http://www.geektieguy.com News and views from the geek tie guy. Sat, 03 May 2008 23:07:35 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I'm happy that Maker Faire in San Mateo is having great success, judging from today's experience. Our family attempted to go today to take part in the clothing swap, mostly. But when we got there, all the parking lots were overflowing/closed and they had people walking around with bullhorns asking ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2008/05/03/maker-faire-drowning-in-success/ This is part 4 of the mini-series on the HP SmartCenter software. Hear about the team's reaction to the Engadget leak and the launch plans at CES 2007. If you missed the first three parts, they are here, here and here. --- One of the really unsettling events before the launch of ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2008/04/24/inside-the-hp-touchsmart-pc-software-hp-smartcenter-part-4/ Welcome to part 3 of this mini-series. Last time around you heard a little bit about the early prototypes and how things progressed from there. This time I'll talk a bit more about some of the functionality in HP SmartCenter and some of the things we were not able to address ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2008/04/17/inside-the-hp-touchsmart-pc-software-hp-smartcenter-part-3/ In the first part of this mini-series, I introduced you to the early planning stages of HP SmartCenter. This time you'll get a little more information on the early development, including a few screenshots of prototpyes. --- I hacked together a very simple first version of HP SmartCenter (then codenamed LaunchPad, which ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2008/04/10/inside-the-hp-touchsmart-pc-software-hp-smartcenter-part-2/ I thought some people might enjoy reading a little "behind the scenes" story about the most high-profile piece of software I've been involved with so far. I feel pretty lucky to have had the chance to work on a unique product and to have what I helped work on be ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2008/04/04/inside-the-hp-touchsmart-pc-software-hp-smartcenter-part-1/ Our family attended a Tom Chapin concert recently. For those of you with kids out there and who may not know him, he's a great children's singer/songwriter whose music you can take along on a roadtrip and listen to for days without getting tired of it. He's also got quite ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2008/03/30/tom-chapin-not-on-the-test/ I had almost forgotten about the OLPC give-one-get-one campaign I took the opportunity to participate in last year. Well, the thing finally came today. I wasn't really all that anxious to get it, so it didn't bother me at all that it took a while. I thought it was more ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2008/03/26/the-olpc-arrived-see-whats-in-the-box/ Here's a quick tip: If you're a Netflix subscriber and are having problems with the WatchNow feature, take a look at whether you have any caching proxy servers between the PC you're using to watch a show and the Netflix servers (yes, that's a long path and a very general ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2008/03/02/netflix-mediaerror1400-one-solution/ I have the good fortune to be able to attend SD West this year. I've heard people at work rave about this conference right in my backyard, and was lucky to get approval to go this year. Unfortunately I've been so swamped with work (really exciting new stuff, too) that I haven't ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2008/03/01/going-to-sd-west-2008-a-planning-worksheet/ [I may have a hard drive mini-series on my hands here, see previous post.] If your computer has performance problems and you can't quite explain why (you've ruled out startup items, spyware and such ilk), it may be worth looking at how your IDE controller manages hard drive data transfer. ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2008/02/18/computer-performance-puzzle-hard-drive-pio-vs-udma-mode/ As I mentioned in my last post, I went to the local Fry's recently to get a replacement hard drive. What prompted me to do that was a warning from the BIOS of my computer saying that the S.M.A.R.T. status of the drive was bad. I'm glad I listened to ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2008/02/18/listen-to-your-hard-drives-smart-status/ Okay, time for a little bragging :). I was at the local Fry's yesterday, buying a new hard drive to replace one that's about to go bad, and on my way out I stopped by the magazine racks. Imagine my surprise when I saw this on the cover: ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2008/02/17/on-the-cover-of-pc-world-february-2008/ I have a laptop that has an issue with properly restarting the sound subsystem after Vista resumes from sleep. Microsoft brought out a hotfix about 6 months ago that supposedly fixed issues like this. On my system, the problem persists, even after installing Service Pack 1! I let the computer ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2008/02/12/vista-sp1-still-no-audio-after-resume-from-sleep/ Vista Service Pack 1 is in the can. It's no coincidence that Vista SP1 and Server 2008 are "here" at the same time. They're one and the same apart from the differences in "configuration", i.e. Client vs. Server stuff. Server 2008 is the product that should have been released in ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2008/02/10/windows-7-what-will-microsoft-learn-from-windows-vista/ The title says it all. Several attempts I've made at installing the .NET Framework 3.5 on x64 Vista boxes failed with Error 1603. After a prolonged Google search, I found a forum with someone mentioning to uninstall KB110806, which seems to be related to .NET 2.0 SP1. I forget the forum and the ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2008/02/01/cant-install-net-35-on-vista-x64-try-uninstalling-kb110806/ I didn't fully realize how ControlTemplate Triggers work (or don't) until I solved a problem with a UserControl today, with the help of this post on the MSDN forums. A Triggers' EnterActions or ExitActions don't seem to get fired when a UserControl is constructed. If you want, say, an animation in ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2008/01/05/wpf-controltemplate-trigger-tip/ The Christmas spirit struck today at the GeekTieGuy household. Here are a few pictures of the Lego Christmas trees I built. Merry Christmas!Share This http://www.geektieguy.com/2007/12/22/a-lego-christmas/ After looking through the comments to Jeff Atwood's recent post on software product keys, I noticed that quite a few went down the rabbit-hole of  free versus paid software. People suggesting that if you don't like paying for software, typing in license keys, managing them and other hassles, you ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2007/12/19/the-software-free-conomy/ It occurred to me that my CardSharkV page didn't have any screenshots to show how the program works or what it looks like. That has now been remedied. Here's the central part of it (grouping the photos): So head on over to the CardSharkV page and take a ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2007/12/10/cardsharkv-now-with-screenshots/ Check out this program I've developed, called CardSharkV. It's a digital picture storage card/camera "downloader" with a twist. It's a bit of an experiment, and I'm looking for some real-world "beta" testers. My plan is to try my hand at charging for the program. But to see if word will spread, ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2007/11/25/introducing-cardsharkv/ I downloaded and installed the latest version of the Media Center SDK just now, and was a bit surprised to see that WPF apps are now officially deprecated as a supported way of extending Windows Media Center on Vista. There's no big announcement around this so far, it's almost just ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2007/11/19/microsoft-deprecates-support-for-xbap-wpf-apps-in-version-53-of-the-media-center-sdk/ This is a problem that's been bugging me for about a year and I finally found time to dig in and work on how to solve it. A big thank you goes to Aaron Stebner for pointing me in the right direction. Thanks Aaron! Anyway, for various reasons I've wanted to ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2007/11/19/how-to-parse-special-lnk-files-aka-msi-shortcuts-aka-windows-installer-advertised-shortcuts-using-c/ I got my copy of "Get Satisfied" this Tuesday night. I began reading it Friday night and found it very interesting. There are stories from every part of the country, written by people from, it seems, every walk of life. I finished it this evening. The one story that made ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2007/11/11/get-satisfied-how-twenty-people-like-you-found-the-satisfaction-of-enough-a-short-review/ I'm just about recovered from two interesting days at Silicon Valley Code Camp. Overall I found the time I spent there well invested. It was fun seeing the diversity of software developers we have here, and the talks were of high quality overall. Here's part of the lunch line from ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2007/10/29/silicon-valley-code-camp-impressions/ I applaud the mayor of Sao Paulo. He had the stomach to approve a law banning billboard advertising in the city. Imagine what a difference this would make in so many U.S. cities. In the San Francisco Bay area there are two main highways to get from San Jose to ... http://www.geektieguy.com/2007/10/06/sao-paulo-banned-billboards-this-summer/