I have been watching this 5 Things Meme blitz it’s way across all the blogs I read. I typically try to stay away from participating in the modern equivalent of a chain letter but I thought this one was fun.  It adds a face, personality, what have you to the relatively impersonal world of the blog.

So here are my 5 things:

1. My interest in technology began with a radio shack electronics kit that you created circuits with by placing wires between springs.  I loved that kit. Eventually I moved up to HeathKits, built a Sinclair from a kit, etc.

2. My formal training is in computer engineering.  I have a BSEE in Computer Engineering but almost switched to computer science my senior year.  I was fed up with the physics of doping P/N junctions.  I enjoyed creating a program in minutes to do what it would take me months to design a chip to do.  Hence I ended school one class away from a computer science degree!

3. I was a CompuServe sysop for a number of years.  I ran the Microsoft support forums on CompuServe with a gentleman by the name of Runnoe Connelly. I then went on to run a network of 15 or so forums including the VBPJ, WINAPA-F, etc forums.

4. My introduction to the world of speaking at conferences was sudden.  My first VBITS I spoke at was in Munich Germany. The following week I spoke at a GUI Computing conference in Melbourne on Monday and Sydney on Thursday.  This was also my longest trip to date.  I flew Seattle-London-Munich-London-Singapore-Perth-Melbourne-Sydney-Cairns-Brisbane-Auckland-Papeete-Los Angelese-Seattle.  This was before the days of online ticketing and my travel agent initially told me the fare would be $7,000.  After I got up off the floor she figured out by making it into an around the world fare the ticket would drop to $2300.

5. One of my first jobs while in High School was as a lifeguard on the Bangor Naval Submarine Base near my home.  This led to me becoming a first aid instructor, CPR instructor, water safety instructor, lifeguarding instructor, fire fighter and emergency medical technician.  I paid a good portion of my way through college working as a reserve firefighter / EMT for the city I went to school in.

I guess I have to tag some other bloggers: Keith Pleas, Sandy Khaund, Richard Hundhausen, Walt Rischer and Brian Noyes

Friday, January 05, 2007 1:06:43 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

I recently setup a Windows Vista Ultimate Media Center to hold the family CD collection and allow navigation of same through the TV set in the family room.  It is finally getting there in usability as my wife can now use it, etc.

As part of this it was time to take each of our individual music libraries and use the excellent Media Monkey to de-duplicate songs, etc and come up with a single library.  I did all of that and the next step was to figure out how to throw a copy on my laptop for use on the road.

First thought, Offline Files!  Without checking how big the folder was I marked the whole thing as always available offline on my Vista Ultimate laptop.

25GB later I got a message that the sync failed because the cache size was too small. Bummer the folder was 47GB!  I decided this wasn’t the right approach so I tried to disable the folder for offline availability.  Once done I still had 25GB on my disk taken up by the offline files. I realized turning off offline files on the share didn’t turn it off on all the folders further down in the hierarchy.

I disabled Offline files. Still 25GB of my disk gone.

I ran a great utility SpaceMonger.exe to try and find it.  Didn’t even show up.

Come to find out offline files are stored in %SYSTEMROOT%\CSC. However even as the administrator you don’t have access to that folder. Even with UAC turned off!  To see what is in it you have to take ownership of that folder and all subfolders.

To clear it you need to disable offline files and then delete those folders.

Finally got my 25GB back. Now looking for a different way to sync parts of my music library to my laptop.

Wednesday, January 03, 2007 10:45:22 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [2]  

I have been a Cingular / AT&T customer now for almost 12 years.  It has always been a love / hate relationship. Their latest incompetence however takes the cake.

I recently upgraded my laptop to Vista Ultimate RTM.  This license came benefit of my participation in the Vista beta program.  At work I have several machines running Vista Enterprise which cam through the Microsoft Volume License program.  The point being Vista is launched and business users are currently using it.

My experience overall has been great.  I had to upgrade a few applications here and there but overall almost every applicaiton amongst the long list that I run is ready to go.  The exceptions so far have been PerfectDisk, Camtasia and Cingular Communications Manager.

I contacted the first two companies Raxco and TechSmith and was basically told that Vista isn’t shipping so they don’t support it yet.  I begged to differ and they pretty much told me, “Well, business users don’t count.  Customers won’t have it until February.”

Of course my response was, “Aren’t business users customers?”

Cingular however took the cake.  I was planning on waiting awhile to contact them until a massive windstorm hit the Seattle area.  I have now been without power, etc for 6 days.  I was thinking it might be nice to be able to use the Sierra AirCard 860 / Cingular 3G service I pay $80/month for from home while the power and internet connections are down.

Finally broke down and called Cingular today.  After the requisite wait I was connected to a representative who wasn’t sure if they supported Vista or not. His response was let’s try the same things we troubleshoot on Windows XP.  Guess what no results.  He then calls someone who tells him they won’t be supporting Vista until February of 2007 when is ships.  I indicate to him that it is currently shipping.  He sticks with it is not shipping until February 2007.  I ask to speak to someone who might have some ideas when support would be forthcoming.  They are all in meetings.  I ask for the case number.  Their case tracking system is down.

Now I await a call back that I sincerely suspect will never come.  I will update this post if I ever get a straight answer.

Browsing the net it appears that Chris Pirillo published a fix that worked for RC1 and before.  On the Cingular forums they mention that it appears the NDIS stack changed slightly post RC1 and that their NDIS shim no longer works.

All I know is that neither the Cingular Communications Manager or the Sierra AirCard Watcher work with Vista Ultimate RTM.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006 10:28:55 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [5]  

Just got this in the mail:

Microsoft will be holding the next Professional Developers Conference (PDC) October 2-5, 2007 in Los Angeles, with two days of pre-conference on September 30 and October 1.  Save the date!

The PDC is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform.  PDC 2007 attendees will have the opportunity to access new code, learn about the latest Microsoft product offerings and hear from Microsoft executives about the various platform developments.

Check http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc/ for updates; you can also subscribe to the RSS feed to find out more information about the event as we get closer.  Registration will open in the May/June timeframe.    

Thank you,

The PDC Team

I will definitely be saving the date.  The PDC has replaced TechEd as the premiere developer oriented event from Microsoft in my book.  I will be there.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006 8:14:14 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [2]  

I spent the Thanksgiving weekend installing the Vista RTM bits to replace my XP install on my Thinkpad T60p.

I wasn’t sure how rocky it was going to be and I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised.

I installed the base OS and right off the bat without loading any drivers my laptop was 95% functional.  I am used to loading 8–9 IBM drivers just to get the Wireless, Volume Buttons, Video, Brightness, Touchpad, etc. all working.  With Vista all of that worked with no drivers!  The only hardward not 100% functional at this point is the fingerprint reader (which I don’t use) and the Hard Drive active shock protection.  The latter I suspect at some point IBM will release a utility for.

Next it was off to the application stack that I run my life with. Not a short list:

InstallPad
Daemon Tools 4.x
SyncbackSE
TrueImage 10
BeyondCompare 2.x
BlogJet
CodeSmith 4.0
CodeRush
Refactor
Easy CD-DA Extractor 10
FeedDemon
FolderShare
Garmin Training Center
MacroMedia Fireworks 8
Microsoft .NET Framework SDK 1.1, 2.0, 3.0
Age of Empires III
Office 2007
Visio 2007
Onenote 2007
Project 2007
Enterprise Library
SQL Server 2005
Visual Studio 2005
NDoc 1.3
Nero 7.5.x
NetTiers 2.0
NUnit
Quickbooks Pro 2007
Quicktime
Skype
TestDriven.NET
ThumbsPlus 7
WinZip
WS_Ping ProPack
XENU LinkSleuth
.NET Memory Profiler
Fiddler
Money 2006
Streets & Trips 2005
NCover
TextPad
Windows Defender
Windows Live Messenger
Windows OneCare Live
SmartFTP
J2SE
uTorrent
FinePrint
Foxit Reader
Web Service Software Factory
Composite Application Block
CopySourceAsHtml
FireFox

All of the preceding applications installed fine and most I have run so far appear to be working.  There were a handful however where I wasn’t so lucky.

• Plaxo – The installer tries, fails and then tells me to try again.  Sent email to support with no response.
  ActiveSync – This one I didn’t install.  I have been waiting for the WMDC to ship but it doesn’t appear to be available in final form yet.
• PerfectDisk 8 – They have a beta out which purports to work with Vista but I must admit running a beta of Software that re-arranges all of the data on my disk makes me more than a little nervous.  Contacted support and was told they would have a version out when Vista was publicly available.  After several go arounds convincing them it is now they punted and said that Microsoft changed the certification rules at the last minute and that they were working dilligently to get certified.
• Windows PowerShell – No Vista version available yet even though both have RTMed.  Disappointing.
  Google Desktop – This one is sketchy.  It installs fine.  Appears to have issues with Outlook 2007 even under XP.  Once installed on Vista I started getting two “Assert in LSP” assertions each time I started IE7.  Decided to uninstall this one and give it a few more weeks.  I can live without it, but just barely since search in Outlook 2007 still hasn’t gotten a lot better.
• Camtasia Studio, SnagIt – They claim the capture tools work under Vista but the editing tools do not.  Contacted support and was told: “I do not have a date on when Camtasia will be compatible, but I would say sometime around when Vista is released to the general public, not just the business professionals. As for SnagIt, we are getting ready to release an update in the next couple of weeks that will be Vista compatible.” My bad for being a “Business Professional”.
• Carbonite – January is the latest date for Vista support.
• Cingular Communication Manager – This is installed but each time I boot up I get a message about an incompatibility. 
• Ethereal – Not brave enough to try this one!
  

Overall I was pretty surprised by how well everything worked!

Tuesday, November 28, 2006 4:04:25 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [3]  

Just noticed this press release around the Microsoft / Novell announcement.  How can this be anything but good?  Vendors working together to make sure the mixed environments we work in everyday aren’t so hard to integrate/build/troubleshoot, etc.

Has some nice side effects for the Mono project I suspect also.  There has always been an unspoken question around how long Microsoft will ignore them. 

Ultimately all the companies involved are finally looking at what the customer wants/needs instead of exclusively what improves their bottom line.

Hopefully we will see more in this area…

Wednesday, November 15, 2006 6:46:49 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]  

I downloaded Office 2007, OneNote 2007, Project 2007 and Visio 2007 from MSDN on Sunday so I could install the final released products.

I spent all day Monday attempting to get keys and failed.

I finally got keys on Tuesday and installed the software.

Office 2007 installed and activated fine

OneNote 2007 installed and activated fine

Project 2007 installed and activated fine

Visio 2007 installed and would not activate.  Complained the product key was already used.

Come to find out the same product key is provided for Visio and Project but it can only be used once.   Whichever one is activated first wins.

Went to download the SaveAs PDF add-in and the Genuine Microsoft Software check told me that the Project 2007 key I obtained from MSDN was a false/counterfeit key.

Fun, Fun!!

Tuesday, November 14, 2006 2:20:47 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [3]  

Plans are underway for VSLive! San Francisco 2007 http://www.ftponline.com/conferences/vslive/2007/sf/.  The Call for Papers is now open - please visit our online database at http://www.ftponline.com/conferences/callforpapers/ to submit proposals for both sessions and workshops.

Key Dates:

Event - March 25-29, 2007 at the Moscone Center West

Call for Papers - Deadline is December 1st

San Francisco will feature expanded ASP.NET coverage, special sessions on Vista and on .NET 3.0, more coverage of Visual Studio Team System/Team Foundation Server and new sessions on SQL Server 2005, C#, Ajax and VB.NET.  We are also planning 5 pre-conference and 5 post-conference workshops.

I am once again chairing the ASPLive! portion of the conference which has been expanded by one additoinal track.

I encourage you to submit your session proposals at the above URL.  Feel free to CC me on any with a VSLive2007 in the subject line.

 

Thursday, November 09, 2006 12:37:11 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Thanks to all of you who attended my Code Camp 2.0 session on Virtualization for Developers.  As promised here is the slide deck I used which contains many of the virtual server tips I have collected.

File Attachment: VirtualizationForDevelopers.pdf (92 KB)

Monday, October 30, 2006 8:59:17 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

I have been remiss in posting information about Code Camp v2.0 this weekend for the Seattle area.  Instead of it being held at Devry University in Federal Way like it was last year it was moved at the last minute to DigiPen in Redmond.

Check out http://seattle.techevents.info/codecamp/2/agenda.aspx to see the sessions. 

Jeff Richter, Bill Vaughn, Richard Hundhausen, Brad Wilson, Peter Provost, Steven Borg, Rod Paddock, Wayne Berry, Stuart Celarier, and many others are presenting some great sessions!

Plan to drop by and participate

Thursday, October 26, 2006 6:24:57 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]