbols" and no album art. Funny, every single album there has a folder.jpg, albumartsmall.jpg, and zunealbumart.jpg - iTunes could have taken its pick. But, nope, it just wanted to show silly little music symbols.

Next, I told it to go get album art. This requires signing into the Apple Store (which I did). This also brings up how my kids are supposed to get album art on their machines. In order to create an Apple Store account it requires a credit card. I am NOT giving my card to 12 and 14 year olds. Sorry Apple, another strike. So, it retrieves the album art (supposedly). It turns out that Apple only lets you download the album art for albums that it sells. (No other music software I have used has this restriction). It further doesn't identify some albums well, so you end up with something that looks like this:

Looks like it got 10% of the album art. So, I had to learn to right click the album and hit "Get Info", then drag and drop or paste the album art (that is already in the folder with the album damn it) into a little box, and then iTunes goes and rewrites the mp3 with the JPG file inside it (a huge waste of space since it should only need one copy of it, not one copy per song). So, I go through that, and sync the Nano again. Now the cover flow works! Sweet!

I had helped the kids and my wife get this far too and it was time to take a trip to my Mom's house. We took the Nano's with us. On the trip, we find that many of the MP3's won't play. Generally it was entire albums. It would play 1/2 second of the song, then immediately display that it was at 8 seconds of the song and then stop. If you hit the "rewind" (back) button it would actually then go and play the song. But there was no way to just listen without fiddling and hitting back all the time when it would stop playing. When we got home, we noticed that iTunes had a similar problem with the same files: it would play 1/2 second and then skip to the next song. There was no way to get them to play at all in iTunes.

Jack the Ripper

I had to test each album and found that about 1/2 - about 73 of them would not play. I spent some time searching the Apple support site. I spent more time with Google. I found reports of this on all types of Apple hardware dating back to 2005. Many folks had tried "fixing" their ID3 tags, etc. but there wasn't a consistent fix. I went ahead and used a stripper (no, not that kind - an ID3 tag stripper) to remove the tags from some sample songs and they still wouldn't play. I then resigned myself to re-ripping all 73 albums using iTunes to do it. Remember, these songs played fine in Media Player, fine on Zunes, and fine on a Creative Zen Micro. Only Apple (did I mention they hate me?) wouldn't play them.

So, I start the re-ripping. Apple is really helpful there. You get some strange dialogs like this:

As far as I can tell, this mean exactly squat. If you want me to pick between two options, at least show something unique about them. iDorks!

Another issue I kept hitting is the accuracy of the CD database being used by Apple. It did have some songs and album names correct that Windows Media Player had gotten wrong - but overall it was far worse than Media Player. Apple's DB had typo's galore, as you can see here:

(The correct entry is left there after I copied the iTunes ripped versions.) I had a lot of manual correcting on things like this. Other times, the software just up and did a WTF. For example seemingly randomly renaming items like this:

This last were some of the WMA files it "converted" and nicely jacked the numbering all up.

As if that wasn't enough, I couldn't find some things at first after the re-rip. Then I realized that it decided that both "Night Ranger's Greatest Hits" and "ZZ Top's Greatest Hits" were "Compilations" and should go under "Compilations\Greatest Hits" (yes, the album name was just "Greatest Hits". It actually threw both artists albums into the same folder:

As I said, WTF. As in WTF were they thinking when they built that? So, more manual corrections. In fact, I spent HOURS on manually correcting this junk - all because Apple can't be bothered to play 1/2 of my MP3 files that work on all other hardware.

All told I spent over 30 hours on this (mostly with the corrections - it doesn't take that long to do the rips). So, you get to decide - does Apple hate me or does their software just suck? It's not an exclusive or either, so you have three options:

• They hate me
• Their software (iTunes) sucks
• They hate me and iTunes sucks.

I'm leaning towards the latter.

How green is too green?

It seems you can't pick up a computer or IT related magazine without having the word green somewhere on the cover - generally accompanied by an article about what vendor xyz is doing to increase the 'greenness' of their product or service or by what provider abc did with their data center to lower the carbon footprint. In general this is great. We get devices that suck less power, operating systems (like Vista) where sleep works better and interim power states save more power, a cleaner planet, etc. That's gotta be a good thing? Right?

That's where my concept of 'too green' comes in. I'm not talking about 32,255,7 although that is too green to. Just like how you can have wood that is 'too green' to burn right, you can have something that is just 'too green' for its own good and doesn't really work right. (In this sense, you can just about think of green in both the 'earth friendly' and 'new' terms and you come out about right - almost like a puppy dog; trying to please but not necessarily doing it right). In fact, that is the topic for this post - we'll call the example today:

Stupid notebook tricks - or the green that was too green.

Take a nice new notebook - say a Lenovo T400 series machine. A nice box certainly. And some of the things I mention here will reproduce on other machines like current HP ones. However, I have personal experience with some stupid T400 tricks, so I will call them out in particular.

Build your T400 with a nice corporate image of Vista Enterprise Edition, complete with the latest drivers in the driver store. Place it on a port replicator and connect it all up. Sign in to your favorite Instant Messaging program (we're still using Office Communicator 2005). Walk away for a meeting. When you come back, the screen is blank. Cool, that's green! Move the mouse to wake the screen up and you notice you are no longer signed into your IM program. If you look quickly enough you see the little 'network' icon in the system tray shows that you lost your network connection momentarily. Hmm. Time to check into that you say? So did I. Next, I set the screen to turn off after just 1 minute. Started up a ping from another machine so I could watch the responses (either ping -t or a custom tool). I also stuck a mirror behind the T400 port replicator so that I could see the indicator lights on the NIC connector. Sure enough, when the screen blanked the NIC lights went out for a second then back on. The PING application noticed - it showed a couple of failures before continuing. Move the mouse, and the lights go off again. The PING fails again, and then comes back.

Now try this same thing when you are undocked (maybe in a meeting using Netmeeting or something similar). In this configuration - undocked - you notice that when the screen blanks nothing changes. That's good, right? We stay connected. But, then you move the mouse to get your screen back and then it disconnects and reconnects. That's got to be the stupidest thing it could do. Leave the network running great while the screen is blank but when the user wants to do some work - let's shut it down and restart it. Did you notice you lost your Netmeeting?

After you start looking into this (I needed a couple of peers to help), you find it is some new 'green' built into the latest Intel networking chipsets and drivers. It only works on Vista, because it relies on being notified by the opeating system that the screen is blank. It's called ''System Idle Power Saving" or SIPS. You can read about it in this PDF from Intel. (It claims that it 'renegotiates' when the screen blanks and again when it comes back on - but you can test this and it only does that in the docked state: when undocked it only bothers when the screen comes back on.) Looking at the charts they provide, it shows that it could go from say 22 mA to 4 mA in certain scenarios. Sounds good until you realize you lose your network connection. What if you were on VPN? How about a WebEx or Netmeeting?

I checked the event log, and like the documentation says it does renegotiate to the slowest it can. When connected to my 1 Gbps hub, it renogotiated down to 10 Mbps. So, if I were to - for example - connect to my machine using Remote Desktop from home and attempt to build a new image and copy it to a network location it would do so at 10 Mbps (because the screen is still blank). That nice new 4.8 Gb Vista image copying at 10 Mbps? Epic Fail.

Now, to be fair - I haven't yet tested what happens when you are on VPN or NetMeeting. I do know that the Intel documentation claims to only do this if the network is idle. They don't seem to define what idle means to them. What it certainly does NOT mean is that 'there are no TCP connections' - because it definitely doesn't seem to care about that. It drops you. Hence the signed out IM program. It may have some arbitrary packet rate that it is figuring 'less than x per second means idle' or some such. Whatever it is doing to calculate idle, I'll call it 'Fail'. It's just too green.

Cue up Captain Kirk and Scotty:

Capt: Scotty, emergency beam out!
Scott: Captain, I canna do it; the transporter system's gone into power save mode. It'll take two minutes to get back ta full power if'n it doesn't blue screen.

You see? Too Green!

The case of the Irritating Ibex

This past weekend I decided it was time to do maintenance and updates on my test systems. Both the notebook and the desktop are setup dual boot with Ubuntu being one of the operating systems. Both were running 8.04 which had been upgraded from 7.10. The 7.10 -> 8.04 upgrade had gone flawlessly on the notebook, but on the desktop (after an over the network upgrade), Ubuntu decided that my wired Ethernet adapter did not exist. After RTFM'ing noob (searching the internet) I had resolved the problem. I figured this time it would have to be better.

(For those that don't know, Ubuntu's current practice is to name releases in alliteration with animal names. Hence the 8.04 release was "Hardy Heron" and the 8.10 is "Intrepid Ibex").

I started by reading the upgrade readme available here. It seemed that I was going to be OK going to 8.10, as my video card is an nVidia FX 5500 which is not on the list of cards for which support for 3D was mysteriously withdrawn. It claimed that my card would be upgraded to the 173 or 177 driver (whatever the hell that meant). So I started both the Desktop and the Notebook upgrading. There was a simple, well documented procedure to tell the 8.04 LTS version that it was OK to upgrade to a non-LTS new version, and they were off and running.

Painless, right? Ubuntu has a fairly well deserved reputation as being easy to install and working on a lot of platforms (as they are not obsessed with not shipping non-free binaries - hence they have a 3D driver for nVidia included). However, this upgrade was worse than the last one. It installed that new "173" driver for my nVidia card, then promptly told me that it wasn't working.


So, be sure that there is a supported nVidia GPU in the system. Check - I did that before installing. Duh! Like I would wait until after the install to check that. OK, next - ensure that the nVidia device files have been created properly. Great! We'll do that! Uhm, how do we do that? Now, I know that on Linux and Unix IO is almost always to a file but what the heck am I supposed to do to check that they were created correctly? Maybe this should offer to fix it for me? Oh, wait - they have a link to the nVidia Readme. Or not. Instead just a vague reference to consulting the nVidia Readme and not a link. Where is this mystical file? Wait, this was just a less snotty way of saying "RTFM noob" wasn't it?

Even worse, on my system I could not even read the dialog as it was positioned off to the left so far that half of it was not even on the screen and it could not be moved (sync problem - it would not sync properly to my 20" 1600x1200 panel). I had to use a different screen just to read the message. Once I clicked OK, it would then show me some options. One of them was something about fixing the problem and reconfiguring. Great! I figured I don't know enough to boot to a console and go edit xconfig.org or some shit, so I would let the GUI do it. That worked great if what I was looking for was a blank screen. However, I was figuring even the normal drab brown Ubuntu default desktop would be better than a blank screen.

I gave up, and decided to try a different video card (an nVidia 6800 GT I had laying around). After finding that the new card took more power than my supply would put out (yes, the power supply actually emitted an over current alarm - a loud screech!), and finding out that the only bandaids in the house were some Disney ones (I always get cut plugging and unplugging molex connectors), I put the old card back in. I figured - I will just update the Windows XP partition and give up for now and re-install Ubuntu from CD (which I had downloaded).

I had already set XP to "standard VGA" in preparation for swapping cards. Since I didn't really end up swapping I just updated XP to the latest driver for the 5500 FX from the nVidia site. That was easy, just run setup. I then thought, well - one last try for the current Ubuntu install. Wham! It came up correctly. No warning about video not working, checking for supported GPU's or running sudo someshit.conf. It's up!

About this time I decided to check the notebook. It had survived the update pretty well. It has no sound now, but otherwise it worked. In fact, it has "some sound". The Ubuntu "enter your ID" sound works, and so does the login sound. But no apps can play sounds. Flash can't, and even the audio configuration applet only plays beeps. I give up on that one for now.

I then wanted to compare round-tripping some docx and xlsx files through OpenOffice with the latest Ubuntu. Whups! 8.10 comes with the 2.4.x branch and not the new 3.0.x series. I went to go upgrade, but Ubuntu won't upgrade it until 9.04. So I thought, the Backports - that'll have it. Apparently I am too early for that. So I went hunting on the internet and found this. Read it and weep. Weep for the "setup.exe" that I downloaded and installed in moments on the Windows XP partition. Apparently to install this Deb package I need type about as much text on the command line as this blog. I think I'll just go play with Open Office on Windows, Ubuntu had sapped enough productivity already this last weekend.

Comcast - royal screwups or just criminals?

I've heard nothing but bad things about Comcast customer service. I generally haven't had to call them for anything the last few years, so I had no real experience of my own to go on. However, we recently got really tired of having two seperate accounts - one for cable TV and one for internet access (which started way back when it was ATTBI). It wouldn't have been a problem having two accounts, but Comcast's online systems seem incapable of accepting automatic monthly payment when a phone number has two accounts associated with it. We could get on account on auto, but not the other. We just had a simple request - here are our two account numbers that match our phone number and address. Please merge them so that we can automatically pay. Sounds like a 5 minute request, right?

Well - you'd think so anyway. My wife called them and after a few minutes of wading through the phone trees, told me that our internet access would be down for a few "moments". I then heard her let the Comcast agent go. Red Alert! Battle Stations! I told her, "you don't let them off the line until it works because they usually do something wrong and I hear they are clueless." Since I was planning to work from home the next morning, internet access was going to be important. Well, we stopped for dinner and an hour later - no access. We rebooted the cable modem - no access. We could ping Comcast's DNS servers, but not get out to anywhere else. So it was some sort of software block - some blockhead in customer service twiddled the bits wrong.

My wife called them back and got another agent. This agent told her that the people in "billing" went home and there was nothing she could do. We called back. Got a helpful person this time. It took 20 minutes, but he got our access back. Had to refresh the DHCP address in the router - but then it was working. However - open Outlook, and get prompted for a password. Shields Up! Arm Photon Torpedoes! That's right - they deleted all of our accounts as part of this. No more master account (can't logon to to the web pages, can't access email) and all 4 of us had our accounts / access deleted.

Now, we are back on the phone again. The next rep's computer "wasn't working" so she transferred us (it must have been time for her to go home). We are now on the line with YACI (Yet Another Comcast Idiot). I'm sure we will be told that there is nothing they can do and that the people who can do anything just went home. I just can't understand how such an inept company can be in business. It must cost them a bunch to take extra calls (hours now!) when their agents don't handle simple calls without cutting off their customer's accounts. I guess it must just be due to their area monopolies (I am 15,000 feet from a DSL CO). Otherwise, I can't explain it. I'd leave if they weren't the only game in town.

Who knows? I've even heard that you can't get your email addresses back. Maybe I'll end up being JDude123987@comcast.net after this. In fact, I had a picture of myself on my profile that showed up on this blog. It is now gone - it was hosted at http://home.comcast.net. I'm leaning towards criminals.

Update - after that last call the accounts were all restored from backup. So we got our correct email addresses back and even my photo for my profile here on Blogger came back. So, hours later we are back up. A simple request to customer service results in this. I can't even imagine how long we would have been down if we didn't work in technology. For example, if my Mom had this happen - when would she have noticed that her primary account had been deleted and her email didn't work anymore? Maybe the next day or the one after that? I still need to decide the main question though: does Comcast just hate their customers or are they just incompetent? I know, I know, "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity". But still - it makes you wonder...

Global Accounts Infrastructure Deployment Council

Wow, that title is a mouthful. It's also where I've been for the last several days. That said, the rest of this post is under NDA. That's right: all two of you who read this can't tell anyone what you read here. Wait - that must have just seeped in from the last several days of presentations - all of which started with some NDA slide or another. After a bit you get tired of hearing about Nonsense Dispersal Agreements anyway. We all know that conferences spew nonsense: no need to have slides about it.

So, this was another conference that tires you out to no end. Reception the first night, then up at 5:00 to do email before sessions, sessions until 5:45, then back on the bus and a dinner from 7:00 until 10:30 then finally back to the hotel and to bed. Next day, up at 5:00 to do email before the sessions and sessions until 5:45 then a steering committee dinner from 6:30 to something late. About the same the third day. At least the stuff is all interesting - it just gets to be tiring after awhile. All that said, I wouldn't change it: we need all that time to get everything in.

One of the funniest happenings was the network there at the Executive Briefing Center. Anyone who has been to Microsoft's Redmond campus lately has probably gotten a print out of an ID and password for accessing the "MSFTGUEST" wireless network. You try to open say www.cnn.com and get redirected to a place to logon - similar to how most hotel networks are setup. Nothing new there. However, in this case - for the first two days - Internet Explorer wouldn't display the site. Firefox would work fine! Now, as embarassing as that must have been for the hosts, it does show that Microsoft does not make web pages that only work in Internet Explorer. It happened to be on Firefox download day, so I needed to use FF 2.014 to connect to the MSFTGUEST network so I could download FF 3.0. That just sounds wrong when you are on an MS network. Worked fine, but then VPN wouldn't work. Its amazing how one of the largest and most successful software engineering firms can't run a wireless guest network that - well - works. Most people using classic VPN solutions such as Cisco, Nortel, or the built in MS VPN L2TP could not connect. Only the people using SSL VPN's or RPC over HTTP (which my company doesn't allow) could get their mail. I finally got in part time by using a Citrix connection to remote desktop. At one point that wouldn't work either and I had to use OWA. I guess they had to take the folks who would normally create a working network and devote them to fixing Vista?

Other than the wireless snafu, the rest of the conference was engaging and fairly interesting (as usual some sessions more so than others). Thanks to Paula, Joseph, and Karen for making the conference a successful and interesting experience.

Tech-Ed and the Case of the Powerpoint Poisoning

As you know, I attended Tech-Ed (IT Pro version) last week in Orlando, Florida. I made it back, my luggage made it with me, and the airline somehow avoided breaking my three Pat O'Brien's hurricane glasses. Friday night after the sessions a couple of us went to the Hard Rock Cafe out at Citywalk and then over to Pat O's piano bar. My voice is still recovering. I think after the second hurricane and the free MGD that the Miller Lite girls gave us (thanks Rochelle and Kelly!) I had decided that I sounded pretty darn good (which called for the 3rd hurricane). I think the other patrons would probably dispute that assessment however.

This year I was disappointed in that very few of the Microsoft folks that I know were there at Tech-Ed. Even one person who was on the agenda for a couple of break outs was a no show. This seems to be getting worse each year as people either take different positions or leave Microsoft entirely. One thing I wasn't disappointed in was the shuttle buses. Somebody did something right there and we never had to wait long at all. In fact, last year many of us had to wait over an hour at the evening event to get a shuttle home. This time, there were several of each route sitting waiting for us. The ones to and from the conference sessions were likewise very available. That part was well done. The weather cooperated this year too and only managed to rain and thunder while we were in sessions. At one point on the third floor you were hard pressed to decide whether there was a lot of clapping next door or if the thunder was just right overhead. This beat last year again, as last year we got completely drenched at the evening event out at Universal.

I did end up with a case of PowerPoint Poisoning though. It was either that or alcohol poisoning, but I'm going with the PowerPoint as my story. The way this works is they feed you a bunch of food, stick you in a darkened room with an often monotone speaker, and flash slides which are often devoid of any interesting content. It's no wonder that half the room nods off from time to time. I know I did, and I saw a lot of other people in the same boat. There were of course the normal stock of superlative speakers who keep the audience engaged. Folks like Mark Russinovich, Steve Riley, and Mark Minasi - no sleeping in their sessions. Well done!

I also went to a few sessions that seemed to be covering some fairly important things but were very lightly attended. One example was Michelle Abrahams talk on Windows Search 4.0. This session was only a level 200, so it wasn't very technical. However, it covered the just released update to Windows Search that makes the Vista Instant Search feature tons more stable (it used to corrupt itself fairly often if you had a high volume of email). Perhaps people stayed away from the level 200 sessions or just didn't think this was important but it was their loss: this is something they should be deploying - now.

Overall, the sessions were pretty good but I did get a lot of repeat information that I've probably known for years as a veteran of several TAP programs. For instance the same guy was there talking about building Windows XP images and how to replace the HAL - same thing as last year and the year before (fortunately I didn't attend this time, but one of my coworkers did). I thought that both Chris Jackson and Aaron Margosis did a good job with their respective sessions on app compat and LUA issues. My notepad does have a couple of nuggets that I picked up from some of these sessions - so the PowerPoint Poisoning was worthwhile.

Tech-Ed bound

It's become almost an annual ritual - heading off to Tech-Ed. I got up early this morning to do online check-in to make sure I have the 2nd exit row aisle seat, print out the sunset, civil twilight, etc. from this handy site, print out the weather forecast, my BitLocker recovery password, hotel confirmation number, Tech-Ed bar code, map of the Orange County Convention Center, and more. Did I mention that I'm a geek? Or did you just figure that out yourself?

This year, Microsoft (in its infinite wisdom) cut Tech-Ed into two pieces: a developer focused track (which is over now) and an IT Pro focused track (which I am heading off to). That's right, they broke Tech-Ed. Broke as in "borked". Someone must have decided that everyone has a tidy little job title like "senior developer who writes code and doesn't need to know about infrastructure" and "IT Architect who specifies SQL Servers and Active Directory but doesn't need to know anything about .Net or C#". Living in the real world, I tend to do a little of both. Actually now that I accepted a Team Lead job, a large portion of my time is spent in meetings and managing people / processes, but I still am able to spend some time creating images (IT Pro) and developing code (Developer). Perhaps Microsoft didn't really want to split Tech-Ed out into two: maybe they didn't have enough hotel rooms in the area to fit everyone? Or maybe Universal Studios couldn't stomach the thought of 15,000 drunk geeks walking around taking pictures of the T-Rex just as they went over the edge in the Jurassic Park ride (yes, last year that was me!). Either way, the sessions I will be attending are surprisingly bereft of titles like "Best practices to make your code multi-lingual" (I think they decided that with so much outsourcing half of the dialog boxes in the code we get are English-as-a-Second-Language anyway). Gone are the "Programming for the new Network Stack" sessions - they must have been last week.

Fortunately, they still have the "SOA358 Publishing and Extending Business Rules in Mainframe (CICS and IMS) and AS/400 Programs Using Microsoft Host Integration Server" session which, according to the really nice "session demand" graph appears to have one person attending it (with two speakers no less - I feel sorry for Paul Larsen and Ricardo Mendes). It's funny how I whine and complain that they don't have any of the coding sessions, when one look at my online schedule shows that I have double and triple booked most time slots. I'm actually down to where I must pick between "CLI360 Tricks of the Windows Vista Masters" and "SEC355 Privacy: The Why, What, and How" by seeing which one is being done by Steve Riley (an awesome speaker by the way). I also had to make sure when looking at sessions like "CLI369 Building the Perfect Master Image" that they aren't being done by Johan Arwidmark - a nice enough and very bright guy, but his "ya, I'm here from Sweden to tell you about the Windows PE" just gets annoying. Sorry, that quote is much better when I can deliver it out loud and mimic the voice and delivery.

After all of that going through the schedule and all, I still had several time slots where I have two or more sessions and I will have to decide at the last moment which one to go to. Probably the one by the least used restroom. Speaking of restrooms - have you ever been to Tech-Ed? Geek conferences like Tech-Ed are the only places on the planet where there are lines outside the men's bathroom and not the women's (as the male/female ratio at Tech-Ed is something like 20 to 1). I often find myself leaving sessions 10 minutes early to be first in line - like lining up for "Indiana Jones and the Last Urinal Available". At least they don't sell tickets... yet. If you are coming to Tech-Ed IT Pro in Orlando, maybe I'll see you in line for the John. I'll be the one wearing whatever Windows Mobil Hat, Server 2008 Pin, etc. supposedly will win me a prize.

DC - a Powerful Place

I recently returned from a successful trip to Washington DC as a chaperone for an eighth grade class trip. Despite my initial thoughts about how I may decide to throw some of the louder ones off of the Washington Monument or push them in front of a bus I actually made it through the trip pretty well. It was one of those regimented, over scheduled, jog through the sites to say you did it kind of trips - the ones that leave you wondering where you actually went by the time you get home and look at the pictures. We left on a Saturday morning at 3:15 AM and returned back on the following Saturday at 1:14 AM.

If you looked fast, you saw basically everything there was to see in Washington DC, and parts of Virginia and Maryland. If, like me, you like to actually READ the placards on the displays and study the fine detail in objects then you would either have to come back on your own or miss the bus. This was the one hour and twenty-five minutes at the Air and Space Museum, one hour and thirty minutes (lunch included in that time) at the Natural History Museum, jog up the stairs to the Lincoln Memorial (at night no less - the pictures suck as we didn't have tripods), the blitzkrieg tour of Gettysburg, etc. Did you get a picture of the Iwo Jima memorial? No, my flash wasn't charged before we had to run back to the bus. The downside of course was the incredible rush to get from place to place without spending any time to really enjoy them while we were there. The upside is that we can say, "been there, sprinted through that" about most of the things in the area. Let's see, my list shows that we saw:

• National Air and Space Museum
• Museum of Natural History
• Newseum
• Lincoln Memorial
• Jefferson Memorial
• FDR Memorial
• Washington Monument
• White House tour
• Capitol Building guided tour
• Gettysburg battlefield guided tour
• Gettysburg visitor center and museum
• Mount Vernon tour
• Monticello tour
• Vietnam Memorial
• Korea Memorial
• WWII Memorial
• Busch Gardens (yes, a whole 6 hours there riding roller coasters!)
• Water Park
• Hauntings Tour
• Colonial Williamsburg tour
• Jamestown tour
• Attended President Bush's speech at Arlington Natl Cemetery on Memorial Day (in the Amphitheater - had to get there at 8:00 AM)
• Dinner / Dance cruise
• Yorktown tour
• National Archives
  

There may have been more; those are off the top of my head. Anyway, it was a bit strange being a "kid herder" (no, not the little goats). We had to make sure they didn't touch the walls or display items in Monticello, hit each other and be loud at the President's address at Arlington, fight about the time to go to sleep, shine laser pointers in people's faces on the bus (yes, they did that on the bus back to the airport - teachers, if you want names, call me) - all the stupid and sometimes evil things 14 year old kids do when they are awake.

Anyway, we made it back - and didn't leave anyone behind. We did have a few stragglers on a couple of occasions - mostly the parents if you can believe that. I guess the worst items were:

• Hotel changed the keys from the credit card shaped magnetic ones to an RFID wristband lock during the day and we had to all get new keys.
• One hotel's magnetic key lock failed and a person couldn't get some of their items out of the room and we got delayed by 30 minutes (plus the items will have to be shipped back).
• Kids fighting with their roommates because many are irresponsible and won't go to sleep and insist on watching TV at all hours of the night.
• A couple of kids got dehydrated on the dance cruise and caused a bit of a scare (but they are fine).
  

On the plus side, tour guides Richard (Bus 1) and Beth (the "cool" bus) did an excellent job with the limited amount of time we were able to spend at each venue, contributing their unique blends of solid historical information and light humor to keep the kids engaged and paying attention (as much as that is possible). The teachers (Bob, Jacey, Shoba, and Pam) did a good job of organizing and keeping the chaos to a minimum although I think maybe a bit more communication with the chaperones so that we can help more would be an improvement for next time. Looks like I'll need to go again in two years when my other kid is in 8th grade.

Here's the President's address at Arlington:



















Here's the WWII Memorial:




Here's the Washington Monument shot from the side of the Jefferson Memorial:

Washington DC - how worried should I be?

I'm scheduled to chaperone a middle-school (8th grade) field trip to Washington DC soon. I've already had trepidations about this as I figured by the end of the week I'd be more likely to push the kids in front of a train than actually try to round them up and ride herd on them. I was thinking that they'd probably be noisy, unruly, and just a bit rude - after all, they are 13 and 14 - the age where they start thinking that they know everything and adults are silly old farts who "just don't get it.".

As if that wasn't enough to think about, now I see that there was recently a scandal on another school's trip to DC. No, the president and the senate left the kids alone. TSA didn't take their iPods or steal their other toys. They didn't get mugged or hit by a car. Instead, the kids allegedy had sex. Damn! I didn't think that I would have to worry about that until 10th grade! Here is the CNN video on the recent brouhaha. There are plenty of sites and bloggers who will tell you all about that trip and what went wrong. I'm more worried about my kid and other charges and how to keep things from going wrong for them. After all, I wonder what happens to an "unsuccessful chaperone"? Banned from the chaperone circuit for life? Expelled from the bus? Registered as a sex offender? More likely, you go down in history as the second doofus to make CNN headlines as your charges also get expelled and people talk about how terrible you must be at your volunteer job.

Anyway, it's an eye opener for me as I didn't think I'd have to be checking the bathrooms and closets on the dance cruise or making sure that there aren't two people under one towel at the hotel's water park. Raging Waters meet raging hormones. We'll be going to the usual places like the White House (Bill's gone, so they should be safe), the various memorials, Arlington National Cemetary (kids - out of the crypt, now!), and everything else all in one week. After a quick visit to some place out of American history, we climb back on the bus and count heads - have to make sure there aren't two in the bathroom!

Well, if anything this news has given me food for thought. Wait: speaking of food - have to make sure the seafood place isn't serving oysters - can't be having the kids exposed to even rumored aphrodisiacs on the trip. Hopefully the kids will return from the trip tired, sore (from walking - what were you thinking?), and chaste - no belts required. If we are lucky they might even learn something that doesn't involve birds and bees.

Update - May 19th, 2008. What was that about a crash? Well, I can't tell you much as the site this comes from says in its copyright notice that material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed (I guess they didn't realize they published it!) - however it appears another DC trip had their trip end with a tragic tour bus accident (here). As if I wasn't worried enough already. Now I'll have to walk around the bus inspecting the tires before getting on each time.

Yosemite - Vernal Falls Trail

On Saturday May 3rd, we went to Yosemite National Park. I highly recommend that you don't go there as you might annoy me by making it too crowded. As always, Yosemite was beautiful. It was beautiful before you were born, and it will be beautiful after you die. The pace of change there for the granite, water falls, and forests is on a timescale so far outside that of a human that it seems eternal. The ethereal beauty is likewise timeless.

On this trip, we took the Vernal Falls trail to the top. You can read about the trail here. It rises 1,000 feet over about 1.5 miles, although you actually walk about 1/2 mile from the parking area just to get to the trail head for a round-trip approximating 4 miles. I'd previously been up Vernal falls 13 years ago. At that time, there were a couple of factors that made this trip really, really hard. Back then, it was a wet year in the park and the water was running down the stairs on the "Mist" trail. It was enough to make you think they "Missed" the naming on that trail and should have called it the "feet are under 3 inches of water, drenched to the bone, watch your step trail". Also, I was out of shape on that trip. It was like climbing the face of Kolvir - those of you who have read Roger Zelazny will know about Kolvir. Anyway, this time I was in much better shape and there was a lot less water. You still got wet, but not drenched, and you could keep your feet dry if you were careful. I still needed to put my camera in a large zip-lock bag, but otherwise it was great. This time the trail seemed relatively easy even though you climb 600 granite steps and 600 feet in elevation over the last quarter mile.

What a spectacular view! Yosemite never fails to humble and amaze.

As usual, there were some free-loaders there in the park. It's a $250 fine if you feed them - but enough people must risk this fine that the animals get a lot of handouts. I imagine they don't try to fine the squirrels, and so they swarm all around you and even on you.

Anyway, as long as it isn't a day when I will be there, this hike is strongly recommended. On my days there, you need to stay home!

Lenovo T61 and the "Oh Shit!" moment

I've used Lenovo ThinkPad notebooks for quite some time and am a member of the team that does hardware evals and image design for a large company that uses Lenovo (currently the T61 and X61 models). My brother-in-law recently bought a T61 15.4 inch model and wanted me to "de-crap" it and set it up for him. Believe it or not, this took about 4 hours of uninstalling the foistware like "90 days" of Norton Internet insecurity, Windows Live toolbar, Office 2007 "trial" version, and several of the "ThinkVantage" tools. Some of the ThinkVantage tools are great - but loading ALL of them really is overkill.

There was a bunch of other stuff to remove as well, and then updating the various "security challenged" and badly designed software like Sun Java (who ever heard of LEAVING versions with known security holes on the system and accessible to code that specifies it when installing a new version. In fact - these jokers from the JRE team don't understand the team "patch" and only do "new versions") and Flash - which seems to have an exploit of the month, and Adobe Acrobat (which puts out security patches and you get to choose between a version that loads files fine, but has security issues and a version that has no known holes but crashes on large files), etc. Also in there was the hour to install Windows Vista SP1 (if you haven't done this - you should: Vista isn't usable without SP1, but once you have the Service Pack it is not too bad).

Finished all that, then realized I had not flashed the BIOS yet. This machine had an older version. So I went to the Lenovo site and grabbed version 2.14 with an April 2nd date. At least I tried to grab it. The site claimed it was there, but just gave an error when you tried to download it. This persisted over night. Today I decided to just grab it from work over VPN as we had started using it the other day. Burned the ISO and booted from CD. Went through all the prompts (yes the computer is on AC power, yes the battery is charged, etc.) It finally said something like "remove the CD and press enter to complete". I did that, and...

It showed a "Lock symbol" on the screen where it would normally have done the POST. This machine didn't have a boot password, didn't have a supervisor or BIOS password, and definitely did not have a hard drive password. What the hell? It didn't like just enter, didn't like just a space, and Lenovo wasn't a good guess either. Where did this password prompt come from? I went to Google and found a few minutes too late that other users are having this same problem. Great! Maybe that's why there was an error downloading the thing: perhaps Lenovo pulled it. It would have been better if they had a "do not use" as then I wouldn't have grabbed it from work. So, after some hair pulling I finally found this on the Lenovo site. I checked the graphic - and sure enough it was the "Power On" one from the very bottom of that Lenovo link.

So, I had to remove the battery and remove the palm rest and the keboard. Lift up some tape, and unclip the system battery leads and remove the system battery (what happened to those "watch battery style" ones with no leads!!!). Put the keyboad and rest back on and power it up like that. This cleared it as the site said it would. Then put it all back together again. Nothing like doing some surgery on a notebook computer on a Saturday morning for NO REASON. Nice QA job on that BIOS release Lenovo. You owe me an hour back.

Give me my music!

All of us who use the internet for more than just email are aware of the lack of any sense of rationality from the folks known "affectionately" in web forums as the "MAFIAA" - the RIAA and MPAA. Some of their latest blather has been about how the United States spends too much money policing burglary, fraud, and bank robberies to the detriment of enforcing - you guessed it - copyright. (link: ArsTechnica). These are the folks who "make up numbers" (a euphemism for pulling them from where the sun doesn't shine), showing that they lose billions of dollars a year to pirates.

Now, I am speaking as a person who has been firmly in the "moderate" camp. I've never downloaded an MP3 - even when I owned the album. I've always performed the rip myself and never shared them with anyone. When people I know come over with their laptop, I tell them they cannot run Kazaa or any other copyright violation engines. So, as you can guess, I don't think that it is cool to "stick it to the man" by downloading songs. It isn't "theft" as defined in the dictionary as much as the "industry" would like you to believe it is - however it is indeed copyright violation and it is wrong by today's rules.

Now, I'm an old fart - about to turn 41. I have a large collection of old fart music (late 70's through late 90's with one or two from the early 2000's thrown in). Some of it I really like. It starts on cassette tape and finishes up on CD. The CD's were no problem; I had three computers ripping them as fast as they could go a few years back. It's a lame way to blow two days - but hey, not too bad. The Cassette tape - that's another story. If the record companies had any sense, they would allow people with "old fart media" to turn in said media for a nice shiny new CD - for the cost of shipping and pressing. But no, they think I should just buy it again. In fact, the forays that they have made into DRM seem to indicate that they think I should buy it again every time a new format comes out and every time I want to put it on a new device that I purchase. Own a movie on DVD? Want to put it on an iPod to watch? Your choice - buy it again or break the law. Hello? Anyone else think that is ridiculous and stupid?

So, back to those cassette tapes. I have been doing an album or two (three on weekends) per day for a couple of weeks now. It takes forever. And guess what? Want to rip them on a new box? One with Vista (of which I was a beta tester and am generally a fan of and have running on all 4 of our families primary computers)? Nope - can't do that as audio is a protected source. That's right - lots of you know about the HDCP abomination where you can't play high-def content unless your video card and monitor support copy protection - but many of you didn't know that even audio is a protected stream with DRM on it - called Protected Audio Path). That damn DRM that movie and record companies are lobbying (and mostly forcing) Microsoft, Apple, and others to implement is preventing me from using my purchased audio tracks in the way that I want to. So I have to keep a Windows XP box around to run the Microsoft Plus Analog Recorder (which is quite nice; splits tape into tracks automatically and takes input from "what you hear" on the sound card and records it) to get that old fart cassette stuff into MP3 or WMA files that I can play on my iPod or Zune while working out. Of course coming from tape, it is only worth encoding at 128 kb - but it still sounds pretty good - about as good as tape ever did. Again - I have a choice here of spending hours and hours and hours doing this, or going online and doing it the illegal (but fast!) way. I don't fancy having my IP address in any logs anywhere (whether at an ISP or a torrent site or Kazaa or whatever) as a copyright violator, so for me it is the hours and hours method. But it sure is tempting to save all that time.

So - anyone care to tell me why the music and video "industries" won't just let me send them a cassette and send me back a CD for say about $5 for postage and handling? They could keep someone employed doing that and not be losing any money to those rampaging pillaging "pirates" we hear so much about. But no - they make me choose between my time (worth a lot more than the $5 for the time spent on an album) and the less legal route. All in the vain hope that I will purchase the same stuff again every time they conveniently switch media on me.

OK, enough is enough

Hey, it's been awhile. I haven't had something steam me up enough to get off my butt and write a blog post in what seems like eons. (In internet years anyway - internet years are like dog years times 1024 or something.).

What's got me steamed this time? It's the lack of stability of the combination of a Dell Lattitude D820/Intel 3945ABG/Vista Ultimate. This plain "doesn't work". Not "it just works". No, it just doesn't work. Oh, it seems to. It sucks you in as you setup your network and connect with WPA2. But, soon enough you find that the wireless just up and locks up on you. It may be after the machine comes out of sleep for the 5th time. It may be the first boot. But, eventually you will get into that dreaded scenario where the "Network" becomes the "NetNOWork". This is typified by the "Network and sharing center won't open". Also, that little networky icon in the system tray stops showing the little tooltip with the signal strength and all. You end up having to reboot - and more times than not you have to hold down the power button because Windows hangs on the Shutting Down screen.

So, what do you do? If you're like me you blame Intel and download the 3945ABG driver of the month from the Dell site. Always hopeful, you load that new driver and cross your fingers. But, like you kind of expected, it doesn't work. You have the same problem. So finally today I went direct to the Intel site. What did I see there? A newer driver than even the Dell site had. So what the hell, right? I tried it. Hopeful as always I loaded it up. But, an hour later - same shit different day. WiFi light on the Lattitude went out. Network and Sharing Center won't open. Network is dead. Reboot - great...

Is this so hard? I've got the latest patches for Vista, the latest BIOS from Dell, the latest driver from Intel. Why do these friggin' things hate each other (and me) so damn much???

I wish these things would get back to "it just works".

TANSTAAFL or TANSTAAFG

My first exposure to the term TANSTAAFL or "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" was in Robert Heinlein's classic "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and again in his later, "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls". Yesterday, I had reason to recall the term - or at least its derivative "There ain't no such thing as a free game".

I had just been up removing spyware from my daughter's computer (again!), when I noticed my son playing that old classic "Elf Bowling 3" from nStorm. I started thinking about when that one came out and whether there might be newer ones available. Later that evening I went to the nStorm site to find out.

Testing Safely
Sure enough, there were two newer versions: Super Elf Bowling, and Elf Bowling Bocce Style. I downloaded them and realized they were installers. The old versions were just exe's that would run without dropping anything on your system. I was a bit put off that they wanted to actually install. So, I installed them on a clean Virtual Machine. The bocce style one wouldn't even run. I've tried it on three machines now (the VM, my son's machine, and a Windows Vista box). It just crashes on start. Nothing to see there - it's junk. The Super Elf Bowling though ran fine. Each version of the Elf has gotten to be more and more just an advertisement for buying unlocked versions of the game. They've had more and more functions not available unless you buy. This one had even more, but if you clicked continue enough times it would eventually let you play a game that was at least OK.

Installing for real
After testing this in the virtual machine, I installed it for my son. Immediately his SpySweeper (http://webroot.com) started complaining about NavExcel NavHelper. Looking up NavExcel showed that it is AdWare capable of hijacking your browser (directing you to places that are not what you typed in) and also showing popup ads. Now, I don't normally install a spyware removal tool into clean test VM's - but this showed me that I should start doing that. I'd unwittingly installed AdWare onto my son's machine! (About this particular AdWare: http://www3.ca.com/securityadvisor/pest/pest.aspx?id=453074928)

Removed and banned
Fortunately SpySweeper had actually prevented most of the NavExcel thing from installing. It cleaned the rest of it with no problem. Armed with the information from SpySweeper, we cleaned up my virtual machine manually. Who knew that nStorm had morphed from a company that produced cute, free games into a company that distributes AdWare with their new "buy me, buy me" limited games. If they don't want to send out free games anymore - hey, that's cool. But installing AdWare on people's machines is just plain wrong. nStorm is relegated to a memory: we won't be visiting the site or installing anything they produce. The upside is that now my son knows TANSTAAFL and he hasn't even read the book yet!

Software like ET: Phone Home

I'm getting to really hate all of the software out there that wants to "phone home" (contact a server somewhere) all the time. There are levels to this of course. I think everyone can agree that they hate the crapware / foistware typically known as spyware. But how about other classes? Here's a quick, non-scientific catergorization:

Programs that check for updates for their software
These would be like Quicktime, Flash Player, Adobe Acrobat Reader, etc. I think those yokels need to understand that their junky software is just a small piece of what computer users have installed and we don't want to have their little stub programs checking for updates all the damn time. In fact, if it weren't required by so many web sites and other programs we'd probably prefer not to have the software itself installed. These things annoy the heck out of me, always wanting to update themselves. Wasting my bandwidth for a purpose that just seems to be a bunch of hooey.

Programs like Microsoft's CEIP
What about the ones that do things like the Microsoft "Customer Experience Improvement Program" (or, "we watch what you click")? In the past, these tended to be opt-in, but lately some of them have been on by default. They also have a habit of not clearly disclosing what in the heck they are going to send. Are they sending my menu clicks? Are they sending my files? Who knows with most of them. Maybe the Shadow knows. One of the things I've been evangelizing with Microsoft in particular is that they should never ship one of these things unless there is a group policy setting to turn it the heck off.

Programs that are absolutely Helpless
I think the worst ones are where they try to go online to show help. For example, Microsoft Office Communicator. Seems OK, until you realize that they forgot to ship a help file and it just goes onto the internet to get help. Not cool; not by a long shot. Why should they assume I have an internet connection? I mean the software is designed to be used on an Intranet, not the internet. I've been noticing more and more programs like this - in fact in testing Windows Vista I see that the main source of help (at least the first one searched) is online. It eventually times out and shows you local help, but with a notice at the top that you are not connected and to retry. Guess what? Just try to find the policy to turn that off! So far, I can't find it. There doesn't appear to be one, although there is a per-user setting that changes it to local help only. Get with it MS: create that policy to make help local only!

Programs that "enhance" themselves online
Microsoft Office anyone? Gotta love those task panes always wanting to get content from the internet. Or what about the templates online? You like clipart? Remember when it used to come on a CD? Not anymore: it's online! Ugh!

So, is anyone else worried about all this? Do you have satellite links in your organization? Any microwave? How about lusers using dialup? Do any work in countries where the goverment owns the bandwidth and it doesn't matter how much you pay - you only get so much of it? As Andy Rooney would say, "Well I do." And as your friendly neighborhood GILDude says, "Give me back my bandwidth!"

Visual Studio 2005 and Vista - Clearly a challenge

Anyone out there used Visual Studio 2005 RTM? Like it? So far I've been quite happy with it, except for an annoying little (minor) quirk where it likes to give the "green squiggly" to certain variables in "Finally" blocks.

How about on Vista? Have you tried to use VS 2005 there? Or perhaps just tried to run the compiled code on Vista? It didn't work, right? I've been fighting this annoyance with some code that I am working on that needs to work on both XP and Vista. Since Vista build 5231 is not very stable (OK, well the truth is not stable at all), I don't want to try to do the dev work on Vista. So I have been building on Windows XP, and debugging and testing on XP. Then I move the EXE over to Vista 5231 and it won't run. It turns out the runtime version of the RTM Visual Studio is v2.0.50727.42. The version on Vista build 5231 is v2.0.050727.20. So the EXE's just crash.

Not a problem, right? Just upgrade the runtime on Vista and it'll work like a champ. Not so fast... Microsoft has made the runtime part of the operating system. So the only way to upgrade it is via an OS Service Pack or patch. Nasty! So, what's a poor enterprising developer to do? Wait for a new build of Vista?

Not likely! What I've been doing is to install the RC of Visual Studio onto my Vista machines. It will run with the version of the runtime installed on 5231. Then, after coding and debugging on Windows XP, I copy the whole project over to the Vista machine and recompile it using the RC version of Visual Studio. So far I've only run into one code change I had to make in order to do that. Opening one of my projects and compiling it in the RC version gave an error on a line of code that the designer had created. The line was:

Me.lvItems.UseCompatibleStateImageBehavior = False

I was able to just rem that line out and the project worked in the RC version and could be tested on Vista.

Kind of a pain to do dev work and testing on both platforms at this point, but at least it is working for me. I can't wait for the next CTP build of Vista as it will be sure to have the RTM version of the runtime and I can quit using the compiler version shuffle to do testing.

Death of a killer app

The headlines may soon read "Microsoft gives death sentence to killer app.".

That's right: an application used by millions has been given the boot. This application is used today on Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. It's very ability to provide services across these platforms has been part of its longstanding appeal. In recent years, Microsoft has de-emphasized it - covering up its UI is different ways. Now Windows Vista has killed it.

What is this mystery application? How did its death come about? And - more importantly - what does it mean to you? It's NetMeeting. Used by millions for that peer-to-peer meeting in an ad-hoc fashion. Used by millions of others in its more recent branding as the app hidden behind the smoke and mirrors in things like Windows Messenger, Office Communicator, and others. That's right: Do you ever hit that "share application" button in one of those tools? If so, you use NetMeeting even if you didn't know it. As for how it died, that's best left to the consipiracy theorists. However, here's a couple of reasons I've heard from various places:

• The code was too old and broken to be easily brought forward into Windows Vista
• It competes with a forthcoming fee-based Microsoft product and had to be dropped
• It couldn't be retrofitted for IPv6 and the new driver model on Vista

If any of those are accurate, it's most likely a fortuitous accident. However, that's what people are saying.

More important than the why question is the "what now?" question. How are people to do any real time collaboration between say a Windows XP machine and a Vista machine? It's impossible; at least using in-box tools. If you want true peer-to-peer like NetMeeting gave you, you need to find a third-party product. Be sure to add the project costs for evaluating, selecting, purchasing, and deploying such a product into the mix for cost-justifying any planned upgrades to Windows Vista. As most people understand, putting in a new OS doesn't happen overnight (unless you have a company of 10 people in which case it just might). So the reality is that people who collaborate freely today will not be able to once one of them is "upgraded" to Vista. In fact, this feature deprecation has the potential to delay (perhaps indefinitely) the adoption of Windows Vista in many corporations.

In this case the jaded, "Where do you want to go today?" seems to be a rhetorical question. Instead, Microsoft's taking you where they want you to go - into a brave new world where you have to spend money to collaborate.