I just finished judging the Finals for Speaker Idol. 

All I can say is why.  The speakers took every bit of feedback from the initial heats and incorporated it into their final presentations.  It was very, very hard to pick a winner.

The finals started with Bob Roudebush of DoubleTake presenting about a new Windows Server 2003 R2 feature, File Server Resource Manager.  Rob presented in the first heat I judged and I found it hard to believe he had tightened up his presesentation.  I would have thought that impossible.

Next up was Alain Tadros from Falafel Software. “Lino” started with some great humor comparing his nickname to LINQ commenting that he didn’t know why Microsoft mispelled the name of that technology.  He then proceeded inform the audience on how to effectively use anonymous delegates.  While following the previous heats suggestions he stumbled while hand typing some code but recovered very nicely.

Next was Sarbjit Gill. All I can say is wow.  This was the second IT presentation focused on why you might want to use split DNS.  The amazing thing was that he did the meat of the presentation in Windows Paint!  He drew diagrams, with a mouse BTW not a tablet, on the fly and illustrated the problem quite effectively.  What a refreshing change from the typical build slides.

Next up was Rob Windsor from ObjectSharp Consulting in Toronto.  He went a little long at 8 minutes but when you realize he showed an end to end WCF sample in Visual Basic in that time you understand why he ran long.  He was smooth and clearly had done this presentation a number of times.

Finally we had Steven Smith from ASPAlliance.  He showed the Easy ways to increase performance for an ASP.NET Application.  He used the load testing tools in Visual Studio Team Test to show the impact each of his changes made.  Great use of the audience to underscore the drama of the performance changes.  Impressive demo to do in 5 minutes.

In the end we had to pick a winner.  It wasn’t easy.

The judges, Stephen (Tempo Tempo) Forte, Kate (C++ Queen) Gregory, Michelle (Indigo Girl) Leroux-Bustamante, and myself had a very difficult time deciding on who should win.  They were all excellent.

We all had different ideas of who was the best so we had to come up with a unique yet top-secret scheme to choose the winner.

In the end there can be only one.

and that one was Steven Smith!   Steven was a last minute wild card in Heat 4 and did an excellent job coming up with a topic on short notice.

Steven will be speaking at TechEd 2008 June 9–13 in Orlando Florida.

Congratulations Steven on a job very well done. 

Thursday, June 07, 2007 10:53:34 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)         Comments [0]  

Speaker Idol is an interesting contest here at TechEd 2007 put on by Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell from DotNetRocks.

The contest is modeled after it’s eponymous namesake American Idol with the winner earning a speaker slot for TechEd 2008 June 9–13!

I was honored to be on the judging panel for the first heat and was blown away by the quality of the presenters. 

We had Kent Alstad, Mike Azugar, Bill Baldasti, Bob Roudebush all present for 5 minutes.  Then four judges: Stephen (Tempo Tempo) Forte, Kate (C++ Queen) Gregory, Tim (Smart Client) Huckaby and myself all gave the speakers pointers on what they did well and how they could improve.

Bob Roudebush came out on top for the first heat and will be headed to the finals.

Congratulations Bob!

Tuesday, June 05, 2007 11:25:17 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)         Comments [1]  

Bob Muglia kicked off the TechEd keynote this morning with a Back to the Future spoof featuring Christopher Lloyd.  Very fun.  Great piece of self-deprecating humor around Hailstorm and how misguided that effort was.

Loved the Windows Server 2008, Viridian, System Center VMM demos.  Looks really sharp and gives me some hope they may start gaining on VMWare at some point.

The Jamie Cool SilverLight demo was a mediocre at best rehash of what was shown at Mix.

The Brian Goldfarb VSTO demo was interesting only for the possibilities it represented, it was mostly eye candy and didn’t communicate much other than the possibilities…

The Michael Woods BizTalk.NET demo was incomprehensible.  He wanted to talk about BizTalk.NET but again mainly eye candy instead of actually explaining how or why.

The DSI demo was fairly cool.  It got me interested based on the value proposition however it didn’t really help me understand what I need as a developer to play in that space.

Finally in closing I have found out that the Orange County Convention Center is Pepsi-Hell.  In their infinite wisdom it appears that someone thought it was a good idea to only serve Pepsi products.  I have cut down my Diet Coke consumption over the years but it is still my favorite carrier for caffeine.

Monday, June 04, 2007 7:58:20 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)         Comments [1]  

I am sitting here prior to TechEd 2007 at a Microsoft Regional Director meeting. 

I got to chatting with a few folks about the decision to postpone the PDC until 2008 and the more I think about it the more I think they made the right decision.

Mix07 covered the latest and greatest of the web technologies.

TechEd will serve as the vehicle for many of the remaining IT and developer announcements.

Orcas should be out the door by the time PDC would hit.

Katmai should be well on the way out the door.

What long lead types of things would they cover?  I would hate to go to a PDC and then have either:

a) them not talk about anything 12–18 months off

or

b) have them talk about stuff that is a ways out but not provide any bits.

Key theme for PDC has always been if you don’t provide bits you don’t get to speak.

I want that to continue and I want Microsoft to have relevant content and if that means delaying until 2008 then so be it…

Sunday, June 03, 2007 2:30:21 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)         Comments [0]  

I am hanging out at the MVP Summit this week and had a photographer sneak up on me during the Gates keynote.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/photos/popup.asp?SubID=2389&page=3&GTitle=MVP%20Global%20Summit&css=gtitle%2Ecss&pubdate=03/14/2007

Wednesday, March 14, 2007 1:51:32 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)         Comments [0]  

I am headed to Mix07 again this year. 

I really enjoyed the “unconference” vibe of Mix.  Very different from TechEd and the PDC.  Very focused on the future of the web.

Check it out.

Thursday, March 08, 2007 10:15:21 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

I have been running Vista Ultimate since November 2006 or so on my main system.  It has a 100GB main drive and recently started reporting only 5GB free. 

BgInfo a great utility would variously report 5GB free or 28GB free.  I couldn’t figure out why it kept changing it’s mind.

SpaceMonger which I frequently use to find big files was reporting only 5GB free and I didn’t see any large chunks of disk space in use.  I got suspicious and added up the blocks of in use disk space and realized they only added up to 60GB!

I grabbed a demo copy of FolderSizes and tried the same thing.  Low and behold my c:\System Volume Information folder was 35GB!  Not only that I didn’t have permissions to see what was in it.  After looking around on Google I figured out that Restore Points could take up to 15% of the disk.  That by my math indicated 15GB not 35GB but I figured I would see if I could clean a few up.  I fired up the Disk Cleanup Manager for Windows and selected “Files from all Users on this computer”.

On the next dialog I selected the C drive.  It scanned the disk for awhile and showed me a few options.  I selected the more options tab and then clicked the Clean up… button under System Restore and Shadow Copies.

Clicked this and Voila 30GB of disk space reappeared.  Now the only problem is I have no idea how to set the maximum space System Restore and Shadow Copies can use on my system.  Anyone have any ideas?

Friday, February 23, 2007 5:10:30 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [2]  

I have been an IBM Thinkpad user for I think around 10 years now.  I think the first one was a 760Z and I have been through around 4–5 of them now.

I like everyone else rely heavily upon my laptop.  When traveling around the world to present at conferences I can’t show up at a location with a dead laptop.  To that end I have had great experience with Thinkpads and clearly other speakers have also.  Go into any speaker lounge and in my experience 65–70% of the speakers will be carrying thinkpads for the exact same reason.  Makes it nice also if you forget a power supply, etc!

Tonight I had an issue with my 10 month old T60p.  I upgraded it to Vista Ultimate RTM in November shortly after it became available.  I have avoided putting any beta software on this machine.  See above about not showing up with a dead machine…

I plugged it into a projector the other day at a client site and it came up black and white!  That’s weird.  Thought it might be the projector.  Tried a different one.  Still black and white.

Thought it might be the hardware so I swapped hard drives to an XP image I have and tried it.  Color shows up just fine.

Got the latest ATI driver from the IBM support site.  Still had the problem.  Waited a couple weeks and got a newer driver off the IBM site released on 1/22/07.  Same problem.

Called IBM support and was told: “IBM will not support Vista unless it came from the factory pre-installed on the system.  Full packaged product purchased and later installed is not supported.” Renee Martin – IBM Support Atlanta

Whoa!  A laptop that I bought 10 months ago with a 3 year warranty is now no longer supported because Microsoft released an operating system upgrade.  One in fact that IBM/Lenovo will be shipping pre-installed on almost identical hardware very soon.

I was a bit worried about the Lenovo acquisition like many but figured they had one or two more designs left in them that were collaborations with IBM.  The 3000 series confirmed that machines designed solely by Lenovo were not going to suit my needs.

I think this is the turning point where they finally jumped the shark.  Time to start looking at other notebook vendors.  I am not thrilled by Dell quality/support.  HP notebooks are uninspiring to say the least.  It might be, I shudder to say it, MacBook Pro w/bootcamp time.

Tuesday, January 23, 2007 6:55:31 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [3]  

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]