November 2004 - Posts

• A Horoscope with a ring of truth...

  It sad that the only horoscope with any ring of truth is my horoscope from BBSpot's Geek Horoscope page: Capricorn Dec 22 - Jan 19 You'll realize much earlier this year, that Christmas songs are really annoying. Posted Nov 29 2004, 11:20 AM by Bob with 1 comment(s)

• Fuzzy AI

  I was perusing one of my favorite comics, User Friendly, and found the true motivation of search for Artificial Intelligence: Posted Nov 29 2004, 10:27 AM by Bob with no comments

• Cold what?

  You'll notice to the left in my links section I have a link pointing to Anandtech. Anandtech is a hardware site ran by Anand Shimpi, who has been running the site for as long as I can remember. Over the years they have had to make many hardware and software changes, ranging from OS and software versions, to moving to clusters of servers to handle the load of their visitors. The latest move they made recently was to move their who site, forums and all, over to ASP.NET.  You can read about their migration process here. Their old software was all written in ColdFusion, and it is interesting to note some of the system changes that moving to ASP.NET allowed them, although it is sad to see the code examples on their site are in VB.NET instead of C#..... For their forums software, they are running 20-40ms page load times with ~1000 users online. With ColdFusion they needed 2 servers clustered to maintain this response time, with the move to ASP.NET they were able to reduce this to one server. For the site itself, with the same hardware, the move to ASP.NET allowed them to server their pages in 15ms with more than 450 users on each server, which is 60-80ms faster than with the ColdFusion pages. Very interesting read to say the least, head over there to read the rest, and say Hi to Anand for me... Posted Nov 28 2004, 10:53 PM by Bob with no comments

• Alms for the poor...

  As I seem to preface alot of my articles with, I know this has been around for a long time. Basically it is free tech books you can download, granted they may not be O'Reilly (actually some of them are and O'Reilly has their own free book section), they are free knowledge. And as has been said many times, and will be said many more, knowledge is power. Also, I am sure most of you also remember that MIT offers many of their courses online for free. True, you do not get any credit for the course, but repeat after me again, knowledge is power. Now quit being lazy and go read something... Posted Nov 28 2004, 10:32 PM by Bob with no comments

• A better Desktop OS that isn't...

  As some have noted over the past year, my choice of Windows 2003 Server as my desktop OS, err..laptop OS in my case, is not exactly the norm. It has been a very long time, pretty much since Server 2003's release, that I have used anything else as my desktop for more than a few days time. That being said, there are a few issues that the less devoted have brought up, things that in their own way are accurate. Fortunantly, these issues can usually be resolved, so I wanted to cover a few of them here. The first thing to keep in mind is that many people think their games will not work on Server 2003. Nothing is further from the truth, and for the most part, every game works fine out of the box, and some even work better. Windows 2003 is stripped down by default out of the box for security, so it actually has a *smaller* memory footprint in default configuration than Windows XP. The only thing that you need to be aware of after install is that hardware acceleration for you videocard is off by default. Simple fix, right click desktop, properties, settings, advanced, troubleshoot, and move that slider all the way to the right. Install issues solved. It could be worse, during beta the sound service was off by default as well... Another thing that really seems to annoy people is the whole 'You have to tell me why you are shutting down or restarting before I will let you shut down or restart.' I agree, annoying as hell. Fortunantly this is just as easily remedied. You can check out Mike's page to find a step by step walk through on modifying your machine's group policy to eliminate that annoyance. Trust me, “modifying your machine's group policy” is actually alot easier than it sounds. The next thing, which I guess can be of interest to some is the bland look of the server desktop and skin compared to the bubbly look of Windows XP. This is also easily solved basically by turning on the Themes service, Start, Administrative Tools, Services, find the Themes service, set it to automatically start and then start it. I know I covered it in an earlier article, but it just seemed worth re-mentioning. The last item I am going to cover in this part of the article is something that I myself was very concerned about. Maybe that means I should have covered it first, maybe not. Doesn't much matter at this point I presume. Anyhow, the last item I wanted to cover is that in Service Pack 2 for Windows XP, there were MANY nice improvements to the security of Internet Explorer. If you look at the majority of IE fixes since SP2 came out, you will notice that most say 'Windows XP SP2 is not affected'. Considering most critical security issues anymore *are* IE issues, this is a big deal. Well, even though it isnt on the street yet, those of you that have access to MSDN Subscriber downloads can have the same additions to your IE in Windows 2003 Server. Granted you shouldn't install it on a production server, the beta of Service Pack 1 for Windows 2003 is available for download. It adds the enhanced IE security, the pop-up blocker and the option to disable IE plugins, all the things I was envious of in SP2. Posted Nov 24 2004, 06:17 PM by Bob with no comments

• Ten things not to do with a beta product

  So...I formatted my box again. Nothing surprising to anyone who knows me. I typically flatten my laptop once every three weeks or so. I normally install Windows 2003 Server and this time I decided I wanted to go ahead and see what differences there are in the beta Service Pack 1 install. So, after installing Windows 2003 Service Pack 1 beta, a few choice games, Virtual PC with the latest Longhorn installed in it, I decide I need to install SQL Server so I can do some actual work on the machine. I have not been thoroughly impressed with SQL 2005 so far, mainly due to some issues I am having with the new client tools and their performance, but I try to be a good little Microsoft drone and install the latest and greatest. The install seems to be progressing well, the SQL Server service installs properly and that is usually where I see an issue if there is going to be one, but my optimism fades as the final tools start installing. DTS....failed, Client Tools...failed. Damn. I really don't want to do all my administration from the command line tools and DTS is also something that I use on a regular basis, so this is not a good sign.I try running through the install again, only choosing those two components this time and end up with the same results. Not the best answer, but not totally unexpected when you run a beta product on top of another beta product. There were some changes in the 2003 SP1 version to DCOM and who knows what other networking protocols, and this could easily have affected SQL 2005 in some odd way. I have an epiphany and decide to try something even crazier. Not necessarily a good long term solution, but something to get me by until I can figure out how to get the tools on the machine. I launch Virtual PC and launch my Longhorn machine. Boom, in goes the SQL 2005 beta CD. Choose install, only choose to install the client tools since I don't want to take any more chances than I have to. The install finishes properly and I am informed that the changes wont take affect until rebooting. I reboot the Virtual Machine. Longhorn takes a really long time to load. I get the desktop background but nothing else. I wait 12 minutes. I reboot the Virtual Machine again. I get desktop background and icons this time, but the taskbar never comes up and the machine will never actually respond. I can double click on something like the My Computer icon and it begins to think about it but never will actually load it. So, I manage to get task manager to come up and notice one of the svchost processes is using between 94 and 100% of the CPU on the Virtual Machine. I kill the svchost process, knowing that this often causes the machine to reboot. The machine starts responding....and then logs me off. I have repeated this behavior several times now. Take this as a lesson as to what happens when you install a beta server product, on a beta OS in a virtual instance on a beta OS... I guess what they say is true. 98% of the time the error *is* between the chair and the keyboard... Posted Nov 20 2004, 02:43 PM by Bob with no comments

• The advantages of being a Microsoft Certified Partner...

  Shortly after arriving at the company I work for, the network administrator, Mike, and I pushed quickly through becoming Microsoft Certified Partners. Being a Microsoft Certified Partner is well worth the effort and the very reasonable amount of money it costs, if nothing else, just for the software licenses you get, and you get a Partner contact to assist you with any Microsoftish issues you may have. Speaking of that, our Partner contact called us today to check on us and see how we were doing. Mike chatted with him for several minutes and when asked if there was anything he could do for us, well, ISA 2004 documentation of course was first on our minds. I swear I heard him giggle right before he hung up after Mike said 'ISA 2004 documentation would be great.' And so the journey continues and our weapons are dull... Posted Nov 20 2004, 02:17 PM by Bob with 3 comment(s)

• Looking to hire...

  This week I found another reason I love working where I work. The company is currently looking to hire a new boss for my department and has brought several possible candidates in so far. The interesting thing about this is who is doing the interviewing. After my boss's boss picks out suitable selections, the 3 employees in my department are the ones that actually interview the potential candidate and accepts or rejects him. Granted once we decide on someone, the boss's boss will make the final decision on wether or not to hire them, but they have to get past us first. How awesome is that? This is such an positively odd development, that the company actually understands that this selection is going to affect the performance of our team, and being so, are allowing us to make sure this person will be compatible and inspirational for our environment. You would almost expect that we would choose someone based on whether or not they will allow us to play video games all day, but we are actually taking this very seriously and looking for someone who will be an inspiration to us to do better while not choking us by being over controlling. I made a statement while interviewing the latest candidate that I hadn't really thought about until I said it. We were discussing the current environment and I mentioned that I have not once since getting this job, granted its only been three months, woke up in the morning and thought 'Damn, I have to go to work.' I would like to stay home and get paid to play Doom 3 like the rest of you, but I am fortunate to have a job that I really enjoy when many are unable to find work. And its not just the work I enjoy, but the environment we create for ourselves while we are doing our work. Posted Nov 20 2004, 02:05 PM by Bob with no comments

• Nothing like a skinned server...

  After reading Mike's post about installing the new skin from Windows 2005 Media Center Edition, I started wondering how hard it would be to install the skin on my laptop, considering I run Windows 2003 Server. Not real hard it seems... <click to enlarge> Basically you only need to go into Services and start the Themes service, setting it to automatically start as well, and following the list of directions from Mike's post, quoted below: Download the theme here to your desktop Place the executable into a new folder With WinZip installed, right-click the file and select winzip > extract to here You will have to create some folders in doing this, but extract these files: C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes\royale.theme C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes\Royale\royale.msstyles C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes\Royale\Shell\shellstyle.dll C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes\Royale\Wallpaper\energybliss.jpg Now go to the Control Panel, double-click Display > select Energy Blue in the themes dropdown and apply Posted Nov 17 2004, 02:00 PM by Bob with 1 comment(s)

• When is a Pear like an Apple?

  I often like to preface my blogs with a comment, and this blog will be no different. I would like to preface this entry with the fact that I am truly a Windows user at heart, so take that into consideration with any of the following comments. I am making this post from within OS X 10.3 something or other, but at the same time I am still on my eMachines 6810. As many of you have already figured out, I ran into an interesting program called PearPC that allows you to emulate a PowerPC CPU, either a G3 or a G4. My journey began with a few events that allowed this experiment to take place. The company I work for has a creative team which, of course, uses Macs. Everyone knows that Macs are the choice of those of us that rely primarily on the right lobe of our brain. *I* on the other hand, have no right lobe to my brain, hence my penchant for PCs. Anyhow, every day is a special day where I work, part of the reason I truly enjoy working there, there is no telling what may happen from day to day. Well, this day brings me sitting in front of a laptop unlike anything I have used before. It is running OS 9. It takes me awhile to figure out how to get only what I want highlighted in the PDF I am editing, the Mac seems more vertically sensitive when you are using its mouse than the PC is. I get by though, but, after completing the changes, I find I need to email them to myself so I can get them on my PC; and no, I have no intention of trying to figure out how to use a network share on the beast. I get the email sent, humorously enough, the Mac is using Outlook Express...I go back to my PC and feel productive again. I mention the experience to a friend of mine who is also a PC user, but has an older Mac, who informs me that he had previously purchased OS X, but never installed it since his older machine is only 350mhz and only has 64megs of RAM. After a short begging session, he agrees to let me have it, even though I did offer a trivial amount to him for it. Thanks again bro!  I had heard of PowerPC emulators for the PC before, and started looking around at what is currently available. I did some basic resarch before settling on PearPC, the 'setup' was basically unzipping the file, changing the config file in WordPad and making an image for the OS to be installed on, all a manual process, though not an overly complex one. Once the emulator was up and running, the install of OS X itself went very smooth, and the system booted and ran normal. I tried to post to my blog and ran into some of the same issues I see people posting about in the .Text help forums. Safari would crash shortly after trying to enter any text in the included posting screen. I downloaded IE for the Mac and had the same issue. I also noticed that when I went to check my gmail account, they did not support Safari, nor did they support the older version of IE that the mac uses, 5.3.2 or something. This problem was rectified by downloading and installing Firefox for the Mac though. Gmail worked fine with Firefox, and to my pleasant surprise, I was also able to blog from Firefox on the Mac. Other than the issues with IE and SAfari, I had no problems at all. I went and downloaded MSN Messenger for the Mac and I have to say, it looks WAY cooler in OS X that it does on Windows. I then installed the Quark demo just to see if I could get some work done in the emulator if need be, it was somewhat sluggish, but worked more and was usable. When I click on the mighty blue Apple at the top of the screen and choose 'About this Mac' it tells me I have a 1.06 Ghz PowerPC G3 and 896 megs of RAM. I worked on OS X all day yesterday, all day being about 12 hours or so. All in all, I think it is a very capable, very beautiful looking operating system. If it wasn't for the fact I need programs that do not run on a Mac to do my day to day work, and the fact that I like to play games......I would buy a Mac. Actually I don't know that that is an accurate accessment. To me OS X is beautiful, it makes Windows XP look very Windows 95ish in comparison. To use OS X makes me say 'Why can't Microsoft hurry up and give us Longhorn and make it look this nice?'. So I don't think I would actually 'Switch' as they say. If I just *had* to have the nice looking OS, I am sure I could install Linux on my x86 machine and find a Window manager that looks close to as nice as OS X. For the time being, I think I may install Longhorn again, looks like Microsoft snuck a newer build than the PDC build onto the subscriber downloads. Maybe my next blog will be from within it... My main goal when all of this started was to be able to at least be able to get some work done and not be totally lost in the rare case I am sat in front of a Mac. I think I am much more comfortable now and I plan on continuing to use the emulator on occasion to see how things progress. They are currently only on version 0.3 of PearPC so by the time 1.0 comes out, it should be something that is very usuable. I look forward to that day so I can launch OS X when I have no real work that needs done and want to just play with the pretty graphics... I'll try to post some pictures in the gallery in the morning. Till then...   Posted Nov 14 2004, 03:44 PM by Bob with no comments

• Microsoft pushes security, well, for others anyhow...

  Well, at least Microsoft wants us writing secure code, even if they are having some issues with it themselves. I am signing up to take the test 70-340, Implementing Security for Applications with Microsoft Visual C# .NET. Even though I already have my MCAD and MCSD.NET, I think it will be a very interesting and fun test that will go a long way toward helping me make better decisions about securing my code when I create web applications. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am not real big on web apps to begin with, but with the last couple of projects I have worked on, it is starting to grow on me. I am going to change 'What Bob is reading' to Building Secure Microsoft ASP.NET Applications and Writing Secure Code as I get ready for the test. I hope to take it by the end of the year, putting me on the same time frame as Mike taking his MCSE 2003 upgrade. Hey Jayson, want to go take 70-340 when I do? Anyone that has taken this test, please let me know any recommendation you may have for preparing. For those of you interested in getting Building Secure ASP.NET Application in PDF format, you can get it free from Microsoft here. I know I may give Microsoft a hard time sometimes, but they support developers better than everyone else put together. Thanks for the love... Posted Nov 12 2004, 11:34 AM by Bob with 2 comment(s)

• What file extension are you...

  Well, since all the cool people here and here are doing it, I figured I would too...   So, now you know who to yell at next time you are in 'DLL Hell'... Posted Nov 12 2004, 08:45 AM by Bob with no comments

• A little thing called Statcounter

  What is statcounter? An interesting utility that Jayson turned me on to when my blog was still hosted on devninja. Statcounter shows you a plethora of information about where your readers are coming from, how they are finding you and how long they are staying to read things. How does this help you as a blogger? Well, it really doesn't but it is extremely cool to play with, and best of all, it is free. I think we should all give mad props to anything we use on a daily basis that is free. The author obviously isn't receiving any monetary benefit, but just knowing that people love your product can be very uplifting. So I just wanted to stop my normal ramblings to say 'Thank you' and ask if there is a link to donate, I would donate in a heartbeat. Also, installing the code for statcounter is amazingly easy and should only take about 10 minutes on the first run through, less if you have done it before, so run out there and get started! Posted Nov 11 2004, 11:05 AM by Bob with 1 comment(s)

• ISA 2004 Revisited

  Seems Mike has much the same feelings towards ISA as I do, as you can see by the title of the post on his blog about it, “Why ISA 2004 Blows, (lack of) Documentation.” Sounds similar to my experience with it. Anyone notice a trend? During my daily wandering over the web, I happen upon isaserver.org. Seems like it would be an interesting place for all things ISA. I found an nice article by our previously mentioned friend Tom Shinder entitled 'Reasons to Upgrade to the 2004 ISA Firewall'. I peruse the text, noticing *4* images of Mr. Shinder's ISA 2004 book that are linked back to Amazon, but interestingly absent in the article is ANY mention WHATSOEVER of the fact that the book ISN'T EVEN IN PRINT YET! Now, to be honest, we have all heard of Vaporware over the years, BitBoys have been promising us 'unrivaled performance in a videa card' since before 3Dfx went out of business. Heck, even one of the newer gaming consoles, The Phantom, has turned out to be one heck of a piece of Vaporware. If you are interested in reading more about Infium Labs Phantom shinanigans, you can read up on it at whereisphantom.com or you can read the humorous story of Kyle at [H]ardOCP's experience fighting with them. Why am I sending you aimlessly around the internet to read random stories? Well, because you will have plenty of time, since you WON'T BE READING AN ISA 2004 BOOK... Posted Nov 11 2004, 10:26 AM by Bob with no comments

• Virtual Server 2005

  I know this isn't exactly breaking news, but I wanted to remind everyone that has an MSDN subscription to download a copy of Virtual Server 2005 while it is available. I am not sure why it is 'for a limited time only' in the download sections, but this is definitely a 'must have' application for any network administrators and coders alike. Think of a server, SQL or otherwise, you can make a full backup of by just backing up the .vhd file. A virtual server goes down, you just dump the .vhd file on another box, any box and boom, server is back up. Awesome utility with a plethora of imaginitive uses. Plethora, hmmm, such a nice word. Posted Nov 10 2004, 02:55 PM by Bob with no comments