I have really been enjoying the Channel9 series about the history of Microsoft. So far they have released years 1975-1981. It’s always interesting to think about the chain of events that took place to bring us to where we are today and to be inspired by the stories of the pioneers who laid the foundation we stand on.
After watching the series I started digging around for some other videos that had a similar theme about the history of personal computers and found this great documentary called Triumph of the Nerds that aired on PBS in 1996 (hard to believe that is 13 years ago!). Even though I knew a large portion of the history covered in the piece, it was a lot of fun to listen to the interviews of the guys who lived it and to think about what new frontiers are still ahead for us to conquer!
So if you’re in the mood for a little nostalgia, I highly recommend checking out both of these!
Misc
channel9, history, Microsoft, Nerds, personal computer
I decided to install Windows 7 on my laptop today. The primary reason for installing beta software on this computer? Speed. Bottom line is Vista ran like a dog on my laptop (Lenovo x61) and it was worth it for me to start over in the hopes that Win7 really is as fast as people are saying. It also helped that Ryan decided to take the Win7 plunge a few days ago and since nothing caught on fire for him I decided it might be safe to give it a go.
So far So Good.
The install was very smooth, took about an hour+, and ran into no problems whatsoever. Everything but the biometrics scanner came up working on first boot which was pretty impressive considering this was a clean install.
From a speed perspective Win7 is a huge upgrade. But then again so is a fresh install of XP, so we will see if I still feel the same way about performance in a month or so. The start menu is snappy, window cycling is very fast, and coming out of hibernation is about 200% faster than Vista. With a 5400 RPM drive, disk churn is a killer, and Win7 seems to keep the crunching to a minimum resulting in the OS staying on its toes.
IE8 also seems to be tweaked for performance. I stopped using IE7 about 6 months ago because I hated waiting a minute and a half for the browser to start up. Then the painfully slow rendering engine put me over the top and I switched to Firefox. It was like going from dial-up to broadband when I made the switch. IE8 seems to be about as fast as Firefox so I think I will hold off on putting FF back on this machine for a few weeks and see how it goes.
Other things I’ve noticed so far (1/2 day of usage):
- Daemon tools doesn’t work – I don’t have a CD drive on this laptop so having a good tool to mount disc images is a must. While I prefer Daemon tools, PowerISO seems to work in 7 just fine.
- You cannot use the WIN-E shortcut twice in a row. It seems Win7 will only open up 1 explorer instance at a time. In order for WIN-E to work a second time the existing explorer window cannot be in the Libraries location. Even if you navigate away but go back to Libraries folder it wont open another instance. Very odd.
- UAC is noticeably less obtrusive. Simply click on “show all processes” in task manager and you’ll quickly realize that you no longer have to “allow” yourself to do the things you’re trying to do (crazy right?).
- My laptop actually runs cooler. Because less churn is less burn.
- Windows media player doesn’t seem to dock in the taskbar anymore. You can still access the play and pause buttons by mousing over the icon and waiting a second but this seems a lot less convenient to me.
- Network connections are easier to manage. Instead of having to click on the network icon in the tray, open a window, and pick the network you want to connect to, you can simply access the list and connect/disconnect right from the system tray. Very nice.
I will continue to post additional things as I come across them. Tomorrow I will get all the dev tools installed and see how everything works with using 7 as a dev platform.
Misc
beta, install, performance, windows 7
I recently switched from T-Mobile to Sprint for my cell phone carrier. I tried many times to tether my Blackberry on T-Mobile and never was able to do it (not like it would have been all that great @ Edge speeds anyway). Since the data connection on Sprint is a lot faster than it was on T-Mobile I figured I would try again to tether my device to my laptop so I could access the Internet while riding the train. The setup was amazingly simple and works great. No cords required, just turn on the laptop, keep the phone in my pocket and surf! Here is the step-by-step on how I got it working:
1. Once you have the phone paired with your computer, view it’s properties to make sure you have the dial-up networking service enabled. You can go ahead and disable the 2 Blackberry services if you want. Leaving them enabled may cause you to get annoying prompts about installing drivers for them.
2. Now that we have confirmed the service is available we need to make a new connection to dial out using the phone. You can setup a new connection from the Network and Sharing Center in the Control Panel.
3. Choose dial-up connection as the type.
4. Choose Standard Modem over Bluetooth link.
5. For the dialing properties all you need to enter is the phone number, #777. No username or password is needed when connecting to the Sprint network.
6. After setting up the dialing properties the computer will connect to the Internet and you can start browsing!
The setup works great although it is slower than when tethering with a USB cable, and the battery on my laptop seems to drain a lot faster when using the bluetooth connection. Still, the convienience of not having to use a USB cable is a huge plus.
Misc
blackberry, bluetooth, modem, Sprint, tether, wireless
As promised in my previous post here is a video of SecondLight that was demoed yesterday during the MS Research keynote.
Misc
PDC, PDC 2008, second light, SecondLight, video
I have always been envious of my friends who have been land-line free. They save money and no longer have to contribute to the overpriced monopoly that is Ameritech SBC AT&T. As much as I longed to be land-line free I have never been able to take the plunge for a few reasons:
- I have multiple cell phones so I would have to pick one to get all the calls for the whole family which isn’t ideal
- You can’t have multiple people talk on a call at the same time
- You have to carry your cell phone around the house rather than have handsets in each room
All that changed this summer when my cell phone carrier T-Mobile launched their T-Mobile @Home package providing customers unlimited nationwide calling and all the goodies for just $10 a month. Basically its a VOIP router that uses a SIM card to allow you to make calls over the internet using your regular land-line handsets. The day this little beauty came out I ran out to a T-Mobile store and picked one up. When you purchase the router you can have T-Mobile transfer your old land-line phone number over so you don’t have to go through the hassle of changing numbers.
I wasn’t exactly sure how I would set it up in my house since all my routers are in my basement and not near where my house phones are. Fortunately when I got it home everything was a snap to setup and I was making internet calls in no time.
Here are some pictures and the steps I took to get everything setup and running in my house:
1. The router is a typical broadband router with 802.11g wireless. However, this one also has 2 slots for SIM cards and 2 phone ports on the back allowing you to plug a phone into the device to make calls over the Internet.
2. The instructions with the router suggest plugging the router into the Internet and then plugging a phone into the router. This works great except I don’t want just one phone hooked up to the router but rather I wanted all my phone jacks in the house to go over this connection (just like it worked before). So instead of plugging a phone into the router I just plugged in a phone cord and connected it to an outlet I have in my basement.
3. I thought that this would be all I needed to do to get all my outlets in the house connected to the router but whenever I picked up the phone I just got this weird busy-like signal. Even though my AT&T connection was dead it was still causing some conflict on the line with the VOIP router. So this was easily remedied by “cutting the cord” to AT&T (this was fun and therapeutic). I went out to my phone box outside the house and just unhooked the wires that were connected to my phone lines inside.
4. Here is a shot of the finished setup — a wiry mess that manages to keep me connected in all ways necessary (@Home router is on the bottom).
This setup has worked great and I have been saving money every month and have a bunch of great phone services that I never was willing to be ripped off paying for before (caller ID being the big one!).
Misc
freedom, land-line, t-mobile, voip
I am in the process of moving my wife’s blog over to WordPress from Xanga and ran into some errors trying to use the RSS importer that comes with WordPress. The error I was getting was “Importing post…Couldn’t get post ID”. So I did what any good husband would do and cracked open the rss.php importer script to see what the problem was. After a little investigation i found out what was causing the error.
The import script was parsing the xml for the title and the description by looking for the tokens <title> and <description> respectively. The problem is that Xanga’s RSS writes out its title and description tags with a few extra attributes so they look like this:
<title xmlns:cf=”http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/rss/core/2005” cf:type=”text”>.
So after doing a little find/replace to make the title tag just say <title> and the description tag to just say <description> the importer worked like a charm!
Misc
rss, wordpress, xanaga
Well I’ve decided to try and start blogging again. I have been working on a pretty wide variety of things lately and I started thinking I should be writing some of this stuff down… so here I am… resurrected after 2 years of silence. I have also moved my blog to my own domain and migrated over to WordPress from CS. Hopefully everything moved over OK and not too much is broken… but I don’t know how much that really matters since those posts are so old now.
Misc
blogging
I need a new RSS reader. The one I have now (Attensa) is great but I do almost 100% of my blog reading on the train with no connection…so when I open up a feed that has pictures (Engadget for instance) all I see are broken images. I know a lot of these readers support attachments for offline viewing but maybe there is one that exists what will also download images and re-create the src attribute on the image tag for me?? Now wouldn’t that be great.
I’ll have to dig around google a bit and see if anything is out there.
Misc
Our team currently has an opening for an experienced tester. We are looking for someone who has the ability to implement and execute a testing strategy for our team utilizing some of the latest Microsoft technologies (like team system and foundation server). Responsibilities would also include implementing and managing the build and release strategy for the team. For a full listing of the requirements and job description you can check out our web site. I’m not even sure a person with the diverse skill-set we need even exists but I think the opportunity here is an excellent one. You get to join our great team of developers (including folks like Ryan and Richard) working with the latest technologies at terrific company (best one I’ve ever worked at). In fact Trading Technologies was named the 3rd best place in Chicago to work by Chicago Magazine so it’s not just me who thinks it a great place to work. 
If you are interested drop me a note at ray.jezek AT tradingtechnologies DOT com or use the contact me link on the blog.
.NET, Misc
Peter has some excellent comments (he articulates what I feel exactly) about Betrands post about server callbacks and Ajax. A few weeks ago here at work we had a long “discussion” about Ajax and how it didn’t seem to fit very well with the current ASP.NET eventing model (or page lifecycle). We all seemed to agree that we liked the concept but it just didn’t provide us with an intuitive model to handle the interaction between front end and the code-behind (also seemed like maintenance would be a huge problem). I think it’s summed up well when Bertrand says, “we want simple events on simple controls”. It’s encouraging to hear that MS is going to bring a model to the table in the ATLAS framework that is more in-line with the current page lifecycle but still provide us with some of the goodness that Ajax has.
Misc
